Rule of Sevens

Using the Rule of Sevens

Fire Starting

Once you know that Fire Starting is listed as one of the 7 survival skills and therefore is very important to wilderness survival, you will want to learn all you can about how to build a fire. You will also take steps to include fire making gear in your everyday survival kit that goes beyond mere matches.

Making a survival fire is not always easy and even survival experts of great experience sometimes have difficulty in building and maintaining a fire. Adverse fire making conditions include poor materials to burn, wet conditions, cold, wind, and even personal injury.

Because being able to make and maintain a fire is so important to wilderness survival, I advocate having at least three means of starting a fire on your person at all times. Should one method fail for whatever reason, you will have two backups to help insure fire making success. Some excellent fire making tools include:

I also recommend you bring with a fire starting aid that will help kindle a fire even in suboptimal conditions such as when your wood is wet. Some excellent fire starting aids include:

Practice making fires in as many environments as you can, using less than ideal materials. Hone your fire making skills so that you can build a fire even when the wood is wet or you do not have much kindling. The more you practice the better off you will be should you need to build a fire in a survival situation.

Shelter Building

A good wilderness survival shelter will go a long way toward protecting you from the elements and keeping up your morale.

A properly made survival shelter will allow you to survive in conditions when your clothing and survival gear is not up to the job. For example good rest is essential to optimum function and in a survival situation you will need to stay as fresh as possible. However, while at rest your body is often losing more heat to the environment than it is producing. Should you not have an adequate sleeping bag this heat loss can lead to hypothermia unless your survival shelter is able to provide an envelope of protection.

Depending upon the survival environment you find yourself in, a shelter can serve one or more of the following purposes:

Protection from the elements
- cold
- sun
- Heat
- Wind
- Wetness
Relief from pesky or disease spreading Insects
Protection from Dangerous animals
Stay hidden from Man
Protect your gear from animals and the elements
A blind from which to ambush animals

At least several of the seven wilderness survival problems are alleviated by having the proper survival shelter including Cold and Heat, Fatigue, Fear and anxiety, Pain and Injury.

Because shelter is so important for wilderness survival, your survival kit should contain the means to create a variety of shelters depending upon the environment you find yourself in. Fifty feet of 550 paracord and a tarp or 5ft x 7ft mylar blanket will go a long way toward construction of a variety survival shelters. A good survival knife or perhaps even a small hatchet or a tomahawk will serve you well for shelter making and are useful for a wide variety of other wilderness survival applications.

In addition to carrying shelter building materials it is important that the wilderness survivor has practiced building shelters utilizing local resources. Debris such as leaves, grasses, boughs, and sticks can be fashioned into excellent debris huts that are warm and dry even in the worst of weather. Snow is an excellent insulator that can be used to great advantage in survival shelter building, including the snow trench shelter, snow cave, and debris hut.

Water Procurement

Having enough clean water to drink is of prime importance to wilderness survival but is often one of the most difficult items to obtain. How long you can live without water depends upon your physical condition and the environment you are in, but even in ideal circumstances you cannot last more than a few days.

Become just a little dehydrated will lead to great mental and physical deterioration; something you cannot afford in wilderness survival. You must do what you can to produce enough fresh water to keep you in top condition.

Remember to always consider untested sources of water as contaminated. Boiling your water to make it safe to drink is always the preferred method. Other methods are poor in comparison as they do not eliminate 100% of disease causing organisms from the water or are subject to misuse or failure. These include water filters and chemicals such as bleach and calcium hypochlorite.

Your wilderness survival kit should contain the means to boil water, including fire starting materials and vessels in which to hold enough water for at least one day. Having enough water to drink will help to keep your physical and mental efficiency high and guard against Cold and Heat, Thirst, Fatigue, Pain and Injury.

Foraging for Food

In most short term wilderness survival situations food is of lesser importance. You can survive for weeks or even months with little or no food. For more information see the Survival Topic How Long Can You Live Without Food.

That said, the ability to obtain food from wild resources can help you survive in the wilderness by giving you the added calories and nutrients necessary for peak performance. The Survival Topic Survival Foraging on the Move gives an example of how much food you can collect under the right conditions even if you are not actively hunting for food supplies.

If you have some knowledge of local wild edible plants, animals, fish, and insects and how to collect them you have a definite survival advantage in any situation lasting for more than a day. But in order to maximize your ability to forage wild foods you would do well to carry:

A good survival knife
Fire making materials
A metal pot or cup in which to cook wild foods in. This will increase palatability as well as destroy disease causing organisms.
Fishing hooks, line, and sinkers. Fish are often one of the easiest to catch wild foods.
Snare wire and the knowledge how to use it. Wire will also be useful in repairing survival gear.

As with other survival skills, to maximize your food foraging success during a survival emergency you first need to practice during before the situation occurs. Only by actually attempting to live for some time off the land will you become proficient.

The ability to successfully forage for wild foods will add needed nutrients to your diet and affect your ability to withstand all seven threats to wilderness survival including Cold and Heat, Hunger, Fatigue, Boredom and Loneliness, Fear and anxiety, and Pain and Injury.

Signaling

Prudent wilderness survivors have multiple means of signaling rescuers. For example, while you can only shout for a limited time before your vocal chords lock up you blow on a shrill whistle indefinitely. In fact a blowing survival whistle can be heard much further than the human voice and is a recognized distress signal.

Other ways of signaling in a wilderness survival emergency include visual cues such as smoky fires, signal mirrors, and marking sand or laying out vegetation to form letters or signal codes. This visual cues can often be seen from great distances for from the air.

Because signaling rescue resources is so important, I recommend your survival kit include:

Fire making materials
Signal mirror
Survival whistle

First Aid

Often wilderness survival situations come about because of injury. Sometimes even a small injury can take on major significance. For example, in town a sprained ankle is not necessarily a big problem while in the wilderness this injury could actually be life threatening.

A problem with major injuries in the wilderness is lack of adequate resources to fully deal with the injury. Usually the best that can be done is an effort at stabilization in preparation for evacuation.

Your wilderness survival kit should contain basic first aid measures.

Self Defense

Self defense is not limited to protecting yourself from animals, insects, and other humans. The most important part of self defense is the decisions you make; avoiding dangerous situations and not going beyond your physical abilities or knowledge.

For example, attempting to scale a peak beyond your physical abilities or the gear you have can put you in a very dangerous survival situation. Feeding or harassing wildlife is another example of poor decision making that can turn against you.

When you consider dangerous animals in the wilderness it is important to keep things in perspective. Humans are the most dangerous animals on earth bar none. Humans will do you harm far more often than the wildlife you share the wilderness with.

In the order of likely probability, the necessity of self defense in wilderness survival situations will arise due to:

The decisions you make
Contact with humans
Wildlife

Self defense in the wilderness includes using your head and minimizing the chance of encounters with dangerous animals, people, and situations. Do not attempt to go beyond your skill levels and know when to back off.

Tools that can be used for self defense include your survival knife, hatchet, fire, personal skills, and your ability to improvise. But above all else, as with everything related to wilderness survival, your best survival tool is your brain.