Kitchen table survival skills are survival skills you can put into practice from your kitchen table. I humbly submit my set of tried and tested (and at times learned from bitter experience) non-glamorous, but effective, kitchen table survival skills:

There's not always a choice, but having a good handle on the weather (know your clouds) can mean the difference between a nice day out and a disaster.

As Alistair Humphrey's writes in his book Local, "Unfolding a map is the ritual that launches all good journeys." There's art and science in route planning—considering the needs and abilities of your party, the terrain, the effect of the weather or altitude, availability of water, interest and views, access, timing, trail condition and more. So many varied aspects go into it. When planning a family hike now, we weigh up a very different set of factors than we did for two fit twenty-somethings happy to endure a little hardship.

If you're going to the wilderness, go with somebody if you can, and leave your intended plan with friends or family back home. If you're not back when expected, at least you'll have someone looking out for you, and a rescue party will know where to start looking.

OK, so it doesn't seem like a survival skill exactly, but going with a local guide will work wonders for your survival. You might not need one for a walk in the local woods, but if you fancy hiking on a glacier or venturing down a river, and it's not something you do too often, then hiring a guide will be the best survival decision you make.

Sure, you can head out and figure it out when you're out there, but mountains, and wilderness generally, are capricious places. There's so much a good hiking book, or a recent trip report can teach you before you set out. Is a river crossable? Is there still snow on a pass? Are the mosquitoes out in force? How long is it likely to take? How much up and down will there be? Where can you camp? And on and on.

Whenever I've been on semi-serious expeditions, I've been very impressed with the kit lists provided by our guides. Every item is carefully chosen—like, say, bringing the 10 essentials—and lists are refined and revisited after each trip. It's rarely exciting assembling your kit and running through lists, but if it means you remembered spare batteries, the water filter, mosquito repellent, or a fire lighter it may prove your saving grace in the wild.

More mundane perhaps, but still helpful, is packing your gear in the right places and order in which you'll use it. You're much more likely to stop and put on sun lotion or a warm hat if it isn't stuffed under your sleeping bag in the depths of your backpack.

When we're tired, it's easy to make poor decisions. The best defence I know for this is to plan trips within your limits so you aren't trying to find a camp spot in the dark, feeling too tired to filter the water, or too tired to keep track of where you're going. After a long day, it's easy to start skipping the things that keep us safe, like putting on an extra layer or stopping for water. A guide once told me, "don't be too lazy to be comfortable."

A small, but very useful practice, I've adopted is having a good awareness of time on your excursions. Plan in advance and estimate how long different sections may take. Making a mental note of when you set off from the trailhead or from a rest stop gives you a sense of your progress, lets you know what it might take to get back if you need to, and teaches you how far you might get ahead of you. If your pace is changing, you'll have a good idea of how strong everyone is still feeling. Knowing when the sun rises and sets and how much daylight you have left means you're less likely to find yourselves in the dark without a headlamp.

I'm sure you might have more to add to the list.

This set came from reflecting on our survival skills before a brilliant chat with Brendan Leonard of the excellent Semi-rad about all things Ultra on the Sketchplanations podcast (episode out in Autumn 2024). Growing up in the 80s, for me survival skills were things Crocodile Dundee had, or perhaps MacGyver. More recently, Bear Grylls would demonstrate making a shelter in the jungle, starting fires, or catching salmon to survive in the wild. However, I realised that my survival skills were much less glamorous, but still rather effective, and most of them are used before I head out on a trip. In other words, my survival skills are ones that mean (touch wood) I don't get into a scrape that need the traditional survival skills most of us think of.

As with so much in life, it's often the unglamorous stuff that makes the difference, like showing up every day, replicating before innovating, writing a rubbish first draft, or re-writing.

I hope this set may keep your expeditions Type I or Type II fun, rather than Type III.

Don't make important decisions on an empty stomach

Perhaps you were really expecting something about a kitchen table: how to set a table

Kitchen table survival skills

While each volcano is unique they can largely be divided into red volcanoes and grey volcanoes.

Red volcanoes typically have effusive eruptions dominated by the classic red-glowing lava flow or lava lake. The constant mild eruptions of lava let gases escape reducing the chances of gas build-up and larger explosions. A classic red volcano is Kīlauea in Hawaii.

