So it's finally happened. Lost in the woods. After all of these years of being an outdoors type you have finally gotten lost. You may have lost your way and gotten turned around. You may have lost your map and compass. Your GPS batteries might have died. Whatever the reason you do not know where you are. What now? Are you prepared to survive? How long will it take for someone to find you? Well hopefully we can answer some of those questions.

Part 1: I'm Lost.
Most people have different reactions to being lost in the woods. A typical reaction is one of utter disbelief and astonishment to finding themselves lost. The subject may feel afraid or even embarrassed. The most obvious act for any lost person to do is to find a familiar place from where they can re-trace their steps. If this doesn't work then a lost person will start to develop their own plan or strategy to resolve their dilemma:

1. Trail/Path Running
The subject may hurriedly move along the nearest path/trail in order to orientate themselves in their surroundings.

2. Straight Lines
Some people will simply travel in a straight line in the hope they will discover a road/path or some other prominent location.

3. Direction Sampling
Here, the subject would establish a base or starting point and will move out in different directions in order to locate something or somewhere familiar.

4. Prominent Point
The subject may climb a tree or a hill in order to get a better view of the area.

5. Natural Feature
Features such as rivers, streams, ridge lines may be followed until their end in the belief they will lead to help or somewhere familiar.

6. Staying Put
Some more experienced outdoor users may do this in the belief that someone will eventually start looking for them and also to prevent becoming even more lost or confused.

7. Move Into An Open Area
Experienced persons may seek to put themselves in an area from where they are more likely to be located, such as moving into a large field or clearing in a copse. In such a scenario, a helicopter search, for example, would be more likely to be successful.

Whatever the reaction the best thing is to realize that you have become lost. As avid outdoors persons the feeling of perceived embarrassment might be hard to overcome but you must put that aside and begin to take stock of your situation. There are going to be some enemies for you to overcome in the very near future that might hinder your ability to survive. There are going to be certain stressors on you that may or may not impair your judgment when it comes to surviving.

Injury, Illness or Death
Injury, Illness and death are something that anyone in a survival situation may have to face. It may be an injury or illness that got you into the situation in the first place. Injury can add to you stress by limiting your ability to move, find food and water, build a shelter, or defend yourself.

Uncertainty and lack of control
Some people have problems operating in settings where everything is not clear-cut. It can be extremely unsettling to not be in control of a situation, not knowing when rescue is coming, or not knowing how to handle yourself.

Environment
Even under normal circumstances nature is quite formidable. Weather, terrain, and local creatures make a survival situation even more stressful. Heat, cold, rain, snow, mountains and forests can all act upon the survivor and cause hardship. By knowing how to use what is available to you the environment can be a source of food and shelter or be a major cause of extreme discomfort.

Hunger and Thirst
Without water and food a person will eventually weaken and die. While most of us have been hungry, very few of us have been starving. Water is infinitely more important than food is in a survival situation. Hunger, while an irritant, is not as debilitating as thirst. The longer your survival situation lasts the more these stressors will act upon you physiologically and psychologically.

Fatigue
Chances are that being in a survival situation will tire you out more than you think it will. It takes a lot of mental energy to think about what you are going to do and then act. Forcing yourself to continue surviving is not easy, as you grow more tired. It is possible that the act of trying to stay awake becomes so difficult due to physical and mental exhaustion that it becomes an additional stressor.

Isolation
Very few of us have ever truly been alone. We have all experienced a time when we are by ourselves, say the wife has taken the kiddies out to the mall for the afternoon and you are home all by yourself, but there is one major difference in being alone and being in isolation. Comfortable surroundings. When the missus takes the kids to the mall and I am alone, I am in surroundings in which I am comfortable. And I do not mean physical comfort. I mean surroundings where I feel at ease. Take all of that away and place the subject in isolation and the stress rises considerably.

Part 2: Now What?

There are a lot of things that you can do to help yourself in a survival situation. We have seen that there will be a psychological reaction to getting lost, and that the longer you are lost the more of a physiological drain there will be on your body. So if you can help yourself get rescued sooner the better it will be on you. There are many things that you can do to help yourself out. Lets see what they are.

Prepare for the worst. Hope for the best:
Everyone should go into the woods prepared for the worst. Hunters usually always take a pack with them containing items that will help them to survive. Do you have the right stuff in the pack? As a minimum you should always have some sort of small first aid kit, something to produce a fire with, and something to make a shelter with. I don't mean that you need to pack a tent with you. A length of good string can be used with the available trees and boughs to produce a lean to that will keep you out of the elements.

Prioritize
It makes no sense to start building a shelter if you have a major injury that you haven't taken care of. You need to prioritize your survival into a pattern that will help you. In order of importance you should prioritize the following way:

First Aid
Fire
Shelter
Signal
Water
Food

First Aid
Look after yourself first. Treat any injury that you may have before doing anything else. If you are in a group then treat your partner and make him as comfortable as possible before carrying on with the survival pattern.

Fire & Shelter
After that you should find an area for a shelter taking into account all of the things previously mentioned regarding the tactics that searchers might use to find you. If you are building a lean to then you will need to find a couple of sturdy trees approximately your height apart so that when you build your shelter and lie in it you can comfortably lie down. You don't want your shelter so small that you are all crunched up inside it nor so large that it takes a huge fire to heat it up.

