Peter Kummerfeldt

  This book should be required reading for anyone who ever ventures off the pavement. After extensive testing of the gear and techniques mentioned in the publication, I recommend this publication as the go-to book for wilderness survival.

Kummerfeldt stresses practical methods of surviving, not obscure, primitive skills and  his techniques, advice on survival systems and kits and common sense approach to wilderness emergencies could save your life.

His DVD “Skills of the Survivor,” sponsored by the National Bowhunters Education Foundation is great, too, and both are well-worth inclusion in any outdoors library.

Kummerfeldt grew up in Kenya, and came to America in 1965, where he joined the U.S. Air Force.  He is a graduate of the Air Force Survival Instructor Training School and served as an instructor at the Basic Survival School, Spokane, Wash.; the Arctic Survival School, Fairbanks, Alaska; and the Jungle Survival School in the Philippines. He served for 12 years as the Survival Training Director at the U.S. Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, Colo.

Today, Kummerfeldt travels widely, promoting the concept of  practical wilderness survival. I met him several years ago at the Deschutes (Oregon) County Sportsman’s Expo after attending one of his seminars. My motivation for going was more curiosity than anything else – I had been knocking around the western mountains on big game hunting  and backpacking trips for decades, and was confident there wasn’t much more  for me to learn about survival gear. I was also heavily involved in my sons’ Boy Scout troop and went camping and backpacking at least once a month. I enjoyed testing and trying out new techniques and equipment. I thought I knew a lot, but one sign of a survival mindset is your willingness to keep learning!. 

I sat spellbound through his seminar on “Survival Myths,” then attended every other seminar he did that day. Afterward, we chatted at his booth, and I bought a copy of  “Surviving a Wilderness Emergency.”  That night, I went home and threw away a lot of the survival stuff I’d carried for years.

For the past few years, Kummerfeldt has been one of my valued sources for stories regarding some aspect of wilderness survival. He does extensive testing of new products, and if  there is something new in the survival market, Kimerfeldt probably has experience with it. I’ve personally used many of his techniques and recommendations when teaching adult leaders and Boy Scouts wilderness skills, and his instructional DVD is part of our troop’s teaching library.

Kummerfeldt is also a featured guest author for SurvivalCommonSense.com and his expertise and superb photography skills are greatly appreciated!

       Check out his website

Recommended Reading:
Surviving a Wilderness Emergency
The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

Editor’s Note: If you haven’t learned survival skills by the time you need them, you probably won’t have time to learn! But this emergency management list from survival expert Peter Kummerfeldt gives you a step-by-step progression of what to do in an urban or wilderness survival situation from the moment you realize you are in trouble.  

The time to study survival techniques is before you need them!

First, read this list before you go anywhere (like right now!) in a calm, non-threatening environment, such as your living room. Think about the recommendations. Discuss them with someone, and get the ideas embedded in your psyche.

Then, print off the list, and include it in survival kits. Let’s hope you don’t need it. But the printout may be a great survival tool to hand to others to help them calm down and focus on staying alive! – Leon) 