Grey volcanoes are known for explosive eruptions. Trapped gases and heat can build up within the volcano releasing explosive eruptions that can shoot ashes and rock high into the sky and cause fast-moving pyroclastic flows of solidified lava and ash. Grey volcanoes are typically much more destructive than red volcanoes and can exhibit some behaviours like their red counterparts. A classic grey volcano is Mt St Helens.

I learned this distinction from the remarkable film Fire of love.

Order of adjectives (came to mind as I wrote 'classic red-glowing lava flow' - try the adjectives in other orders =) )

Red volcano, grey volcano

Banner clouds can form on the side of a high or exposed peak and seem to stick to the mountain face like a banner, even on an otherwise cloudless day. There are several theories for how they form but in general strong winds of cold dry air from one side likely interact with warmer humid air on the other. Look out for them next time you're in the mountains.

Also see lenticular clouds, thunder clouds, and more clouds.

Banner cloud

Durable dynamic systems have elements, or layers, that change at different rates. The fast layers that change quickly provide the innovation, while the slower layers stabilise and remember.

In his short article Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning, Stewart Brand gives this evocative example of the time hierarchy of a coniferous forest:

"Take a coniferous forest.  The hierarchy in scale of pine needle, tree crown, patch, stand, whole forest, and biome is also a time hierarchy.  The needle changes within a year, the crown over several years, the patch over many decades, the stand over a couple of centuries, the forest over a thousand years, and the biome over ten thousand years.  The range of what the needle may do is constrained by the crown, which is constrained by the patch and stand, which are controlled by the forest, which is controlled by the biome.  Nevertheless, innovation percolates throughout the system via evolutionary competition among lineages of individual trees dealing with the stresses of crowding, parasites, predation, and weather.  Occasionally, large shocks such as fire or disease or human predation can suddenly upset the whole system, sometimes all the way down to the biome level."

It's an example of his wonderful framework of pace layers which he applies as the working structure of a robust and adaptable civilisation.

Time hierarchy

"This negative is the score. The print is the performance."

This memorable analogy is from Ansel Adams, one of the foremost American photographers.

From the negative captured by the camera, Ansel would experiment with cropping, dodging and burning (lightening and darkening) to create the final print.

We have a large print of moon and half dome in our hallway. It reminds me that what the camera captured directly isn't the final piece. You still have the performance to perform.

The analogy works beyond photographs. A recipe, a script, a joke, or a business idea all still need the right performance.

Prints and performances

Ever since I came across Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's concept of Flow it has stayed with me as a simple framework and beacon for finding joy, creativity, and total involvement with life.  

"What I 'discovered' was that happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us come to being happy."

When researching happiness Csikszentmihalyi found that be they climbers, ballet dancers, chess players, or gardeners, people gave surprisingly similar descriptions to how they felt at their peak experience while performing an activity.

When in flow people are wholly focused on the present moment, they experience a strong sense of control, they lose their self-consciousness and their ego, their experience of time changes so that time can fly by or a moment can seem to slow down, and the joy of performing the activity becomes an end in itself.

Flow has a fairly simple set of conditions which I find myself using as a little mental checklist:

When climbing, a prototypical flow activity, it's clear that you are trying to get to the top, you can immediately see if you are making progress and whether an action progressed you or not, and it's wise to pick a wall that is difficult but not impossible, for you to enjoy it. No wonder climbing can be so addictive.

By contrast, it was evident to me that none of these were present when studying for my PhD.

I also like flow because it reminds me that peak happiness is unlikely to be experienced by sitting around watching the TV.

The quote is from, Flow, the psychology of happiness, by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, who also taught me that any name can work to do great work.

Flow

It all matters. Be it one person, one bird, or one tree. We are all connected. As John Muir wrote in My First Summer in the Sierra:

"As soon as we take one thing by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

The sketch is Heart Lake in his beloved Sierra Nevada.

Hitched to everything else in the universe

I hadn’t given much thought to hope, beyond it being a nice feeling to have, until I heard of CR Snyder’s cognitive model for hope which shed a new light on it for me. He proposed a model of hope where (paraphrasing) an individual may be hopeful if they have:

Goals they desire. If you don’t or can’t picture any future state you’d like then you won’t have a lot of hope.

