Top 5 Wilderness Survival Mistakes

[Music] hi recently we did a presentation on my top five tips for wilderness survival then we followed up with my top five guns for wilderness survival well today will be part three in our three-part series on survival where i will beat this subject completely into the ground with my top five mistakes that people make on the subject of wilderness survival and of course before we get to the top five we have to have a brief recap and we have to have some prerequisites now when i say brief recap i do mean very brief i've discussed these things in depth in previous presentations and i want to start with my definition of what i mean when i say wilderness survival which is when you're in the field under adverse conditions and you have to spend the night or multiple nights when you had not intended to and you were not prepared to now my top five tips for wilderness survival are one proper prior planning prevents getting in the situation in the first place two know yourself and seek self-improvement three carry equipment commensurate with your knowledge and skill level however four don't over pack and five get all your gear together and keep it in something that's easy to carry like a jacket with a lot of pockets a fanny pack a small backpack get it all together and then carry that now the prerequisites that you need to know before we get to the top five are one fair warning just about all i'm going to do today is talk two the subject of wilderness survival is a subject with which i consider myself to be familiar i spent a lot of time in the military i've done hunting trips hiking trips camping trips i consider myself to be competent in this subject but i do not consider myself to be the consummate subject expert there's a lot of people that know more than i do i know that because they constantly remind me about how they know so much more than i do third as i discuss this i am not going to be talking about statistics i'm going to talk about the things that the crew and i have experienced the mistakes that i've made the mistakes that i've seen people make the mistakes that members of the crew have made the mistakes that they've seen people make some of the crew has actually done some work with search and rescue i'm talking about the mistakes that they have seen people make that got those people in the position when they needed to be searched for when they needed to be rescued and finally the top five will not be in any particular order except i will say what i consider to be the worst mistake for last so with that let's get started before i even get to point one i'm going to have to ask everyone to please remember that we're no longer in the third grade and not make fun of the way i talk okay point one i'm going to spend more time discussing point one than the other four points i may spend more time on point one than the other four points combined and there's some reasons for that one being it can be a little bit difficult for me to explain two because it's a broad ranging topic three because the people who are the first to make this mistake are very often the last to realize they have and four because although i do not consider point one to be the worst mistake people make i do consider it to be the most common and what is it it's the mistake of believing that you have a trait or a characteristic or a talent or a skill that you just don't have or even if you do have a certain degree of skill on a given subject it's the mistake of believing that your skill level is far greater than it really is and this is a mistake that gets a lot of people in a lot of trouble now that might sound fairly straightforward but i want to explain this in far more detail than i need to but bear with me little children i mean five six seven year old kids very commonly believe themselves to know things they just don't know they believe themselves to be able to do things that they just can't do good example five-year-old kindergarten student he's seen westerns on tv he sees people ride horses he just thinks he could do that then he gets the opportunity to go out to the farm where he's gonna get to ride a horse oh boy that sounds cool and it turns out that what he's really doing is sitting on the horse holding the saddle horn while an adult holds the reins and walks the horse back and forth the kid is disgusted he's disappointed he thinks this is the dumbest thing he's ever seen because he thinks that if he were holding the reins he could giddy up that horse all over the place no he can't but he thinks he can this is a very common trait among little kids now most of the time by the time kids are 10 11 12 years old they've really started growing out of that we all know that teenagers can be very over confident in their abilities to do certain things like drive but if you put a 13 year old kid behind the controls of a helicopter and told him start it up and fly it go ahead he won't take you up on that because he knows that he doesn't know how little kids have the belief they can do things that they can't do but sometimes kids don't grow out of that as much as or as soon as they should let me tell you an anecdote i'm at a mountain man rendezvous cooking over the fire shooting our muzzleloading guns and so forth part of this is throwing tomahawks now i'm fairly good at throwing tomahawks but i'm not particularly skilled at teaching someone else how to do it so i've got one of the crew with me he's very inexperienced at this i'm trying to work with him we're muddling through about then a 12 year old kid comes up and tells us we're doing it wrong and