How Do I Know When I Have Enough Knowledge To Visit Wilderness On My Own?

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How do you know when you know enough? How can you quantify this? How do you prioritize what you need to learn? My thoughts on all of these questions and more here...

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Video Transcription

right let's move on quickly how do I know when I know enough this is quite deep philosophical question on one level this is from our no vs mer and are no has been in touch quite a few times it's good to have a question from you are no on the a sport curtly show this is via Twitter and the question is if I can hi Paul I like your show thank you and how do I know when I have enough knowledge to go to the wilderness on my own well on one level you could just kind of laugh that question off and if you are soft arrogant and superficial which which I'm not and and it as I say it is quite a deep philosophical question is how do we know when we know enough do particularly for practicing skills in a relatively benign environment and then we're going somewhere more testing how do we know that we've trained hard enough how do we know that we know the right range of skills how do we know that we practice them well enough to apply them properly and efficiently and effectively in a real world situation it's a very good question and it's a hard one to answer but what I would say is and again it's about specification to start off with there isn't such a thing as a we use this term wilderness very broadly and somewhat sloppily sometimes and I'm not saying you're being sloppy but we as a whole we use the word wilderness for everything from tundra to Tiger forest boreal forest to you know the the the deserts of Africa through to and you know the step in South America the mongolian playing there's lots of places that we call wilderness but they're all very very different and so I think you have to define a little bit more carefully and I'm sure in your own mind you've got a place that you want to go and whether it's in Scandinavia North America or Africa or Asia or in the mountains in the forest or in the deserts or in the plains or it could be lakes could be seashores and could be remote coastlines but you've got somewhere you've got in mind as a wilderness that you want to visit and you want to you want to explore and you want to be comfortable in and you want to be capable in and I think first off you have to specify to yourself explicitly what where that is when then you can think about okay well what resources are available there and you know what tree species are common and widespread that I need to know that are useful to me and make sure that you have the skills to use them whether it's fire lighting or or other things that you may need to do there how do I find my way there can I what natural navigation aids are there there are there any issues we use encompasses in those places in terms of magnetic variation all of these things that are going to you know make you be able to navigate properly or prevent you from navigating property make sure you understand those things that you can find your way there and back safely what are the hazards are there any animal hazards other snakes are there other poisonous plants other plants with contact poisons so learn about the environment and is you know most places in the world there are fantastic guide books that you can get hold off and you can start to learn about some of those things even if it's just general you know like East African plants or East African trees you can you can learn and quite a lot just from learning from reading those things you know and there are basic skills which will serve you well wherever you go being able to like small stick fires be able to light things with a fire steel being able to make feather sticks being able to and understand the motion of the Sun and the moon and be able to navigate via them all those things are widely applicable friction fire lighting by bow drill is a very widely applicable technique and so all of these things and you can apply wherever you're going but then you need to look at the specifics of the environment and is it a particularly cold environment do you need specific knowledge about looking after yourself in the cold and build build up a picture of what you need might just be seasonal you might need certain skills in the summer different skills in the winter and then work on them do you need particular craft in terms of in terms of personal skill sets in terms of movement do you need do you need to be able to paddle a canoe on Rapids do you need to be able to ski you need to be able to ski and pull a poke do you need to be able to snowshoe to learn those skills you can you can learn you can break it down so that you can do those things nearer to home or you can go on a lesser trip like go out on a day trip by ski go out on an overnight trip to a hut by ski go out for a weekend trip by ski go outfit and then go out and go on your week-long hut-2 hut-2 or that you want to do in the wilderness you can build up that way the same same as anything so don't just if you're not used to hiking at all if you've never done any day hikes don't be thinking about doing a two-week hike into a really remote wilderness get your basic hiking skills up get get your basic physical fitness for the activity up and then build up build experience build fitness build resilience have a feedback loop for what equipment works what equipment doesn't that is how you get good so yes if you ask how can I prepare myself for wilderness in isolation here's you here's this amorphous idea of wilderness the gap seems very big but if you break it down about what does that actually mean and what do I need to be able to do to in order to be comfortable in order to look after myself in order to be able to get myself home safely again and then build on those skills and put those blocks in place one by one and then build up experience gradually iteratively you will get to a point where that

who's bridged and you'll comfortably go into that environment and have an enjoyable time and if things do go wrong you'll have some skills to fall back on that will help you get out of there and always remember to tell somebody where you're going always tell somebody when you're going to be back and that is one of the most important things that you can do right canoe survival situation this is from Andrew Casey and it's from Instagram and his question says hi Paul and to all the ask Paul curtly viewers I hope you are all well episode 26 got me thinking in regards to survival shows on TV survival shows are for entertainment