While I am working on my computer, I often watch Youtube videos. Since I'm not usually paying a whole lot of attention, a video that I chose will end, and another one will start, usually related in some way to the one that I had been watching. Anyhow, in the course of the last few hours, a couple of videos came on, I think by the same guy, one about the dangers of hiking alone, and the other about the dangers of camping alone. I'm not stupid, and he didn't cover anything that I wasn't already aware of, but he did bring up a topic that I could use for discussions here. Of course, there are dangers in doing these things alone, and I suppose that they'd be exacerbated with age. I could hurt myself while I'm out in the middle of the woods, or I could have a medical emergency, and, since many of the places that I camp, even on my own land up north, are areas where I don't have cell phone coverage, the chances of getting help if I were unable to get to help on my own would be low. My wife would know that I'm on our land up north, but she wouldn't expect to hear from me or be able to get in touch with me because she knows there's no cell phone coverage, so she wouldn't start to worry until sometime after dark if she didn't hear from me, and not even then if I was camping out in the woods. When I'm hiking, on or off of my land, I don't even know where I am sometimes, because the fun of hiking is to walk to places that are interesting, and these aren't paved hiking trails with cafes spaced along the way. When I go hiking, I have an idea as to where I'm going, and I might even have a printed map from a trail site that I'm a member of. But when the published trails ask me to double back the way I came, I will often look for another alternative, which might be an animal trail or a logging road. I pretty much always carry a compass if I'm not going to be in a boxed-in area where all I have to do is walk in a straight line in any direction and come out to something recognizable, and, even then, I'll usually carry a compass. So, I am unlikely to get hopelessly lost, although I might be surprised at where I come out. For that matter, I clear trees out on my land up north alone, and I am very careful while doing that because chainsaws are way scarier than black bears. Still, people do have accidents with chainsaws, so I recognize that as a possibility, albeit unlikely. However, and I'll bet you knew there was going to be a however, I like being out in the woods, and I can't think of anyone I'd want to take with me, at least not anyone who'd want to go, given that my wife is not about to accompany me while I am primitive camping or hiking through a swamp. A big part of what I like about being in the woods is the solitude. I'm not dead yet, and I like doing these things. Plus, there are things that need doing in my woods this summer. I'm thinking that if I were to die out in the woods, that might be preferable to dying in a hospital room a few years from now. I don't want to die out in the woods, and I'll take a whole lot of reasonable precautions to avoid that eventuality, but there has to be more to life than not dying. Maybe I was raised that way, as we were allowed to take chances when I was a kid.
Heck, I've had these concerns when wandering around my own property. The "A" is me, the shape is my property, and all the X are the nearest homes. The two X close to me are the neighbors I drive by on the right-of-way. Trees block their view of my house (and vice versa.) If I were to be injured out here, no one would see my body or hear my whimpers. I have no one who would miss me, now that COVID has chased me from church. Maybe my neighbor would do a wellness check if the missus had not recently seen me drive by on my way out shopping, but that would take weeks and would be iffy at best. I do get some spotty cell coverage when I'm out & about on my property, but it's horrible when there are leaves on the trees and nonexistent in certain gullies. Even a satellite phone wouldn't be much of an improvement under a canopy of leaves (I know, I carry a Garmin with me.) That being said, except for the communication issue (assuming I were conscious after an event), I don't see the isolation risk as being all that much greater than living alone in an apartment. The upsides are obvious. Certainly if I were going to die, I would prefer it to be in such surroundings rather than in a hospital, not knowing how many years (if any) of some undetermined quality I might be able to eke out by living a constricted life. I doubt I'd get a hospital to discharge me to have the ambulance service drive me home, wheel me down by my creek (or just roll me down the hill) and wish me bon voyage (although for the right amount of cash...) I'm not adverse to having the critters munch on me and poop out my bits across the county. To do otherwise is actually kinda unnatural...that's what happens to them. Regarding solitude: I sometimes hike up to the cemetery in the woods. I have no idea why I like being there. It's solitude but with company...very quite company. I've researched some of the folks buried there, both on line and by talking to locals and their descendants, so these are not complete strangers to me. I have a WW1 veteran buried here (Pvt. George White) who was a member of the 811 Pioneer Infantry, part of an all-black group stood up in early 1918. He was killed that October. There are depressions that just have stones for markers. They all have stories, lost to time. So I'm not exactly alone.