starts telling us what we should be doing well right about then the kid's mother arrives and tells the kid and i think i can get the quote right don't tell people how to do things when you don't know how to do it to which the kid replies actually mom i do know how so i hand the kid to tomahawk go ahead show us how kid throws the tomahawk about 10 times never does stick it in the block misses the block completely more often than than not and i then have to take the tomahawk back and tell the kid that no maybe you don't know how this kid is a little behind the power curve of growing out of that belief that they can do all kinds of things and that is something i see in people who consider themselves to be knowledgeable on the subject of wilderness survival now bear with me while i go off on a tangent there's a particular faction of our society and they are described with a certain word and what these people do among other things is they become fixated on a particular person and they become obsessed with that person and they drive by that person's house and they call that person on the phone and they send that person texts and emails and they try to hack that person's email account and hack their phone and we call these particular type of people stalkers i'll get there now different jurisdictions will have different laws but basically there's a line when the stalker is on this side of the line they're annoying or comical when they cross that line they've committed a crime and i am always amazed at stalker's ability to know where that line is and know just how to get right up to it without crossing it it's as if they go to stalking school there's some kind of app that you can use to call someone on their phone and when i look at my phone and it reads a certain number that's not the number that's really calling me that's a stalker using an app i never knew such a thing existed but all the stalkers know about it it's as if on the day that someone raises their hand and declares their intent to be a creepy stalker they are magically endowed with this amazing body of knowledge on the subject now what does that have to do with wilderness survival because there are a lot of people who consider themselves to be knowledgeable on the subject that don't really know very much it's as if the day they raise their hand and say i'm going to be a wilderness survival commando that they think they are magically endowed with all this knowledge but they are not and that gets a lot of people in trouble now let me tell you an anecdote i'm talking to a 16 year old kid and we happen to be talking about this subject and he considers himself to be very knowledgeable and he makes the statement that in the woods he thinks he can get by with just a knife and i did not perceive that he was trying to be boastful that he really thought he could do that okay and i asked him about his fire building plan and his fire building plan is that he's going to in the field find a piece of flint spark that on his knife blade and build a fire okay i have used flint and steel to start fires on a few occasions i do not consider myself an expert on it but i'm at least familiar with it and i know that different types of steel are much better than others for making sparks like my buck 119 i don't think that a witchy woman with sparks flying from her fingertips could get anything to spark off of this i don't know what kind of knife blade that kid had and i suspect he really didn't either now i have used flint and steel to start fires and i know that if i have just the right conditions and just the right tinder and you give me a long time to do it yes i can do it but if it were a dark stormy night i would not want to rely on my ability to use flint and steel but the real thing is in talking to this kid for about one minute it becomes glaringly obvious that he has never done it he's never done it what i call for real and i don't mean in a survival situation i just mean you're in the field you caught some fish in the lake and now you have to get a fire started to cook those or you're going to be eating sushi and you really do need a fire he's never done it under adverse conditions like on a rainy day or in an environment where there's been a lot of rain for the last week and everything's wet he's never done it under really good controlled training conditions he's never done it in the dark he's never even just gone into the backyard and given it a whirl he has never done it yet he's supremely confident that he can this is the kind of mistake that i'm talking about now an extension of that is believing that your skill level's far greater than it is okay let me tell you another anecdote i do a lot of hunting and camping and hiking trips and i did a lot of this stuff with this particular individual and he did have a lot of skill when it came to field craft he really did and he did have a lot of skill when it comes to building fires okay well one day we're driving and we're going out into the field and about the time we get there he remembers that he has neglected to put any matches in his waterproof match container and asks me if i can spare any and i told him yeah i have some but the 20 in my waterproof match container so i can spare some but not all that many he considers that no problem at all because i only need one one well okay three i can give you more than three but he was insistent he would not take any more than three well we didn't get into a situation that day where we really needed a fire but to me the idea that you only need to carry three matches is kind of silly now this is back when we were