This contains all the information I have learned in my 10 years as a search and rescue worker. The next ones will be the real thing.

I joined SAR back in 2013 out of college after getting my degree in biology. I grew up in a small town in the Sierra foothills and we had one of the best SAR teams in the country. Just to give you an idea, we had 2 of the 3 board members of the National Association for Search and Rescue on our team. That being said, I learned a LOT of useful information from the old timers back then. <br><br>This is important information that you should definitely know, but I don’t want to imply that I know everything. This is just what I have found useful and learned while working SAR. <br><br>Also, if you ever get lost, and I do mean EVER, and you have no cell service, just call 911 and hit send. If they get a call from you with no cell service, they will just send someone out to see what happened. <br><br>**I am not a doctor, but I am a first responder and EMT.** <br><br>I will break this up into topics of interest for you guys. <br><br>**If you are lost in the wilderness**<br><br>- Try your best to stay calm. Your brain can think a lot better than you think it can. <br>- Find or make shelter. <br>- Start a fire if you can. <br>- If you have no water bottle, find a water source. <br>- If you have a phone with GPS, figure out where you are and where you need to go. <br>- Find a landmark or something and stay near it. It’s 100 times easier for us to find someone who stays near one spot than someone who is just wondering around. <br>- If you are in an area with no snow and can find a road, follow it out. It should take you to civilization. <br><br>**Shelter**<br><br>- If you have a sleeping bag, you have enough to stay warm in 40 degree weather. <br>- If it is going to rain, find a dry spot to set up camp for the night. <br>- Make a lean to if it is going to rain. Find a tree with a branch that is fairly horizontal and lean branches against it. You can then put a space blanket or a piece of bark or something on top to keep the rain off. <br>- You can also make a “debris hut”. You can Google it. I’ve personally never done it, but I’ve seen it done. <br><br>**Fire starting**<br><br>- When you are in a survival situation, your brain goes to shit pretty fast. Write yourself notes. I don’t care what they are for. If you can’t find a flint/nsteel, you can use a piece of aluminum and a shoe to make a spark. Write that down and pin it to your jacket/shirt somewhere. The energy you use trying to remember things that you forgot is precious energy that you can use on something else. <br>- Carry a lighter everyday. You can buy a small one that you cant even feel the weight of. It will be a nice booty weight to keep it from getting lost. <br>- If you have a flint/nsteel, you first need to find a piece of steel to use to create the spark. I carry a piece of a saw blade that I sharpened to a point. It works perfectly. <br>- Use a ferro rod. The bigger ones are easier to use and create bigger sparks. <br>- Use baby wipes or hand sanitizer to start a fire. You can put a dab of hand sanitizer on some kindling/tinder and hit it with a spark and you will get a small flame. <br>- Dryer lint is perfect for tinder and you can carry it with you in a plastic bag. <br>- I always carry a small piece of foil (like from aluminum foil) balled up and some dryer lint in a plastic bag. That way I can start a fire in the rain if I have to. <br>- If you can’t find kindling, look for pieces of trees that have fallen and are on the ground. Take the bark off the piece of wood, and that will be perfect kindling. <br>- To make bigger kindling out of smaller pieces of wood, place some tinder in the middle of a piece of wood, hit it with a spark, and it will make a small flame that will burn for about 5 minutes. Keep putting more tinder on it and eventually you will get a bigger flame. <br>- If you have a piece of glass, you can focus the sun onto some tinder and start a fire that way. <br><br>**Water**<br><br>- Always carry some form of water purification or filter with you. <br>- Always carry a water bottle with you. <br>- If you have a life straw or similar water filtration device, you can just drink from a stream or something. <br>- Water Filtration tablets work great and are cheap. I personally have a Sawyer Mini attached to my water bottle. <br>- Boil water if you can. You don’t have to boil it for 10 minutes or anything. Just get it to boil for a second and that will kill anything that is in it. <br>- If you can’t find a water source, look where animals are hanging out. There is probably water there. <br><br>**First Aid**<br><br>- Always carry a first aid kit with you. <br>- I personally have a small tourniquet on my back pack in case I get my foot/leg blown off by a trap or something (it did happen to one of our searchers while we were searching a house that was supposed to be abandoned). <br>- If you are bleeding a lot and can’t stop it, use anything you can as a tourniquet. <br>- If you burn yourself, put cool water on it until the pain stops, but don’t break any blisters that form. <br>- I personally carry Benadryl, Tylenol, Ibuprofen, and Ex-lax with me whenever I’m out in the wilderness. Pain and itching can be dealt with but not poop.<br><br>**Signaling for help**<br><br>- If you have a whistle, blow it every couple of minutes. Someone might hear you. <br>- If we hear a whistle, we know that we are looking for a person and not an animal. <br>- Start a small fire and smother it with dirt. It will create a good smoke signal. <br>- If you have a space blanket, reflect the sun off it in the direction of any passing aircraft. <br>- I personally carry 3 flares and a small mirror that I can use to reflect signals off of. <br><br>**Miscellaneous**<br><br>- If you have an booty bag, carry it everywhere you go. If you don’t have one, get one. It should have everything that you need to stay alive for at least a day. <br>- Always carry a knife and some sort of flashlight. Even if it’s just a BIC lighter. <br><br>**Miscellaneous from stories/experiences**<br><br>- I had a helicopter shine its spotlight on me once thinking I was the lost person. I didn’t know that it wasn’t a UFO until it shined it’s light on the trees above me and I saw the shadow of a helicopter. I can’t tell you how scared I was until I figured it out. <br>- If you get lost at night and see a light, just yell your head off until it goes away. The worst that will happen is some strangers will hear you yelling. Best case is that it’s someone looking for you. <br>- I was doing an training exercise and got “lost” and found an old shoe. I thought that it was a lost child and some animal had eaten it and I was fucked. It turned out to be a shoe from an old bootlegging operation in the 1920’s. <br>- I was out on a search and I saw a piece of a blown up water bottle that was full of some liquid. I thought that it was some kids remains that had been eaten by an animal and it turned out to be a bottle of dish soap. <br>- I was making shaking a tree looking for beehives in the branches and a piece of a tree fell off and landed on my shoulder. I thought that I had been shot at until I realized that it was just a piece of a tree. <br>- If you are lost and someone finds you, just tell them that you were in a survival situation and that you appreciate them helping you. Don’t admit that you are stupid and got lost. <br>- We found a Walker that was lost and he told me that he was a member of a group called the “911 Walkers”. I tried to find more information about it when I got back to station, but couldn’t. <br><br>**Personal stories**<br><br>- One time I was training with the sheriff’s K9. She was a tracking dog and we were out training her in the desert. I “lost” myself by crawling through a small tunnel of bushes and then went up a tree. The dog was super good and found me in the tree. I was able to see her follow my tracks across the desert and when she hit the tunnel of bushes, she followed it and then lost the scent. She spent about an hour just barking at the entrance of the tunnel until her handler came over and talked to her for a bit, then she went and found a scent and it wasn’t until she got to the tree that I was in that she figured out that i had crawled through the tunnel. It was 100% cool to see her work like that. <br>- We were searching an abandoned house and I had to climb through a window to get inside without ruining the door. I bled all over the place and got a huge scab on the inside of my leg. <br>- I had to do CPR on a 2 month old baby that we found in a parked car at Walmart. (He was fine. The mom