Pathways. You need to see some ways that you may make step-by-step progress towards a goal.

Willpower or agency. You need to be motivated and believe that you have the ability to succeed at your goal.

With all of these you can imagine feeling hopeful. Without any one of them and you probably won’t so much.

The mountain is the Ogre, a wholly impossible looking peak scaled by Doug Scott and others for which I would have had zero hope to climb (no pathways, no willpower) and yet they remarkably did.

HT once again to Brené Brown in Dare to Lead.

Hope

There’s something about being out in Nature for 3 days or more that resets us and improves our mood, our wellbeing, and how well our brain is working. Observed by river rafting guide Ken Sanders who used to see a marked change in the groups he led on the 3rd day of being out on the river, it’s known as the 3-day effect. Since then, David Strayer and his group at the University of Utah have conducted studies that measured a real change in our calmness and even our creative problem solving after 3 or more days in Nature.

“I think it takes the first two days and nights to wash away whatever veneer of civilization you have brought with you. The new reality begins on that third day.”

More about the 3 day effect at National Geograhic: This is your brain on Nature and REI: The Nature Fix.

No doubt similar things at work to the magic of forest bathing.

The 3-day effect

Everyone knows Everest is the highest mountain at a colossal 8,848m above sea level. But, depending on how you’re measuring, there are two other candidates for tallest mountain.

Mauna Kea is a volcano on the big island of Hawaii. In fact the whole island is made from volcano, so as a peak it rises from the base of the Pacific ocean to over 4,200m above sea level. Including the part of the mountain that rises from the sea bed it is over 10,000m tall.

Mt Chimborazo can also lay a claim to the tallest mountain. The Earth is not a perfect sphere — it bulges around the Equator meaning that points on the Equator are several kilometres further from the centre of the Earth than points further North or South. A bulging around the centre is a common shape for a spinning sphere due to the force exerted by the spinning. Sitting almost exactly on the Equator means that Chimborazo’s already enormous 6,263m from sea level makes its summit the furthest point on the Earth’s surface from the centre of the Earth.

I’m not totally sure if that means that at some point Chimborazo’s summit makes it the closest point to the sun, but it definitely sounds plausible! 

The 3 tallest mountains

The effect you may have noticed where things further in the distance lose their intensity and colour until they fade into the sky. Most often noticeable with hills or mountains, but also in a misty forest as mist, dust, fog or things like pollution increase the effect.

If it’s a blue sky day, the distance will take on a bluer tone like the colour of the sky.

This scene painted from our ascent of Mt Rainier in the Pacific Northwest. And here’s a sunset version.

Atmospheric perspective

Divergent (Mid-Atlantic ridge, The Rift Valley), Convergent (The Andes, The Himalayas) and Transform (San Andreas fault, Dead Sea Transform). There are some sub-varieties but these are the main ones. This makes natural sense, so there’s no remembering to do, when you have two contacting plates: they can either be pushing together, pulling apart or rubbing past each other.

Incidentally, the idea that the giant continents move around all the time, enough to pull apart South America and Africa, and thrust up the Himalayas, obvious as it may seem now, was once not at all obvious. And if you stand on the ground in a big landscape, it’s kind of amazing to think of just what an amazing notion it was to propose.

I read about it in Bill Bryson’s, A Short History of Nearly Everything for which I found a relevant excerpt online - The Earth Moves (pdf) - should you be interested in the characters that had the courage to seriously propose it.

Tectonic plate interaction boundaries

V-shaped, formed by a river and U-shaped after carving by a glacier. Plus variations thereof.

I believe you get canyons when the land is going up and the river is cutting down. A nice frame shift I saw in a nature program was to not think of the river as moving, but instead think of the river as stationary and the land (the continental plates) as moving around it. You’ll get a canyon when the land is pushing up and the river is cutting down. Much like pushing a block of cheese up through a cheese wire. OK the cheese is my analogy which is why it’s not as good.

Had a helpful comment from Austin correcting and explaining, “canyons are formed any time the weathering action of some force (i.e. a flowing river) greatly outpaces the surrounding environment’s eroding forces. For example, the grand canyon is so deep because it never rains in the desert, and wind doesn’t erode as quickly as water.”

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Category: mountains