Why do Survival Skills Seem Overwhelming?

The world of survival skills can get COMPLICATED! One of the problems is that the field is very broad, so let's take a minute to try and define it with more clarity. One section of the space is what we will call primitive living skills. These are the focus of shows like Alone or Naked and Afraid. In these scenarios where people are choosing to live off the landscape with limited technology for an extended period of time. A big focus of these skills are food procurement because in a long term scenario food becomes a major factor. These skills are wonderful, they are a great way to connect with nature, but they are not what we should be focusing on if we want to be prepared for an emergency scenario on a hike. 

The skills we really need to focus on are short term survival skills. While there is definitely some crossover with long term primitive living skills, short term survival skills are going to focus on staying safe for 1-3 days and working your way back to society either via a search and rescue team or by self rescue. We don’t need to know how to forage or trap or flint knap an arrow head to get through a 1-3 day unexpected stay in the backcountry, but we do need to know how to maintain our core body temperature using fire and shelter and purify water. 

When building the survival skills needed to be prepared for a hike, we need to focus on a few core skills and do our best to not get overwhelmed by all the others. If we define our potential survival scenarios, we can then select the right skills that we need to work on so that we can all be more confident and capable on our adventures.