Survival Skills and Stories (SCPL)

In the winter of 1932, New England was battered by the most brutal nor'easter in years, wreaking havoc on land and creating a wind-whipped peril of the freezing Atlantic. In the early hours of Monday, February 18, while the storm raged, two oil tankers, the Fort Mercer and the Pendleton, broke in two. The Coast Guard raced its cutters to the Fort Mercer to rescue the men huddled in the halves, and when the Pendleton proved to be in danger of capsizing,...

"For readers of Jon Krakauer and The Lost City of Z, a remarkable tale of survival and solitude-- the true story of a man who lived alone in a tent in the Maine woods, never talking to another person and surviving by stealing supplies from nearby cabins for twenty-seven years. In 1986, twenty-year-old Christopher Knight left his home in Massachusetts, drove to Maine, and disappeared into the woods. He would not have a conversation with another human...

Nando Parrado regained consciousness to discover that the plane carrying his rugby team, as well as family members and supporters, had crashed deep in the Andes. Many were dead or dying, among them his own mother and sister. Those who remained were stranded on a glacier at nearly 12,000 feet, with no supplies and no means of summoning help. They struggled to endure freezing temperatures, deadly avalanches, and then the devastating news that the search...

"Shortly before Christmas in 1943, five Army aviators left Alaska's Ladd Field on a test flight. Only one ever returned: Leon Crane, a city kid from Philadelphia with little more than a parachute on his back when he bailed from his B-24 Liberator before it crashed into the Arctic. Alone in subzero temperatures, Crane managed to stay alive in the dead of the Yukon winter for nearly twelve weeks and, amazingly, walked out of the ordeal intact. 81 Days...

"In the whirling noise of our advancing technological age, we are seemingly never alone, never out-of-touch with the barrage of electronic data and information. Felicity Aston, physicist and meteorologist, took two months off from all human contact as she became the first woman -- and only the third person in history - to ski across the entire continent of Antarctica alone. She did it, too, with the simple apparatus of cross-country, without the aids...

In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. How McCandless came to die is the unforgettable...

One woman, 10,000 miles on foot, 6 countries, 8 pairs of hiking boots, 3,000 cups of tea, 1,000 days and nights. Not since Cheryl Strayed's adventure on the Pacific Crest Trail has there been such a powerful epic by a woman alone. In Wild by Nature, National Geographic Explorer Sarah Marquis takes you on the trail of her ten-thousand-mile solo hike from Siberia to Thailand, at which point she was transported by boat to complete the hike at her favorite...

A Pulitzer Prize winning journalist relates the experiences of the thirty-three men who endured entrapment beneath thousands of feet of rock for a record-breaking sixty-nine days during the San José mine collapse outside of Copiapó, Chile, in August 2010.

"In Scouting's Guide to First Aid, current Scouts, Scout alumni, and readers interested in the outdoors are provided with time-tested advice on how to safely identify, harvest, and use edible wild plants. Some practical tips include: how to triage, assess, and identify medical emergencies; what to include in a first aid kit for your home; when to seek help for health emergencies; how to safely move a sick or injured person; how to perform CPR and...