Survival Series

PALMER — You know how it goes; you’re on a two-day snowmachine trip to Eureka, you get lost, your machine gets stuck. One of your party becomes hypothermia and another is buried in an avalanche.

If you’ve never been on a trip like this, count yourself lucky.

But a couple dozen people gave up their Saturday to go to the Fox Run Lodge and RV Park and get a taste of what it might be like to be on that awful snowmachine trek as part of the North American Outdoors Institute’s Wilderness Survival Challenge.

“Everybody that came is interested in finding out about what they can do if something happens while they’re out in the wilderness,” said Debra McGhan, NAOI executive director .

Toward that end, attendees began their adventure seated on the floor of one of the RV park’s buildings, packing laminated pictures of tents and tarps into sandwich bags to simulate packing for the trip. She said the plan in the make-believe scenario lined out for the day’s exercise was to snowmachine to Eureka, arriving before dark to stay at the lodge there.

“That’s not what’s going to happen, but it’s what they think is going to happen,” she said.

On the way, the participants are told they notice snowmachine tracks breaking off from the main trail and decide to see where they lead. Then the wind rolls in, covers the tracks and just like that they’re lost.

Each mishap along the way corresponds to a different station set up around the RV Park. This mishap in particular was covered at the Compass and Navigation station. This station dealing with how to free a snowmachine stuck in river overflow involved a lot of ropes, carabiners and pulleys.

After freeing the stuck snowmachine, participants had to rescue somebody out of an avalanche. So they got a crash course in avalanche beacons, shovels and the long poles known as probes. Next in the scenario, they ran out of daylight and had to build shelters. They learned how to turn a tarp into a pup tent. Or a teepee. Or spread it out over a dugout in the snow.

With night came deeper cold and thus participants learned a few tricks for building fires with flint and steel.

Quick suggestion — cotton balls covered in petroleum jelly make good fire starters. But don’t just shower a sloppy cotton ball with sparks; tease out some of the fibers first.

Last was the medical station, where participants discussed how to deal with hypothermia and frostbite.

Along the way the budding survivalists were graded on how useful the things they packed were and how well they did completing various tasks. They were competing for lift tickets at Alpenglow and snowmachine helmets.

Dorothy Adler, one of NAOI’s instructors, ran the class on avalanches. The institute has a number of trainings throughout the year. The next one in the Valley is scheduled for January. A complete calendar is on the institute’s website at besnowsmart.org.

Adler said she also created the whole scenario this summer with one of NAOI’s interns. She’s run it once before in August, but tweaks it each time to be season-specific; hence, snowmachines and avalanches.

“Hopefully, people walk away with some skills,” she said.

But the challenge covered just the basics. Adler said the hope is that students will come back for more in-depth training.

“Thirty minutes is really not enough time to cover how these things work,” she said.

Adler said she was impressed with the varied levels of experience in Saturday’s group. Some attendees were volunteers with search and rescue groups. One man in her first clinic of the day actually had to search for a friend after he was buried in an avalanche.

Which, she said, really drove home the day’s safety message.

“It’s really important to wear a beacon,” she said.

Other good advice — watch out for hypothermia, but dehydration is actually the No. 1 cause of outdoor injuries and death. Which is why, McGhan said, it’s good to learn this stuff in a safe environment with experienced instructors and followed by a lunch of sloppy joes.

“Everyone’s going to come out alive and we’re going to feed them,” she said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.