Outdoors, Navigation & Survival
Operating away from infrastructure.
10 topics · 11 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Death Valley in '49
William Lewis Manly · 1894
A first-person account of the 1849 crossing of Death Valley, arguing through its own near-fatal detail that desert survival comes down to husbanding…
+6 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Emergency Food Plants and Poisonous Plants of the Islands of the Pacific
Elmer D. Merrill · 1943
Technical manual TM 10-420: a downed aviator or soldier stranded on a Pacific island can identify which common plants are safe food and which are…
+3 more at this level
11 works
William Lewis Manly
A first-person account of the 1849 crossing of Death Valley, arguing through its own near-fatal detail that desert survival comes down to husbanding water and refusing to travel by the heat of day rather than any single piece of knowledge.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Horace Kephart
A practical handbook built from Kephart's own years in the Appalachian backcountry, arguing that comfort and safety in the wilderness come from minimal, well-chosen kit and mastered technique rather than heavy equipment.
link checked 17 Sept 2026A. Hyatt Verrill
A working knot is defined by what it is for, and organises hitches, bends, splices and lashings by the job they do rather than by appearance.
about 45 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Daniel Carter Beard
Shelter should be matched to the materials, time and tools actually at hand, and works through a graded sequence from a one-night brush lean-to to a full log cabin.
about 3.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Daniel Carter Beard
Fire is the centre of camp life, and teaches fire-making, fire-tending and cooking over an open flame as skills to be practised deliberately, not improvised in an emergency.
about 4 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026David Werner
Most of what a health worker without medical training needs is careful observation and a small number of well-understood interventions, laid out so a village health worker can act without a doctor present.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics
Minimising a visitor's impact on wild land comes down to seven practical principles — plan ahead, travel and camp on durable ground, dispose of waste properly, leave what you find, minimise fire impact, respect wildlife, be considerate of others — taught here as a single connected ethic rather than a list of rules.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Elmer D. Merrill
Technical manual TM 10-420: a downed aviator or soldier stranded on a Pacific island can identify which common plants are safe food and which are dangerous look-alikes, illustrated for identification without a botanist present.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States Department of the Army
Field manual FM 21-76: survival is a psychological problem first, and teaches the same field-expedient shelter, water, fire and food procurement used by downed aircrews and soldiers cut off from support.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States Department of the Army
Field manual FM 31-70: cold is a tactical and physiological enemy that kills through wet clothing and inactivity more often than raw temperature, and drills soldiers on the layering and movement discipline that prevents it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026J. E. Ongerth, R. L. Johnson, S. C. MacDonald, F. Falle & J. H. Standridge
Tests the field methods backpackers actually use against Giardia cysts and finds boiling and iodine reliably effective while several popular filters are not, against the manufacturers' claims.
link checked 17 Sept 2026