If you are planning to go on an outdoor survival trip, be sure you are physically and mentally able and prepared for such a daring and risky adventure.
We suggest you take the time to gather some notes and plan your trip way in advance. All though this will be an awesome experience, and a lot of fun, it could be very dangerous and potentially life threatening if not prepared for it. There is a big difference between hiking or camping then going on a real live survival trip. A survival trip means your only taking accentual items to live off of. A survival trip is not for the beginning hiker or camper, but for the experience outdoor enthusiast, an outdoor person that has done a lot of hiking, camping, fishing or hunting in the wilderness, or has had some kind of military experience in the wilderness. One thing for sure, is to never try to do something like this on your own, always have a partner or two to go with you.
Depending on what kind of trip your going to take, you need to give it a lot of thought. Do you have all the right outdoor gear that your going to need to survive? Are you going to take a trip for a week, a month or several months? Are you going to the mountains or a desert? Are you taking a trip in the wilderness or just in the back woods?
There are many different types or ways of taking a survival trip. Like, you could take a trip threw the swamps of Louisiana, or a wilderness trip threw the hills of Yellowstone Park in Wyoming. No matter where you decide to go, it takes a lot of planning and preparation. By all rights, it would be wise to plan many months ahead.
What kind of outdoor gear and how much are you going to take? What route are you going to take? What time of the year do you want to go? Is it going to be extremely cold or unbearably hot? Is it going to be hot in the daytime and cold at night? Are there going to be any rivers to cross or canyons to scale? Are you going to be able to get in touch of the outside world, if there was an emergency? I could go on and on about things that could go wrong, and that’s why it takes a lot of planning.
If you are an experienced outdoor enthusiast and have quite a bit of knowledge in hiking and camping, but have never been in, or done a real life survival trip, I believe you would like to take your first trip to the Appalachian Trail in the eastern United States.
The Appalachian Trail is a marked trail for hikers and campers. It is approximately 2,200 miles long and runs from the state of Georgia all the way to Maine. It is the longest continuous marked trail in the United States. The Appalachians offer some of the most beautiful sites of landscape that America has. There is some pretty big rivers that you are going to have to cross too. These rivers also provide some mighty fine fishing also. Even though it is a marked trail for hikers and campers, it still offers an awesome challenge to under take and would be a great achievement for anyone that has never done a real life survival trip.
To just get out and hike this whole trail from south to north or vice verses, would take you about 6 to 7 months if you wanted to do the whole trip at one time. There are plenty of small towns to get to off the trail if you needed to stock up on supplies, but that is just like taking a long hiking trip instead of a real life survival trip.
A survival trip consists of getting off the beaten path and actually live off the land, another words, do it the hard way. Yes, this is just like taking a hiking trip, but if you take and live it the hard way and do things that are unnatural like starting your campfire with two sticks or getting your water from little ponds and creeks and having to boil your water to purify it, and eating things like worms or grub worms, eating berries and mushrooms and so forth, then your doing it the hard way. Finding or building a shelter from mother nature instead of pitching a tent is a great experience. Making and setting snares to catch animals like rabbit, squirrel or wild pigs so you can eat is a great experience. Finding certain plants that hold water that you could drink is another good experience.
Make sure that when you do plan a trip, study up and get information on the area you will be going in. You need to know what type of edible plants there are. What kind of animals inhabit there? Are there animals of prey, like bear or mountain lion, or even wolves? Are there snakes, and how many different species, and are they venomous or not? What kind of insects or spiders are there, and are they venomous?
Doing things like this is all part of survival, and this is a good learning and training experience. You may never know when something bad could happen, so you need to be prepared for the worse. Remember, this is only a practice survival trip and not a real one, but if you don’t plan it well, it could go awfully wrong for you and turn in to a real life survival situation.
For more information on the Appalachian mountains, look it up on the web or call just about any of the eastern states of commerce for literature and maps.
You can find more outdoor survival articles of mine and other well known authors at many other article directories sites. Gather all the information you can get before taking on such a wonderful adventure.