all carrying those wooden strike anywhere kitchen matches and i can tell you there have been many occasions where i have struck one match and used it to light my cam still over used it to light whatever material i was going to light yes i've started fires with one match many times there's also been many times where i pulled a match out of the waterproof match container gone to strike it on this rough part of the container and the head just crumbled off there's been times where i've gone to strike it in the match broke in half and the half with the head on it fell on the very wet ground there's been times i've taken a match out of a waterproof match container and everything in the environment was so wet there was nothing to strike it on so i tried to strike it on another match and crumble the heads off both the biggest culprit is wind there's been many times i've tried to light something and the wind blows the match out before i can even get started and i end up trying to hold the stuff in my coat and light it to keep it out of the wind there's been a few times where it's taken me eight or nine matches to get a fire started the idea that i only need to carry one is to me hubris but a lot of people suffer from this because they think their skill level is far greater than it really is and you'll see this when it comes to marksmanship physical fitness land navigation the list goes on at astra there are people who will think that they're going to go into the field and they're not hunting or anything they don't want to carry a rifle but they're going to carry a handgun so they'll carry a handgun like this ruger mark 3 which depending on what you're doing can be an outstanding survival gun and somebody will tell me about his plan is that he's going to carry a gun like that for the purpose of shooting small game like squirrels or rabbits or grouse or quail and i don't mean shoot them out of the sky actually in the state in which i reside it is legal to hunt grouse with a 22 pistol okay sounds like a good plan except i happen to know and i'm not talking about the match guy anymore i'm talking about somebody else i happen to know that under good controlled range conditions at 25 yards he can't hold a group any better than that but he thinks at that distance he's going to be able to hit a squirrel he believes himself to have a skill level far greater than what his skill level really is now this also comes to things like reading a compass and land navigation you'll see somebody with a compass like this and they think they know how to operate it well i'm out in the field and without looking at my compass i'll make the statement that well north is basically that way and somebody will pull out their compass and look at it and it tells them that north is that way and they want to tell me about how wrong i am okay problem is he doesn't realize that as he's saying that way is north he's pointing almost directly at the rising sun last i checked the sun doesn't rise in the north and so i have to explain to him why don't you move your rifle away from your compass oh so he does and the needle goes over to the right direction because he thinks he knows how to operate the compass but he's unaware that compasses are magnetic and they're attracted to ferrous metals he's also so inobservant that he doesn't notice that he's looking at the rising sun and he's so obtuse that he hasn't noticed the many many times that i've looked at my compass like this to keep my rifle away from it thinking that you know how to do something that you just don't know how to do now this also goes into people who believe themselves to have characteristics or talents or traits that they don't have such as it gets to be about noon and someone will say let's go over that hill a couple of miles away and climb it no i don't think we could do that and get back before dark and then they make some grossly unrealistic statement like it's only a couple of miles away i could get there in half an hour when i happen to know that he can't walk on flat level ground and cover two miles in half an hour there's no way he's going to go through the field and do that but he believes he can there's another subject i want to talk about and when i discuss this i know i'm going to get a lot of hate mail please just let me get through this there are certain people that have certain talents like the track and field athlete who can do long jump and actually jump 20 feet that's amazing there are people that have certain talents but in the subject of wilderness survival there's a lot of people who believe themselves to have talents that they don't have there are a few people in my experience less than one percent of the population who can walk outside and be outside for a minute or two and then estimate the ambient temperature when i'm talking about temperature i'm talking about fahrenheit estimate the temperature within a degree or two every time and be right just about every time there are people that can do that however the other 99 percent of you can't and there's another thing that people believe themselves to be able to do when it comes to land navigation there are certain people again in my experience less than one percent of us can go to a place and because they're very observant and because they have good proprioception and because they keep track of how far they've gone and what direction they've gone they can do land navigation extremely well they can come out to a place like this and look around and say yeah north is about there and be right okay there are some people that can do that there was a time that we