BY Herschel Smith
8 years, 6 months ago
Outdoor Life has an interesting list of 26 survival myths that can get you killed. It’s well worth reading all of them. This one in particular struck me.
14. A big fire beats a shelter
Large-log fires have kept people alive in the cold, but that doesn’t mean you can afford to skip building a shelter. What if it rains or becomes really windy? You never want to sleep out in the open if you can help it. Take the time to build a shelter. It will pay you back every time.
Well yes, there’s the issue of rain, which will kill you if you attempt to sleep in it all night. The wind is another issue, and is related to the primary reason I would recommend building a shelter.
There are four types of heat transfer: conductive, convective, radiant and evaporative. In the absence of survival gear, you need to build a bed of pine bows, straw, leaves and other things to lift you off of the ground to prevent conductive heat transfer (which occurs when two bodies are in contact) from your body to the ground.
If the wind is blowing, that means that convective heat transfer is occurring. But one often overlooked reason for a shelter is the fact that the universe becomes an infinite heat sink at night. Your body is radiating heat to the universe without a shelter over you.
Even if you only bend branches and use saplings and construct a hemispherical cage over which you throw leaves and mulch (a common emergency shelter in the South), you need to have a shelter at night. Never travel so long and so far that you forego the construction of a shelter to keep you alive until morning.
