A lot of wilderness survival training is geared towards what to do when the worst happens – when you get lost, injured, or stranded, and no one is coming to save you, at least not anytime soon. And that’s a good thing. Because although those situations are extremely rare, there’s no substitute for being prepared with the right mindset, skillset, and gearset well ahead of time.
But as much as I believe in quality training, I’ll always say the best wilderness survival emergency is the one that never happens. In the years I spent in search & rescue, I noticed over time there were common threads that ran through the cases of people who got found quickly vs. not. When I first started SARCRAFT, I wrote them down and incorporated them into our curricula. If you’ve ever been to any of our wilderness survival classes, you’ve heard this already. If not, may I present you with… SARCRAFT’s Seven Steps to Staying Found.
Step One: Complete a Trip Plan
A trip plan doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be as simple as a few sentences on a piece of scrap paper or as complex as a full-on National Geographic-style expedition plan with chapters, headers, maps, photos, etc.
A trip plan has three main ingredients: Where you’re going, how long you expect to be gone, and who you’re going with. It needs to be in writing, since spouses, friends, and family members are notorious for remembering details incorrectly. A SAR team could waste valuable hours or days looking for you in the wrong area, all because your point of contact back home was certain that’s where you were going. Ideally it will be a specific route plan with where you park to start your trip, the trails you plan to take, campsites you plan to stay at, and where you plan to take out. Scheduled check-ins are advisable if you’re traveling alone. Leave a copy of the trip plan with each trip member’s point of contact, so everyone is literally on the same page.
Sound extreme? It shouldn’t. This is the stuff you should be doing to ensure a successful outdoor adventure anyway, you’re just putting it on paper. As a search & rescue technician, I can tell you this: We were trained to find lost persons with or without this information. But having it certainly makes the job easier, cutting out hours of time spent gathering information. In an emergency, especially in extreme conditions, those hours are worth a lot. But what room does that leave for changing your mind while you’re in the woods, and letting the adventure take you where it wants to? Read on…
Step Two: Stick to Your Trip Plan
A trip plan is useless if you don’t follow it. If your point of contact back home believes with full certainty that you’re on X Mountain, because that’s where you said you’d be, and you’re really on Y Mountain because your group decided to change plans, you’re worse off than if you didn’t leave a plan at all. SAR teams will focus all of their efforts in an area you aren’t.
But what if there’s something really, really cool to check out on Y Mountain and your whole group wants to change your route? If you think this might happen, write it into your trip plan. Say that you’re planning on going to X Mountain, but you know that you might want to go to Y Mountain, and give the contingency route. This isn’t as good as a single route, but it still allows SAR teams to concentrate their resources in a far more focused area than what we call ROW, or the Rest Of the World. If you change plans on the spur of the moment, your other option is to call your point of contact back home and inform them of the change of plans, should cell service allow, which it may or may not. Which brings us to our next point: Who is this point of contact?
Step Three: Have a Point of Contact Back Home
This is who you leave your trip plan with, check in with if you change plans, call in the event of a problem, etc. They are the person who will call 911 if you’re overdue, and turn your trip plan over to SAR or law enforcement. The criteria for a point of contact is someone responsible who also cares about you. Your young child cares about you, but probably isn’t responsible enough to call 911 and know what to tell them. Your boss at work is responsible, but may not care about you enough to do anything unless you miss several days of work. Ideally, this person is a spouse, parent, adult child, other family member, friend, trusted coworker.
Step Four: Stay On the Trail
In July 2013, 66-year-old Geraldine Largay, a long-distance section hiker on the Appalachian Trail, was scheduled to meet her husband for a food pickup in Redington Township, Maine, before continuing her hike. She never showed up. Two years later, her remains were discovered by a surveying crew. Although her bones had been scattered by bears and wolves, the medical examiner determined that her death was caused by starvation and dehydration. According to her diary, she had gotten off the trail and became lost in the dark, dense spruce forest, wandering in circles for days. She went weeks without food before zipping herself in her sleeping bag and preparing for the end.
She was half a mile from the trail. Although Maine’s Hundred Mile Wilderness is much more forbidding and easy to get lost in than most of the areas we frequent, the rule still holds. Stay on the trail. Your chances of becoming lost or disoriented increase dramatically without that reference point.
Step Five: Stay Situationally Aware
Situational awareness is probably one of the most underrated of all lifesaving skills. Staying mindful of your surroundings as you travel through the wilderness is extremely helpful in preventing you from suddenly looking up and realizing you have no idea where you are. Make mental notes of terrain changes, flora and fauna, and the position of the sun in the sky. Turn around from time to time to see what the trail you’re on looks like going the other way. (This is especially true for those of us who hunt on foot. When we’re tracking game, everything else gets blocked out. Break your concentration from time to time.) Look for distinctive landmarks, like large boulders or unusual trees. And the instant you’re unsure of where you are or where you’re going, stop and get your bearings. Speaking of bearings…
Step Six: Bring a Map & Compass
Not a dollar button compass, or one that’s part of your whistle, or hangs on your zipper, but a well-made, reliable baseplate or lensatic compass. I personally carry a Suunto MC-2 Professional. Brunton and Silva also make serviceable compasses. Your map should be a topographical map in a standard scale and datum format that you know how to read. Having a topo map in itself can be invaluable, just by orienting the map to the terrain, you can often determine your location without a compass.
Notice I have not recommended a GPS. They are useful, but only to a point. I have seen thousand-dollar GPS units glitch out and be off by as much as half a kilometer. Heavy tree cover in the summer can block the signal, as can terrain features such as steep ridges or mountainsides. Batteries can always die. In search & rescue, we carried them as a supplemental navigational aid to verify our map & compass work and to transmit coordinates, but we never, ever trusted them with our lives or the lives of our patients. The earth’s magnetic field is more or less a constant. Get a map & compass.
Step Seven: Learn How to Use Them
Like any other gear, a map & compass are useless unless you possess the skills to harness them. Accurate land navigation is a skill that takes a great deal of practice to master. Learning how to plot a point, shoot a bearing, count your pace, and so on can take time, but are well worth it. Reading a map is a skill that surprisingly few adults have. Be the exception. In addition to learning a map & compass, learn methods of navigation without them as well, such as terrain association, using your watch, or making a sundial. Shameless plug – I also highly recommend taking a land navigation class taught by a qualified instructor, like our Land Navigation Essentials class. It will save you a tremendous amount of time and frustration over trying to figure it out on your own.
Conclusion
There’s never any guarantee that your trip will go flawlessly and without mishap. No matter how great your gear and how well planned your trip, nature is unpredictable. Some circumstances, such as medical emergencies, are often beyond your control. But if you follow the steps outlined above, your chances getting lost decrease exponentially, and your chances of being found increase dramatically. They will save search & rescue teams precious hours when time is of the essence. Rescue, although it may sometimes be technically challenging, is the relatively easy part. The search for an individual or a group, especially in the “big woods,” is what’s difficult. It truly can be like finding the needle in the proverbial haystack. File a trip plan, communicate with your point of contact back home, and set fire to the haystack. It might just save your life.
– Alex