had to go to a place and there's a whole bunch of buildings in this area and we had to find the right building and we took care of whatever it was we were doing then a year later we had to go back to the exact same place and i'm looking around what building did we go to and brian says is that one right there because he's observant like that and he can do things like that the other 99 of us can't now if you were to ask me right now what direction is north i can tell you that it's basically right about there now there's reasons that i know that and it has nothing to do with a sense of direction it has to do with i've been in this particular place often enough that i know where the sun comes up this time of year and i also happen to know that the sun rises basically in the east and sets basically in the west but it can vary off of that depending on what time of year it is but as i'm filming this today the first day of spring was not that long ago and the first day of spring is one of two days in the year where the sun rises in the true east and sets in the true west and since i know where that was i can tell you about which way is north and that has nothing to do with a sense of direction or anything else it has to do with things i've learned over the years if i were out here at night provided that i could see some of the stars i could still tell you which way is north because i know how to find the north star contrary to popular belief it is not the brightest star in the sky but because i know how to find it i can tell you which way is north there are certain people who think that they could walk blindfolded all over the place spin them around a bunch of times and they'll be able to tell you which way is north because they have a sense of direction well as far as i know from the sources i've seen pigeons have a sense of direction but among humans there's less than one percent that really have an uncanny ability to do land navigation and the other 99 of us don't but among people who consider themselves knowledgeable on wilderness survival there's a lot of people who think that they do now let me tell you another anecdote recently i had a deck put on a house oh side note paul morgan out of lincoln city oregon he and his crew do remodeling home repair carpentry work outstanding okay but to get back on task somebody comes over they're looking at the deck and i said that's really nice and then he tells me that i should cut down those trees on the other side of the yard okay and he explains that if i cut down those trees i'd have a good view of the ocean no that's north the ocean's over there and he actually argues the point with me for a minute or two no the ocean's over there you don't have a sense of direction now there's a mistake that people make when driving and i've found that inexperienced drivers younger people make this mistake more often than more experienced drivers and when you're on certain types of freeways in certain places you can make this mistake a little more often such as when you get on i-80 and you want to go east or west there's certain places where the freeway even though it's called 80 easter 80 west is running almost north and south and so you really need to go north but you know it's i-80 west oh no it isn't it was i-80 east it's a mistake people make i've certainly made it a couple of times well one day i was talking to somebody and i used that as an example of something or other and i said yeah when you get on the freeway the wrong direction we've all done that and he tells me that he's never done that because quote i have a better sense of direction than that close quote no you don't the belief that you have a talent or a trait that you don't have gets people in trouble all the time and this goes from the ability to read a compass the ability to operate machinery overestimating your marksmanship skills overestimating your fire building skills overestimating your land navigation skills your level of physical fitness the list goes on and on and on and this is something that takes place in many facets of society but it's something i see in people who consider themselves to be knowledgeable on the subject of wilderness survival more often than i see it anywhere else in life so with all of that let's go to point two so point two point two is an extension of point one and it's a two-parter as where point one is thinking you have an ability that you don't have point two a is thinking that a piece of equipment has an ability that it doesn't have point 2 b is failing to recognize the capabilities that your equipment does have put more simply but less accurately 2a is thinking a piece of gear can do something when it can't 2b is thinking a piece of gear can't do something when it can multifaceted and gets a lot of people in trouble and this can be anything from buying a coat with a nylon shell going outside for a minute or two seeing the water bead on it thinking it's waterproof then taking it into the field and discovering the hard way that it isn't it can be something like buying a sleeping bag that has a label that reads that it's rated down to zero degrees fahrenheit then you take it camping when it's 20 degrees and you're really cold because the testing process didn't take into account realistic field conditions like wind and humidity or maybe the test subject had better resistance to cold than you do maybe he's from juneau and you're from jamaica but finding out the hard way that no your sleeping bag didn't keep you warm thinking that your boots are waterproof when they're not and so on and so on and so forth and probably the