Wilderness Survival Guide 61 www.adventuresmart.ca When both physically and psychologically exhausted, you will begin to act carelessly and experience feelings of hopelessness, frustration and boredom to the point where your only desire is to lie down and die to escape from a situation you feel is too difficult to face. You are experiencing fatigue and your mental ability to cope with the stresses of survival can be reduced as a result of it. When you are inactive, fear, loneliness and boredom will start to creep up on you and threaten to be overwhelming. The best way to overcome fear and panic is to keep your mind active. Take stock of your situation and plan out the next day’s activities. Mentally look for ways you can improve your shelter, to make your stay more comfortable and help searchers find you. If you start to feel lonely, talk out loud to the tree you have befriended (hugged). It’s alive and it won’t talk back. Try to avoid a “Why me!?!” outlook on the situation. Instead, think of all the people out there looking for you and how you can help them find you alive! To help deal with boredom, as well as keep warmwhile inside your shelter, tense up all your muscles for 5 – 10 seconds, and then relax them. Repeat this exercise with your feet and hand muscles to warm them also. Remember if you exercise outside your shelter, you should do so in a sheltered area and only enough to warm up. If you get wet or stay out in the wind too long, the heat loss that could result may outweigh the benefits of exercise. Overdoing it could lead to physical exhaustion, thus speeding up fatigue, so be careful. To avoid the effects of fatigue, you must think before you act to help reduce physical exhaustion, while at the same time keeping your mind active on the tasks at hand. Think of all the people working hard to find you. FATIGUE, LONELINESS & BOREDOM SHELTER With heat loss being your greatest threat, finding or constructing a shelter to keep you dry and out of the wind the first day is critical to your survival. Man made shelters such as the tepee, the lean-to, the tripod, the snow trench, the quinsy, to name a few, all provide the best overall chance for prolonged survival, but may require some advance training and practice to perfect. If daylight and conditions permit, you could look for a natural shelter, like the windless side of an overhanging rock, a cave, the spreading roots and continued...
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