How To Pack For A Day Hike
BY Herschel Smith
8 years, 4 months ago
This is another report of folks who needed to do some work to survive in the wilderness, albeit for a short time. From this article comes this video.
Don’t listen to her advice. What is she leaving out? We cover this frequently here. Also make sure to take trekking poles, a tarp (or heavy rubberized poncho) and 550 cordage (from which three items you can have virtually instant shelter). Take a container that can be used to boil water, a knife, a tactical light, and a gun. Oh, and don’t leave out the fire starter.
Unlike this very unwise man and his son, don’t keep on pushing in the hopes that something good will happen.
We heard waterfalls, one after another, but the mind tends to latch onto something it yearns to believe. A waterfall, Jack and I had been told, marked a faint fisherman’s trail out of the gorge, and we’d been searching for it now for the last few hours. We were no longer thinking of trout; our fly rods were broken down and tucked under our arms. We were trying to get out of the woods before dark, but each waterfall we heard turned out to be the wind coursing through the trees or the creek rushing by boulders. It was one false summit after another. And now worry began to gnaw at my gut, because I’d broken every rule when we left the truck.
We had no map, compass, or flashlight. No shelter, signaling device, or fire starter. No firsthand knowledge of where we were. No clue how to beat the dropping sun back to the trail. I had ignored 40 years of knowing better.
This situation can be dealt with by building a debris hut for protection against the rain and wind, and pine bows or straw to get your bodies off of the ground, along with finding a potable water source. But in order to pull this off, you have to stop in time and quit hoping that civilization is just around the bend.
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