When is the TIME!!!!

recondo4u

recondo4u

Joined
Apr 5, 2001
Messages
442
Ok,
you have been in the bush meny times, you always carry a small but complete survival kit, you have your fav. knife or knives.Then, BOOM!! for whatever reason you are lost, or say cut off from being able to get out, BUT YOU DO NOT KNOW THIS YET! Lets say its around 16:00hrs. the weather is somewhat unpredictable. so at what point do you put the heart of your survival plan into action, remember you can not wait until you get out or rescued to act,darkness,weather or extrem conditions are a factor, at some point you have to say its time!!! when??

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I'll take point
 
ok,
my plan has been implemented whaen i realize that i can not reach shelter in a suitable time frame. my last encounter with this scenario was when while hunting in the bighorn mountains we were closed in by fog, the freezing rain and snow, it became apparent that we should not try the descent from the mountain in these conditions on horse back. we the set up an impromptu camp, fire, makeshift shelter, cooked up some coffee, our assistant guide got himself soaked in the freezing rain, was dressed poorly for the conditions in the first place, but he did have a very large knife hanging from his belt and a cowboy hat.

well we warmed him up, waited untill the weather to clear, got back on the trail and all were home safely.

as an interesting aside, several of the other fellow in the group came up with a suggestion that we all split up and find our way back down. i kept thinking this sounds like one of those stories in sports afield about lost hunters and hypothermia. fortunately several of us prevailed on the group to stick together. what a potential nightmare.

alex
 
Been there. As soon as I come to the realization that not all's well, I begin to assess my situation, my gear at hand, and making do with materials at hand to come up with shelter and fire (not neccessarily in that order), then water, and possibly food.

If I may have premature in my decision to make camp, at least I'll have spent a decent night out and have a good story to tell here.

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It's not the pace of life that concerns me, It's the sudden stop at the end.
 
It doesn't have to be wilderness to be an interesting story...

Lets see... 1973, I'm hitchhiking from Boston to San Francisco. Its been a long day. I've made it as far as western NY state to a town called Batavia where me and a half dozen others who have met up along the road find ourselves without a ride and shelter at midnight. So we hike off the highway and down the road about a quarter mile (remember its pretty dark) where we find this large circular field (maybe 200ft across) surrounded by trees. Nice spot, so we unhitch our packs, set up a few tarps, and go to sleep.

We are rudely awakend at about 4:00 am with a battery of large searchlights in our faces and the voices of a dozen men ordering us up and out of our tarps. We emerge to find ourselves surrounded by NY Hwy. Patrol officers who procede to shake us down for a couple of hours going through our things for drugs (luckily no one had any), calling in our licenses making sure we had no warrants out for our arrest, etc.

As dawn breaks, we realize how we have gotten ourselves into this. Turns out the nice big field surrounded by trees we have found for the night is sitting right in front (a stone's throw literally) of the NY State Western Regional Hwy. Patrol HQ!

Eventually, they told us all to go back to the highway and get the hell out of there! In retrospect, it might be good that I wasn't a knife knut at the time. The only blade I had on me was a small SAK which they found and ignored.

 
Matthew,

Reminds me of a hiking story from a while ago, I was up in PA near Indaiantown Gap on the AT, and decided to side hike off the trail to follow a neat ridgeline. It got to dusk, and I got a little disoriented, couldn't find my way back to the trail or to my planned campsite, no problem, as I was hiking alone, had plenty of water, my dinner, and my tent and stuff on my back. Bunked down in a nice likely place near a bend in the stream, and went to sleep. Woke up in the morning, surrounded by soldiers with M16's pointing at me, It seems I had stumbled into the Indiantown Gap national guard training grounds, and an enterprising leiutennant decided to run my camp as a suprise infiltration exercise. They were moving through the area as part of a company wide infantry training thing. They scared the hell out of me, I fell right out of my hammock, which was I think the idea, and then the officer told me to get out of the training area, and gave me a compass heading back to the trail. Seems they got hikers in the grounds all the time, and decided to have a little fun
smile.gif
The soldiers thought it was a riot and I did too after I picked the pine needles out of my teeth.

