Choosing a Wilderness Survival Knife

Written by Epsilon on January 31, 2009 – 8:17 am -

(1) Wilderness situations require light packing for mobility and simplicity during travel.  (2) A regular Joe without stone age survival skills knows to bring steel equipment. 

Let’s assume a simple survival situation.  Our subject, Survival Steve, is out hunting with a couple of buddies.  They’re 20 miles from the nearest civilization, but they know what they’re doing and they’ve come prepared.  Steve’s buddies are hot on the trail of some large animal when the greasy hamburger Steve had for lunch finally catches up with him.  He tells his buddies to go on ahead while he makes a pit stop in the bush.  The buddies are making good time, and the sun’s going down, so they don’t argue and forge ahead.

Unsurprisingly, Steve makes a wrong turn while trying to catch up, hikes an hour in the wrong direction and realizes that he’s probably going to be spending the night alone in the wild.  He’ll find his way back to camp as soon as the sun comes up, but he’d be foolish to go wandering around in the dark.  He calls out for his friends, but they don’t call back.

Steve’s happy he came prepared.  He’d seriously considered bringing a hatchet, but it was too big to hike with, so it stayed at camp.  He’d also considered dropping a 3″ folding blade knife in his pocket because it wouldn’t get in his way.  Instead, Survival Steve had opted for a 5″ fixed blade. It was light enough to pack yet strong enough to pound through 2″ branches with ease.

Steve finished his lean-to in the dark then, with the flashlight he so cleverly packed, set to work on a fire.  Once again, the fixed blade was nearly perfect.  It was a little small for splitting kindling and a tad large for shaving a feather stick, but it was a good compromise.  Steve could have survived just fine with the hatchet or the folder,  but over a range of applications, his fixed blade knife was the most reliable and easy to carry and use.

Tags: knife, Survival, wilderness
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What’s a Lumen Anyway?

Written by Epsilon on January 29, 2009 – 8:09 am -

Flashlights often come with a lumen rating.  For instance, the Phoebus Tactical Mid Size Flashlight boasts 65 lumens while the Princeton Tec Corona Headlamp puts out 35.  Assuming that all manufacturers use the same testing methodology (doubtful), a lumen rating would provide an easy benchmark for comparing flashlights.  A more likely scenario is that each manufacturer uses completely different measurement techniques, so lumens are only going to be reliable within a single manufacturer’s product line.

This article titled “Lux, Lumens and Watts, What’s the Difference?” by Brillianz Ltd illuminates light measurement techniques . . . a little.  The thorniest issue in comparing light sources is that their beams are never at the same concentration.  For instance, a 100 watt light bulb with no reflector will light up a campsite, but a much weaker flashlight with a focused reflector won’t touch the campsite but will still light up a rabbit in the brush at 50 yards.  Is there any way to compare?

Apparently not.  According to the Brillianz article,  sunlight ranges from 32,000 to 100,000 lumens per square meter, and a bright office has about 400 lumens per square meter.  Ambient outdoor light is also about 400 lumens per square meter.  Because lumens have meaning only when compared to the area that they’re lighting up, your flashlight’s reflector is, therefore, just as critical as it’s lumen rating.

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Military Survival Field Manual

Written by Epsilon on January 28, 2009 – 4:23 am -

In our humble opinion, DIY is the best solution to hundreds of problems.  We build our own cabinets, piece together our own bicycles and decorate the house with our own (usually) artistic creations.  Doing things yourself and doing them well tends to impress people, and that feeds our ego (BONUS!).

Emergency preparedness must be DIY.  72-hour kits and first aid kits will help in a narrow set of circumstances; basically, if you’re dropped off in the desert and help is on the way, you should be able to fend off the elements for a day or two or three.  If you’re hiking in a remote area and you lose the keys to your car, you’ll want something a little more substantial.

The Military Survival Field Manual is geared toward DIY behind enemy lines, which is the exact kind of overkill that ScoSu is all about.  After you get past the details about not leaving tracks that an enemy soldier might find and the camouflage patterns to use in coniferous areas (broad slashes of course), you’ll find some ridiculously applicable techniques written in the plainest English imaginable.

Here’s an excerpt from the section on testing plants for edibility.

