Coming this June 9-10, 2012 we will be holding a free survival shelters course that will include the construction of some sophisticated survival shelters for our newest survival camp in Huntington! The class will last two days and participants can choose to stay overnight at the camp if they choose.

A Frame Debris Bed, Extremely Comfortable!

Structures Built will include:

-advanced debris hut with internal heating and fireplace extension

-wigwam

-Lean to w/reflector

-swamp bed

-A Frame jungle hooch

-mini wickiup

Location: Huntington, AR Survival Camp (Click Here for more info)

Date: June 9-10, 2012

Cost: FREE

Items Needed: overnight camping gear, outdoor clothing, bug spray, boots, food and water

If you have any of these and want to bring them we could use the following: chainsaws, machetes, knives, axes, tarps, shovels, rakes or anything you think might be useful in expediting construction of these primitive shelters. We have a 4 wheeler to haul equipment to camp.

Register:  Contact Us to let us know you will be coming.  Children Welcome!

SIGMA 3 Survival School is very proud to announce that we are going GLOBAL and we have now expanded down into the Amazon jungle in Peru. We now have access to two major jungle facilities that have all the amenities one needs for training. One facility is located near town and has all the modern amenities that a jungle village should have and then we have another more remote 1000 acre property that is deep in the jungle. The courses will be a hybrid of a vacation and jungle survival learning experience. You will be immersed into the jungle lifestyle almost immediately and you will not only learn jungle survival skills but you will get to relax and enjoy your time in the jungle as a vacation also. You will have the opportunity to catch your own fish on the beach, harvest your own fruit, and bath in the beautiful waterfalls of the Amazon river. This a huge once in a lifetime opportunity to go on an expedition/vacation that other trips could never compare with. You will travel by boat, boat plane, off road vehicles and more in order to get to our destination. This course will be 14 days plus travel time and cost approximately $3000 with all expenses covered. Your cost to us for the course is $1995 and then you will have to handle your plane flight into Peru and then we will take over from there!. If your interested in going on a jungle survival trip with us to one of the most remote places on the planet then get your reservations now!

What will you learn?

-Primitive Jungle Shelters

-How to procure water in the jungle

-Machete Only Survival

-Friction Fire methods of the Amazon

-How to trap small game and fish

- And so much more!

Click the Pic below for more info!

Hey Everyone,

We have started a new AMAZING program for you to save money on our courses! Our school is growing bigger everyday, and we are expanding into all kinds of areas around the internet and we need your help. In order for us to get more internet exposure we need to post  links on other popular  sites to our website Home Page. So, we are giving credit in exchange for you posting links to our website. You should post this info in commentary on news, survival/tactical/preparedness forums, or anything related to what we do here at SIGMA 3 Survival School. Anywhere you can post a link to our site gets you credit.
If you sign up for this program then we will update you on the keywords that need to be posted. For every link you make, you will receive ONE dollar towards training credits. So if you post 300 links then you get $300 towards to our training programs. Certain specialty courses will have a cap on the credit but every course that we offer has lots of training credit availability. It literally takes seconds and you could pay for entire courses in a short amount of time! In order to participate in this program you  need to Contact Us and let us know you want to trade links for credit. In order to trade in your links for credit you just need to make a list of the links and email it to us when you sign up for a course! That simple. 100 Links=$100

This is our first keyword term project. This is how we should list ourselves to ensure optimal consideration by Google:
Sigma 3 Survival School
The hypertext (HTML) for this is:
Sigma 3 <a href=”http://www.survivalschool.us”>Survival School</a>
Note that the hyperlink text portion is the anchor text and is “Survival School”.

So basically everytime you mention SIGMA 3 Survival School you need to hyperlink the survival school portion  of our name to http://www.survivalschool.us. Just post SIGMA 3 Survival School to get a training credit. Contact Us if you have any questions.

