It’s now flooded up to the windows and you realize there’s no hope of getting out by yourself. You struggle back to the shore and realize your phone was in the charger and is now underwater and wouldn’t work even if you could find it. You drag yourself up onto the bank of the stream, wet from the chest down and shivering from the cold. It’s about an hour or so until sundown and there’s no way you’re going to be able to walk back to the main road. With all the twists and turns you took coming in you’re pretty sure you couldn’t find your way back anyway. Related article: Coffee Can Survival Kit for Your Vehicle Suddenly, the left side of your vehicle slips into a trough in the fast-moving water and the engine quits as it floods. The next thing you know, ice-cold water is flowing around your feet and rising fast. You slide over to the passenger side and jump out as the car sinks another foot. Your fancy handheld GPS takes you down a back road. You’re eager to get to your hotel and you’re tired, so you follow the GPS even though the road is making you uneasy. It’s gone from tar, to dirt, to little more than a goat path over the last five miles and suddenly you come up on a wide stream. You figure the GPS wouldn’t steer you wrong so you ease into the stream confident you’ll be able to drive through it.

Maybe you’re looking for abandoned ghost trains in the North Woods.

You’re driving through unfamiliar country in the Northeast in the fall. Hypothetical Wilderness Survival Scenario Unfortunately, you’re also wrong.įor some reason, when people think about getting lost – especially if it’s going to be overnight – they want to go looking for food first. Read through the following scenario and then we’ll revisit it after looking at the Survival Rule of Threes. Could you survive here in winter if you got lost overnight?

Three rules of survival