1. Test only 1 part of a plant at a time.
2. Separate the plant into its basic components (stems, roots, buds, and flowers).
3. Smell the food for strong acid odors.  Remember, smell alone does not indicate a plant is edible or inedible.
4. DO NOT eat 8 hours before the test and drink only purified water.
5. During the 8 hours you abstain from eating, test for contact poisoning by placing a piece of the plant on the inside of your elbow or wrist.  The sap or juice should contact the skin.  Usually 15 minutes is enough time to allow for a reaction.
6. During testing, take NOTHING by mouth EXCEPT purified water and the plant you are testing.
7. Select a small portion of a single part and prepare it the way you plan to eat it.
8. Before placing the prepared plant in your mouth, touch a small portion (a pinch) to the outer surface of your lip to test for burning or itching.
9. If after 3 minutes there is no reaction on your lip, place the plant on your tongue and hold it for 15 minutes.
10. If there is no reaction, thoroughly chew a pinch and hold it in your mouth for 15 minutes (DO NOT SWALLOW).  If any ill effects occur, rinse out your mouth with water.
11. If nothing abnormal occurs, swallow the food and wait 8 hours.  If any ill effects occur during this period, induce vomiting and drink a water and charcoal mixture.
12. If no ill effects occur, eat ¼ cup of the same plant prepared the same way.  Wait another 8 hours.  If no ill effects occur, the plant part as prepared is safe for eating.

Tags: bug out bag, diy, guide, military, Survival, wilderness
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Fire From the Domestic Gods

Written by Mel on January 27, 2009 – 3:02 am -

Dryer lint is an easy-to-overlook but incredibly handy wilderness survival tool.  A waterproof canister or zip-lock bag full of  dryer lint can save valuable time when you need to start a fire under adverse conditions and don’t have an abundance of dry combustibles on hand.

The genius behind dryer lint is that it weighs nothing, squeezes into the most compact 72-hour kit or bug out bag and is  already collecting in your trash can.  The next time you’re holding a handful of dryer lint, stash it next to your flint and steel.  It may only start a few fires for you, but it’ll be there when you’re in a hurry.

Photo taken by Melissa Esplin

Tags: bug out bag, camping, fire, wilderness
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Lost Keys & Secret Plans

Written by Mel on January 14, 2009 – 11:05 pm -

An adventuresome couple with which we are intimately familiar, we’ll call them Linda and Cordell, took a trip in their white 2001 Chevy Suburban to some Arizona slot canyons last summer for a long day hike.  Linda and Cordell love the outdoors and leave their teenagers at home regularly so they can escape out into the mountains around their home in Phoenix. They take so many trips that they’d left without telling anyone where they were going.  It was only a day hike, and they’d be back by nightfall.

photo taken by Melissa Esplin

The slot canyon they were interested in hiking was relatively remote,  so they didn’t see cars or people after they left the highway and set out down miles of dirt roads. The hiking and wading and swimming were great, and they were enjoying the warm weather and the gorgeous rocks. They arrived safely back at the car in the evening only to realize that  Cordell’s car keys had somehow snuck out of his backpack and disappeared, likely in one of the many water crossings they’d made during the day.  Contrary to popular belief, Summer in Arizona can be quite chilly at night, so Cordell and Linda were getting nervous.

Cordell searched through all of their packs without any luck, and they had no hope of recovering the keys from the canyon trail.  Their car was parked miles away from any paved roads or signs of civilization.   Cordell went into survival mode.  He reasoned that his best hope for escape that night was to somehow get the car started. He managed to destroy the driver’s side door lock on their Suburban and get inside for some shelter. Neither Cordell nor Linda had any idea how to hotwire a car, but they tried and tried and tried until their car battery was completely dead and the stearing column was a mess of stripped wire.

Cordell and Linda huddled together in the back seat to ride out the night, but they had no emergency blankets or sleeping bags to keep warm.  The clothes on their backs were meant for warm-weather hiking and swimming, so they didn’t help much either.  They hadn’t brought any material for starting a fire, and even if they had, it was easier to just stick to the car. Fortunately, the night didn’t get too cold, and they had managed to break into the car without smashing any windows.

Early the next morning the stranded couple  started hiking out.  They figured they’d have to hike all day and maybe through the night before they’d find a paved road.   Coincidentally, a park ranger decided to take a rarely used backroad that day, spotted the exhausted hikers and drove them back to the ranger station.  Cordell called one of their kids to come pick them up and they were back home in Phoenix that afternoon.

What were they thinking?  They left ill prepared with no backup plans and nobody who knew where to look for them.  Their kids had spent the night worried about their parents, but nobody the teenagers called had any idea where the parents had gone.  If Linda had sprained her ankle or broken a bone, they’d have been in a lot more trouble, so in fact, the emergency was far from a worst-case scenario.

An extra set of keys, a clear itinerary with the kids, an emergency radio, emergency blankets or just a 72-hour kit in the trunk of the car would have made an enormous difference.

Tags: stay alive, Survival, tip
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