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Diary of a Survivalist- Bugging Out

Let me first define what the Diary of a Survivalist series was intended to do. I’ve been hearing for years from preppers that it really isn’t possible to live off the land long term for survival in a SHTF situation. That has always been a preposterous idea and our goal was to prove just how wrong this idea is. Its not only possible to survive off the land but with some limited training and equipment you can make it easy and comfortable. Now it is difficult to survive completely primitive with no real modern tools, but if you are equipped with a proper bug out bag then life can be very easy. Here is a quick rundown of the minimum essential items that should be in every bag.

Shelter- I prefer to carry a lightweight tarp because of the diverse amount of uses they have. Tents will never match up to a good basha tarp, except for their ability to keep out bugs. But you can’t have a fire with a tent and a mosquito net for your head will negate all the advantages of a tent over a tarp. So get a good tarp.

Water- The one item everyone should have in their bag is a good water filter. My favorite filter is expensive but it will filter 13,000 gallons of water, which means it won’t ever go out on you. The best one on the market is Katadyn Pocket Filter and if you have the money should be something everyone buys. The next most import thing is to make sure you have a stainless steel bottle, because you can boil water in it as well as carry it. I also recommend a bladder of some type and the best one on the market is probably the dromedary bag. Iodine also comes in handy when you are feeling to lazy to filter or boil your water. But should be used in very limited quantities.

Fire-This can be a difficult task if you aren’t well trained in how to get tinder from the land. So I recommend everyone get

some training on primitive and modern fire craft. But a flint and steel and cotton balls will do the trick every time. I also love the fire piston and regard this as one of the best methods to make fire. The bic lighter should also never be forgotten because it is cheap and you can carry several of them.

Food-If you are going to carry food in you BOB, I like to carry some peanut butter and maybe some honey. This is an

Too Easy!

extremely high calorie and protein food that will give you much needed energy in a small container. It can also be used as bait for almost anything. But my main source of food is going to come from the land. That’s why I carry a trapping kit, fishing kit, and .22 rifle. With these items I can easily procure meat and you don’t need much training to be able to catch food with these items time and time again. Combine these things with wild plants knowledge and you will eat like a king. If you don’t have wild plants training then you better get some! It is the only food that won’t run away from you.

Tools- Your most important items are your tools because they enable you to live off the land easily and effectively. Anything can be done primitively but it takes substantially more time and effort. You absolutely must carry a couple of good knives. Either a large knife/small knife setup or a small knife/small axe setup. I also recommend carrying a lightweight pack saw such as the Bahco Laplander. These little saws make quick work of medium diameter limbs and small cutting chores. You have to carry cordage also. These are must have items if you want to thrive instead of survive.

Take a look at these videos and watch our progress to through this week long experiment and see what it takes to survive in the wild with a well designed bug out kit. We can teach you how to do this with only a few classes and you will be able to survive with minimal equipment for the long term in almost any environment. Please subscribe and comment.

Here is our Video Documentary of surviving off the land

(The video will lay out my complete bug out kit)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOfUzNxr7fQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu0pc489L6I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47EkXCATOjo

Monday June 25, 2012 – Friday June 29, 2012

Map and Directions | Register

S.E.R.E. (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape)

This class will be run by the world renown SERE/Sniper/Combat Tracker instructor Kelly Alwood. He is a Tactical Operator that gets embedded with Seal Teams to serve warrants on High Value Targets in Baghdad, Iraq. Kelly is also level 3 military SERE instructor, which means that he instructs special forces in the most intense SERE instruction that the US military offers. Usually only available to TIER 1 Operators! Our course will cover all aspects of SERE for combat operations and potential bug out scenarios you might be faced with. The purpose of this course is to ensure that our civilian and military students will be prepared to survive in the wilderness, evade potential people seeking to do them harm, resist your captors in interrogation, and finally how to escape!

Training Synopsis

SURVIVE-

Shelter/No fancy shelter construction here. This will be a nitty gritty rundown on how to create simple, stealthy, and comfortable scout style shelters that will protect you from the elements.

