Winter Wilderness Survival Tips

Avoiding Exposure

• Hypothermia is a real possibility during this time of year, and a 7-degree drop in body temperature can make it impossible to think clearly and do what needs to be done. If your clothes are not keeping you warm, stuff them with all the dry leaves you can find. This creates insulating air pockets that will raise your body temperature. Fill your jacket and pants with leaves until there are no gaps. Since a lot of heat is lost through the top of your head, if you're not wearing a hat you should cover up with any cloth you can spare. Avoid sweating or getting wet, as this drastically reduces the insulating capacity of your clothes. If you lose feeling in your extremities and they have a pale white appearance, you might have frostbite. Use friction to improve circulation in your hands and feet before they get to this point.

  The best way to protect yourself from dangerously low temperatures and a winter storm is with the proper shelter. Use natural wind and weather breaks whenever possible, such as pits at the base of evergreen trees, to reduce the work needed to build your shelter. An ideal shelter provides protection from the elements, is free of natural hazards, can withstand powerful storms, is well ventilated and insulated and enables you to dry wet clothes. A tree-pit snow shelter is probably your best bet since much of the work is already done. An evergreen or other tree with thick branches can serve as your roof. Enlarge the pit at its base by digging out the snow around the trunk to your desired depth and diameter. Pack it down around the top and inside the pit. Put evergreen boughs or other foliage at the bottom of your pit to separate you from the cold ground. You can dig a foot deep by foot wide trench under your bedding and fill it with dry rocks you have heated in a fire and then covered up with soil to stay warm all night. If snow blows under your tree, lay additional boughs across the top of your pit to form a protective cover.

Building a Fire

• Because fire prevents and treats hypothermia and frostbite, building one should be your next task. Aside from providing essential warmth, fire generates smoke and light for signaling, sterilizes water, cooks food, dries wet clothing and hardens wood for tool-making. It can be the difference between life and death.

  Prepare the fire site by creating a platform from green logs arranged side by side or by digging into the earth to form a snow-free cavity. Build a windbreak out of dry rocks, then collect tinder, kindling and fuel wood. Use pine pitch and needles, with shaved slivers from dry twigs, for your tinder. Kindling should be no thicker than your thumb, and sticks from evergreens work best. Dry limbs from hardwood trees make ideal fuel wood.

  If you need a quick fire for cooking, put your tinder on the platform or in the cavity, lean the kindling all around it and arrange the fuel wood in a vertical angle above it to form a tepee. To build a long-burning fire that produces good coals, lay two large logs parallel to each other and build a perpendicular platform of slightly smaller limbs on top of them. Continue arranging platforms of progressively smaller limbs that are perpendicular to the platforms below and above them until you have a pyramid.

  If you do not have matches or a lighter to start the fire, use an eye-wear or flashlight lens to focus sunlight on your tinder. Flint or quartz and steel can also be rubbed together to generate a shower of sparks, or sufficient friction between soft and hard woods can create a red-hot coal.

Getting Potable Water

• In the winter months, water is more readily available but it may not be in a liquid form. Never eat snow or pieces of ice to satisfy thirst. This lowers your body temperature and increases the risk of dehydration. Snow and ice must be melted to convert them to a liquid. Because snow is only 25 percent water, it should only be used as a last resort. Ice is a better bet and even sea ice is a good source of water if its tint has changed from gray to blue. Once the ice turns blue it has lost most of its salt and is safe for drinking.

  To melt ice and snow for drinking, build a tripod stand out of 6-foot limbs lashed together at the top and put it next to your fire or out in the sun. Fill a clean bag or large cloth with the ice and snow, and tie it shut while suspending it below the top of your stand. Put a container underneath to collect the water as it drips through. Keep refilling your water generator to ensure a constant supply of potable water. In a pinch you can pile up snow on a large piece of bark and set it at an angle next to your fire with a container positioned to collect the run-off. Heat dry rocks in a fire and add them to the water to boil it for 20 minutes before drinking.

Finding Food

• It takes months to starve to death. so food is not an immediate concern. However, when other needs are met a steady supply of food can give you a mental boost and the energy to accomplish important tasks. The easiest way to find food is by harvesting edible wild plants. Because bad choices can be fatal, your best bet is to focus on the four classes of plants that are readily available and easily identified. Most bladed grasses are edible and you can swallow the juices and spit out the fiber if you're willing to dig down beneath a layer of snow to find them. Cattails are located where the ground is wet or marshy and can be identified by their long stalks and sausage-shaped seed heads. The shoots, roots and seed heads are all edible and some parts are also medicinal. Pine trees have high levels of vitamin C and you can boil their needles to produce more of it than is found in a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Seeds from mature pine cones are also highly nutritious and they are favored by survivalists. A real storehouse of nutrition can be found in the mighty oak with its protein-rich acorns. Some are good raw but all are ready to eat after boiling in several changes of water to eliminate the bitter-tasting tannic acid.

  You can expand your plant diet with ants, worms, grubs and other easily caught insects. Ants and worms burrow down below the frost line during winter so it might be more productive to check for insects inside dead logs and behind the bark of old trees. Cook anything you find to eliminate parasites.