RAT Wilderness Ops Course--Review

[Expatriated]

Guys, this was originally written for publication but due to a series of foul-ups, it never got published. Rather than have it rot away unread, I figured some of you guys would like to know about RAT's Wilderness Ops Course.

If you don't want to read the whole thing, here's the executive summary: a) buy a HEST, b) take the course.

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I’m tired. And hungry. And after two days of little sleep and virtually no food, I’m having trouble locating the sign left by the fugitive I’m tracking through the woods. But with some concentrated effort and a little help from the park ranger I’m with, I locate my quarry hiding behind a tree. It’s Hugh Coffee of “Ditch Medicine” fame. No, Hugh hasn’t gone rogue; he and I are partnered up for the last exercise in a week full of exercises at Randall’s Adventure and Training Five-Day Woodland Operations Course.

I first met Jeff Randall shortly after 9/11 when I was doing some contract work along the Colombian/Venezuelan border. The outfit I was with at the time was looking for some quality jungle survival instruction and Jeff’s name kept coming up as the recommended trainer by all we had talked to. And for good reason. Jeff Randall and Mike Perrin’s jungle survival school in the Peruvian Amazon has become world renown.

After a decade of overseas training, the Randall team has begun conducting training stateside. I recently had the privilege to travel to Ft. Payne, Alabama and attend one of these courses and, although not the easiest class I’ve ever taken, it was nonetheless very rewarding.

Day 1 began with the standard administrative fare but moved very quickly into the first block of instruction: Wilderness Navigation. Unfortunately, in the day of the ubiquitous GPS, old school map and compass use seems something of a dying art, but for LEO’s operating in rural environments, it is hands down one of the most essential skills to possess. We were to get plenty of practice over the next 5 days. Next, U.S. Park Ranger Jimmy Dunn began to introduce the tracking portion of the class. Jimmy is extremely knowledgeable himself, having graduated several tracking schools, but more importantly, he possesses myriad real world experiences tracking fugitives and lost hikers through the woods.

As the old saying goes, however, “The mind can only absorb what the butt can endure.” So, leaving the sterile environment of the classroom, we headed outdoors to get a bit more practical. That is one thing I came to appreciate about the training class: it was a learn-by-doing approach.

Tools of the navigation trade—compass, map and knife


Once outside, we began to hone our basic tracking skills in a sandpit as well as navigating to pre-determined UTM coordinates given us by the instructors. With Desoto State Park and its 3,500+ acres as our playground, this was no simple back yard exercise. Once it was dark, we finished up the very long day with a survival lecture from Jeff to prepare us for the upcoming days.

 

[Expatriated]

5-Star deluxe woodland accommodations-an improvised shelter done right.

Day 2 was a highly concentrated learning experience conducted by the incredibly-skilled Tracy Nelson, a Conservation Officer for the state of Alabama. The skills learned today would serve us well for the rest of the week as all of them would eventually come in useful. Basic rope work, improvised shelter building, and fire-making were the challenges of the day.

Ranger Jimmy Dunn instructing rope work


If you’ve never tried to start a fire from what is simply lying around in the woods, it is an eye-opener. Buying a case of Bic lighters to stash in all vehicles, packs, vests, jackets, and sleeping bags was pretty much the top of everyone’s “To Do” list when they got back. It quickly became apparent to me, that if you want to get warm, you can a) start a fire with a bow drill or b) TRY to start a fire with a bow drill; either way, you won’t stay cold for long.

Looking for a spark—hard at work with a bow drill

Batoning a notch into a fireboard to allow for an ember to fall


About this point in the class, gear issues began to arise. What worked, what didn’t, what seemed practical at the time of purchase and what students would actually prefer to have were starting to work their way to the forefront of the discussions. I, for one, was skeptical prior to the class on how well a machete would work in a woodland environment. After running the new ESEE Lite Machete for the week, I became a true convert. With a basic set of handling skills the ESEE machete would chop live and dead wood easily enough to build shelters. It skinned bark, scraped up tinder, dug holes, and built snares. It should definitely be a part of any rural LEO’s kit, as well as those of Search and Rescue teams.

