Source: Page 114 of White Noise Keywords: "boat," "college," "floods"

From: "Rosalie B." <gmbeasley@mindspring.com> Subject: Re: Survival and Scouting (was Re: College savings...) Date: 31 Mar 2002 Newsgroups: misc.kids.moderated

Noreen Cooper <ncooper@wahoo.sjsu.edu> wrote: >Rosalie B. <gmbeasley@mindspring.com> wrote: >: Survival skills would mean to me such things as how to survive an >: avalanche, what to do if you fall into the rapids, what to do if you are >: confronted by a bear, dealing with quicksand, how to survive if you are >: caught out in an exposed area at night in a storm etc. >Maybe I need to relate a personal story. I had no formal camping >experience and didn't grow up in a family that camped. Still, I liked to >hike and bought one book on how to camp, would do various day hikes, back >country hikes in Yosemite, and one day went up to the Tahoe area to camp >overnight. It was at the end of the winter season when my companion and I >drove up there. Neither of us had any formal wilderness training >experience. We hiked up some very clear trails and set up the tent. In >the middle of the night, it started to snow and when we woke up, all the >trails were covered. We got seriously lost and it was a very frightening >experience. Yes it would be frightening. However, you were adults and you COULD have looked at the weather forecast and probably discovered that snow was predicted. I don't know that a young child would ever be in that situation by himself unless the family LIVED in such an area. >If what you mean by camping is hitching the trailer to a camp site and >walking no further than one mile from base camp, yes, no formal survival >training is needed. However, the kinds of hiking I would do involved back >country hiking and I now think it was really stupid of me to go into the >backcountry without some kind of survival training. No - that's not what I meant. We did take the children camping in Yosemite when they were about 3 and 5, and we walked to the top of the Mist Trail, if you know where that is. We also hiked with them at the Pinnacles, and in Mesa Verde, and had a cabin in King's Canyon where the snow paths to the cabin were over our head, and where we were visited by a bear. It was the fact that you didn't have ordinary training in camping that was at fault- that you didn't think to check the weather forecast, or didn't think that snow would be that important. When I said that one needed to pick a camp site, it isn't just whether the site is level and free of tree roots, but also whether it might be exposed to flash floods that might be involved for instance. I remember going camping with my cousins out in Colorado (my grandmother had just died, and my father's brother was attending to funeral arrangements, so my parents took the kids off so that they would be out of the way). In any case, my father knew the area, and insisted that we camp up on top of the hill because he saw thunderstorms in the distance. We were quite a way up from the little stream that was at the bottom of the canyon. In the morning, the stream had grown and was up almost to our campsite. Had our father not known the country and about flash floods, we'd have been swept away. I don't regard knowing how to use a compass as a 'survival' skill - just ordinary things that people ought to know, like how to swim, not to stand up in a canoe, not to touch poison ivy, and not to drive into moving water where you don't know the depth, dressing appropriately for the weather, and not to use the elevators in a fire. >Supposedly, Boy Scouts do train kids how to use a compass, start fires >without matches, how to handle wild life, etc. I don't think kids would >get avalanche training in California but they should know what to do if >they run across a bobcat in the wild. That's the kind of information I'd >want my son to learn. I've always regarded the starting a fire without a match as an excuse for not having appropriate equipment (matches). California has some pretty tall mountains with a lot of snow. It isn't all coastal. I taught survival swimming, which included among other things, swimming with a loaded pack and rifle (!!), silent swimming, a burning oil swim, how to jump off a big boat into the water, and life-saving skills, but with both the rescuer and victim fully clothed. (I did this because I had a daughter than wanted to do Junior Lifesaving [when the Red Cross still had such a course], and she was too young. There was no age limit on advanced survival swimming. It was a little hard to get someone to lend her a gun to swim with.) grandma Rosalie

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