Essential Wilderness Navigation by Craig Caudill & Tracy Trimble

Author:Craig Caudill & Tracy Trimble [Caudill, Craig & Trimble, Tracy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Page Street Publishing
Published: 2019-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

PRACTICAL EXERCISE 5:

TRAVELING BY CANOE OR KAYAK

I will never forget my first use of wilderness navigation in stressful conditions. It was a situation in which doing some preplanning with a map and some basic natural navigation allowed a friend and me to do a self-rescue.

In Kentucky, we are fond of saying, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a few minutes.” This was certainly true for a friend and me on a canoe trip in the spring of 1996. There had been heavy spring rains, and the rivers and creeks were swollen with water. This ensured that two young, experienced paddlers were ready to go out and enjoy the rapids. Despite our eagerness to get on the water, we did take a look at a USGS topo map of the area. We had been on enough trips that, despite our excellent success rate, we realized sometimes unexpected things happen and you need to get assistance or walk out on your own for self-rescue. This was long before cell phones were a common thing for individuals to carry. We had no GPS, so we memorized notable points along the route and made mental checks for those points along the paddle.

We noted that there was a distinct point of change for our rescue plans. Self-rescue is simply the act of handling a disaster on your own and making your way out. Rather than sit on the side of the river and wait possibly twenty-four hours or more for a search-and-rescue team, we determined to hike out ourselves. As we approached an area known as the Narrows, there was a very distinct turn in the river that headed southward. The turn in the river was near 90 degrees, and we simply could not miss it. We determined prior to that point that if we needed to self-rescue, we would exit on the west side of the river because there was a road within walking distance. We also determined that if something happened to us at this noteworthy point or beyond, we would exit the river to the east. On that side, there was a well-known trail that would take us to where our vehicle was parked.

Our preplanning saved our lives that day. Wild rivers are powerful forces of nature, and the Rockcastle River proved this to us. In one swift movement coming out of an eddy, our canoe got hung on a rock and folded in half. After throwing us out of it, it eventually became free but got stuck downstream on a rock in the middle of the river. After many attempts, we were unable to free it from the rapids. We were forced to leave due to the cold weather and the fear of hypothermia.

With only the clothes on our backs, we made our way east out of the river to the trail and then hiked to our vehicle. This is where we recognized another issue: We had our shuttle driver, who had taken my truck to the drop-off point, place my key under the floor mat and lock up the truck.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.