Survival Situations Can Be Sneaky

It doesn't take a huge disaster like Katrina or Haiti to create a genuine survival situation. Sometimes, all it takes is a miscalculation on our part.

In recent weeks, two women from Wisconsin were visiting the Arizona desert and decided to hike Camelback Mountain.

I should pause here to point out that Wisconsin has neither mountains nor desert, so these women might not have had much past experience in those environments. (With all due respect to those who believe some of the bumps in the terrain of Wisconsin are really mountains, we lived there for four years and, being from the West, we know the difference.)

Back to our story — the women, ages 53 and 78 took off for their hike at about 6:00 in the morning.

Here's another issue: The desert is cool at 6:00 in the morning, but in the middle of July it will quickly transform into an unbearable furnace after the sun rises.

At 11:00 a.m., emergency personnel received a call. The women were in need of rescue. Although the women had water with them, they were exhausted, experiencing dizziness, and were incapable of making it back down the mountain. Fortunately, the fire rescue team brought them out alive.

So, what is the point of my relating this incident? Is this about being too old, or the wrong gender to participate in strenuous outdoor activities? Not at all! I know of women in their 70s who run Ironman triathlons in the heat of Kona, Hawaii. So it has nothing to do with being a woman or being a senior citizen.

It has everything to do with knowing what you're getting yourself into before you launch off into an adventure. It's about doing your homework, understanding the climate patterns for the area, gradually training your body to endure whatever you're going to impose upon it, wearing the right clothing, and preparing proper equipment to see you through the experience.

Was this a genuine survival incident? Absolutely! It is possible to perish in a matter of hours under conditions like that, so these ladies were lucky to get out alive. I have a file cabinet full of stories about people who went off on a little day hike and never made it back, so I never underestimate the danger of a short hike. But the fact that these folks were unfamiliar with the conditions they would face made it doubly dangerous.

This was a case of a survival situation being sneaky — gradually overtaking a couple of people who were not totally prepared with an understanding of the environment.

Bear Attack

It was 4:00 a.m. when the bear, or perhaps bears, rampaged through the campground, leaving one camper dead and others injured and scrambling to the relative safety of their cars to save their lives.

The Soda Butte campground, near Yellowstone National Park, was the scene of a similar incident in 2008, when a grizzly bear attacked and injured a man while he slept in this tent. The 27- site campground is located near the Beartooth (aptly named, apparently) Highway, 125 miles southwest of Billings, Montana The area is well known for its grizzly and black bear populations, according to a spokesperson for the Gallatin National Forest.

There are lessons for us to learn from all this.

• Bears will tear the walls out of a tent to get to you, so nothing made of fabric (such as a tent trailer) will stop them from coming inside. 
• These are nocturnal hunters, so while you're asleep, they're looking for a meal. 
• Even if the bear doesn't kill you, one swipe of the claws, or one bite will cause horrible injury and perhaps even death. Bears are filthy, so an open wound caused by their claws or teeth will probably become infected. Even if you survive the attack, you might carry the burden of that injury for the rest of your life. 
• Before you decide on a campground, find out if it is known bear (or cougar) country. A little situational awareness will go a long way toward making your decision. 
• Find out if there have been recent reports of activity or sightings of these animals in the area. 
• In bear country, never bring food or garbage into camp. Always suspend those items from a bear wire a distance from camp. 
• Do not bring snacks into the tent. 
• After cooking and cleaning up, remove your clothing and hang it from the bear wire. Don't wear into the tent the same clothes you wore while cooking or handling food. 
• Always clean up every scrap of food around the food-prep area. Either burn the scraps or put them in the garbage bag that is hung from the bear wire. 
• Report to local park or forest officials any encounter with bears and cougars. This information will be posted to alert others who might be camping, fishing, hunting, or hiking in the area.
• If you are confronted by a bear, do not run. That will only trigger an attack. With black bears, it usually (but not always) works to make a lot of noise and make yourself look big. With grizzlies, that might be taken as a challenge to their local authority and will trigger an attack, so your best option (assuming you can't kill the bear with a gun) is to lie down and play dead. If you have a backpack, lie face down with the pack on your back to protect you from the manhandling you are probably going to suffer. If you're lucky, the bear will whack you around a bit, lose interest (if you are totally quiet and still), and eventually wander away. But there are no guarantees. 

Call For Help

The worst thing you can do with a survival situation is to prolong it. The sooner you get rescued, the sooner you can remove the word survival from the description of the incident. And the fastest way to get rescued is to notify someone that you are in trouble. Even better is to let that person know exactly where you are, so the search teams don't have to waste time scouring the countryside looking for you.

Fortunately, we live in a day when technology gives us the ability to pinpoint our location. That's half of the problem whipped just by having a GPS. But that still doesn't solve the problem of letting others know that we're in trouble and need to be rescued. To do that, requires another piece of equipment that can send a message to a satellite system and beam our GPS coordinates to the rescue team.