After you have sighted your shelter, build a fire approximately one good pace forward of where your shelter is going to be. You'll need lots of good tinder and kindling to build a fire, especially if the ground is damp or snow covered. If it is too wet you may want to consider putting a "raft" of sticks or small logs on the ground and building your fire on top of it. Why build a fire first? A fire gives you a lot of psychological boost in a survival situation. It's something that we are comfortable with. It provides warmth, light, a place to dry wet clothes, and is an improvised signal but the biggest boost it gives us is for the time being it gives us a place to call home. If you are out looking for building material for your shelter and you get turned around, all you need do is look around, find your fire and you know where "home" is. That's a great motivator for a lost person. Keep your fire burning at all times. It takes a lot of firewood to do this, but the good thing about wood is that it will all burn, you don't need to waste energy by cutting it. Just throw it into the fire and keep feeding the ends in as it burns through. So what's the best wood to use? Anything that will burn right? As I found out while on course in England all wood will eventually burn but getting it to the point of being a useful fire can be difficult. Wet wood takes a long time to generate enough heat to continue combustion. The best wood to use is standing dead wood. If you can find this kind of wood it is pretty dry to begin with and should burn more readily than dead wood lying on the forest floor. All that wood does is suck up moisture from the ground.

Once you have a good fire going then its time to begin your shelter. A shelter doesn't have to be elaborate but there are some rules of thumb that you might want to consider when building it. No matter what type of shelter you are building, be it a lean-to, or an "A" frame it needs to be able to repel water and retain heat. If you are using natural material like boughs then the key to doing both of those things is thickness. The thicker you can weave your boughs together the more waterproof it will be and the more heat it will retain. I always carry a ground sheet in my pack that provides me with the water shedding qualities that I am looking for so all I need to worry about is heat retention. After I build my frame I place my ground sheet over it and then put lots of boughs over top of that. The boughs need to be over 18 inches thick depending on how cold it is out. After that, if it is cold enough I then cover it all with about a foot of snow. Remember that I said that snow is one of the best insulators around. If I have enough boughs on the shelter the heat from my fire will not penetrate deep enough to cause the snow to melt, but the snow on the back of the shelter will Insulate the cold from getting through. Once your shelter is up then it's time to worry about what you are sleeping on. For the most part it will probably be boughs. Spruce or pine is the best but they should be as bushy as possible. Again the idea is to insulate you from the cold ground. Boughs have a natural curve to them and you want to place them on the ground curve up so that they provide some spring and loft to your bed. The general rule of thumb is for the bed to be 24 inches thick with boughs. That should keep you off the ground for the first night. You will need to replenish the boughs the next day, as you will have matted them down over night.

Signals
Once your campsite is set up then you can worry about getting yourself found. One of the greatest problems in finding lost persons is the fact that some people keep moving instead of sitting still and waiting for rescue. It takes a lot of will power to sit and wait for someone else to find you, but it is the best and quickest way to be found. You can help your cause by signaling to rescuers. A whistle is always good to have in your pack. Just a plain old referees whistle that you can blow from time to time. The high pitch of the whistle travels great distances. Another thing you can use to aid your rescue is building a signal fire. A signal fire generates lots of smoke to signal to passing aircraft. Any fire will do if you put lots of green boughs on it. The hotter the fire the quicker the smoke will be generated and the higher the smoke will go. There is a way of building a signal fire so that the smoke really goes high. You build a tripod frame out of green trees and tie a platform on the frame. You build your fire on this platform and then cover the frame with green boughs. You light the fire from underneath and wait for the heat to begin rising. The heat rising will cause the fire to draw more air in from the bottom forming a chimney effect which drives the smoke up faster. When properly done the heat rising sends the smoke straight up in the air almost a hundred feet. The international distress signal is three of anything. Three shots, three whistles, three fires. You don't necessarily need three fires as they are labor intensive but if you have nothing better to do.

Water and Food
Lastly you need to keep your strength up until rescued so you need food and water. Anyone who goes into the woods should be able to accomplish this no problem.. Water is very important. Ration sweat, not water. Do not work at a pace where you will sweat and begin to become dehydrated. Work slowly and steadily. If a source of water is available then use it. Whatever it is. Swamp water is just as drinkable as a running stream. If you have the ability to boil water then you should. A rolling boil for three to five minutes will kill any parasites and viruses in the water. Let the water cool slowly afterwards; don't add cold water to cool it off, as you may be re-introducing parasites into the water you just boiled. The two major parasites in Canadian waters are Giardia Lamblia, also known as "beaver fever" and Cryptosporidium. Both tiny parasites that get into your intestines and cause pretty severe dehydration through diarrhea and vomiting. There are certain viruses in water supplies also like E-Coli, Poliovirus and rotavirus, which will not only make you sick but can, also kill you if not treated properly. So boil water if possible. How much water do you need? None of us drinks enough water in the run of a day to begin with. A sedentary person will excrete almost 2.5 liters of water through urination, sweating and breathing. That number will double for an active person. So drink lots.
Food can be whatever you catch to supplement whatever you brought with you. Remember that food is divided into carbohydrates, protein, and fats. If there is a shortage of water you should not eat protein and fats, as they require water to break down in your gut. You can dehydrate yourself even further by eating these. So if you have no water then do not eat protein and fat. Carbohydrates are another matter. Not only do they not require water for digestion, but also, they actually produce water inside your body when they are broken down. Not a lot of water, not even enough to survive on but you are not leaving yourself in a water deficit by eating carbs like you are when eating fats and proteins.

Conclusion
Getting lost in the woods does not mean the end. A little knowledge and preparation before you leave to go on your hunting, fishing, hiking, or whatever type of trip is well worth it. Remember that there are enemies to your survival but if you use your knowledge of the woods and battle these enemies then when the rescue team gets to you, you will be alive to tell them all about your little adventure.