by Peter Kummerfeldt 

SIT DOWN, GET OFF YOUR FEET 

- Control your panic 

- Talk positively to yourself 

- Have a drink of water, smoke a cigarette, eat something 

- Don’t move around until you are in control of yourself and your actions 

- Analyze the immediate threats to your safety 

- Determine the length of your survival situation and prepare accordingly 

- Analyze your chances of recovery 

PROTECT AND MAINTAIN YOUR LIFE 

- Get out of the elements 

- Put your back to the wind 

- Minimize your heat loss 

- Seek or make a shelter 

- Improvise sources of heat 

- Count your blessings that you’re still alive 

ADMINISTER SELF-AID 

- Think before you act 

- Be careful — do no harm to yourself 

- Treat the injuries 

- Prevent dehydration and hypothermia 

PROTECT YOUR EQUIPMENT 

- Do not throw anything away 

- Bring all useful equipment into your shelter 

CONSERVE YOUR RESOURCES 

- Inventory both manmade and natural materials available to you 

- Conserve your body heat 

SIGNAL YOUR DISTRESS 

- Use all available signaling equipment to advertise your status and location 

MANAGE YOUR BODY AND YOUR MIND 

- Do not get wet 

- Eat 

- Drink 

- Stay put 

- Control your imagination 

- Improve your clothing 

- Rest 

- Be alert 

- Be patient 

- Maintain a positive mental attitude 

 Peter Kummerfeldt was born in Kenya, Africa and came to America in 1965 

and joined the U.S. Air Force. He is a graduate of the Air 

Peter Kummerfeldt has taught wilderness survival for more than 40 years.

 Force Survival Instructor Training School and has served as an instructor at the Basic Survival School, Spokane, Washington; the Arctic Survival School, Fairbanks, Alaska, and the Jungle Survival School, Republic of the Philippines. For twelve years, Peter was the Survival Training Director at the United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado. He retired from the Air Force in 1995 after 30 years of service. 

 In 1992, concerned with the number of accidents that were occurring in the outdoors annually and the number of tourists traveling overseas who were involved in unpleasant and sometimes life-threatening incidents Peter created  Outdoorsafe.com 

 He is the author of Surviving a Wilderness Emergency and has addressed over 20,000 people as the featured speaker at numerous seminars, conferences and national conventions . 

 Recommended Reading:
Build the Perfect Survival Kit
Basic Essentials Wilderness First Aid, 3rd (Basic Essentials Series) 

Surviving a Wilderness Emergency 

For more related SurvivalCommonSense.com tips and stories, click on the highlighted words:   

• STOP: Use this exercise to reduce stress and focus your thoughts.
• Write a note to let people know where you went, before you left.
• Take your Ten Essentials on every outing.
• Dress with the right fabrics.
• Have a plan to make a tarp shelter.
• Carry lightweight, compact firestarter.
• Find the most effective fire ignition system.
• How to make charcloth, a material that can catch a spark from any source.
• Use charcloth as an effective method of catching a spark to make a fire.
• It can kill you: Hypothermia
• Hardtack: A great emergency food
• About Leon Pantenburg
  

I read “Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why” by Lawrence Gonzales, in a few marathon sessions. The fast-paced accounts of real life survival situations are mesmerizing. It’s a good survival mindset read and I couldn’t help wondering what I might do in some of the situations.

This book is good information for anybody who practices survival common sense, because a survival mindset must be established before you will be able to use any tools and training you might have aquired.  In the book,  Gonzales mentions 12 points that disaster survivors seemed to have in common.  These points are definately worth reading and thinking about, even if you don’t get anything else out of the book.

1. Perceive, believe: If there is any denial, it is counterbalanced by a solid belief in the clear evidence of their senses. In other words, survivors establish a survival mindset immediately. They see opportunity, even good, in their situation.
2. Stay calm (use humor, use fear to focus) In the initial crisis, survivors use fear, and aren’t ruled by it.
3. Think/analyze/plan: Survivors quickly organize, set up small manageable tasks. In other words, they’re using the STOP tool.
4. Take correct decisive action: Survivors were able to convert thoughts to action. They deal with what they can from moment to moment, hour to hour.
5. Celebrate successes: This is important to maintaining motivation and avoiding hopelessness.
6. Count you blessings: Be grateful you’re alive.
7. Play: Sing, play mind games, recite poetry, count things etc.
8. See the beauty: Survivors are attuned to the wonder of the world.
9. Believe you will succeed: All the above practices lead to the point where survivors become convinced they will prevail.
10. Surrender: Let go of your fear of dying. This is the type of thinking John Leach calls: “resignation without giving up. It is survival by surrender.”
11. Do whatever is necessary: Survivors know their abilities and don’t over or under estimate them. They believe anything is possible and act accordingly.
12. Never give up: There is always one more thing you can do.

