Bradford Angier's Wilderness Classic - How To Stay Alive in the Woods

One of the first books I received on wilderness skills as a young man was How To Stay Alive in the Woods. In fact, it was probably the second book in my collection – right after FM 21-76. I don’t recall having too many impressions of the book back then. Knowing myself, I probably read the sections that were the most interesting – snares and fire – and skimmed the rest. Because, as I was aware then and you probably know by now, water and first aid and navigation are all pretty useless topics. Who cares about all that, right? I guess I would have been the perfect target audience for shows like Man vs. Wild.

Jump forward to this week, a friend of mine from work found an older copy of the book from Goodwill and generously gave it to me as a gift. The original copyright for the book was from 1956. This copy looks to be maybe late 80′s, early 90′s. I’ve been reading back through it on my lunch breaks, recalling a few parts from a decade ago, but most of it seems like a fresh read. I actually really enjoy finding and reading some of the older wilderness works. Not having been alive in the 50′s, I imagine that they were one generation closer to the folks who lived from the land and relied daily on the skills most of us practice as a

hobby. A good example, when I was at RAT back in March, Jeff Randall has been reading through an old Boy Scout manual recently and had stumbled across a woods technique that I’ve never seen in any survival book. It was a method common to woodworkers and furniture makers, but had been apparently somewhat lost to bushcraft. The technique was geared to shelter building when lashing material might be scarce or unavailable and it picture to the right. Those are the kind of finds that pop up now and then in the old books that make them particularly enjoyable to peruse.

Yes, some of the information in Bradford Angier’s book is a little outdated. Don’t let that keep you from reading it though! I mean the guy wrote this stuff half a century ago. Throwing the book out because he endorses wool (Remember, “Fleece” isn’t sheep wool. It’s polyethylene terephthalate, the same stuff plastic bottles are made of, and didn’t come along until the late 70s.) means you lose some interesting info and a good perspective from a man who lived what he wrote.