There are times when there is a gulf between the way people imagine they could handle a situation and the reality of their being able to manage much longer than a second or two. And a piece on the American website Study Finds on the 24th of May shines a stark light on how this mismatch relates to the whole notion of prepping.
The bottom line of the posting is that in a recent survey, the average American reckoned they could survive for a whole two weeks alone in the wilderness. Yet only 17% of those surveyed had any confidence in their being able to start a fire and only 14% reckoned they’d be able to identify edible plants, fruit, or berries.
The harsh realities
However many adventure programmes you watch, and no matter how you might have admired the survival techniques of Bear Grylls or Ed Stafford, there’s no escaping some of the harsh realities involved in surviving in the wilderness.
The serious prepper will be aware of those realities and not only have plans about how to face up to them but will also have practised and trained until carrying them out become second nature. So, what are some of those harsh realities. A posting on the Back Country Chronicles website had some answers:
- you can survive for 3 minutes without air – or oxygen – and about the same length of time in icy water;
- you can survive for 3 hours without shelter in a harsh environment – provided you keep out of that icy water;
- you can survive for 3 days without water – provided you’re in a sheltered environment protected from extremes of weather;
- you can survive for 3 weeks without food – provided you have water and shelter.
You could put some of those limits to an imaginary test by answering the series of questions posed on the How Stuff Works website’s “How long could you survive in the wilderness”? The reality might be only an estimated few days!
What’re you going to do about it?
If you are serious about closing the gap between mere wishful thinking and the reality of prepping for a genuine survival situation, maybe it’s time you thought about signing up for a survival or bushcraft course. There are also wilderness survival books available that can give you a head start.
In our posting on the 28th of January, we ran through some of the benefits you might get from completing one of the growing number of such courses – thanks to the valuable new skills you’ll pick up, the extent to which you’ll be able to challenge yourself, and the camaraderie of overcoming obstacles and setbacks in the company of others.
As we said then – and as we’ll continue to insist – successful prepping is about learning, practising, and applying the skills and talents you have learned rather than any amount of expensive or sophisticated survival tools or equipment.
Through that process, you’ll likely discover that the more you learn, the more you discover that there is to learn. You might start out with a big gap between what you think you can do, what you think you know, and the harsh realities of the situation – but, through experience, you can begin to close that gap.
