Survival hinges primarily on observing your surroundings and accurately determining the seriousness of your situation, then taking the proper action to SURVIVE!
Tips
- Put trick birthday candles that won't blow out in your survival kit!
- Practice survival skills in ALL weather conditions! Fire building and shelter construction could be and should be challenging, but in a safe environment.
- Thistle down and puff ball spores are nearly explosive as a tinder...mix with dry grasses, inner bark fibers, etc. Add fireweed down, old man's beard, scraped birch bark with dried grasses.
- Cut up an old bicycle inner tube into 1-2" squares (5-10 should suffice) and keep them handy in your fire-building kit for something that burns long and hot, like a candle!
- Dried fiber plants (fireweed, milkweed, grasses, nettles, dogbane, yucca, cattail, and the inner barks of cedars, linden, elm, walnut, hickory, aspen, cottonwood) make great cordage AND tinders!!
- Cutting an old inner tube into small loops or bands enable you to use them like rubber bands, recycling the inner tube. Of course, an auto inner tube will give larger bands. Use the bands to secure gear to a pack strap, to other gear, or whatever your ideas can yield!
- The old pitch stick, knot, or burl from a Douglas fir, balsam fir, or pitch pine will burn wet or dry. So will birch bark. And you thought there were no ready tinders out there!