Tip - Survival

With any luck, recreational camping these days should in no way put your life at risk. However, if you are a backcountry hiker, if you are going anywhere that could put you in danger, or if you are headed anywhere that might not get visited for days, you should take some simple steps to safeguard your health. As hard as it is to believe, people, do get stranded and lost for days, like James Kim, - Going out of cellphone range, without anyone coming by for days or weeks? If you are going anywhere like this, you should be prepared.

I stumbled upon Doug Ritter's website while trying to find reviews of camping knives. That's coming soon, but instead I found this interesting site about survival, Equipped to Survive. Not, as he succinctly puts it, Survivalists, but survival for you, should you become stranded somewhere for a really long time. And that's what caught my eye. Though he appears to have started the site for aviators, he has expanded to all sorts of situations. Doug's site has lots of great articles on Personal Locater Beam gear, survival kits, skills, equipment, techniques and how to deal with special situations.

Since my post today is about tips, I'm going to link to several of Doug's articles, among others, about survival.

First up is Doug Ritter's own personal pocket survival kit, that you can make up. Not sure how you'll get the vicodin, but if you can, that's got to be one of the smarter kit ingredients I've seen in some time. This article has other great links to categories of items you'll need to survive such as food, medicine and devices. Ready.gov, our friendly government's survivalist arm, has a set of links for survival kits you can make. And that ol' reliable, Wikipedia, has a lengthy entry on kits.

What should you do if you get stuck on a logging road miles away from everybody? Doug has awesome tips. Some of the best? Carry a AA battery cell phone recharger, and texting signals can travel farther than voice signals. And find higher ground, altitude is your friend when trying to phone out. Here's a tip from just about everybody: If traveling in the winter where you might get snow bound, carry a metal coffee can, some rolls of toilet paper, a gallon of isopropyl alcohol and these instructions. You can heat your car or truck for over 24 hours with this setup, saving gas for motoring out when the thaw hits.