Survival · 7 min
Water, signalling, and being found
Why this matters
Rescue in New York is competent and well organised. Your job is to make the party easy to find and able to wait, which is a different job from rescuing yourself.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to
- Treat backcountry water by the three practical methods
- Signal effectively by ground, sound, light and radio
- Describe how lost people behave and how to plan around it
Water
Assume all surface water in New York is contaminated. Giardia lamblia is widespread, Cryptosporidium is present, and bacterial contamination follows beaver, livestock and people.
| Method | How | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Boiling | A rolling boil is enough; time at temperature does the work | Completely reliable against everything biological. Costs fuel and time |
| Filtering | 0.2 micron or finer removes protozoa and bacteria | Not viruses, rarely an issue here. Filters clog and freeze, which cracks them and ruins them silently |
| Chemical | Iodine or chlorine dioxide, per the label | Light and cheap. Slow, and iodine is poor against Cryptosporidium. Cold water needs longer |
Collect from moving water above any camp, avoid stagnant pools and beaver flows, and pre-filter silty water through cloth. In winter, melt snow rather than eating it: eating snow costs body heat you cannot spare, and it takes a surprising volume of snow to make a litre.
Signalling
- Three of anything is distress. Three whistle blasts, three shots, three fires in a triangle. A reply is two
- Whistle beats voice by an enormous margin. It carries further, works when you are exhausted, and every client should have one on their pack strap
- Signal mirror is the highest-visibility daytime tool there is, visible for miles to an aircraft. Sweep the horizon even when you hear nothing
- Ground-to-air: make it big, geometric and high-contrast. A large X means unable to proceed. Use anything bright: packs, tents, jackets, trampled snow
- Light: a headlamp on strobe, visible for miles at night in the mountains
- Satellite messenger or PLB: the fastest route to a response. Send it early, while you have battery and sky, not as a last resort at midnight
- Smoke: green boughs on a hot fire by day, dry fuel for flame at night. Only where fire is legal and safe
Stay put once you have signalled. A moving party is far harder to find, and searchers work outward from a known point. The exception is moving a short distance to open ground where you can be seen, or to shelter you can survive in.
How lost people actually behave
Search managers plan around well-documented patterns, and knowing them helps you predict a missing client.
- Most lost hikers are found close to their last known point, and usually within a mile or two of a trail
- People travel downhill and downstream, following the path of least resistance. This is why so many are found in drainages, and why "follow the water out" is bad advice in the Adirondacks, where drainages lead into swamp, blowdown and gorge
- People follow linear features: trails, streams, old roads, fence lines
- Children behave differently by age, often hiding from searchers and rarely responding to their names being called. Tell parents to expect that
The guide's counter-measures are simple and they work: brief the party at the trailhead on what to do if separated (stop, whistle, stay put), count heads at every junction and every break, and never let the group string out past voice contact.
From the field
A client is missing at a junction. You do not fan the party out to search. You stop everyone, count again, mark the junction, send two reliable clients no further than the last confirmed point while you whistle and wait, and set a hard time at which you call the Rangers. Adding lost people to a search is the classic amateur error.
This lesson is part of the NYS Licensed Guide Exam course. Open it in the course to answer the retrieval checks that go with it, track what you have read, and quiz the whole unit. Lessons, quizzes and the glossary are free.