Water/ We will cover several methods for quickly procuring water using stealthy yet safe methods.

Fire/ Fire is a big luxury in a survival situation and not something that can usually be afforded but we will cover methods for quickly building stealthy fires and concealing the smoke.

Food/ Food in a SERE situation is something that can be a huge comfort and give much needed energy when your weak. The class will cover some stealthy methods to trap small game as well as some other methods for procuring food in the wilderness.

EVASION-

The evasion section of the class will cover how to avoid tracker teams, land navigation using primitive methods, counter tracking, use of camoflage, and tips and tricks for preventing people from find you!

RESISTANCE-

This is the interrogation portion of the class. You will be physically interrogated by one of the best in the business! You will learn how to deal with your interrogator, what to say, and how to deal with being captured.

ESCAPE-

The escape portion of the course will teach you how to escape various types of restraints including: handcuffs, zip ties, duct tape, ropes, and much more! And once you learn how to escape then you will be taught various methods for avoiding your pursuers in the wilderness.

The final day will be an all day FTX where you will begin with an interrogation, escape custody, and then be forced into the woods to avoid the tracker teams that will be pursuing you over a day and half. You will avoid the trackers and then have to navigate to a rendevous point where you will meet up with your unit for evacuation and debriefing! You will be carrying an Airsoft M4 and will be immersed into close quarters combat with instructors and our tracker teams. If you are caught or killed you will have to escape custody all over, so don’t get caught! Come see if you have what it takes to make it through SERE!

 
Location: Huntington, AR

Instructor: Kelly Alwood (Level 3 SERE instructor, Sniper, combat tracker, and escape and evasion expert)

Items Needed: Camo clothing, boots, camo face paint or mask, stainless steel bottle that can be placed in fire, flashlight, fixed blade knife, fire starter, overnight camping gear, paracord, and check Recommended Items page for more info!

Length: 5 Days/4 Nights

Disclaimer: This is a physically intense course and you will be in a military like atmosphere where you will be required to follow instruction from the instructors.

Register

(This is the story of our Newest Primitive Survival Instructor Josh Hamlin, he has an immense amount of real life survival experience and will be teaching at our wilderness survival classes to pass on his knowledge to SIGMA 3 Survival students)

If you haven’t read part one or two then click below!

Alone in the Wilderness Part 1

Alone in the Wilderness Part 2

After this, I found a cure for the loneliness in the woods.  I came across a hiker.  I was excited, because he was a Native American, and so am I.  I walked up and greeted him, and he gave me a hesitant and perplexed “uh, hi”.  Looking back, I can see why he was so startled.  I had a big beard, because I hadn’t shaved in months, and to make matters worse, I was wearing a loin cloth.  His name was Rick, and he was a member of a Native American church.  Many Native American churches have brought old rituals into their practice of Christianity, and Rick performed sweat lodge ceremonies for Native American Christians.  I showed him my camp.  We bonded and became great friends, which was good, because he came to visit me, and he brought others.  Now, I had friends who valued my quest to find the old ways and who could embrace the spiritual aspect as well.

A group of soldiers came across me, too.  They played paintball to practice warfare.  They gave me a challenge to take a 5 minute head start.  They were to track me and shoot me.  I ran over the roughest terrain I could find and hid in a small cave certain that they wouldn’t find me.  I was wrong.  Within a few minutes I found myself being pelted with paintballs.  I don’t’ remember these guys names.  I just called them the “paintballers”.

One of the worst struggles in the wilderness is insects.  When you’re in the wilderness, don’t be afraid of the dark or of Bigfoot…be afraid of mosquitoes.  I tried every plant I knew to keep them off, and they worked…for a few minutes.  Then I would sweat, and here they would come again.  I got so desperate that I actually covered myself in a blanket during the heat of summer just to block the bugs.  I breathed through a small hole left for my mouth.  When I woke up, my lips were swollen like a clown’s.  Those things are relentless.  The only thing I ever did that was significantly effective was sleeping right on the river.  There was a wind on the river, and I think that kept their numbers down.  If you are planning on a time in the wilderness, just plan on enduring mobs of mosquitoes, because it’s a fact of life out there.

