A framework for survival
Are you watching the latest survival TV show, Alone? I’ve not seen such a resurgence of interest in survival skills since Bear Grylls did something unmentionable to a frog in the early 2000’s.
Since the pandemic, the (usually inebriated) chat with friends about ‘what would you do?’ in various apocalyptic scenarios, has taken on a new edge with the understanding that our social stability is, at best, a week away from mayhem at any given moment.
Opening our annual survival and wilderness course that took place last week, I asked attendees to think about survival scenarios and how we’d approach each situation. It quickly became clear that a simple question of survival priorities typically descends into a convoluted debate with many variables depending on the scenario, which ranged from Alone style classic survive-in-the-wilderness to volcano-exploding-end-of-everything extremity.
So, what would you do if you were dumped into the wild with just the things you could carry?
Thankfully there is a right and wrong answer, although with a bit of nuance and the need for common sense to make suitable amendments.
I’m going to explain my framework for most wilderness survival situations, and it comes in two parts.
Part one: The Rule of Three
The rule of 3 is a well known quick-reference guide within bushcraft and survival. There are many variants floating about, but this is mine.
It goes like this.
You can survive…
Three seconds without thinking.
Three minutes without air.
Three hours without shelter.
Three days without water.
Three weeks without food.
The point of the rule of 3 is to remind us all what our general survival priorities should be, given how long we can last without something. But as we’ll see, it doesn’t solve all our survival dilemmas and it requires a bit of tweaking to be practically useful.
Here’s the Rule of 3 in more detail.
Three seconds without thinking.
Most survival situations are either caused by and/or exacerbated by poor decision making and human errors.
In future articles I’ll talk about how personality traits have a huge influence on people's long-term survival probabilities, whether alone or in a group.
It just takes a momentary lapse of concentration with a bladed tool to seriously injure yourself outdoors.
It takes a few seconds to stop paying attention to your environment and walk into danger.
You can get lost in no time at all.
Our greatest attribute in survival situations is our advanced brain but we have to train ourselves to engage it properly.
Part of the reason for this is our honed fight or flight response, which I’ll also talk about in future articles as part of a series on the psychology of survival.
Stay focused, make every decision outdoors a conscious one, take deliberate actions from deliberate thoughts. This is the number one key to survival.
Three minutes without air.
This always seems a bit obscure and also something that you probably don’t need reminding about if you’re struggling to breathe. But again, it’s about our decisions when we’re in the wild.
If you’re thinking about crossing any body of water, or if there’s a danger of snow or avalanches (whether snow or mud), remembering how quickly you’ll succumb to hypoxia and then death without oxygen is an important sense check.
Us survival instructors have an almost excessive respect for the danger of water outdoors. To others it can seem paranoid or over the top, but the reality is that nothing is more dangerous in the wild than a body of water.
I once told someone to be careful when they were thinking about having a wade in a seemingly calm eddy of water along the River Dart, but the river was in full spate and flowing vigorously an arms reach past the pool and it’s rare in the UK for water temperatures to get much higher than about 15 degrees centigrade, even in summer. I was scoffed at and the retort came back “I’m not an idiot” before they went on to brag about all the other dangerous waters they’d swam in around the world, including with crocodiles.
It takes just six inches (15 cm) of water to sweep a person off their feet, and you can drown in a puddle. Cold water shock, lack of dexterity, force of water (you’d need to be an olympic weightlifter to push yourself off rocks in water moving at just 10 mph), and debris are some of the many challenges in water that will give you an unwelcome introduction to the rule of surviving just three minutes without air.
Three hours without shelter.
This is the one most people overlook or downplay. You can go outside now and confidently not expect to be dead in three hours time, so why is this the third rule of three!?
In the wild one of the biggest killers is hypothermia or heat stroke, and they can affect anyone regardless of age or fitness.
Shelter is your best protection against the weather, but people often leave it too late to think about shelter building and by then they’re falling victim to the elements.
Our fragile human bodies need to maintain a consistent internal body temperature of about 37 degrees centigrade (it varies slightly for everyone). A couple of degrees over or under this Goldilocks zone and we quickly find ourselves in physical distress.
I’ll delve into the warning signs, effects, and remedies for overheating and overcooling in future articles.
Your clothing will only provide so much protection, and if you’re facing persistent rain then once that clothing is compromised you’ll quickly start to go down with cold.
Shelter provides an important layer of protection from the elements, as well as from wild animals, but also creates a powerful psychological barrier to help you through survival adversity.
Three days without water.
Our bodies use water at a surprising rate, regardless of whether we’re urinating regularly or not. Even at night in moderate or cool temperatures, you’ll still sweat away the equivalent of a can of coke. Add breathing, exertion, stress, and the weather into the mix and you’ll likely be losing hydration far faster than you’re used to.
Without water, our body quickly starts to shut down.
But how do you get water in the wild? Anyone who’s slurped from a crystal clear stream in the Brecon Beacons only to walk 100m further and find a dead sheep floating in it, will know the hidden risk of drinking wild water without treating it.
This is where Rule of 3 starts to get a bit nuanced.
In reality, notwithstanding fancy water purifying pumps or chemical purification tablets, your only real way to ensure water is drinkable (or ‘potable’ to use the correct outdoorsy term) is to boil it.
Therefore you need fire.
We don’t directly need fire to survive so it doesn’t feature in the Rule of 3, but fire is a mechanism for survival and without it our long-term survival chances reduce dramatically.
Fire is essential for purifying life-giving water, and for warmth, protection against wild animals, cooking, and more.
We humans have a unique relationship with fire, and one that I’ll explore more in future articles.
So, we can survive three days without water but we’re likely to need fire to make water potable.
Three weeks without food.
We’re hard-wired to want food. Even sitting on our bums doing nothing will burn around 1,500 calories a day (our basal metabolic rate, which also varies person to person).
We’re also an opportunistic omnivore, so have a wide range of foods available to us covering the main food groups: proteins, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals.
But we can survive without any food for weeks. Really.
It sucks, and you’ll feel like crap when your body switches from burning energy from food and short-term sugars to your fat reserves, but it is survivable for longer than you want to think.
Mentally fighting the innate desire for food is one of the biggest challenges in any survival situation, and as those of you following Alone on telly will see, it breaks most people.
So these are the basics of what you can survive without, and for how long. The Rule of 3 provides a simple quick-reference guide in most wilderness survival situations, but it is limited.
The problem with Rule of 3 is it doesn’t help us get out of the survival scenario and either get rescued, rescue ourselves, or survive long-term in the wild.
That’s why we need a P.L.A.N.
To be continued …