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

Other Good Reads:
Man’s Search for Meaning
Surviving a Wilderness Emergency

“Times Online” Aug. 21, 2009

It has long been a staple of adventure stories: the hero, lost in the wilderness, painstakingly tries to find his way back to civilization only to stumble across his own tracks and discover that he has been walking in circles.

Without visable landmarks, a lost person may wander in circles.

Now the popular belief that people in unfamiliar surroundings tend to walk round in circles has been confirmed by scientists.

Experiments in a German forest and the Sahara desert in Tunisia have shown that lost people double back on themselves without meaning to unless they have a marker, such as the Sun or Moon, to guide their way.

“The stories about people who end up walking in circles when lost are true,” said Jan Souman, of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, who led the research.

“People cannot walk in a straight line if they do not have absolute references, such as a tower or a mountain in the distance, or the Sun or Moon, and often end up walking in circles.”

The scientists, whose work is published in the journal Current Biology, also debunked a popular explanation that has been advanced to explain walking in circles.

It has been suggested that people might veer in one direction because one leg is slightly longer or stronger than the other. Over time such small differences could cause somebody to walk in a circle.

The new research, however, in which people were blindfolded and asked to walk in a straight line, found that while they ultimately walked in circles, they did not do so reliably in any particular direction. The subjects sometimes veered left and sometimes right, which would not happen if differential stride length or power was a factor.

Dr. Souman said that it was more likely that circular walking patterns tended to emerge from increasing uncertainty about direction. “Small random errors in the various sensory signals that provide information about walking direction add up over time, making what a person perceives to be straight ahead drift away from the true straight ahead direction,” he said.

In the study the research team took six volunteers to the Bienwald forest, in southern Germany, and asked them to walk in as straight a line as they could while their progress was monitored using GPS devices. Four volunteers walked on a cloudy day when the Sun was hidden and two in bright sunshine.

The four who walked under clouds all moved in circles and three of them crossed their own paths repeatedly without noticing. The two volunteers who were able to see the Sun walked in straight lines, except for 15 minutes when it was obscured by cloud.

A similar pattern occurred when three other volunteers were tested in the Sahara desert in southern Tunisia. Two volunteers, who walked during the day and could see the Sun, veered off course but did not walk in circles. The third, who walked at night, kept to a straight line when the Moon was visible but doubled back on himself when it disappeared behind clouds.

The team is planning to investigate the phenomenon further in the laboratory by asking volunteers to walk through a virtual-reality forest on a specially designed treadmill.

Here’s the scenario: You walked further down that interesting-looking trail than originally planned and the sun is starting to set behind the mountains. An unsettled feeling in your stomach starts to get worse, and becomes a knot. The knot twists tighter as you realize you don’t have a clue where you are.  The thought sets it: I may be lost…

When everything looks the same, and you realize you're lost, STOP.

For many of us, the first reaction might be to take off, rapidly, in the direction we came from. Maybe jogging would be a good idea. Then, despite your best intentions, you start to panic…

But think: STOP. Say it out loud if you have to, then think what the acronym stands for: Stop, Think, Observe, Plan.

This well-used old acronym, probably mentioned in every survival manual, should be embedded in your psyche. STOP is a survival mind-set exercise. Here’s how to use it. Follow these steps.

Stop: Unless it’s dangerous, quit moving and sit down. Breathe. Take a drink of water. Eat a snack. Stay put – you can’t think until you can focus your thoughts. Time yourself – take at least 30 minutes to let the adrenaline wear off.

Think: Assess your choices and the tools available. Do you have your 10 essentials and the necessary survival gear along? Can you use them? Knowing you’re prepared for an unexpected night out can give you confidence and make you feel less afraid. This confidence could keep you from doing something stupid.

Observe: Take the surroundings into account, because this will affect what comes next. Is it getting dark? Is the temperature dropping or is the weather getting bad? These environmental factors must be considerations.

Plan: Based on your previous actions in this exercise, make an overall plan. Then make some immediate decisions and get going. Don’t expect anyone to help you, and don’t procrastinate.