I had another encounter with the brutality of predation, and again, it had a profound impact on me.  At one time, there had been a homestead out there.  The structure was long gone and nature had reclaimed the land but evidence was still there….daffodils and yucca grew in a square  around my camp sight and a square hole of concrete went into the ground. The hole was about 2 feet wide 3 feet long and 4 feet deep. it was an eye sore and i wanted it gone so i decided to fill it up…i had thrown lots of sticks into the hole which rested in there like a ramp and i used the whole as a trash can for my fish bones. One evening in the fall around dusk i heard a loud cracking sound and i ran out of my shelter to see that an old coon had tried to climb down into that hole after the fishbones and the sticks had broken and he was trapped. MEAT!  I grabbed my rabbit stick and went after him. I like coons, and i didn’t want to kill him, but he was so fat and I knew I would regret it if i didn’t so i killed him.  He was a fierce warrior and tried hard to jump out and get me but he was just too fat. He didn’t try to jump out of the hole away from me.  He tried to get out of the hole on my side. He didn’t run he fought. I didn’t want to hurt him so when i hit him I did it lightly and said sorry after each blow. but because I wasn’t using enough force I only prolonged his suffering.  I had to hit him probably 60 times before he finally surrendered his spirit. His body shook with convulsions as he died, and I again felt like a murderer.  I pulled him out of the whole and his eyes were open and it felt like he was staring at me hatefully, so i cut off his head and took it away from camp and buried it.  I felt the predator well up inside me, and I howled like a wolf and cried my eyes out as I cleaned the animal.  After my trauma subsided I began to be really interest in the insides of the animal. Did you know that a raccoons penis is a hook shaped bone?  Well i didn’t before then, but I saved it and made a necklace out of it. I also saved his skin, and the amount of fat on his skin was astounding.  There was tons of  fat on the inside of his skin.  I saved the fat and made a lamp from it. The meat i roasted on the fire and ate all in one sitting. it was extremely tough but delicious.

Winter was a dull time.  The leaves had fallen, and most of the birds had left.  The animals that were still awake were less active.  It wasn’t fun.  It was cold.  I had very little clothing because I had gotten robbed.  I didn’t do much of anything but lay in bed in my shelter and feed sticks to the fire.  It never got so cold that the pond froze so my fish trap was still working, but it was slower in the winter and caught fewer fish.  The insects were all dead and i didn’t have much to eat.  I knew where some Solomon’s Seal was when it was alive, so I still gathered the roots of it long after it was gone.  I still had a small but constant supply of fish so between the fish and the Solomon’s Seal roots, I never starved but i did starve for variety.  I didn’t really need that much energy though because I only left my shelter to go get fish, roots and firewood. We had a one big snow while I was out there, and I got snowed into my shelter for about a week (I had no shoes), but it melted off and the winter slowly faded into spring again.  The cycle began again.  Spring beauties reminded me that my year was over.  I packed my stuff and the next time Rick came to visit i left the mountain with him.

I left my mountain and went back into the hustle and bustle totally to meet the hectic pace of it all.  The sounds of the city, the chaos, the buzzes and humming sounds everywhere. The traffic and the crime, the dirty looks from strangers, rape and murder on the news, miserable people drudging on in miserable jobs. There was also happiness and smiles from strangers and contentment from some people, but they were few and far between.  I had fit in here before, or at least I had pretended to, but now it was different.  Now it was unbearable. After two weeks off the mountain I turned around and went home, back to my mountain.  I would still be there now if it weren’t for my mission: to teach as many people that will listen about the wonders of nature and ultimately the wonder of the CREATOR. I ultimately never came home fully from that journey because I ended up staying in the bush over two years. And I still frequently live in the woods for long periods of time in between odd jobs I do occasionally for walking around money. My life is to teach the methods of our ancestors and walk in the path of the old ones that came before us! And it will be my goal to make all the students that cross my path completely self reliant in any wilderness in the world!

