Get noticed by rescuers

If you're injured or the conditions are too bad to travel you may want to stay put and wait until you get rescued. This assumes that somebody knows you're missing, so make sure you tell someone where you're going and when you plan to be back. In the wintertime they will most likely be looking for you from the air with infrared (heat) vision systems.

Your body gives out enough heat to be seen, but from far away it could easily be mistaken for a large animal and the rescuers could end up passing you by. Also if you're behind a rock or a large tree seeking shelter from the cold wind they can easily miss you.

The best way to guarantee that they will see you from the air is to have a continuous fire burning. The trouble is that it may take many hours or even a few days until they come looking and you have no way of knowing exactly when, and you will soon run out of firewood for your fire. What you need to use is a wood burning  backpacking stove like the Stratus Trailstove or similar stove, the trailstove is a small very light-weight wood burning backpacking stove that is specially well suited for winter backpacking. It actually burns hotter than a regular fire but consumes way less wood than a regular fire. A burning trailstove will show up like a bright beacon in the infrared scope, there's is no way that the rescuers will miss you if you have a trailstove. Of course they will find you if you have a regular fire as well but as mentioned above you will have to work a lot harder collecting fire wood to keep it going non-stop, but if you don't have a Trailstove or similar stove then that's what you need to do.









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