What to think about when you're learning skills
Here is a list of things to keep in mind for survival situations:
About 10 years ago I had the chance to hang out in Arizona with a survival expert that I had looked up to for years. Cody Lundin did not disappoint, he was humble, funny and knowledgable. What originally drew me to his information was that his number one goal in a survival situation is maintaining core body temperature. If you keep that one idea in mind, it will drive and dictate logical survival choices.
Setting up your priorities of work make more sense when you keep this as your basic concept. Every survival guy and expert has his or her own set of rules about order of operations. Many of them keep this order as gospel. Truth is that the, “situation dictates”. This is a saying we had in the Corps about everything. When designing something mechanical or building something that is not dynamic, the order is dictated by A + B + C + D. Survival doesn’t work that way and shouldn’t work that way. It needs to be fluid.
Survival boils down to, “I need all these parts to keep my body operating in normal operating conditions.” Using this as a directive means that if you are in 110-degree heat with no chance of rain, building a fire may not be a priority. Maybe a shelter is more important to protect you from the sun. If it just started raining and it is only going to get worse maybe a shelter and dry firewood/tinder is priority and water gathering is put on the back burner. This means that you can’t live in a checklist mentality. You have to live in a freethinking mentality that allows for flexibility and being dynamic.
This only works if you have the basic skillsets covered. Skillsets are only reliable if they have been pressure tested. They need to be practiced when you’re tired, wet, grumpy, and after poor sleep to be reliable in a survival situation.
You have to be able to do the required tasks well. It also means that you should be good enough to use what you have with you to perform these needed tasks. This doesn’t mean that you need to be able to walk out with nothing and pressure flake a knife, start a fire with sticks and make cordage out what you find, kill an animal and build a wickiup. These are great skills but they take time to develop. For example, I learned how to use a bow drill at sea level in mild humidity. I could get a fire started with raw materials, making all the parts and tinder with raw supplies in 8 min. I practiced 3 or 4 times a day for 2 weeks. Then I went into the mountains and couldn’t get a fire started because, at altitude, there was not as much oxygen. If that had been my only fire starting method I would have been screwed.
Location and climate change everything and you have to take it into consideration. Any time of the year mountains are cold at night! My friend Ben and I were camping in Yosemite, it had been raining for 3 days and we decided to practice fire making. In 30 min using natural fuel that we found in the environment and using sparked based fire starting (ferrocerium rod and knife), we had a fire that burned well until we put it out 2 hours later. When I was filming for the Discovery TV show “The Colony”, I was by myself in the Bayou of Louisiana in a super humid area, it was so hard keeping a fire lit with dry wood I decided to just use a fire to cook with. In Wyoming, it only took me 20 minutes to gather wood, make a bow drill, start a fire and have hot water. In the Bayou, the same task took me 45 minutes. It was not just harder to get that hot water, it was exponentially harder so much so that it made me tired and grumpy. It’s usually fun to get up and start a fire but that particular week in the Bayou, I would make one fire a day and as soon as I stopped tending to it, it would die. In Wyoming I could have started that fire and kept it running year-round with minimal effort.
Find someone you connect with to teach you and practice in a controlled environment then take it outside. Once outside have more than one way to accomplish the task being practiced. Don’t decide to practice them all at once or you will fail.
Make it fun!