One of the best ways to accomplish this is by using a device called the SPOT Satellite Messenger. This is the device I carry because it's multifunctional — it will track your movements, send a "checking in" message, send a "help" message, or call for rescuers to come and get you.

One of its functions is to keep track of where you are, and send this information to persons you have selected to be on your notification "team" back home. When you activate the tracking function, the device automatically sends your GPS coordinates every 10 minutes, and your team members can follow your progress on a Google map.

The second function allows you to send a personal pre-recorded message to your team. My message says, "Hey, just wanted to let you know where I am and that everything is okay here." That helps relieve stress at home while you're out exploring the backcountry.

Third is the function that calls for help. This isn't the button to push when your life is at risk and you need helicopters to come and pull you out. Rather, this is the function that sends a pre-recorded message that might say something like, "I need your help. Please come to the location shown on the Google map." You might use this one if you are in a moderate amount of trouble, but it's not yet worthy of a full-blown rescue team. You can't modify the pre-recorded message, so you can't specify if you've got a flat tire, run out of gas, or are just lonely and in need of some company. But if your team is reliable, they should show up and lend a hand with whatever is troubling you.

Finally there's the 911 button that calls for professional rescue. The satellite picks up this signal and relays your GPS coordinates to the GEOS International Emergency Response Center for processing. They, in turn, relay the information to the rescue organization nearest your location.

There are numerous stories about people who have been saved because they used this device, and countless others would have been saved had they been carrying it. I highly recommend that you examine the website at www.findmespot.com to learn more about this life-saving technology.

Protect Children

As I write this, the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office is conducting a search, aided by more than 50 people. The subject of the search is a 2-year-old boy who was camping with his family. He was last seen inside a tent while sleeping with family members. Sometime around 1:45 in the morning, he went missing from his sleeping bag.

I don't have all the details yet, so I can't say for certain what precautions were taken to keep the child from wandering away in the night. But I suspect that the bug screen across the entrance to the tent might not have been zipped securely. Arizona is hot, and the family might have left the screen open to allow better airflow. If that's the case, it also would make it easier for a child to get out of the tent.

Parents with young children might want to reconsider their camping habits to improve the security of the youngsters. That might begin with always zipping the tent doors at night. Being a bit uncomfortable is worth it, if it will prevent a tragedy.

Sailors at sea routinely wear a harness and tether arrangement to keep from being lost overboard, and I can see how a lightweight version of this type of thing might be useful for keeping a young child from wandering away unnoticed.

Just an idea, and I welcome comments and suggestions that can be passed along in this blog.

Campfire-Related Tragedy

Of all the threats brought about by natural events that we sometimes refer to as "disasters," flooding takes the highest toll in human life. In hurricanes, for example, it isn't the wind that directly causes the most deaths — it's the flooding, some of which is caused by the wind blowing water ashore in what's called "storm surge" and some of which is caused by swollen rivers due to intense rainfall.

While wind is impressive, water is downright powerful stuff. Each gallon weighs nearly 8.5 pounds, and when it's moving it creates an enormous force that people simply are not strong enough to stand against. If you get caught in moving water, you're going to move with it. If it's fast-moving water, you'll get swept away.

That's what happened to a 12-year-old girl in Flagstaff, Arizona this week. A heavy thunderstorm dumped a load of water on an area that had been denuded only a month before by wildfire. When the water hit the ground, it just ran downhill as fast as gravity could pull it, with no vegetation to help slow the gathering flood. Soon, it was a roaring black river rushing through a subdivision where no river was supposed to be. The little girl was caught in the flow and swept down a culvert. They still haven't found her.

But here's the strange way one event links to another. A month ago, the wildfire that killed off all the vegetation in that area was caused by a careless camper who failed to fully extinguish a campfire. This is Smoky The Bear 101, but it still happens. That lingering campfire ignited the wildfire that stripped away the vegetation that might have helped reduce the threat of flashflood when the thunderstorm hit. In a sense, that careless camper is directly responsible for the loss of this little girl's life.

So what do we learn from all this?

• Be careful with your campfire. Make sure it's dead out before you leave. 
• Be aware that burned out areas are prone to flashflood, mudslides, etc. when big storms hit. Stay tuned in to what the weather is doing, and leave those areas ahead of the storm. 
• Children (and adults) might be curious and attracted to something exciting like a sudden rush of water nearby. Teach children to run away from rushing water. They should run perpendicular to the flow of water, not parallel to it. They should run uphill. 
• Do not drive through rushing water that is crossing a road. It takes very little current to sweep away a vehicle. And the roadway might be damaged by the flow of water, leaving a crater you cannot see below the water. 

