Welcome to the Gritty Podcast. I am your host, Brian Call. Today, folks, I wanted to talk a little bit about some sticky situations I've experienced and then what I know now, how I would handle that because it's a tragedy when someone gets hurt or dies in the backcountry.

It can happen easily. Water, that's one that elements the cold cliffs fog, those things can kill you. There's a lot that's back there that can get to you and most of it is completely avoidable.

The old saying goes, you know, panic is what kills in an emergency situation, not so much the conditions.

So there's this idea. You're out there, you fall into an icy river and somehow you're going to get out and start a fire and save yourself.

People really emphasize the importance of carrying something to start a fire and light a fire with and so on.

And I've discussed this multiple times on the podcast with different guests, namely John Barclow a few times because Barclow who trained a lot of Navy Seals back in the day on the rewarming drill that the Navy Seals use.

He really has broken down how you survive a situation where you're in those life threatening conditions. So I'm going to go over that real quick.

I've been in that position before, you know, where I have found myself absolutely soaking wet and basically I did exactly what John covers.

So I'm going to read this to you here real quick. This is really easy to happen to by the way when I was in Prince of Wells Island years ago,

I went down there with my brother in law, Travis and we flew on an airplane, got there, rented a car on the island.

We just had what we could fit in our backpack. We drove to a trail and then we climbed all the way up through the bush.

It was miserable up to the Alpine Meadows up top.

Whether it was pretty decent on the way in on the way out though, it had rained every day for like seven days straight like a torrential downpour.

The rivers were swollen, they were neck deep. We couldn't find a place to cross. It was rough and it was getting colder and colder and all our clothes were wet.

And there was a serious chance of getting hypothermic and dying from the elements. So there's different things you can do in that situation.

Starting a fire with everything being just soaked in a rainforest like that. Pretty tough. What does a guy do?

Barclow kind of covers that in the rewarming drill that he did with the Navy Seals.

I've been in other situations one time I was at 12,000 feet, 11,000 feet one time.

And me and my buddy, we were heading to our shelters. But rather than stopping and changing into rain gear because we knew a storm was coming and it was coming in fast and hard.

We sprinted to our shelters. Well, that was a bad idea because once the fog and the rain hit, it was really tough to find the shelter.

And it only took like, I don't know, 30 to 60 seconds of that storm to just crash into us for us to get soaked to the bone.

I was actually a little less foolish. I ripped my rain jacket out of my backpack and threw it on and just didn't get pants on.

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