(This is the story of our Newest Primitive Survival Instructor Josh Hamlin, he has an immense amount of real life survival experience and will be teaching at our wilderness survival classes to pass on his knowledge to SIGMA 3 Survival students)

If you haven’t read part one then click below!

Alone in the Wilderness Part 1

It rained for days, and I had built no shelter.  I took refuge under an old bridge for a while, but the flood water rose, and I found no escape after that.  I sat by the pond again…just sitting in the rain….and waited it out.  I desperately needed a shelter, so I made a lean-to first.  It was not much, but it worked until I could get something better.  I was ready for an upgrade pretty quick, so I made my way up the hill a little to where it leveled out into a flat.  I built a wickiup in only a few hours.  Whenever the weather was nice, I slept by the pond, but when it rained I moved to my wickiup.  The shelter was leaky and far from perfect, but it was better than sleeping in pouring rain, so I counted it a success.  With shelter, food, fire, and water taken care of, I began to enjoy my life in the wild.  Things got easier, I had plenty of fish in my trap consistently, and I had a shelter.  I began to be able to relax and enjoy watching the animals.  There were a few beaver in the pond, and I enjoyed the comedic company of goofy armadillos running around my camping area as well.

My fish trap caught a turtle about that time, and I came to grips with another struggle: the brutality of predation and feeding myself on animal meat.  For some reason rodents and fish didn’t trigger my sympathy, but when I saw that a turtle had drowned in my trap, I actually tried to resuscitate it with CPR.  I was overcome with grief, and actually broke down crying.  Your psychology in survival can really cause you to feel for life much more passionately than in our modern society. You can feel free to laugh a bit, because it’s a bit funny to me now looking back, but you should know that it was a real struggle at that time.  I’m not a cruel person, and this was a healthy struggle to do what I needed to do in nature to feed myself.  I cooked and ate the turtle with all the reverence and respect due our animal brethren. I then altered my fish trap so that it would have air space above the water, so that the turtles would not die in it, but truth be told the turtle meat was so tasty that I cooked and ate every turtle that got in my trap after that.

Not all went smoothly.  Once, when I had been out scouting the landscape, I returned to find my books stolen, along with some baskets I had woven .  I was furious, and I looked for tracks, but I’m not the most talented tracker, and I never found who did it, which was probably a good thing for them.  I decided that I needed a weapon, so I made an axe out of the flint that I had brought with me, and I made a bow out of a small butternut Hickory tree.  Making the bow was laborious, but it brought me a lot of entertainment when I finally completed it.

Having made and an axe, I decided to build a better shelter.  I decided to make a wigwam, and that shelter requires a lot of cordage.  50 feet of cordage doesn’t go very far, so I had to wind some more.  I found myself winding cordage every single night, and there was never enough.  The wigwam frame only took a few days, but the thatching had to be grass, and the grass was a long way off and up a hill.  I was in no hurry, so I didn’t work on it too much, which is why the thatching took several months!

With a fish trap that was consistently productive, plenty of edible plants that I was familiar with, plenty of grasshoppers and crickets, and a shelter, my needs were met, and life was decent.  But in these situations solace turns into isolation which turns into loneliness.  In my case this somewhat challenged my identity and self-image.  I had always considered myself a loner, able to thrive without other people around.  I may have an independent streak, and I may march to the beat of a different drummer, but I found out quickly that I need others.  I was missing them, and I began to talk to the animals…then to the trees…then to the dirt and the sky.

