Which Is The Hardest Terrain To Survive In?

Thank you for your three questions Vicki, here is the first

Vicki Smith,Cumbria,UK Which is the hardest terrain to survive in?

The hardest terrain to survive in will always be the one where you have least knowledge and experience…

Someone who grew up as a native in the Desert will probably have a hard time living in a UK forests, and would have an evenharder time living in the city streets, as somone who lives in the streets relatively easily compaired to how they would copy if you dropped them in the forest…

Thats not really an answer is it, but it is the answer really…

Where you focus your learning or where the majority of your experience is gained is the greatest ease of living…

The hardest places I have lived was one night camping at a relativily high altidude in the CairnGorm Mountain in Scotland…

I had much of the modern technology needed to survive there, we could have built a snow cave to live in, if I not had the technology to live there even though it was only for one night, I would not have gone…

So again the answer maybe comes down to technology, the tools and equipment you carry be it modern technology or ancient technology, but more importantly I think is the technology I call knowledge…

Choose a terrain, any terrain, and if you can figure out how to shelter your body in such a way as to keep it at a comfortable temperature, either with clothing of shelter made from avalible materials, then you have step one of living in that environment…

Next can you keep your body supplied with water, that is clean, uncontaminated and will not significantly alter your core body temperature (by this I mean being just warm enough and then drinking ice cold water will make it harder for you to stay warm)…

If either of these things shelter or gathering water and carrying it, need tools can you make them from avalible material…

Can you keep yourself health, and deal with any minor scrapes, cuts, bruises, blisters, bites & stings, some climates make the tiniest cut or scrape a whole bunch of trouble if you cannot keep it clean or apply suitable precautions to keep parasites away long enough for the body to seal the membrane thin transition between your blood and the outside environment… (The tropical regions of the world can make these small cuts bad news if you do not know suiteable plants to use as poltice or carry medicines with you…

If you need fire, can you make it easily and do you have an easy supply of fuel…

Food, do you know what you can eat in this place…

Wander with a aborigional person who knows their place on the landscape in the outback of Australia and you may find you are always fed and watered and never experience hunger or thurst. Take that exact same route alone or with someone with no knowledge of place and you could be dead in a few days…

The hardest terrain to live in is an opinion, and it will depend of the knowledge, skills of the person you ask…

If you can take enough equipment with you even the moon is an option for a place to hang out for a while…

If you must rely on being able to make & harvest what you need from the landscape then learn the skills of the people who lived there before our technology, they already figured everything out, those that got it wrong died and their skills died with them, those that lived had the skills that worked and these got passed on…

Personally I think it also has a lot to do with your state of mind in a place. I don’t like to be cold, but I can go for days without food and it not really effect me much. Put me somewhere where I cannot keep warm enough and I’ll tell you it’s the toughests place of earth to live. Ask someone else about their stay in the summer woodland of the UK in the most perfect conditions but they could not eat for 3 days and that might be their toughest place to live and yet paradise for me…

I guess the hardest terrain to live in is where raw materials are scarce or hard to get to, places that experience extremes of temperature hot or cold combined with a lack of avalible because it is frozen or it hardly ever rains, and you have your tough terrain, to me the amount of animal life is a guide, the more diverse it is the eaiser it is to live, although the extreme of this would be the tropical rain forests where there is such an abundance of life that many of the most tiny parasites will use us as their home with somethimes detrimental effect…

I’m not sure I’ve answered your question Vicki but I have enjoyed considering the ideas here, to me the greatest thing you can learn is a principle, like the principle of shelter, once understood it allows you to look at the materials avalibale and create a suitable shelter in any climate…

Julian Drummond