So you’re lost in the wilderness, dusk is falling, and the nearest civilisation is many miles away. How are you going to get out of this mess? For that matter, with the weather taking a turn for the worse, how are you going to get through the night? If you love exploring the wild, rugged, empty parts of the planet, getting lost or stranded can simply be the result of a wrong turn, a twisted ankle, or a miscalculation with the map.
Luckily, you don’t have to be a survival specialist to learn a few simple tricks that could, if the unthinkable happened, save your life. Here are some ingenious survival tips that anybody can master.
Make the most of your phone
One of the best ways to escape any situation is to summon help. You’ll probably have a mobile phone with you, but do you have a signal? If so when you make your call be sure to ask for a number that you can text. Texting will conserve battery life.
You may be able to get GPS too. If so, find where you are on your smartphone’s map. Remember, if the map had loaded before you may not even need phone reception. Enable GPS and quickly note the direction of important features, like houses, tracks and rivers and streams, and your position in relation to them.
Once you've done that remember to turn your GPS off and turn it on only occasionally if you need to check your position, as GPS will put extra strain on your phone's battery.
Start a fire
If you think you might be lost or stranded for a while, and especially overnight, you’ll need a fire, for warmth, signalling, defense (from wild animals), water boiling (for purification) and cooking. But you have no matches or lighter, so what do you do?
According to Les Stroud - aka Survivorman and presenter of SOS Island - you can still make a fire, as long as you have a decent torch. Prepare plenty of kindling in the form of dried grass and leaves, and then unscrew the bulb and very carefully break the glass, making sure not to break the filament. Screw the bulb back in and place a small cotton ball in and around the filament. Turn the torch on and, if you’re in luck, the cotton will ignite. Quickly transfer the fire to a larger pile of kindling in a suitable dry spot on the ground.
Use your camera
If you’re completely lost but have a signal it's important to get to a high point. There you can use your camera phone to take pictures of any prominent features - outcrops of rock, distant mountains, a wooded valley and so on - and text them to your contact. You might not have a clue where you are, but a local will recognise the landscape.
Signal for help
If you have no mobile signal and can’t walk to the nearest point for help, you have to draw that help to you. If it’s a sunny day, a vanity mirror, the mirror from a car or a CD can all be used for signaling. Get to the highest point you can so the flash of sunlight off glass or metal can be seen as widely as possible.
When night falls our everyday gadgetry comes into its own. You’ve probably got a camera phone with a flash. You may even have a flashlight app on your smartphone. Use these to signal sparingly, at regular intervals, and switch your phone off in-between to save battery life.
Use what you find
While you’re searching for kindling, search for litter. If humans have been to that spot before they may have left paper - great for the fire - or plastic bottles, which you can reuse to collect and store water.
Moving off
If you suspect nobody is looking for you and a cold, hungry night has passed you may need to get moving. This is when you have to determine the best direction to move in. Follow a track or stream if you can, and if none exist you need to work out compass directions and stick to the one you sense is best.
Your phone may have a compass app. If not, no problem. Take off your watch and point the hour hand at the sun. South is located halfway between the hour hand and 12 O'clock.
So there you have it, some ingenious survival tips for modern adventurers, using the things we all carry with us every day.
Source: yahoo News
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