two biggest offenders of this are people's belief in their firearm and people's belief in their vehicle there are people who think they can hit a target at a certain distance when they can't and that's point one but point two is thinking that their firearm can hit something at a certain distance when it really can't underestimating the amount of drop their firearm has at a distance because they overestimated its capabilities and probably the worst offender of that is people's belief in the taurus judge and i do not get any pleasure from telling people that this is a really poor quality gun well except that i do but we fired this in part two i don't need to demonstrate this again today but there's a lot of people out there that think that this can replace your 30 30 rifle when it comes to deer hunting there's people who think that this is a viable substitute for a genuine 410 shotgun you're just going to shoot pigeons right out of the sky with it which i won't say is impossible i'll just say is implausible but this goes on in many different ways people's belief in their vehicles you drive out in the middle of nowhere and you end up stranded because you thought your vehicle got 20 miles to the gallon when it really only gets 15. you thought that your four-wheel drive could get through that mud bug and then you find out the hard way that no it can't let me tell you an anecdote very early one morning i get up i have to go somewhere i go outside and there's light rain but feels like about 40 degrees i'm not too worried well then i get into my vehicle where i have controlled conditions and i can't feel the temperature anymore drive about 10 miles and the temperature has changed now once i merge onto the freeway i start sliding around freezing rain and the freeway is a nice smooth sleek sheet of ice it's like driving on a hockey rink so i'm going about 15 miles an hour very light traffic about then i see in the side view mirror someone gaining on me very quickly now i'm in the slow lane and this person comes by me in the fast lane going about 60 miles an hour in just a four door sedan okay well they've got a lot of confidence in their vehicle well as they get about 200 meters past me and they're catching up with the vehicle in front of them super four-door sedan has to step on the brake the instant the brake lights come on they come on and i start seeing the vehicle shimmying and then i see brake lights headlights brake lights headlights brake lights headlights and then i see the vehicle pinballing off the cement barriers because somebody thought that their anti-lock brake system and their traction control and their all-wheel drive made the vehicle impervious to the problems of ice thinking the vehicle had a capability that it just didn't have now no one was hurt so evidently the seat belts worked okay but you can see the problem with believing that your vehicle has capabilities that it doesn't have believing that any piece of equipment has capabilities that it doesn't have now 2b failing to recognize the capabilities that your equipment does have this can be because you're not familiar with it because you haven't trained with it sometimes it's because you forgot that you had the piece of equipment with you but for example a long time ago when people had phones like this i went into the garage the door is shut the other door shuts behind me the overhead light doesn't work there's no windows it's really dark and i dropped my keys okay well i had the bright idea whipping out my flip phone the screen lights up found my keys very easily okay fast forward to this century when i have a phone like this one and one day i was in the dark and i just pressed the button that lit up the screen but it didn't give me enough light to actually do what i was trying to do and later i'm telling somebody about this and somebody tells me that i should have used the flashlight on my phone but my phone doesn't have a well if it has a flashlight i'm not aware of it sure enough somebody takes it yeah there you go failing to recognize the capabilities that my piece of equipment does have most phones also have compasses and calculators and the list goes on sometimes you fail to use your equipment to its full potential because you have all this gear and you just forgot that you had a particular piece of equipment with you let me tell you another anecdote i go out to the pond to go duck hunting and i'm with the same guy that only needed one match and we sit there and we sit there and we sit there and we don't see anything and after a while he says something to the effect of we should have brought a duck call i do have a duck call i didn't bring it specifically to go duck hunting i bought it years before as some kind of gag or something i don't even remember what it had just been in my pocket for years oh yeah i pulled this out of my coat pocket and i pull out a duck call and i make noise with it and yes it did sound more like burgess meredith than a duck but as soon as i make this duck call sound he bursts out laughing tells me what a doofus i am and that's the stupidest duck call ever and there's no way that would ever attract a duck duck probably wasn't the word i used at the moment but he got caught completely off guard because he thought that this piece of equipment wasn't capable of doing what it was supposed to do when evidently it was working quite well so you see failing to recognize the capability that a piece of equipment has because he thought it didn't work failing to recognize the capabilities that piece of equipment has because i forgot it i had it with me that was a