Survival Tips

[Iceaxe]

Survival Tips

Acknowledge your situation as soon as possible -- denial leads to death.

Control your panic. Concentrate on your breathing, take big deep slow breaths -- your heart rate will come down and you

[Sombeech]

Drink your own urine -- it will stave off dehydration temporarily.

I think it's a widespread myth that drinking urine is bad. Good to know.

[Mtnman1830]

not too sure about drinking urine. when you are dehydrated allready, your urine output is highly concentrated with waste products and minerals because your body is conserving all the water it can (hence the darker yellow color) and your urine output is minimal.

Urine is composed of nitrogenous wastes like Urea, Creatinine, Ammonia, Uric acid, and others and Ions like Sodium, Chloride, and Potassium (and others). ingesting these with minimal water, will take more water for the body to utilize.

The higher the concentration of minerals in the kidneys (more solids than liquid) osmotic pressure moves water to the body, and when you are dehydrated, you don't have enough water anyway.

Will drinking urine help stay off dehydration, or make it worse?

My Physiology book don't talk about it, but that is for you to decide.

(you are welcome for the physiology lesson)

[Reedus]

I remember in Physiology class someone asked the professor if urine will degydrate you. The answer: YES. Urine (especially if you are already dehydrated) contains sodium. Sodium retains water by pulling water out of your cells, effectively dehydrating you.

Reedus

:popcorn:

[Iceaxe]

There are hundreds of documented cases where people were lost in the desert or at sea and the ones who drank urine survived while the others did not.

Aron Ralston let his urine settle in a bottle and only drank the top portion, while dumping out the very bottom where the nasty stuff had settled.

.

[Reedus]

Good point. Bottoms up :pitcher:

[accadacca]

Good point. Bottoms up :pitcher:
:friday: :lol8:

[Iceaxe]

Times Online April 13, 2006
By Times Online and agencies

An Australian lost in the remote Outback for 10 weeks said today that he survived on a diet of frogs, lizards and leeches.

Ricky Megee, 35, was found by farm workers at a rough shelter on the banks of a dam on a remote cattle property in the Northern Territory, near the Western Australia state border.

"I ate the leeches raw, straight out of the dam, grasshoppers I just ate them," Megee told ABC Radio. "But the only thing I really sort of had to cook was the frogs.

"I slipped them onto a bit of wire and stuck the wire on top of my humpy (bush shelter), let the sun dry them out a fair bit until they were a bit crispy and then just ate them."

Details of how Megee came to be lost were unclear, with some reports saying his car had broken down and others that he had been drugged and dumped by a hitchhiker he picked up.

Cattle station manager Mark Clifford said that Megee was very thin when he was found."He

[Sombeech]

Frogs actually aren't that bad - if breaded and cooked right. :haha: Oh, and with ranch dressing.

[Iceaxe]

I had frog legs a couple times when I was in Galvastin Texas.

They kind of taste like cat :lol8:

[moabfool]

Most of us are smart enough to know this, but....

If you are in a tight spot, find a source of fresh water, but you have no way to purify it, drink up. Supposedly there was a couple who hiked into Navajo Falls at Havasupai for the day last summer, got lost, and died of dehydration, at Navajo Falls!!! :stupid: We can assume they had heard all the preaching about not drinking water straight from the stream and were worried about getting sick from giardia.

Now that could be total "urban legend," and I'm not in the mood to check. Take it with a grain of salt since I'm a magnet for those kind of stories. Every time I go someplace someone has been killed by this or that the week before. It's either lightning on the Grand Teton (twice, but only true once), a Boy Scout that fell off Angels' Landing (twice, yet there was nothing in the newspaper), some body's ATC melted on the rap out of Heaps and they died (no way of knowing & I've never done Heaps), etc....

Regardless of whether the story is true, the lesson would be well learned. Dehydration will get you long before a parasite will.

[tatwood]

Regardless of whether the story is true, the lesson would be well learned. Dehydration will get you long before a parasite will.

Good point :2thumbs:

[stefan]

a Boy Scout that fell off Angels' Landing


Someone recently did fall off angel's landing, 1000' straight down.

So it does happen, though one might expect with higher frequency.