survival training

survival training, teaching people to survive in the wilderness, using essentially Stone Age skills. Such techniques include building shelters from available materials, making fire without matches, locating water, identifying edible plants, manufacturing tools, hunting and trapping animals with primitive devices, and making protective clothing and blankets from skins and fibres. Taught in some secondary schools, colleges, youth groups, and special camps, the programs may also incorporate backpacking, mountain walking, high-altitude camping, and rock climbing.

Shelters built in survival training include lean-tos or teepees made of branches thatched with grass, bark, leaves, or mud, rock shelters, and snow caves. Beds are made from boughs and grass or in cold weather may be constructed over stones heated in a campfire. Fires are started with tinder made from dry bark and shredded grass lighted either with a spark struck from flint or with a bow drill. Students are taught how to obtain water from the soil by digging holes, squeezing mud, or building an evaporation still and to collect water from the air and from plants; to harvest and process edible plants and identify insects to provide emergency food; to hunt birds and small game with arrows or throwing sticks or to trap them with snares and nets; to fish with willow poles, natural fibres, and bone; to make tools by flaking, hammering, or scraping stone or by working bone; to make bows and arrows from wood, sinew, and feather; to make ropes and weave clothing and blankets from bark, grass, and tanned skins.

On completion of training, each student undergoes a final test called the “solo,” in which he is left in a remote area for several days and nights with a minimum of equipment and must find his own food and shelter, using the skills that he has learned.

Survival education is routinely a part of basic military training in many countries. Emergency workers and those who work in remote areas in occupations such as resource extraction, wilderness lands management, and professional rescue operations often receive basic survival training. Several levels of organized scouting offer merit or achievement badges for completion of rudimentary survival-training exercises.