Floods are a serious threat. Already this year in China, more than 1,000 people have died or disappeared in floods. The worst year ever for that country was 1998 when 4,150 died in floods. 

Pocket Water Filter

It's inconvenient to carry a cumbersome pump-type water filter every time you take a hike in the wilderness. You might be able to carry what you need for the day, but what if your stay becomes longer than anticipated? All it takes is a sudden storm, the onset of illness, an injury, or getting lost to extend your stay in the outback longer than you planned for. And if you don't have some kind of method to provide yourself with clean drinking water during that additional time, you might end up in serious trouble.

There is a way to carry a lightweight water filter in your pocket. It's called the Aquamira Frontier Filter (available from the company at www.aquamira.com or from other online sources). This little filter is used just like a straw, and it breaks down into two very compact parts so it's easy to carry in a shirt pocket. And it weighs next to nothing. Not only that, but it will screen out giardia and cryptosporidium, the two most prevalent illness-producing waterborne organisms in North America.

The filter is rated for 20 gallons, assuming that you don't suck a lot of silt into it. Cloudy water will quickly clog any kind of filter, so it's important to allow particulates to settle to the bottom and then draw your drinking water from the clear top layer. You can help clear the water by spreading a t-shirt on the surface and allowing the fabric to act as a pre-filter by catching silt and allowing clear water to pass through. Then you would draw your drink from the clear water above the shirt. 

Use this filter just like a straw, to suck water directly from any body of water. Even a small puddle can provide lifesaving liquid. 

Aquamira also makes larger filtration systems, but this one is my favorite as a grab-and-go unit for short trips into the mountains or desert. With a 20-gallon capacity, it would provide almost 3 weeks worth of survival water, if I were drinking a gallon per day.

For about $12, it's hard to beat this essential piece of survival equipment.

Priorities

Is it more important to have food, water, shelter or fire?

There is a common belief that shelter is always the highest priority, followed by fire, followed by water and then food. Logical arguments can be made for that being the correct order, but survival situations are not always so simple as to leave us with a single order of priorities.  Examples:

• If the problem is that you fall overboard in 40-degree Lake Manitscold, the most important survival consideration is to stay afloat until you are rescued. 
• If the problem is that you accidentally shot your buddy through the leg with your killer broadhead, first aid becomes the first priority. 
• If the problem is that you’re lost in the woods and night is coming on, everything depends upon whether it’s August or February and the woods in question are located on Oahu or the north end of Vancouver Island. 

You get the picture. There are many factors involved in making the determination about what is the most important survival issue at the moment. But because you can only do one thing at a time, you have to know how to decide where to start and why. This is really a question of knowing how to set priorities.

Establishing priorities is extremely important to the successful outcome of a survival situation, because if you don’t know what’s most important, you’re likely to work on the wrong thing.

In order to establish a reasonable priority list, you must evaluate the following elements of your situation realistically:

• Immediate threats to life 
• Long-term threats 
• State of physical health — illness or injuries 
• Mental / emotional condition 
• Terrain — swamp, mountains, desert, etc. 
• Location — do you know exactly where you are? 
• Weather — immediate and long-term 
• Number of people in the survival party 
• Available resources — equipment, food, water, medical supplies 
• Natural resources — shelter, fire, water, food 
• Likelihood of rescue 

Once you clearly understand the situation, you can begin to formulate a survival plan. But you can only do this if you honestly understand the first and second points on our list — immediate and long-term threats to life. In chronological order, the human body is threatened in the following ways: 

• You can die almost instantly from any number of things, such as drowning, animal attack, a fall from a cliff, being overrun by a wildfire, etc. 
• You can die from exposure to heat or cold in a matter of hours or even less. 
• You can die from lack of water intake in a few days. 
• You can die from illnesses or injuries on a varying schedule that ranges from almost immediately to months, depending upon the seriousness of the malady. 
• You can die from starvation in a month. You probably won’t live long enough to die from starvation, if you fail to take care of more urgent needs. However, if you can’t get enough nourishment, your ability to think and function will be severely hampered, and that will play a detrimental role in your ability to survive. 

From this, we might be tempted to jump to an unfortunate conclusion and make a general assumption that food is not as important as shelter. But survival situations can be so varied that items on the priority list can easily swap positions. There may actually be a situation in which food is the priority, because every other item on the list is either not critical at the moment or is satisfied already. Example: You’re marooned in good health on Survivor Island where the temperature is always pleasant and a freshwater spring is right at your camp — all you need right now is food to bolster your energy and comfort you psychologically. Work on a lightweight shelter after lunch, then try to figure out some signal devices. 

Obviously, we can’t carve priority lists in granite. There is no one-size-fits-all list, because each situation must be evaluated on its own merits. Only then can priorities be established. But being able to accurately identify your most urgent needs is where the whole survival process begins.