Survival Camp.

[arnisador]

They Will Survive (http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/08/01/travel/escapes/01survival.html)


Ms. Williams, a baker with a black belt in karate who lives in a Syracuse suburb, had given the class to her boyfriend, Eric Koll, for his birthday, and they were there together. She chose Mr. McCann’s school to get “dirt time,” which she defines as practicing survival techniques previously experienced only on instructional videos. Mr. Koll hoped this course might lead him to a career in wilderness education.

Peter Tourian, a biology teacher from South Orange, N.J., signed up in part to prepare himself for any threats that might arise — “being a husband, there’s a natural instinct to protect” — and after witnessing frightening disorder in the school where he teaches. “When a kid pulled out a machete in the lunchroom, that really changed my thinking,” he said.



Like many Manhattanites, I packed a “go bag” after Sept. 11, but my inspiration to enroll in survival school had less to do with faltering homeland security than with failings of my own.
[...]

Second only to the brain, he said, is a sharp knife. In a survival scenario — say, your Cessna goes down in the jungle or you just get lost while hiking (http://travel.nytimes.com/travel/guides/hiking/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier) — you can rely on a knife for many useful tasks, from skinning dinner to splitting firewood. With a word from Mr. McCann, Ms. Vogler, a cheery former home economics teacher, grabbed a big knife from a sheath on her thigh. Brandishing a Crocodile Dundee-style blade, she reduced a log to kindling with a few chops.


Anyone else consider survival training part of their self-defense preparedness?

[Brock]

I believe the PTK students here in PA did just that with GrandTuhon Gaje while he was here.

[TuhonBill]

I have an article on survival gear on the Pekiti-Tirsia International website. Go to my links page and scroll down to Outdoor and Emergency Supplies, then click "PTI survival gear article".

http://www.pekiti.com/links.php

Regards,
Tuhon Bill McGrath

[Brian R. VanCise]

Survival training is an essential part of IRT. http://www.fmatalk.com/images/icons/icon6.gif I think that simple things like knowing how to start a fire, make a shelter, find clean water as well as when and how and where to move are simply very, very important and those just touch a little on survival training. http://www.fmatalk.com/images/icons/icon14.gif

[5thprofession47]

Outdoor survival training was a regular part of training in Robert Bussey's Warrior International. I had to have a solid working knowledge of these skills to complete my instructor certification. We had annual summer camps that incorporated some of these skills but the real lessons were at winter camp. One year we were taken out into the freezing Nebraska countryside and given three matches (this was after outdoor survival training over the prior months) and told to "come back in the moring". We had to construct shelters, build a fire, procure potable water and just survive the elements! It was scary but fun at the same time.

[Brock]

I guess we here in Rural PA take these skills as a given. Most of us can identify at least 3 types of animal tracks and/or crap.

[tellner]

Survival can include all sorts of things from recognizing downed power lines to recognizing unsafe canned food, splinting a broken leg, building shelter, signaling aircraft and felling a tree. If it helps you survive it's survival.

There's a couple things most people forget...

1) Men die. Teams survive. Survival by yourself is difficult if not impossible. Nobody can do everything. That's why we're social animals. Read Robinson Crusoe. There are some bad people who want to eat him. But it's much more about how much grain to eat versus how much to save for planting, optimal goat populations, improvising a shovel to replace the digging stick and how many hours you can afford to spend tanning hides. Most of all, life stops sucking when he has someone to share the load. When there are three of them it gets downright manageable.

One of the worst things about us as a nation - I'm talking to the Americans here - is that we've become anti-social, isolated and pretty darned selfish. Those work alright in a mass media, mass consumption, well-to-do society. They are lousy when you have to rely on each other to get by. Ayn Rand, "Greed is Good" and large-L Libertarian dogma about private everything and the evils of "Collectivism" can and must be jettisoned when the highly interdependent extraordinarily complex industrial base they depend on disappears.

Get to know your neighbors. They're the community you'll be stuck with.

If you don't leave ahead of the pack the roads will all be jammed, and everyone will die of thirst one tank of gas out of the city. And forget about living by hunting. All the game within a day's drive of the major cities will be dead within a week. And most of it will go to waste because almost nobody knows how to do food preservation.

2) Most people don't know what they're planning for. If you ask what "survival" you'll find that it's all pretty hazy, especially to self-described "survivalists". There's vague talk about a cabin in the woods or an actual fortified compound, the total breakdown of society, hunting, camo (lots and lots of camo), plenty of guns, invaders (formerly the Yellow Peril, then Commies, now illegals and Swarthy Orientals) and all sorts of other stuff.

For most people it's all very Apocalypse complete with supernatural enemies and MoM fantasies. A realistic look at what could happen, what might happen and what could only happen at the edges of quantum probability is usually lacking. A three day blackout is likely at some point. Civil unrest with riots and a heavy-handed local or national government response is certainly possible. A takeover by the Antichrist with nuclear war goodness and invading Russians sprinkled in every town is more like Tim La Haye on really bad acid or a Militia of Montana porn flick. Theoretically possible, but no rational person is going to spend much time on it.

3) It's about you. It's not about the toys. When most people talk about survival it's about how many pounds of what sort of food they've bought, camo, whether they are carrying enough ordnance to equip a reinforced platoon or a company, more camo, the BoB they've filled up for when "SHTF", even more camo, "living off the land" (undefined) and so on. More tools or rather more of the right tools are always nice. But there's way too much emphasis on consuming your way past the end of consumer culture and less about being able to recognize what needs to be done and improvising it.

[blindside]

They Will Survive (http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/08/01/travel/escapes/01survival.html)

Anyone else consider survival training part of their self-defense preparedness?

Yes, but a camp like this is the equivelent of a weekend seminar of 6 different martial arts instructors each teaching a beginner something cool about their art. A mile wide and an inch deep.

Whats your emergency? In Wyoming it was going off the road into a ditch and not being found until spring, or the power going out for a week, here in Washington it is living downwind and downstream of the Hanford Site. In one case I had a blizzard bag which not-so-coincidentally is identical to my current bug out bag. But thinking a weekend camp is going to help you if you crash your plane in the woods, well, keep wishing. In scouts I did the whole "three days in the woods, with nothing but the clothes on your back and your knife." Cold, hungry, and lonely nights..... in August. Even now, with years of experience trapping furbearers, I'd be hard pressed to find enough food using makeshift traps. Hugh Glass I ain't. (If you don't know who Hugh Glass is, well, its one of the most amazing survival stories that I know of. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Glass )

Anywho, I'd prioritize good medical skills above good wilderness survival skills in my training regimen. But justifying the giant rambo (sorry, survival) knife is much more fun.

Lamont