Winter Mountaineering

Essential Survival Skills in the Wilderness for Your Winter Adventures

Essential Survival Skills in the Wilderness for Your Winter Adventures

During the winter, the condition is more extreme, and it requires strong stamina. But, can you deal with the survival skills? Here are survival skills for winter adventures worth taking note of. Winter will make more extreme situations. Plus, it requires a whole lot of determination and stamina. It will also require you to deal with the essential survival skills you will greatly need. So, you have to know about locating edible wild plants, navigation, and water sources. You also have to recognize how to avoid hypothermia and dehydration.

 

Winter Hiking - it's not really about the gear.

Winter Hiking - it's not really about the gear.

Don’t go any further, you’ll die. Today’s quiz, hotshots, is what you would do if you heard this phrase on the trail. Would you turn around, or would you keep going? It’s also a statement that’s led me to pen this mini-diatribe. Before I go any further, I can already hear you asking, “Wait – what’s the situation? The terrain? The temperature? I can’t answer this question until I know these things.” Fair enough, let me give you the relevant background details: it was a partly cloudy day in Zion National Park. The cloud deck was resting at around 7,000 feet, and the ambient temperature at the Weeping Rock Trailhead (Information here) was around 20 degrees, although it could have been slightly colder as there were intermittent wind gusts of around 10 mph. For the last two days it had been snowing down to approximately 4,500 feet, but at the lower elevations there had been some melting and re-freezing. These were the conditions I found when I arrived at the trailhead one Sunday in mid-December of 2012 at around 7:30 a.m.