This brings me to a life-changing spiritual experience I had in the wilderness, and my story would be incomplete without relating it.  Over thousands of years, thousands of spiritual seekers have taken to the wilderness for deep spiritual seeking, and I chose that path myself.  It shouldn’t be news to you that spending more time in nature will reveal just how connected everything in the eco-system is.  I began to really commune with the balance of nature and looked on in wonder as I lived in my place in that balance.  What could be more spiritual than that?  Like many people who think this way, I had turned to pagan practices, which placed a high value on nature and our communion with the wild.

Think of this: I hear bird alarm calls.  They would go out, and other birds would alarm in circles spreading through the forest.  I could stalk to the quiet spots and find the tracks of predators such as foxes or cats.  The concentric circles of alarms going through the forest, the relationship of predator to prey,  the uses I had for what nature freely handed me…I began to perceive purpose and intention behind the continuity I saw in nature.  It was so fierce, but so beautiful.  I understood it to be a work of art from the hand of a deliberate creator, not the impersonal energy source I had always thought it to be.  That personal creator showed up out there in the wilderness, and confronted all my preconceived notions of who it was.  There was a real challenge and struggle as I came to grips with the reality of God, the God of Abraham, the God I was brought up to believe was my bitterest enemy and the enemy of the wilderness and my people.  I finally just cried out to God, speaking right into the air: “God”, I said, “are you real?” I didn’t expect an audible answer, but I got one: “Yes.  I am the God of Abraham.”  I was filled with fear, and I literally trembled violently like many figures in the bible when they met God.  I asked one more question:  “Are you Jesus?”.  The answer came “Yes, I am Jesus whom you have been attacking.”  He showed me visions of all the people He had sent me in His name.  “I have been calling to you, but you would not listen.”  The conviction grew so strong that I ended up on the ground begging God for His forgiveness.  The voice stopped talking, but God lifted me up and hugged me.  The voice has never spoken again, but I immediately left the mountain and headed to a church where I procured a bible.  I went back to my mountain to study the bible, and I have been an avid student of the bible ever since.  The voice has not spoken to me since, but I have felt the reassuring hand of God on my shoulder during hard times.

Alone in the Wilderness Part 3 Coming Soon!

(This is the story of our Newest Primitive Survival Instructor Josh Hamlin, he has an immense amount of real life survival experience and will be teaching at our wilderness survival classes to pass on his knowledge to SIGMA 3 Survival students)   

Hello,

My name is Josh Hamlin.  I lived 2 years in the wilderness living off the land.  I was no stranger to the outdoors or to primitive skills by the time I set about the task, but you can only gain so much from practicing the individual skills within the safety net and comfort of civilization.  The time had come, and I had a need to place these skills in their context, physically and spiritually.  It will not surprise you that my deep reverence for nature had led me to practices of pagan spirituality.  I set out with the intention of sharpening my skills as a survivalist and strengthening my spiritual connection to the wild.  Both of these things happened, but not in the way I thought they would.  Then again, if I had known all that before-hand, I would not have needed to undertake the journey, would I?

I had someone drop me off near a place I used to go to get away as a child.  It was a hill near Tulsa, Oklahoma on the Arkansas river. It was a small area about 3 miles long and about a mile wide, but resources were plentiful, so the location was appropriate.  I had a few items with me.  I brought two dried gourds with me for water bottles.  I brought 50 ft. of hand-twisted cordage.  I brought some clothing and a blanket, since I would not be allowed to kill and skin large game.  Lastly, I brought parts I and II of John and Gerry McPherson’s Naked Into the Wilderness.

As the car drove away, all my romantic notions abandoned me, and the reality of the struggle that lay ahead set in.  This was it, and the task seemed insurmountable.  For all my training, I began to feel like a fool for even doing this.  Still, I had committed myself with my boasts, and I was determined not to return a failure.  You can dream all you want about living wild and free, and anyone can call themselves a “survivalist”, but if you’re going to really get at it, there is no way around it.  You will have to come face to face with the fear that I felt as I realized how very alone I was.

