Eat snow to stay hydrated? If you are careful

Description

Of course it is always best to carry water with you, but if for some reason you are without water in the cold, you can carefully eat snow for fluid intake. Watch my simple method using wasted body heat. For more info check out our blog at wildernessinnovation com. It will post within 24 hours of the video.

Tags: winter,hydration,survival,water,cold,eat,snow,safety,perry,peacock

Video Transcription

Perrie peacock here with wilderness innovation and I'm up here snow shooting around a bit today and I wanted to talk just a little bit about hydration I've got I've got another video coming up on some some other other methods or this just kind of a basic thing today and some ideas you know a lot of we know that it's vitally important to in summer winter doesn't matter when to keep your body properly hydrated and you know it's no different in the wintertime and sometimes we don't drink as much in the winter as we should and and we can get ourselves into problems you know hypothermia the one of the leading causes of that coming about is dehydration and so it's it's very important for us to make sure in the winter time that we keep ourselves properly hydrated we drink plenty of fluids and I've had people ask me and Italy this is the subject of today's little video they've asked me you know that everybody's heard that you know if you're out yeah in the snow in the wintertime or whatever and you don't have any water with you or whatever that you know you shouldn't eat snow to try to try to get fluid back into your body and although I I agree with that and I June I carry a kind of a flat flask inside my clothing which I'll show you on another video but let's just say you're out and you don't have any water you did you forgot to bring it or say you had a water bottle with you and it fell off somewhere and you lost it well what do you do well number one is don't allow yourself to become dehydrated it's worth it's it's better to take a chance on something and try to get some fluid in your then to get dehydrated because then you're going to be in real danger so I've got a little technique here that will allow you to hydrate your body by eating snow but you have to do it in this particular way and and like I say you got to have patience and let me let me show you what I mean here get started into it I don't know if you can see down into the snow right here I've scooped up some snow here this is Western Western snow it's very powdery you see I mean it's it doesn't pack at all it's pretty pretty dry snow now here's what here's what you do right here now you know if you've if you've had a had a slushy or whatever at Sonic or anything like that you know if if you do too much of that you're gonna get a headache and you know your your throats gonna hurt and all that sort of thing well you know that's why I say about patience what you want to do is is do a little just do a little bit at a time as I as I show you here and it's going to be kind of hard to do this exactly because I have to do it and kind of talk to you at the same time it's hard to do that with stuff in my mouth but what I would do is take some of this snow like this

and then what I've done in my mouth is just kind of with my tongue packed it into a little to something kind of flat like this and here's what I don't don't try to just devour snow and chew it up and swallow it and all that you're really going to get in rough shape if you do much of that your lips are going to get cracked and bleeding your tongue is gonna get sore you have a headache you know but if you do this every ten minutes or so along the trail you just make it like this you put it in your mouth and I just kind of hold it against my kind of against my teeth a little bit and what what you want to do is as normal you breathe in through your nose and instead of breathing out through your nose breathe out through your mouth so what you're doing is you've got your body your body heat as you exhale that warm air what you're going to do is blow as you breathe out it's going to blow against this and melt this so you're going to use your body heat to melt the snow but you're going to do it not in your stomach but in your mouth and as it melts it you'll just feel it kind of trickling and you'll just kind of you'll just kind of be trickling some some water down your throat that sort of thing as it melts if you do this and do it like this you can go you can go all day long do something like this every ten minutes and you know you can you can easily do a cup or two cups of water in an hour and you know probably even more than that if you really wanted to but very comfortably and you know you can keep yourself from becoming dehydrated now I'm gonna go ahead and just kind of show you so I just put this in my mouth and hold it against my teeth they're kind of against the front of my mouth in certain those okay now see I've have said there's a lot of water gone out of that already just just a few breaths and this is very easy to do it's not uncomfortable your mouth doesn't get overly cold nothing like that you're not gonna chop up your lips or anything like that but if you want to do this method if you're like I say the best thing is if you have water with you but if you don't don't allow yourself to get too dehydrated do this method and like I say don't try to do it all at once just a little at a time and you can keep your body hydrated to a reasonable level until you can stop or whatever and get a fire or whatever melts you something or you know whatever this so this will get you by this will get you some fluids so go ahead and try this method and like I say it's it's kind of a backup to being properly prepared and having having water with you but you know do this and and don't allow your stuff to get dehydrated this is Perry peacock with wilderness innovation saying have a safe fun time out in the snow and look forward to my next upcoming video where we talk a little bit about carrying water and that sort of thing and melting water and very severe conditions and all that sort of things so break peacock wilderness innovation catch on the next video have a great time in the snow over now