Survival 101: The 5 Skills That Could Save Your Life

5 Wilderness Survival Skills Everyone Should Know

Roads can sometimes be rocky—fraught with danger, disaster, and difficulty. Steep grades, blind turns, accidents, emergencies, and misadventures can sideline even the most prepared person. A wrong turn or misjudged trail can lead to running out of gas or a damaged rig with no resources available to help you return to basecamp. Lost, stuck, stranded, injured… you’re ensnared in a tight situation that only your skills can pull you out of.

Since Mother Nature’s backyard can be an unforgiving place to be stranded, having a core group of survival abilities is a valuable resource on which to rely. But what skills will serve you best?

Defiance

Fear, self-doubt, and the overwhelming and emotionally crushing blow of an emergency situation can be paralyzing, freezing you to complete uselessness. Sure, your body can lift 400 pounds, but the second your brain doesn’t want to, you’ll be lucky to be able to lift your own arms. As well, the opposite is true. We’ve all heard stories of soldiers being shot multiple times and completely disregarding the pain until the mission was completed. It wasn’t that his body was especially stronger than others; it was his brain that well prepared for the what-ifs and could-bes.

The most important tool in your survivor’s tackle box should be mental fortitude. When a survival situation looms, your attitude first will determine which road you start down, one that leads to salvation or one that leads to ruin. Having a positive attitude against all adversity can literally mean the difference between life and death, as there are enumerable stories of people not having the mental resilience to confront a challenge without panicking.

First, stop and assess the situation, understand what forces are against you, and prioritize the threats. Plan for success, prepare for failure, and always be willing to change tactics as the situation unfolds. This is where thousands of years of instinct stored in the oldest parts of your brain come alive, and survivalists allow it to. By keeping one’s mind actively engaged in surmounting the emergency and always addressing the problem from a variety of points of view, the chances of survival greatly improve.

Fire

One of the biggest stresses facing someone in a survival situation is his or her ability (or inability) to start a fire, as there is a great amount of importance in this single act. Fire not only provides light and heat; it can cook your food, ward off intruders (animal or otherwise), and provide mental comfort in a potentially scary situation. There are dozens of ways to start a fire, from the well-known but difficult rubbing two sticks together to simply whipping out your handy lighter and torching whatever is closest.

Ideally, when traveling in the wilderness, it’s best to carry multiple fire-starting tools, such as a lighter, matches, flint and steel, but having in your set of skills several methods of starting a fire without matches will be invaluable, especially when you’re stuck somewhere with limited gear.

Consider reflectors such as magnifying glasses, reading glasses (glasses for farsightedness work best), or a Fresnel lens that focus light from the sun into a tight point. There are ways to start a fire with combustibles such as a nine-volt battery and a wad of steel wool or gunpowder from a unfired shell (ignite it with your car’s cigarette lighter). You can also rely on the old-fashioned ways as well by rubbing two sticks together with a fire plough or by fashioning a bow drill.

Shelter

The idea of spending the night under the stars under emergency circumstances can sound dreadful, especially in the pouring rain or in the depths of winter. A basic shelter can not only keep your head dry; it can conserve heat as well as provide a comforting sense of safety.

Take into account the purpose of your shelter. Make it as large as it needs to be to support the number of people that intend to use it and as sturdy as the environment dictates. Consider the weather. Any shelter can become unstable and collapse if weight overloads the supports, while overbuilding a shelter in hot weather can lead to problems.

There are dozens of materials available today that can be used to make a tent, such as woven cotton canvas, nylon tent fabric, laminated plastic poly tarps—even plastic painters’ drop cloths. Barring that, a simple lean-to can be fashioned from fallen branches, or you could create a roof spanning a pair of boulders. The idea is to be creative in keeping out the weather while providing for yourself a reliable shelter to temporarily call home.

Water

The human body is a giant bag of water—in fact, we’re 60 to 70 percent water—and that bag must be refilled frequently. And it must be filled with fresh water. In the backcountry of North America, water is a readily available commodity, as the climate of most of the wilderness is the perfect atmosphere for streams, creeks, and rivers flowing with fresh water.

The problem is when you’re in America’s deserts, the Southwest or the Badlands, which are great for off-road trails but bad for providing sources of water. An invaluable set of skills to have is knowing a variety of different ways to find or create water, from building a solar still to leach the moisture from the air (or vegetation), to reading the lay of the land to best guess where a water source might be.

Once you’ve found water, however, how do you know that the next mouthful isn’t going to be swirling with bacteria, viruses, protozoa, parasitic worm eggs or chemical contaminants? Giardia lamblia is one of the most well-known risks to drinking backcountry water. It is a protozoan parasite that enters the water via the feces of mammals and then attaches itself in the small intestines. It can cause diarrhea, vomiting, bloating, and weight loss. Yeah, fun stuff.

Cryptosporidium parvum is another protozoa species that populates fresh water in North America via the same method as Giardia. The results of ingesting water infected with C. parum is tremendous diarrhea. If you drink unfiltered water from a stream or river, realize that you didn’t pack nearly enough toilet paper for what will lay ahead of you. If you had to, could you improvise a crude charcoal water filter?

