shaman’s survival basics

THE SHAMANIC GUIDE TO NOT GETTING SCREWED IN THE FIRST PLACE

(short version)

Planning makes these sorts of things as looking for moss on  bark unnecessary.  Study your topo. Study your road maps. Make note of where you are going in relation to roads, habitation, and other bits of civilization.  Plan what to do if you get screwed ahead of time. For each leg of the trip figure out what you'll do if you get screwed. Let other people know your plan. If nothing else, leave a brief description of your plan at your car. That way the authorities won't waste a lot of time looking for the corpse in the wrong place. 

The best plan for getting unscrewed begins with a call to a person you trust saying "If I don't call you by Tuesday, tell them to look for me . . ."

I once boogered my leg on a simple overnighter.  I knew I had 8 miles to the next nearest road that had regular rounds by a ranger.  I walked 1 mile in 4 hours, and the charlie horse I thought I'd walk off kept getting worse. Faced with an estimated ETA at the road long after dark, I pulled Plan B out and went back the way I came. Based on my calculation, I arrived back at the car with a half hour of light left, and drove myself out to medical treatment for a ruptured cyst that might have cost me the leg if I'd tried to go on.

THE SHAMANIC GUIDE TO GETTING YOURSELF UN-SCREWED

(short version)

1) Don't rely on your senses if you're that screwed.  Something is wrong. I once had the heat get to my head on a simple 5 mile hike and almost ran the party off a cliff.   I had a compass and a GPS, but stopped believing both of them. Sit down and rest.  If it's cold, build a fire. Get a grip on yourself, you're going to need it.

2) Forget North. If you don't know where you are and where you are going, any direction will do.  Do two things:

a)  Listen for traffic:  A road!!!   

b)  Look for flowing water or signs of previously flowing water.  Follow where it goes. Eventually you'll end up at civilization.  If nothing else, at least start heading downhill. Most people live within a thousand feet of sea level, most people go to the mountains to get away from the crowd.  Gee. What a concept!

3)  You will never find home as long as your head is in a place where the sun never shines. Turn over a new leaf and start being rational. As soon as all your emotional (excremental expletive) is in one sock, take a careful inventory of everything you have.  Ditch the stuff you won't need. Make lists, set priorities.  

4) If you're not absolutely sure you're going to make it out before you assume ambient temperature, spend what resources you have holing up.  That's a tough decision to make.  If you screwed up and didn't leave word of your plans, it might take a few days of agony before the dumb clucks find you.  However, if you concentrate on keeping your sorry self warm, dry, and hydrated you will make it out.  Make fire, make shelter, and wait.  When you get home, read what I've written and try again next year.

5) Make yourself as findable as possible. If you hole up in a cave, make sure you leave plenty of sign on the outside or you'll be mulch. If you chose to walk out, start leaving a trail of notes, blazes, markers, etc.  Build big fires.  Make noise with anything you can think of except your own voice-- you'll be hoarse and worn out and you'll die.

6) After a while it all starts looking the same.  Even if you don't have a compass, set a goal of getting to a specific landmark in the direction you want to go. It may be a tree 50 yards out, but dont' go wandering in a general direction.  Most people have one leg shorter than the other, and most people don't know how to compensate. Hence, most people will walk in wide mile-and-a-half circles if they have no other offsetting stimuli. Setting intermediate goals  will also keep you from panicking.  Walking through an endless Northern landscape of cedars on flat swampy ground taught me this.  You may be down to 10 feet per leg, but once you give up and start stumbling around, you'll know what screwed really means.

7) Do not attempt to travel at night.  I do a lot of adventuring in the Big South Fork region of Southern KY. If you've seen "Last of the Mohicans" you know the kind of terrain, I'm into.  I'd done quite a bit of caving when I was younger, so I assumed hiking in the dark with a flashlight was similar. For years, my belief held up.  Let me tell you that there are 60 ft cliffs in these United States that don't show up on topos. There are also sink holes. I've run into both in the dark. In fact once I went out deer hunting and almost walked off a 60 ft cliff, and the only thing that saved me was falling in a sinkhole about 10 ft from the edge and getting stuck up to my waist.

EPILOGUE:

Listen to your old Shaman.  Get a good survival guide and start taking what it says to heart.  Start small, work up.   Make every walk in the county park an bit of training for the big trail.  Start making plans. Start working plans.

If none of this has sunk in, and you still want to know how to find North in a pinch,  go out on a snowy night and look up at Orion.  Admire the beauty of the Hunter and his dog chasing the great bull Taurus.  Remember these words from my buddy John:

"You know, there are times when I look up at that sight, I think back to those dark times after fall had given into Winter.  We were just up north of the Ardennes.  At any time, we'd start catching fire from the eighty-eights. The Krauts would aim them to go off in the trees over our heads. Being in a foxhole wouldn't save you. There was no where to go. You had to just sit and take it.

"One night, I went into a snow covered field; it must have been about 10 below. There was Orion.  It suddenly occured to me that if I opened my jacket and laid down, I could be home in a matter of minutes.  I'd had enough of being cold and being shot at, and I'd heard that before you went, you'd feel warm.

"I started to undo the buttons on my coat, but my hands were too cold and I just couldn't do it.  I was angry at first, and then I realized that either way didn't make much of a difference. Finally I gave up and walked back to my dugout.  To this day, I still remember that moment fondly, and whenever I'm out on cold frosty night, I look to Orion for comfort and solace and peace of mind."

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The one thing I thought about on the way home tonight  was that most of the times I've gotten really lost it happened because of a major malfunction at the start of the trip. 

Ex A:  The directions to the trailhead were written before the little picnic grove was closed and the spur it was on bulldozed. You continue mindlessly down the road, find the next nearest picnic grove with a likely looking trail heading into the woods, and off you go.  Two hours later, the trail ends in a swamp that is not on your trail map.

Ex B:  You pull into the entrance for the WMA and go into the woods.  You do not know that the entrance you think you're at is really 2 miles down the road.

In example B, I hunted all day using the topo, and only found out I was horribly screwed when it was time to leave.  There were similar landforms at both entrances.  The difference was the one down the road had another entrance 2 miles back up the road, the other one had endless trackless void.

If this sort of thing happens, you're always left with big coarse problems which usually require big coarse solutions. It isn't a matter of finding a particular 50 yard long turnoff.  It's a matter of finding the road  that it connects to, or ANY road or ANYWHERE besides where you are.   The trick is to think big and to think about limiting risk and maximizing chances for success. 

Solution B:

The roads in had followed ridge lines.  Therefore going up to the top of the ridge got us to the level where the roads where.  The rest was just a matter of finding route signs and choosing left or right at the proper times.

Solution A:

I bushwacked around the swamp  (swamp bad, not-swamp good) and pushed until I had a road. I knew there were country roads within 2 miles no matter which way we went.  It just so happened we were less than a 1/4 mile off target when we found a road.  We stopped to pick a bunch of burrs off and continued on our way.