Wilderness Survival: The First Hour, the Order of Work, and the Skills That Get You Found

Stop moving as soon as you know you are lost or hurt. Get warm and dry before anything else: put on every layer, get out of the wind and off the ground, and build a fire if you can. Make yourself easy to find: bright colors in the open, three whistle blasts every few minutes, a signal fire ready to smoke. Treat every drop of water you drink. Do not spend energy on food for the first days. Most people are found within 72 hours if they stay put and stay visible, and most who die do so from cold and wet in the first night.

A rough ranking of what kills first: about 3 minutes without air, 3 hours without shelter in cold, wet or windy weather, 3 days without water, 3 weeks without food. It is not a stopwatch; a fit person in mild weather lasts longer at each step and a wet person in wind lasts less. Its job is to set the order of work. Shelter and warmth come before water, water comes long before food, and food is nearly last on the list.

Small, low, off the ground and out of the wind, and the roof matters less than the insulation under you. The fastest good shelter is a debris hut: a ridgepole propped at hip height on a stump or a forked stick, ribs leaned along both sides, then two to three feet of leaves, needles and grass piled over the ribs and another foot stuffed inside to lie on. It takes an hour or two and it holds body heat without a fire. A tarp or an emergency blanket rigged as a lean-to facing a fire is faster if you carried one. Site it away from dead trees, dry washes, low ground that collects cold and flood, and at least fifteen feet from the fire.

Water runs downhill and animals and insects gather at it: follow a valley down, watch for green strips of vegetation, listen at dawn and dusk. Prefer clear, moving water from as high up the drainage as you can get, and treat all of it: a one-minute rolling boil, or filter to 1 micron and add chlorine or iodine. Clear mountain water carries Giardia. Avoid water below a beaver pond, a pasture, a camp or a mine, and never drink from a pond with green scum, which boiling makes worse. In the dry, dig a seep in a sandy wash bend, collect dew with a cloth at dawn, and melt snow rather than eating it.

Three of anything is the distress signal: three whistle blasts, three fires in a triangle, three flashes, three piles of rocks. A whistle carries a mile where a voice carries a hundred yards. A signal mirror flashed at an aircraft or a ridge is visible twenty miles on a sunny day; aim through the sighting hole or over a V of your fingers. Green boughs or a wet log on a hot fire make white smoke in daylight; a bright fire at night. Lay a big X or SOS of rocks, logs or trampled snow in an opening, at least twenty feet across. Bright clothing on a rock. And a satellite messenger or PLB pressed once does all of it at once.

Gather three times more than you think you need before you strike anything: a fist of tinder (dry grass, birch bark, the shredded inner bark of cedar, fatwood shavings, or the cotton ball and petroleum jelly from your kit), an armful of pencil-thin dry twigs snapped from standing dead branches, not the ground, then thumb-thick, then wrist-thick. Build on a platform of dry bark or split wood if the ground is wet. Light the tinder, feed the smallest sticks a few at a time, and do not smother it. In rain, split a dead branch and take the dry wood from the center. A lighter, a ferro rod and waterproof matches, all three, ride in the pack because each one fails in some weather.

Stay put, almost always. Searchers start from your last known point and your planned route, and a person who stays near it, sheltered and signaling, is found; a person moving cross-country is a moving target who is also getting tired and hurt. Walk out only if nobody knows you are missing or where to look, if you are certain of the route and it is short, or if staying is dangerous. If you do move, leave a note and arrows pointing your direction, follow water downstream, and stop before dark.

The ten essentials, every trip: navigation (map, compass, and a GPS or phone with the map downloaded), a headlamp with spare batteries, sun protection, first aid, a knife, fire (lighter, ferro rod, waterproof matches, tinder), an emergency shelter (a bivy or an emergency blanket and a tarp), extra food, extra water and a way to treat more, and extra insulating layers. Add a whistle, a signal mirror, cordage, duct tape, and where there is no cell signal, a satellite messenger or PLB. The whole kit is under three pounds. The one item that is not gear is the trip plan you left with someone.