routine that would have made abbott and costello jealous but the bottom line here is many people get in trouble because they think their equipment has capabilities that it doesn't have or they fail to recognize the capabilities their equipment does have point three this includes a demonstration i can only do it once i have to do it in real time i can't refilm this you really are going to have to bear with me also 0.3 is something a lot of you have already gotten to as where point one is thinking you can do something that you can't and point to a is thinking your gear can do something that it can't to be thinking your gear can't do something when it can the reason that a lot of people have the problems of 0.1 and 0.2 is because of 0.3 the failure to train train with your gear train under realistic field conditions the failure to test your equipment if the kid who thought he could spark his knife blade had ever gone into the field and tested that he would have learned that it's far more difficult than he thought and once he knew that he would have been able to practice it and become better at it or he would have had the option of abandoning that idea and just getting a waterproof match container and filling it with matches if the people who think their taurus judge revolver can do all these great things had ever gone to the range and put up realistic targets at realistic distances they'd learn something about the capabilities and limitations of that firearm the guy who thinks he can walk to the top of the hill in an unrealistic time if he had ever put on a pack gone out to a hiking trail that's actually measured the distances are marked so it's a known distance and timed himself he would know how far he could walk in a given time the failure to train and test your equipment now that brings up a topic c-o-g-h-l-a-n apostrophe s colons coglins coughlins i really do not know how to pronounce that word they make a lot of stuff some of which is really good some of which is not now this is their fire sticks and it's a package of sticks like this which are basically particle board that are held together with paraffin inexpensive easy to use and they're waterproof i know they're waterproof because the waterproof is written on the label and because i've tested them i haven't tested every fire starter on the market but i've tested a few and of those i've tested this one is possibly the best in terms of bang for your buck i'd say it's absolutely the best but they have another product same company coughlins let's call it they're fire starters now these are shorter than the fire sticks but they appear to be the same product except they have a nice big strike on box only match head on them so if it's the same product i'm going to presume that it's probably waterproof but is that match head waterproof let's put it to the test there's also the problem that even if that match head is waterproof this chintzy cardboard box with the striker and remember their strike on box only is not waterproof you carry this in your pocket for a few hours out in a wet environment and it's going to be in not very good shape and i'm just pouring water on it this isn't hours of exposure okay [Music] okay not bad but the light breeze we have here just blew it out that's important to know too so it looks like if this is wet for a short time it might still work now in discussing things like the breeze earlier i was talking about in the days when i carried strike anywhere wooden kitchen matches they work well enough but the biggest problem was the breeze blowing them out there's times i'd have to get my tinder and put it in my coat with me and try to strike the match and get it in there and light it actually in my coat before the wind could blow the match out okay one of the things that people talk about using as a fire starter in addition to all these things is just a candle if you can get the candle lit it'll burn for a long time yes you can blow it out but it's a little more resistant to being blown out than one of those wooden matches and it'll burn long enough you can get it in the fire and get your fire lit but then you have to take that candle back out of the fire you have to stow it somewhere so what some people will use is really little candles like birthday cake candles you know where i'm going these can be useful well a long time ago i came up with the idea of practical joke relighting birthday cake candles as long as i can get the thing lit then if the breeze blows it out it'll relight itself now a long time ago when i came up with this idea i thought it was a good idea and i gotta say i still do however because at that time getting to the store wasn't something i could do very easily and at that time the two dollars that i paid for them was a fortune i never tested them i just stuck them in my gear carried them in case of emergencies never did have an emergency where i actually needed one so although i thought it was a good idea hypothetically i have never actually put it to the test so let's put it to the test i paid about two dollars for this package of trick birthday candles got them at safeway a few days ago and i won't light it with a match i'll light it with my butane lighter and the wind blew it out before i could really get it started so let's do the old inside the coke trick okay it's burning in there and now it's burning there is a light breeze but it's still burning okay let's not hang our hats on the results of just one okay it's burning now it's interesting in the past when i've seen these on birthday cakes you can see a spark or two come off of them it gives them