I immediately sat down near a small pond and did the most discouraging thing for anyone in this situation.  I sat in despair and waited to die.  Here was the unexpected twist: this was part of the process.  I sat there for 3 days straight having already given up on life.  On that third day, thirst paid me a visit, and the pond did not look so inviting.   There was a creek nearby, and I drank from it until the thirst was quenched.  It was then that I realized how hungry I was, so I set about planning to get food.  Understand this, though: I was still in despair and still welcomed death.  I did not do this with determination to survive, but rather I was lead by primal desire for food and water.  It was very basic and very immediate need that took over my mind and directed my actions.

My need for food led me to make a fish trap.  I had to cut down some saplings to make the trap, and I had no knife.  Cutting saplings with flint is no easy task, and it took me a long time.  In fact, it took me 2 days of work to get enough saplings to make the trap.  I used some of my cordage to lash the trap together, and I threw the trap into the pond.  I checked it the next day and found my trap empty.  Truly, nature did not owe me food.

Still hungry, I wove more cordage through the holes on the trap, the better to stop the fish from escaping, and threw the trap back into the pond.  I left my spot by the pond and returned to the creek, this time for crawdads to eat.  It wasn’t long before I caught several crawdads, but I needed to cook them.  There was an old Sycamore that had been overturned with the roots exposed.  Sycamore is a good wood for a bow drill fire and it had roots that were pointed upward which will help them dry, so I put it to use and made myself a fire.  I put the crawdads on the coals, cooked them, and had a tasty meal of one of my favorites.

I returned to the spot on the pond and checked my fish trap.  Several times I had wound more cordage into the trap to prevent the fish escaping, and my labors bore fruit.  Inside my trap was a blue-gill fish.  I ate it, re-baited the trap with its guts, wound some more cordage into some of the holes in the trap, and threw it back into the pond.  I turned a real corner in my situation with the fish trap.  It wasn’t long before my trap was reliably catching fish, and food was no longer a problem.  That was one need taken care of.  That’s when it began to rain.

Alone in the Wilderness Part 2

This was submitted by Josh, one of the many students that has learned just how effective paracord is for stopping blood. We always get at least one student per class that usually cut themselves, usually about 30 minutes after I tell them to not cut a certain way, LOL! Like I always say you got to cut yourself one time real good before you truly learn! Here is Josh’s Story!

Paracord Bandage…It works!

Author: Josh McKay (Sigma 3 Student)

Robert Allen has recently been put out some informative videos on the paracord bandage. In a nutshell, if you don’t have a first aid kit available and someone in your group slices themselves open pretty good with a knife or other sharp object, ordinary paracord can be used as an effective means of stopping bleeding and holding the wound together. Such was the case when I sliced my finger open at a Sigma 3 survival class several months back. I wanted to take the time to testify as to my personal experience with this method and how successful it was.

Robert once told me that everybody will slice themselves open really good at least once before they really learn how to handle their knife and to respect its edge. After he told me that, he followed it up with his own story of slicing himself. Yet as I stood there only an hour after hearing that story with blood rolling off my hand, it still didn’t quite mend the wound to my pride. I was de-limbing branches off of a stalk that I was about to break down to use for cordage. One limb in particular was somewhat growing the wrong way and giving me a hassle. Keep in mind that I am not a knife expert by any means, but I do know the basics of knife safety. So pretty much out of pure laziness, instead of turning the long stalk the other way so that I could get a better angle at the limb and still keep my knife moving away from my other hand and my body…I turned the knife blade towards myself and brought it down. Now to gain a better insight into what was going through my thick skull when I decided to do this…I will fill you in on my thought process. The knife was in my right hand. My other hand was gripping the stalk between where I was working on de-limbing and my body. When I flipped the blade around to bring it in towards my body, I scooted my left hand down the stalk a little more thinking that there was no way the knife would come down that far when it penetrated through the limb. Wrong. I proceeded with my plan and brought the knife down into the limb. It worked, the limb came off like butter. But with that came the knife through the limb (like butter), and bouncing off of my left birdie business finger straight to the bone.

