Imagine a fun afternoon hike around Mt. Baker. You’re enjoying the quiet of the forest, the dappled light shining through the trees, and the intoxicating smell of the leaves when thick fog rolls in unexpectedly at 4:00 p.m. In a panic, you follow the wrong trail for hours along a progressively steeper face until you’ve run out of daylight.
Imagine being on a snowmobile in the back-country with friends, zipping through the powder and chasing each other between the tree trunks when a blizzard sets in and the last snowmobile doesn’t show up at the rendezvous point.
Or imagine the mountain biking trip you’ve been daydreaming about for months, bombing down the mountain with the wind in your face. You get separated from your group on a tricky portion of singletrack, and decide to press on when you come to an unknown fork in the trail. Feeling exhausted and dehydrated, you take a corner too fast and crash, taco–ing your front wheel and breaking your collar bone.
Lost, hurt, stranded – these scenarios and others like them play out over three thousand times per year in the United States. Folks heading outdoors in search of adventure don’t plan on getting lost or hurt in the wilderness. It can happen to the best of us, and when it does, people underestimate the challenges of the wilderness and overestimate their own ability.
To help you avoid becoming a statistic by rightly explaining the dangers of the wilderness and ensuring that you are physically and mentally prepared for any snags during your adventures, we’ve put together this wilderness survival guide.
- Stay Found – Make Survival Training a Waste of Time
- Fear the Weather – Wilderness Enemy Number One
- Communication – It’s Not Just For Married People
- Buddy Up – One Is The Loneliest Number
- Survival Kit – The New Ten Essentials, Plus…
- Survival Priorities – Remember The Rule of 3