A SURVIVAL KIT YOU CAN LIVE WITH: THE EXPERTS' CHOICES

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If four wilderness skills experts were given $50 each to put together survival kits, how would their choices agree and how would they differ?

When asked by a greenhorn Easterner if he'd ever been lost, Jim Bridger—one of America's most intrepid explorers and mountain men of the early 1800s—is said to have replied (and we paraphrase), "No, don't reckon I was ever lost . . . but I was powerful turned around for three weeks one time."

Less than half a century later, Mark Twain wrote (in Roughing It) of having been stranded with two fellow travelers in a blinding snowstorm somewhere in the remote sagebrush deserts of eastern Nevada. Too fearful to part company and search for shelter from the storm, the trio—tenderfeet all—huddled together like a covey of quail against the cold and tried to get a fire started. Failing that, the luckless pilgrims slumped into a general depression and fell to confessing their sins and offering to repent if only they might be allowed to outlive their predicament. They survived the storm—but barely—and, with the light of morning, discovered that they'd spent the entire night just a few steps from the safety and comfort of a stage station.

Those two stories represent the extremes of wilderness survival preparedness: Mountain man Jim Bridget, though he might at times have wandered the wilderness alone for weeks before finding his way out, never considered himself lost—a word that to him indicated a sense of helplessness—because he was absolutely at home in the w wilderness at the opposite extreme, Twain and his fellow greenhorns came very close to perishing as much from despair as from the elements . . . with safety just a stone's toss away.

If you were out hunting, fishing, or hiking one day and suddenly found yourself "confused" and very much alone, would you react like a Bridget . . . or a Twain? Wilderness survival experts agree that nothing can replace experience as the best backwoods life insurance. But they're also unanimous in their conviction that next to experience comes preparationin the form of a light, compact survival kit that can be carried along anytime you venture off the beaten path.

Since few folks these days have either the opportunity or the inclination to become Jim Bridgers—but many nonetheless do trek into the boonies occasionally or even frequently—we asked four of America's leading authorities on wilderness living to each devise and send us a survival kit that would be compact and light enough to be carried along on any outing.

The results of our survival kit survey, presented on the next two pages, should prove enlightening to anyone who's interested—as every-one should be—in living through a wilderness emergency.