away as re-lighting candles i'm not seeing that here magic relight birthday candles well that doesn't look very magical or relightable oh there it's sparking a little bit it has to burn for a while before the sparky stuff starts going and it re-lights so what we're seeing here is that you have to keep it burning for a while before it'll relight itself but don't let it burn too long then you get past the point where it'll re-light itself are you kidding me okay i'm gonna have to call that about a 99 failure imagine if i had learned how poorly those worked on a cold dark windy rainy night that would have been no fun at all you absolutely have to test your gear and of course some of those practical joke birthday candles work just fine but you don't want to be in the middle of nowhere when you discovered that the ones you bought were garbage okay point four on my list on my top five tips for wilderness survival point four was don't over pack well on my top five mistakes people make point four is over packing carrying too much gear resulting in having no gear when you actually need it let me see if i can explain that you go out deer hunting and you go set up a camp and then someone gets up in the morning and goes out on a particular route they're going to take to go hunting and he carries his survival pack with him and i'm not talking about the 50 pound nonsense pack that some people have and call their survival pack i mean he's carrying about 20 pounds of useful equipment cold weather gear extra socks wet weather gear food water and so forth but after carrying that pack all day and walking for miles he gets back to camp and decides carrying that pack was no fun but instead of reorganizing revamping it so the next day he's carrying seven or eight pounds no he just leaves the whole thing at camp throws a few extra rounds in his pocket calls it good then he doesn't have any gear when he needs it you have to create a balance on one extreme you have no gear or you're the guy that only needs one match on the other extreme you have too much and leave it all back at camp carrying just a few of the right things is better than not carrying anything for example i carry this swiss army knife and yes i have skinned and gutted a deer with it not ideal but it's better than nothing and having the swiss army knife with me is a whole lot better than having this knife that i left back at camp also you'll see people will carry like emergency space blankets or sleeping bags okay here's a space bag it's like a space blanket but it's formed into a bag very useful and having this with me is a whole lot better than having a nice thick heavy sleeping bag with gore-tex sleeping bag cover back at camp as far as fire building materials you have to carry gear commensurate with your level of knowledge and skill but having this butane lighter in my pocket is a whole lot better than having this butane lighter back at camp you have to have gear with you and packing too much means you have none when you really need it now point five and i said i would save what i consider to be the worst mistake for last and i have this is not only a very big mistake but it is the foundation on which many other mistakes are built and that is through arrogance or naivety or even more so laziness rationalizing that you don't really need any particular skill set that you don't need any particular gear living in denial that anything bad can happen to you there are people who will go into the field thinking i can't get lost i can't fall down and hurt myself there's no way that any bad person or or vicious animals are going to do anything bad to me that kind of denial gets people in trouble and it gets those people's associates in trouble now this might sound as i go through it similar to point one it's actually in many ways the opposite as where in point one someone fools themselves into thinking they have a skill or a trait that they don't this is where people fully realize that they don't have a skill or a trait so they rationalize that that skill or trait isn't important because they're really too lazy to gear up or train themselves as where in point one the kid who thought he could spark his blade and make a fire if he were to train and test he'd discover that he couldn't really do that in point five it's somebody that knows full well that he has very poor fire building skills so instead of training training realistically getting some education instead of what's doing second best which would be carrying gear to compensate for his lack of fire building skills gear like road flares or the giant cigarette lighter what he does is because he's too lazy to do that he convinces himself that fire building just isn't really an important skill in the field he doesn't need to build a fire because he'll never get lost he doesn't need to build a fire because well it's not really that cold out or his coat is adequate against the temperature people like that often find out the hard way that their gear is not adequate against the weather they're going to face i see this kind of thing manifesting itself all the time in many different ways as we're in point one we see the person who thinks they know how to use a compass but doesn't in point five we see the person who knows full well he doesn't know how to use a compass he doesn't know how to use a gps he doesn't have a compass or a gps but instead of obtaining those things and learning how to use them because he's lazy he rationalizes that he'll never really need those because he's not going to get lost because he's not going very far he knows the area very well and