I also carried an ESEE small, fixed-blade knife called the HEST. It comes with a versatile kydex, molle-backed sheath, easily adapted to fit well on a vest, pack, thigh-rig or belt. Throughout the week, this knife was called on to perform some serious woodland chores. It skinned animals, batoned wood, started fires with a ferro rod, built a bow drill and a figure four dead-fall trap and dug up roots and rocks. I would wash the blood off of it with river sand and sharpen it each night with a small portable rod. Needless to say, this knife goes with me everywhere now.


Finally, there was a very interesting exercise in observation out in the field. As law enforcement officers, we pride ourselves on our ability to observe things that the average person does not. Without giving away too much information, the observation course can be a very humbling experience. But, to a man, everyone agreed afterward that they would never look at the woods in the same way again.

In the evening, Hugh Coffee gave an abbreviated trauma medical class (this block is expected to expand in the future). For those of you not familiar with Hugh, he is a veritable fount of emergency medical knowledge. He has operated in such diverse places as the Sudan and Central America and I anxiously await his updated “Ditch Medicine” book. Hugh gave a good overview on recent developments in trauma equipment and hemostatic agents as well as protocol for handling serious trauma occurring miles from adequate medical care.

 

[Expatriated]

hors d’oeuvres, a la Jeff Randall



Day 3 brought the woods proper. After leaving exhausted waitresses in our wake at the Cracker Barrel, we left civilization filled with sweet tea and biscuits and gravy and hiked into the woods, not planning on coming out until the afternoon of day 5. Very limited gear was permitted for this day but no food or water. This is when the course started coming together and we started relying heavily on the skills we had learned the previous two days.

First on the agenda was finding some water and the instructors, out of the kindness of their hearts, provided us with some coordinates deep into the forest where a spring awaited us. Let me stress that this was a very small spring and if your pace count or bearing was off, it would have been a very long, dry day. After hitting a couple of more points through some of the densest undergrowth I’ve seen in the U.S., we navigated to our initial objective--the instructor’s base camp. There, the lessons continued in this classroom au natural, learning snares and participating in an absolutely wonderful class on wild edibles by Tracy Nelson. I have always struggled with plant identification and I expected this exercise to be of little value. Not so. Tracy presented some easily recognizable plants and herbs that can literally save your life if you’ve got nothing else to eat in the woods. I would come to eat several of these plants over the next few days with a confidence I had never had before when it came to consuming wild plants.

Hugh Coffee plotting our next course


Tracking skills and reading sign were also discussed this day. This is not just a theoretical exercise; it has very practical uses, as was recently illustrated in Georgia. On December 3, 2009, Whitfield Deputy Todd Thompson used the skills he acquired as a recent graduate of this course to track a DEA fugitive through the woods while assisting the U.S. Marshals Service. Along with other Whitfield Deputies, Lt. Patrick Rollins and Sgt. Clay Pangle, the Marshals hit the suspected drug dealer’s residence but he had apparently fled from the trailer. Employing the skills they had learned, the deputies spotted the fugitive’s sign through the woods, including reading bent foliage and a muddy footprint left on a log. Although the Marshals were reportedly initially skeptical, they soon realized Deputy Thompson knew exactly what he was doing and the rather surprised fugitive was quickly apprehended. He was charged with possession of 100 kilos of marijuana and 500 grams of meth--a good lick in anyone’s book.

With not much time to construct shelters and very little gear, night became an exercise of garnering a little sleep next to the fire until the cold became greater than the heat output and you awoke to throw a few more logs on the fire. The temperature got down into the upper 30’s each night, which quickly reinforced the need for a properly built shelter.

The morning of Day 4 brought the unpleasant task of turning what little gear we had over to the instructors. Each of us left camp for our next navigational target that morning with the only permitted gear: knife, water bottle (empty of course!) and a small ESEE survival kit, provided by the instructors. Our task was to navigate to a predetermined point and construct shelters for the night, obtaining water and any other useful items we found along the way. Being stripped of all your usual outdoor gear puts one in a very observant and creative frame of mind. Students were quickly observed starting to carry the most bizarre assortment of flotsam they thought would come in useful later that evening. Old pieces of Styrofoam were very common, for makeshift insulation and pillows. I found a thick glass bottle, still intact so that I could boil some water in it.