Me- “ah, I think I cut myself.” (Finger begins gushing) Me- “Oh yeah…hey, uh…guys? Anybody bring a first aid kit along?” (Finger gushing even more) Guys- “Um…actually I left the first aid kit back at the camp since we weren’t going to be down here very long.” Me- “ohhhh….so….what now?”

At first, a student who happened to be an EMT tore up his undershirt and formed a bandage to help stop the bleeding. Robert also added some crushed yarrow as a primitive antiseptic. This bandage worked for a while, but as far as I can remember, I believe the problem was that the bleeding was just a little too much. We weren’t able to get enough pressure with the shirt and it was quickly filling up with blood. (the excessive bleeding was most likely due to the fact that I penetrated a vein in my finger) Luckily, being that I was in a survival school class…you usually have somebody hauling around paracord in their pocket. Such was the case with Luis (one of Sigma’s un-named in house instructors), a military veteran with multiple tours to most recently Afghanistan and God knows where else. Every time I see Luis, he has paracord in his hands tying some obscure knot that nobody knows about. Luis whips some paracord out of his pocket and says “give me your finger”. Now if you know Luis, he often says things like this when he has a remedy to your problem. I had a headache once and Louis said “come over here, I’ll take care of it”. I thought he was joking about bashing me upside the head to take care of the headache…but he was dead serious… he proceeded using pressure points on my skull and 5 minutes later I didn’t have a headache. The dude knows his stuff. So I bring my finger up and he starts wrapping it up with this paracord. Very tightly. Yes it hurt. But it worked, and that’s the important thing. Immediately the bleeding stopped, and as you can see from the videos Robert has posted, this method also holds the wound together. A couple applications of your typical super glue and several days later…my finger is good as new and the scar is minimal at best. (but still serves as a reminder of why you always take the time to consider safety when handling a knife for ANY purpose)

It would have been nice to have had a video camera to capture all this, but unfortunately we did not. This was a valuable teaching moment for the entire class. Unfortunately this teaching moment was at my expense, but I don’t regret it. I learned a hard lesson about knife safety,  (Hopefully the LAST lesson I have to learn about knife safety) and all of us learned a very valuable lesson on how to bandage a small wound of this nature with nothing but paracord. This method could also be used with primitive cordage in a pinch with no gear, although may not be as effective as the paracord. Here is a video on the exact bandage used in this blog. Check it out!

We just posted a new class to the schedule called Women’s Pocket Book Survival.  Also remember that we have our Sigma 3 Survival Standard course coming up on July 16 so make sure to get signed up if you haven’t already. This is our most thorough wilderness survival course on the basics. 4 days 3 nights! Check website for more details!

www.SurvivalSchool.US

Women’s Pocket Book Survival Course Description:

This course is for ladies only and will teach you how much survival gear an average woman carries in her purse! Most items in a purse have multiple uses in urban/wilderness survival situations. Our instructors will show you how each item in your bag can be used to increase your chances of survival if the situation should arise. There are so many items in a purse that have tremendous use in many different situations and we will show you their uses. We will also cover some basic items that you should be carry on a regular basis, also called an EDC kit. For instance, did you know that lipstick is good for starting fires because you can smear it on the tinder to increase the longevity of the flame. We will be showing a ton of little tips and tricks that might save your life one day! The class will also cover some basic techniques on how to defend against attackers and would be rapists! This course will mainly be in a class room setting and we will travel outdoors to demonstrate some of the techniques! Don’t be a victim! Come get prepared with Sigma 3 Survival School!

Date: July 2 2011;  9am-5pm

Cost: $75

Location: Huntington, AR

Notes: Women only!

Hope to see you there!