Always carry with you in your rig a small water purifier. Filtration technology has become so advanced that a compact purifier can fit in the palm of your hand and be reliable enough to filter hundreds of gallons of water. The biggest challenge will be finding the water.

Food

Though you can only last a few days without water, the human body can go for a couple of weeks without anything to eat. That doesn’t mean you should, however. Survival in a harsh environment could drag on for weeks, and to a well-prepared survivalist, most natural environments are filled with a variety of foods that meet a human’s nutritional needs.

For the most basic of needs, there are hundreds of plants that are not only edible but quite enjoyable. Amaranth, cattail, chicory, dandelions, prickly pear cactus, wild mustard, and wood sorrel are just a few examples of edible plants found across North America.

Spend some time learning about the plants in your area can help you stave off starvation. Be sure to properly identify a plant before you attempt to eat it. Those with a milky sap, spines, thorns, an almond scent, pinks, purples, and black colors, and those with three-leaved patterns are nature’s way of telling you it isn’t edible. And steer clear of mushrooms.

Although plants will fulfill most of your nutrition needs in an emergency situation, you should learn about the habits of animals, small animal trapping techniques, and how to properly prepare meat, essential skills to master in a long-term survival situation. Know that animals follow well-worn trails and that they congregate around water sources, and rarely stray far from their nests, burrows, or homes.

Wrapping It Up

These five skills are a bare basic set of areas of knowledge that are of the utmost importance in order to survive an emergency situation. There are hundreds of skills across dozens of genres that are great for specialty circumstances, but boil them down to the broad strokes and they will fall under these five categories.

Do you have to be a master shelter builder in order to build a lean-to with sticks and leaves or do you have to understand the mysticisms of a divining rod in order to find water? Of course not, but a good understanding of the techniques that fall into these categories may save your life one day. You don’t just want to stay alive… you want to survive and thrive.

SKILLS ARE PERISHABLE

Oftentimes our skills are a very perishable resource, especially when they have to be performed quickly, like in a first aid situation, or if you don’t use them very often, like starting a fire or tying a specific knot. For that reason, making sure you practice them is important. There isn’t any one best way to keep on top of your skills, but there are three that work well together.

01. One of the simplest ways to stay sharp is integrating them into your daily routines. Pull out your flint and steel when you need to light the charcoal grill or the gas stove in the kitchen. Sharpen your kitchen knives by hand instead of using that electric sharpener or sending them out to get sharpened. Make an adhesive bandage with tape and a gauze pad instead of using a Band Aid.

02. The second way to keep in practice is to attend single-day or weekend seminars as refresher courses. There are dozens of groups and individuals who teach a wide range of skills throughout the year and throughout the country. In addition to being a great way to refresh your knowledge base and to get some more hands-on practice, seminars are also a good way to learn new or advanced skills. Many also offer videos and online classes that you can use to refresh and expand your knowledge base. Courses are available on topics ranging from outdoor survival to emergency preparedness and first aid.

03. The third way to stay sharp is to plan events wherein you have to use your skills. If you really want to top off your outdoor survival skills, you can always take a camping trip or go backpacking. Set up your regular campsite as a fallback option, then find out if you remember how to build a fire without matches or with damp wood. Pull out your tarp and try setting it up in the dark; make sure you can still get it tight and tie that taut-line hitch. Use your water purification tablets or filter pump to get your water instead of drinking that bottled water you bought at the supermarket. Use your compass and hike cross-country for a half hour, try to find yourself on the map, then turn on a new bearing for another half hour, and then find your way back. While you’re out enjoying Mother Nature you can also see how far you can really walk with your bug-out bag on your back and if you can actually walk that “average of three miles per hour” the experts say you should be doing.

5 LEADERSHIP SKILLS

01. Communication—Understanding how to communicate tasks to people is as important as the tasks themselves. Keep people well informed when changes happen and do so in a manner that everyone can understand. When you’re in a stressful situation, one of the first things to suffer is one’s ability to process new information. You need to be able to make others understand what is happening and what they all need to do about it.

02. Decisiveness—One thing that can ruin the group dynamic in an emergency situation is vacillation, a wavering from one direction or choice to another. Prepare for the unexpected and nothing will surprise you. When we display an inability to make a decision, people will quickly lose faith in not only us as leaders but in the whole enterprise. Employ the “Q-CAT” system: Be Quick, Committed, Analytical and Thoughtful when making decisions.

03. Team Building—You didn’t necessarily pick this group of people you need to work with, but helping them to work together will result in higher productivity and better morale. Avoid personal conflicts between individuals by channeling their anger or frustration into tasks that are good for the whole group.

04. Confidence—Know who you are and what you want, what your weaknesses are, and how you’ve compensated for them in a positive way. You don’t have to be the best at everything to be a leader. You just have to surround yourself with people that are committed to producing results.

05. Motivational Skills—Having high morale is one of the most important mental states a person needs to be in to remain positive, productive, and supportive. Encourage people when they need energy to keep going. Celebrate success and be quick with praise, even for the smallest tasks. Be careful to never criticize or place blame, and always be willing to pitch in first with a task.