Trying to stay dry on a river crossing

Building a shelter became the primary objective as a decent shelter can take several hours to construct, depending on the availability of materials. Again, the machete is invaluable for this task. Once shelters were constructed, night began falling fast and everyone was desperate for some food to replace the high calorie consumption due an entire day of strenuous physical activity. Some started fishing with the small kit packed inside the survival pouch. Others began gathering herbs and plants. It was about this time that the instructors’ benevolence shone upon us again. Providing us with coordinates, they assigned a small group to retrieve some food for us. After a couple of hours, the group came back with 1 dead raccoon and 4 live chickens. All were fair game to eat. The chickens were dispatched and quartered quickly and divided among the group. A few ounces of chicken per person was not a lot but it helped get the blood sugar back up, and roasting it over the fire, it was actually a pleasant experience. Just having a fire and a sense of routine and normalcy (cooking) is a huge moral booster, as anyone who’s ever been in a true survival situation will attest. The raccoon was used as an object lesson on how to skin a snared animal and everyone got some experience with the little creature.

Author skinning a raccoon with an ESEE HEST

The last night was not exactly the Ritz-Carlton but with a decent fire and some proper planning and shelter building, it was easily survivable. That is not to say that anyone felt like sleeping in the next day, however! We were all up and ready with the sun to hike out and finish our last few tracking exercises before getting back to a shower and a hot meal, where someone ELSE does all the work for a change.

Overall, this class is an outstanding chance for LEO’s or SAR teams to put to practice some wilderness skills, especially learning how to survive with virtually no equipment, were that unfortunate event to occur. Operating in an environment where help is not as close as a phone call or the next passing car requires certain advanced skills. You can get those skills from Randall’s Adventure and Training.

What campfire dreams are made of—Alabama BBQ!:thumbup:

 

[Joe Fowler]

Awesome review! I'm going to read it again.

Thank you for posting this. :thumbup:

 

[greyhound352]

Thanks for posting, Great review!

 

[Decklin]

Wow, Nice review. I wanted to take the course before I read the review, now I feel I must.

 

[BenchmadeBoy]

Excellent article. Looks like an amazing course. On a side note, I've just added a Lite Machete to my X-mas list

 

[jacktrades_nbk]

great article, enjoyed reading it twice, thanks for sharing here :thumbup:

 

[smcclown05]

Great review! Thanks for sharing.

 

[Moosez45]

Thanks Expat, that's some good reviewin'. I'm planning on heading down in spring, to get me some. Thanks again.

Moose

 

[JUST1MOR]

Guys, this was originally written for publication but due to a series of foul-ups, it never got published. Rather than have it rot away unread, I figured some of you guys would like to know about RAT's Wilderness Ops Course. If you don't want to read the whole thing, here's the executive summary: a) buy a HEST, b) take the course.

Expatriated, excellent summary & content. Hopefully, this will be a vacation trip sometime in the near future. Spending 5 days without the comforts of home does not seem like an intelligent thought, but you can not deny that tingle of intrigue & excitement that somehow gets into your head. Thank you for your sharing this with us.
Be safe.

 

[tarditi]

Sounds excellent - moved from the "need to do" list to the "need to do ASAP" list.

 

[Pea-Ta]

Thanks for sharing, def something I wanna do.

 

[texastonydobbs]

Thanks for Sharing

 

[dogboye]

Excellent read! Thanks!

 

[Monsieur]

Great review, made me want to take this course even more. Thanks for sharing

 

[StoneColdChuckTX]

Damn, I'm hungry for some BBQ now.


Thanks for posting the review. :thumbup:

 

[johntylermclain]

really cool man

 

[Wanderlust]

thanks for the review it sounds like an amazing class, I will try and take it when I can get some time off.

and you are right about that Lite Machete, that thing is amazing, I carry it every day at work. If anybody is thinking about getting won do it, it is well worth the money

 

[R.A.T.]

Thanks for the review, brother. Hope to see you back down in April.