quite often those people don't know the area very well at all now there are two main ways that i see this manifest itself one is in driving there are some people who do not like to wear seat belts they find them uncomfortable the list of reasons goes on and on they just don't like to wear seat belts and when they do that they're putting themselves at risk but instead of being honest with themselves and with everybody else and saying yeah i know i'm putting myself at risk but i hate wearing a seat belt it's a risk i'm going to take no they will lie to themselves and everyone else and rationalize that they don't need to wear a seat belt because they're a good driver well i might be a good driver but the guy that ran the red light and t-boned me was not or they'll rationalize that well they're not driving very far so they don't really need to wear a seatbelt what could happen only half mile from the house this is a mentality that gets a lot of people in a lot of trouble now the other place i see this manifested so often is in the commentary in this format it's very common that i will compare two different types of ammo or even more so two different types of handguns and i'll do as part of that an accuracy comparison so i'll set up two targets like 20 or 25 yards and i'll shoot the two handguns side by side and i'll compare the accuracy and it has nothing to do with survival or lethal confrontations or law enforcement or self-defense or any of that it's just comparing the accuracy or at least comparing the accuracy i can achieve with certain handguns and when i do that there is no shortage of angry hate mail from people telling me how terrible that comparison was and how unnecessary it was to shoot at 20 yards because quote you would never do that okay that's really silly for two reasons one i'm not talking about lethal confrontations or anything else i'm just comparing the accuracy i had to compare it at that distance because if i compared the accuracy at five yards both groups would be small enough you wouldn't really see much difference and two telling me that i would never do that when i've actually been in a situation and i just say this to make the point i've been in a situation where someone fired at me from about a hundred yards away and i had to shoot back with the only firearm i had at that moment which was a handgun so telling me that i would never do that is kind of silly but this is the kind of thing we see a lot in the area of survival the people who have inadequate skills inadequate gear and are too lazy to increase the level of those things and so they rationalize that they don't need those things the person who's complaining that the 20-yard accuracy test is silly is someone who knows very well that he has very poor marksmanship skills so he's managed to convince himself that he'll never have to shoot anything more than five yards away now what makes these people the biggest danger not only to themselves but to the rest of us is that those people who choose to do the easy wrong thing instead of the difficult right thing don't like to be alone and they often will try to shame other people into not being prepared in part two when i was talking about guns for wilderness survival i mentioned that sometimes in the field if you're with other people you're going to have to carry your guns surreptitiously and i'm going to use a technical term here because there are people who think that guns are yucky this is the kind of thing you have to deal with is that people who rationalize and know their rationalizing try to shame those of us who try to be prepared in some way and there's been many occasions where people have bitched at me from my pack and bitched at me for the things in my pockets and bitched at me about the lbv these kind of people are a danger to themselves and everyone around them now i'm going to tell you an anecdote and this is one of the saddest things i have ever seen as a dental assistant i am required to keep a current cpr card and what is very common if you work at a clinic that has a fair number of employees is that once a year they'll get a local emt you certified to teach the class and he'll come to the clinic and we'll all stay after work and we'll all take the class well at the clinic i was working at a particular time about midday i mentioned to the receptionist oh yeah we're all staying after work take the class and she tells me that she's not you're not going to stay for the class she tells me no she doesn't need to take the class she doesn't need to have that information okay well first of all it's a free class to get information that's really useful but she doesn't need it shortly after that i found out that about four or five months before this class was to take place there had been a big flood and her house was in a place where it wasn't flooded but it became really isolated because of the flood and on that particular day her husband had a myocardial infarction and died before the emts could get there she could have kept him alive if she'd known cpr and even after that she's sitting there telling me that she doesn't need to take the class are you [ __ ] kidding me no that is exactly what happened this kind of denial and laziness makes those kind of people not only a danger to themselves but a danger to the rest of us and that is the biggest mistake people make on the subject of wilderness survival [Music] you

Channel: Paul Harrell

Views: 388,706

Keywords: paul harrell, paul harrell wilderness survival, wilderness survival mistakes

Id: B0SejTWds-M

Length: 54min 4sec (3244 seconds)

Published: Sat May 22 2021