Don't sleep with another mans wife or your girlfriends sister! 
Best Survival Advice You Ever Got.
- Thread starter Argonaut
- Start date
Most of the stuff I'd have offered up has been said already. I'll sum up the best of it as ...
"Be prepared, in skills, equipment, and knowledge. Make sure your tools are in good working order. Tell someone where you are going and when you'll be back, and never hike alone."
Beyond that, one specific piece of advice I got decades ago was ...
When hiking, if you find yourself coming unbalanced and you are about to twist your ankle ... fall down instead. That ten-mile hike back to civilisation is a lot easier with a broken wrist/arm/whatever than with a twisted/broken ankle.
(Of course, you should be able to fall down without breaking anything at all ... but if you have to pick between an ankle and an arm ... no brainer ...sacrifice the arm.)
If you get lost, the odds of a gorgeous brunette showing up with a fresh coconut cream pie is pretty good, so ... hmm ... I think I'm heading off to get lost!
Even better, bring two sets of keys, and make sure they are secured on your person ... not just stuck in the pocket. Tied, clipped, zippered ... imagine yourself going for a tumble, losing your pack, all the lose contents of your pockets falling out, it's all gone ... and NOW how do you get into your car and drive home?
Second set gets the same treatment on your reliable hiking partner.
... and commenting that "soccer is for wimps" is probably even a worse idea.
Yeah.
Be able to navigate yourself back home using nothing more than your wits.
As hard as it is for our more "macho" self-defence types to admit, it's pretty much the same everywhere. All those guys whose motto is "I'd rather be judged by twelve than carried by six" should change that motto to "running away and sleeping at home beats the heck out of the hospital, the police cells, or the morgue."
"Be prepared, in skills, equipment, and knowledge. Make sure your tools are in good working order. Tell someone where you are going and when you'll be back, and never hike alone."
Beyond that, one specific piece of advice I got decades ago was ...
When hiking, if you find yourself coming unbalanced and you are about to twist your ankle ... fall down instead. That ten-mile hike back to civilisation is a lot easier with a broken wrist/arm/whatever than with a twisted/broken ankle.
(Of course, you should be able to fall down without breaking anything at all ... but if you have to pick between an ankle and an arm ... no brainer ...sacrifice the arm.)
If you get lost, the odds of a gorgeous brunette showing up with a fresh coconut cream pie is pretty good, so ... hmm ... I think I'm heading off to get lost!
Even better, bring two sets of keys, and make sure they are secured on your person ... not just stuck in the pocket. Tied, clipped, zippered ... imagine yourself going for a tumble, losing your pack, all the lose contents of your pockets falling out, it's all gone ... and NOW how do you get into your car and drive home?
Second set gets the same treatment on your reliable hiking partner.
... and commenting that "soccer is for wimps" is probably even a worse idea.
Yeah.
Be able to navigate yourself back home using nothing more than your wits.
That video is lovely... but how am I going to explain in court why I broke his nose, and then proceeded to smash his face into a table screaming "DON'T YOU EVER DO THIS AGAIN!!!
As hard as it is for our more "macho" self-defence types to admit, it's pretty much the same everywhere. All those guys whose motto is "I'd rather be judged by twelve than carried by six" should change that motto to "running away and sleeping at home beats the heck out of the hospital, the police cells, or the morgue."
I went through a few years in which I often twisted my ankle. In that time I gained a reflex where I detect ankle-twisting early and fall immediately, and it has served me well. I never thought about it, I just detected it earlier and earlier and every time I would try harder to take my weight off of it, with the much preferred side-effect of falling. A twisted ankle is quite painful, and the pain lasts a long time.
It DOES need to be a reflex though, so try to remember it and cultivate it in general, rather than waiting until you're 80 miles from civilization.
Never sleep with a bitter woman, you never know when you may fall in love.
--my grandfather's advice.
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Now you tell me!
Mine doesn't necessarily pertain to the wilderness but I had a platoon Sgt. in the Marines tell me "always carry a pocketknife". He wasn't talking about a knife for self defense, he was talking about a tool. The knife is man's primal tool, it probably came about just after the club. You can always use a good scout or Swiss Army knife. I never go anywhere without one.
This has served me well many a time.
Fortune favors the well-prepared.
A good friend and a marine always told me, "anyone worth shooting once is worth shooting twice ".
Survival isn't always about the wilderness .
Survival isn't always about the wilderness .
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