Backcountry survival lesson No. 1: building a fire when it’s life or death
by MARTIN J. KIDSTON - Helena Independent Record
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Outdoor survival instructor David Cronenwett discusses the importance of a single match. Making smart decisions and keeping a positive outlook can greatly improve your chance of surviving a bad situation in Montana’s backcountry. “If you’re in a survival situation, you’ll also need to get some sleep,” he says. “You can’t function if you don’t get adequate sleep. You’ll make stupid, bad decisions.”
MARTIN KIDSTON - Independent Record
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YORK - Reluctant to waste a single match, he strikes it close to the paper-thin curls he whittled from a log. We gather around as the phosphorous tip sparks, then hisses, and the yellow flame takes to the wooden shavings.
Within minutes, a fire burns upon the blanket of dirt and snow. A pillar of smoke lifts upon the freezing air while the forest creaks under the weight of winter.
David Cronenwett’s lesson on outdoor survival has begun. Over the next few hours, he’ll put to rest old myths and improve our odds of surviving a potentially deadly situation.
“The amount of luck, or providence, or synchronicity that comes into a survival situation is pretty remarkable sometimes,” Cronenwett said. “But you can improve the odds. Nature favors the prepared.”
A wise person once said that an accident is called an accident because no one crashes on purpose. The same can be said for ending up in a survival scenario. Nobody plans on getting lost, breaking an ankle or becoming stranded by a winter storm.
But these things happen. Search and rescue deploys nearly 25 times a year in Lewis and Clark County alone to locate the missing and overdue. Unexpected injuries, equipment failure and sudden storms account for most emergency situations.
“One of the fundamental rules of nature is to adapt,” Cronenwett said. “If you’re put in a stressful survival situation, I guarantee you’re going to have a hard time with it, because you’re grappling with your mind.”
A survival situation doesn’t mean you’re simply lost in the woods. Rather, Cronenwett defines it is an event that may kill you if immediate and corrective action isn’t taken.
And he should know. As a full-time naturalist for the Nature Conservancy, Cronenwett has been teaching outdoor survival, bush craft and primitive skills for more than a decade. He studied at the Boulder Outdoor Survival School in Utah and apprenticed with a fabled Alberta woodsman named Morris.
While Cronenwett has taken his class across Montana, giving survival courses at the U.S. Forest Service, the University of Montana and Carroll College, today’s lesson unfolds in the Big Belt Mountains, known more for hungry summer ticks than winter hardship.
But even this doesn’t matter. A survival situation can happen anywhere, in any condition, at nearly any moment.
“What user group does search and rescue get called out the most to look for?” Cronenwett asks the group. Some guess hunters, others hikers. The correct answer, he tells us, is day users. “All survival situations are different, but there are four universal points to remember.”
Cronenwett suggests packing a survival kit suited to you needs. Included in that kit, he prefers to keep a journal to pen letters into the future, keeping his mind in a survival state of being.
He also iterates a number, that being 98.6. Maintaining the body’s core temperature means you’ll likely survive.
While some points are simple, they often get overlooked, including the need for sleep. Unless you’re in the advanced stages of hypothermia, he says, it’s a myth that if you fall asleep, you’ll freeze to death.
Without sleep - even if it comes in catnaps that last no longer than 20 minutes - you’ll start making poor choices. A level head and smart decisions are paramount to surviving bad situations, and if you’re lost or stranded, you’re already in a bad situation.
“In a survival situation, being positive is very, very important,” he explained. “Accepting some discomfort but acting to improve upon it is huge in cases of survival.”
Dressing for the worst winter has to offer in Montana is also huge. Cronenwett spends 30 minutes talking about clothing, the dos and don’ts of layering and what not to wear in the woods.
Some in today’s class are wearing ski masks over rosy-red faces and wind-breaking shells over thin layers of clothing. Sam Chapman, who helped arrange the course, sports four layers of Merino wool under two outer jackets.
Others wear cotton long-Johns or denim jeans. It’s a bad choice, and as Cronenwett gets deeper into the topic of clothing, the reasons why become clear.
“Clothing is the most important piece of equipment by far,” he said, showing off his collection of buckskin, his mukluks and floppy-eared hats. “There are plenty of stories about people who survived with nothing but really good clothing.”
In a nutshell, cotton fibers collapse when cold and wet, unlike wool fibers, which hold their insulating layer.
“But wool itches,” I complain. “So I wear a T-shirt underneath. Is that so bad?”
As it turns out, it’s a recipe for disaster, even death. Chances are, if I were truly lost, dressed as I am, I would succumb to hypothermia and freeze before sunrise.
Cronenwett and Chapman could teach an entire college semester on textiles, including the differences between wool and cotton and synthetic sport shirts. But they spare us the science while making it easy enough to understand.
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