One of my favorite Onion headlines of all time is “Report: Average Male 4,000% Less Effective In Fights Than They Imagine.” This is, coincidentally, also true about wilderness survival. I’m not sure that the average hiker is unrealistic about their survival skills. But I think a very vocal minority of outdoorsmen—I say outdoorsmen, because these people are almost always men—imagine that they could improvise their way out of a crisis with little more than a Buck knife, a length of paracord, and whatever vague knowledge about lean-to building and snare construction they’ve retained from their Scouting days or absorbed from Instagram.
We often conceptualize survival skill as an extreme, almost primal form of self-reliance: If all your gear and plans fail, you should be able to endure on your skills and toughness alone, along with maybe a sharp blade. After all, if you rely on a thick down jacket, a sleeping bag, or a tent to survive, are you really prepared?
All of that conveniently ignores the fact that preparation is a skill, and all the bushcraft lore that gets passed off as survival techniques—making snares, building natural shelters, creating solar stills—are skills too, just much harder ones. If you are not the kind of person who remembers to pack a lighter, you will never be the kind of person who practices making a fire with a hand drill until you can do it in a snowstorm with an injured leg. (And practice it you’ll need to, incessantly. As anyone who has survived an honest-to-God, looking-down-the-barrel-of-the-gun emergency will tell you, the flood of adrenaline makes everything harder. Your hands shake, your mind races, you struggle to recall information you could have recited a few minutes earier. If you plan on taking action, said action had better be committed to your muscle memory.)
For Backpacker this week, I rounded up five of the most commonly shared survival skills hikers don’t need to know. Any knowledge is good, and if you want to master these skills, more power to you—at the very least, it will give you a deeper undersanding of and appreciation for what it takes to meet your basic needs without modern conveniences. But when my safety is on the line, I’d rather be the person who has the water sources marked on his map than the one who knows how to wring a cup of dirty liquid out of the foliage.
What I’m Into Right Now
This phone, which I bought for $30 at a Walmart, is not particularly nice. That’s kind of the point: I decided a few months ago that I had sacrificed too much of my life to the mechanical Moloch that is my smartphone, so I went looking for a phone that would let me get texts from my wife and call 911 if my house catches on fire without exposing me to the busted sewage pipe that is modern corporate social media. The Flex 2, which runs on KaiOS—a purposely low-spec operating system—can do all that, but I’ve also been pleasantly surprised by the low-tech 2006-era amenities it offers. The (all ad-supported) apps available to it include a podcatcher, an MP3 player, and an RSS feed reader that’s clunky enough—it only displays the last ten stories from any source—that I don’t end up doomscrolling forever. As a plus, it functions as an internet hotspot, so I can still boot up my dormant Android when I do need it for work.
OK, so: There’s this guy named Kaiman, and a wizard transformed him so now he has an iguana head for a head, and he’s really mad about it, except he also has amnesia so he doesn’t remember who did it. So he goes around fighting wizards and putting their heads in his mouth, and then the guy who lives in his mouth—there’s a full-grown man who lives in his mouth—comes out and tells him whether it’s the right wizard or not. And he and his friend, who owns a dumpling restaurant, go through a door to the wizard world, and meet this wizard who does mushroom magic, because he had to eat a bunch of mushrooms while he was trapped in hell—hell is real, by the way, and it’s full of devils who used to be wizards until they took the devil exam to become devils, and also Kaiman’s other buddy is a doctor who’s 50 years old, but he looks like a teenager because a different wizard cursed him, and he’s married to a devil who’s part of a rock band made up of devils—hey, no wait, come back, I promise it’s good!