As far as the time for starting to think survival, I generally think dusk is important, if dusk comes, and you still are in a position where you can't get to home/somewhere in a half hour, I tend to lay up and start to think about my resources.

Best,
Todd (edgedance)
 
I can sneak and peak in the Pine Barrens of South Jersey with the best of 'em. I am familiar with the terrain, flora, fauna and landscape patterns. Most of the Pine barrens has similar features but on this December afternoon I was in a very familiar area for the purpose of checking on one of my deerstands. I had hunted out of this stand in the past and had hunted the immediate area many times.

Due to a quickly changing circumstance, I was required to press this stand into service, the night before opening day. I had not visited this stand since the previous season as I had built others to coincide with altered game patterns. 1600 hours, interestingly enough, I went to check on this stand. I parked my truck at the end of the trail a mere 150 or so yards from the stand. By memory I traversed a heavily vegetated area into a cedar swamp fringed by laurels.

The stand was there, but needed attention. Wearing only jeans, flannel shirt and a carpenter's tool belt (loaded only with nails and a hammer) I worked on the stand and got it tightened up. Well, we all know what happens at 1700 in December, it gets dark. It gets real dark under a heavy canopy with no moon and overcast conditions.

I am embarrased to say it, being one who had snooped and pooped all over the place and is known to carry more gear than necessary, I got turned around. I followed terrain changes (what little there are in the Pine Barrens) and tried to follow fringe borders, but wasn't getting anywhere. No compass, no ready means of starting a fire, no cell phone (it was in the truck) no nuthin'.

It was damp and cold. I was shivering. My feet were wet, (from not following the fringe as accurately as I should have), and was more embarrased than anything else. My son, who was about 8 at the time, knew much better than this ... and he knew it from my training him!

I availed myself to the only survival kit I had with me besides myself, I prayed.

Very soon thereafter, I crossed a sand road, identified my own tire tracks and, after finding a place were I went through a puddle, ascertained direction of vehicle travel. My truck was only 175 yards ahead.

INSIDE THE TRUCK was enough MREs to throw a party, matches, lighters, firesteels, knives, guns, hatchet, shovel, ammo, cell phone, compasses (3, that I counted !!!), hand held GPS with the darn fix of this exact deerstand saved in memory!!!, extra socks, extra clothes, extra boots, jackets, hats, raingear, SAKs (as in more than one), fixed, folder, multi-bladed, multi-tooled, working, broken, new, used, abused and just about every other type of gear imaginable. It was, afterall, the evening before opening day of deer hunting season and just the pepperoni and beer on hand could have carried me and a handful of others for a time.

How stupid of me not to have at least brought a small compass, matches, pocket knife and the cell phone. But, I was only going a short distance in very familiar turf.

Don't any of you dare pick on me for this post as I did it for you, not for me.

[This message has been edited by Nimrod (edited 05-20-2001).]

[This message has been edited by Nimrod (edited 05-20-2001).]
 
Nimrod, you're not alone. I had a similar situation about 4 years ago. I missed a well marked trail and was disoriented for a couple of hours, not carrying squat. Really dumb.

Now I refuse to leave the trailhead without my pack. Just won't do it, learned my lesson. Now I pack plenty and I carry it. I would much rather turn back because I'm tired than go through that again!
 
These are the kind of things I wanted to hear about. We each know or own level of survival skills up to the point of being in a real survival situation,(at that point we can only hope our mind will kick into survival mode) is it harder for one of us who has had some type of skills training be it school or self tought to put our survival plan into action than say a person with limited skills? do we press on a little harder a little longer then the person who may know he's in trouble sooner due to his or her lack of skills training? This was on my mind!

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I'll take point
 
recondo4u,
i look at it in a way that we are well aware of the dangers, more so than most "outdoors people" so we take better precautions not to get into a bad situation, and ounce of prevention ... type thing.

always better to avoid a problem than to deal with it. that is why we carry fire starters, space blankets, matches, dry tinder, etc. not that we are planning on using them, but if we are thrust into a situation, we will walk out alive, compared to some of the "guides" i have had while hunting i am much better prepared for eventualities than they are. only the foolish tempt the fates.

alex
 
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