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The
cover of Scouting, September-October 2019
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Most
of you probably don’t get Scouting magazine, so you won’t have read
“Skills for Your Situation”, by Les Stroud.
In this article he talks about survival and he breaks outdoors skills
into four types; survival skills, emergency preparedness skills, primitive
skills and bushcraft skills. His
thoughts on survival and in particular the weekend recreational survivor are
spot on and I had never thought to break up outdoor skills into different types:
so I thought that I would share his article with you and expand on it, a
bit. Hopefully his thoughts, as well as
mine, will help you identify which skills to learn and practice in case you
need to survive an emergency in the wilderness.
First
things first though; what I have written in this article is in no way a
criticism and in no way detracts from Les Stroud’s thoughts or opinions. I fact, I have always been and I still am a
great admirer of his work and his thoughts on survival and on the teaching of
survival skills: in many ways he has been and continues to be a role model for
me and he has greatly influenced my writing for The Woodsman’s Journal Online. In short, I am a huge fan of the Survivorman!
“One of my greatest fears was realized after
I began the genre of survival shows on TV.
Some started to look at survival as more like a fun hobby…”
Les Stroud
Les
Stroud’s thoughts on survival and learning and practicing survival skills, as
he explained in “Skills for Your Situation”, are that the “…true goal of survival is to get home alive and well”. He continued by saying, they “…are not recreational skills” and that “…practicing and learning survival skills
recreationally is a terrific way to get a handle on the methods”, however,
“…you must keep an overarching serious
and even somber attitude about the purpose” of studying and practicing
survival skills. According to Mr.
Stroud, “Survival is not fun. It is difficult, scary, humbling, painful and,
in a word, ugly”. I agree with Les
Stroud, that it is important to remember why we learn these skills, and to
remember what surviving an extreme situation or disaster in the wilderness is
truly like: hopefully you will only ever have to practice your skills and never
have to put your skills into practice.
“Knowing how to get a fire going anywhere,
anytime, is just about the most important all around survival skill you can
master” Les Stroud
Survival Skills
Survival
skills, as Les Stroud noted are “…methods
you can employ to simply survive an extreme situation or disaster in the bush”
and are skills that deal with immediate and short-term problems.
Les Stroud, wrote that “…survival is, by its very nature, meant to
be short-term” and in “Outside” online, Devon O’Neill noted that statistically
most “misplaced” persons are found within 72 hours of being reported missing. He also wrote that, 85% “misplaced” persons
are found within the first 12 hours and 97% within the first 24 hours of being
reported missing. So the survival skills
that you have learned and practiced only have to keep you alive for 72 hours or
three short days: days which in a survival situation will feel like weeks.
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Rule
of Threes, graphic by the author
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One very good way at looking at an individual skill and seeing if it
belongs with “Survival Skills” is to use the “Rule of Threes”. The “Rule of Threes” is a planning tool,
which helps you prioritize which actions, and therefore skills, are the most
critical to your immediate and short-term survival. The “Rule of Threes” states that you cannot
survive for more than 3 minutes without air or with severe bleeding. You cannot survive for more than 3 hours
without a fire or a shelter from the environment. You cannot survive for more than 3 days without
water or sleep. But you can survive for
3 weeks without food. The “Rule of
Threes” assumes that the rules above them have already been met, so if you are
in the desert without any water and you are bleeding severely, according to the
three-minute rule, the most important action to take at that moment is to stop
the bleeding.
So,
looking at the “Rule of Threes”, the most important immediate and short-term
skills would be first aid skills, followed by shelter and fire building, then
skills on how to find and purify water and finally hunting, fishing, trapping
and other food gathering skills. Other
important short-term survival skills that fall into the “Rule of Threes”
somewhere between three hours and three days are signaling, using a compass to
orient yourself and how to find directions without a compass. Skills that don’t help us with these very
immediate and short-term survival goals are not “Survival Skills”
One very important survival skill, that is not considered in the “Rule of
Threes” is learning to recognize and prevent panic and understanding the
psychology of being lost. It is critical
that you do not give into panic and woodshock, that you practice S.T.O.P. and do
not give in to the “Seven Deadly Enemies of Survival”: for more on these subjects
and on “Rule of Threes” read “The Ace of Spades: Survival Basics”, HERE, and
“Getting Lost And What To Do About It”, Circa 1915”, HERE.
“Emergency preparedness skills are used in
more urban circumstances, such as dealing with a hurricane or blackout…”
Les Stroud
Emergency Preparedness
Skills
Typically,
emergency preparedness skills help you prepare for and deal with emergencies
and situations that are close to home or, by extension, close to the vehicle
that you are travelling in. Les Stroud
wrote that knowing how to conserve food and water in an urban disaster could
save your life.
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Window
box, 1920s, from “Before the refrigerator got its hum”, The Smithsonian
Institute
|
I
live in the northeast of the United States, near the Great Lakes, where it is
cold and snowy for a large part of the year; in the past, during power outages,
I have had to make and use window ice box to keep cold things cold, while I
worked to keep the house warm. Other
important emergency preparedness skills for my area of the world are, knowing
how to drive in the snow, safely, and how to conserve heat in your car or how
to make a “warm-room” in your house when there is no power. And while you could argue that knowing how to
stay alive in a snowbound car is a survival skill, unless you are travelling on
a remote road (and really why are you travelling on a remote road during a snow
storm anyways; what were you thinking?) your stay in the stranded car will
probably be short.
An
emergency preparedness skill that will help you survive an extreme situation or
emergency in the wilderness is learning how to prepare first aid and survival
kits: remember, both first aid and survival kits can range from pocket-sized to
day-pack-sized and can be created for different emergencies, situations and
uses.
“Primitive skills…They are not necessarily
survival skills; they are thriving skills…”
Les Stroud
Primitive Skills
Another
name for primitive skills would be aboriginal skills, and they are the skills
that native peoples, from any given area, once used as a part everyday
life. Skills that can fall into this
category are basketry, making pottery from clay, preparing and tanning hides,
building advanced shelters and cooking over an open fire. Many of these skills could be used to help
you survive an emergency in the wilderness, however most of them are difficult
to learn, are time and energy consuming and might take more than one per person
to accomplish.
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Larry
Dean Olsen’s book Outdoor Survival Skills is a great book on primitive
skills, photo by the author
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Primitive
skills require expert knowledge of native or aboriginal skills; they solve medium
to long-term problems, take time, energy and sometimes more than one person to accomplish
successfully: all things that you might be lacking in an emergency or survival
situation in the wilderness.
Les
Stroud believes, and I agree with him, that snowshoe making is a primitive
skill that has survival applications. Let’s
say that you have had an emergency in the winter wilderness and you have
decided to walk out instead of waiting for rescuers: walking in deep snow can
be very exhausting and exhaustion in a survival situation is a killer,
particularly in the winter. Knowing how
to make expedient or primitive snowshoes, in that situation, can mean the
difference between successfully walking out and freezing to death in the
wilderness.
Other
primitive skills that might be useful in a survival situation are
fire-starting, without modern tools, and basic flint knapping. Basic flint knapping is simply fracturing rocks
to make sharp edged or other basic tools, unlike advanced flint knapping which
is the crafting of advanced stone tools and projectile points.
“Bushcraft skills…These skills are
mostly unnecessary in a survival situation…” Les Stroud
Bushcraft Skills
Bushcraft
skills, which could just as well be called pioneer skills, require expert
knowledge of the pioneer way of life and they solve medium to long-term problems,
take time, energy, expert knowledge and sometimes more than one person to
accomplish successfully: again these are all things that you might be lacking
in an emergency or survival situation in the wilderness. Some of these skills might be able to be
adapted to a survival situation, but for the most part these skills are
designed to make long-term life in the wilderness more comfortable. Bushcraft skills include log-cabin building,
bridge building, primitive furniture making and other domestic skills; they
involve learning the use and care of axes, knives and rope, and how to use
lashings and knots.
I
hope that this will help you decide which skills will be most useful in helping
you to survive that “…difficult, scary,
humbling, painful and, in a word, ugly…” thing that is survival in an
emergency or disaster in the wilderness.
I hope that you continue to enjoy The
Woodsman’s Journal Online and my videos at BandanaMan Productions and don’t
forget to follow me on both The Woodsman’s Journal Online and subscribe to
BandanaMan Productions on YouTube, and if you have questions, as always, feel
free to leave a comment on either site. I announce new articles on Facebook at Eric Reynolds,
on Instagram at bandanamanaproductions, and on VK at Eric Reynolds, so watch
for me.
Sources
O’Neill, Devon “How
Backcountry Search and Rescue Works”, [Outside, March 4, 2016], https://www.outsideonline.com/2059616/how-backcountry-search-and-rescue-works,
accessed 10/09/2018
Stroud,
Les, “Skills for Your Situation”, Scouting, September-October 2019, Vol.
107, No. 4, [Boy Scouts of America, Irving, TX], p. 44-45
Window box, 1920s, from
“Before the refrigerator got its hum”, [The Smithsonian Institute, National
Museum of American History, Trade, Literature and Special Collections; Behring
Center] https://americanhistory.si.edu/object-project/refrigerators/ice-tongs,
accessed 9/7/19
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