I seldom use a chainsaw to fall trees alone, as I had an acquaintance who had been working the woods for years have a tree fall on him when cutting trees alone. He was alive but pinned by the head and shoulders by the tree he had cut and laid that way for hours until his wife, expecting him home for lunch, went looking for him when he didn't arrive. If he had been alone and far away from home, or if his wife had been at work or away, he would've laid in the woods until he died of thirst or exposure. I only cut trees when my wife is home and knows where I am. I used to hike alone many times, but no longer do so, mostly for physical reasons.
I had been, mostly, a solitary hiker/camper until my second wife came along. I enjoyed my solitude in the middle of nowhere, although I carried a compass and topo map, and having taken an orienteering class, I was good at getting around in the wilderness. Being a tree guy and a Certified Arborist, I get the trades for my profession, and in the monthly fatality reports, there are always a few entries on those who were clearing their land, and had a tree fall the wrong way, pinning them or killing them, outright. Chainsaw accidents obviously happen, but in the reports, those incidents most often happen on production jobs where sawyers are very concerned with speed, and chainsaws and speedy cuts don't always mix well. Trees do have a habit of falling in unpredictable ways, especially when you're an amateur or one who rarely cuts them down. Doing so, far away from any human contact, is a fool's job. My present (17 year) LTR is not into camping, unless it's in my RV, and even then, she's not an enthusiast. Having been away from tents and sleeping bags for many, many years, I would hesitate to go off alone, shouldering my old backpack that served me well, in Kenya, back in the 80's. As for dying in the wilderness, I had a premonition about India and a mountain top, decades ago, while in an altered state, but the world was different, so different, then. These days, being an old guy, I doubt I'd make it out of a point of departure city in Northern India without being waylaid by some opportunists looking for anything I might be carrying. Be that as it may, some peak, on some mountain, in some US State, may be my ultimate exit point, someday, or, then again, I just might go in the familiar surroundings of my own home. A hospital/hospice bed is not for me, as long as I have the power and mental faculties to prevent that whole scene.
We do very little apart, except when I go to get a haircut, so, nothing for either of us to worry about. Went camping once, when we lived in Colorado before, but that was the last time. Got rid of all camping equipment. Have never done any hiking. Neither of us want to get "that physical". Some folks think we are crazy for not doing anything apart, but that's the way we love our marriage.
I like setting up a camp in the woods with what I can carry in a backpack, which might be a tarp, a hammock, or both, but I can also build shelters with what I can find in the woods. Yeah, I can start a fire without matches or a lighter too, but I would generally carry one or the other. It's not like a box of matches or a lighter would be too heavy to carry or take up too much space. It's been a few years, but only about four, since I have camped outside in the woods in the winter without a tent. It's easier to make a tent out of a tarp than to pitch a tent, so I don't even own a tent. The ones that will last are too heavy to carry. I thought of doing it this winter, but the task of walking two miles (each way) through the snow to get to my land is more daunting than spending the night outdoors in a Maine winter. I do plan on spending at least a few nights in the woods this summer, though.
When I camped in winter here, I always used a tent. My eldest sons, however, would often just roll into a tarp on the snow, or, if it got below -20 F., they would make a snow cave and sleep there.
I have never done this, nor do I have the skills. I've camped in a tent a lot, but it's always been where I could unpack my vehicle at or near the campsite. I've camped in cold weather (with summertime gear), but that was only the occasional overnight thing when I was gonna get up the next day to do a guided whitewater trip...you usually do those in an effort to time the spring thaw of winter's snow so the rivers will be high.
If you arrange some logs (usually, deadfall) behind where you're going to sleep and some more on the other side of your fire, it will direct the heat toward you and the logs behind you will spread the heat around you. Of course, it also helps to have a good sleeping bag and a wool blanket, which is the heaviest thing that I usually carry. Wool is nice because it can keep you warm even when wet. When I was a kid, my cousins and I would camp out in the woods, or in camps that we had built, during the winter often. One year, we built a teepee completely out of stuff we could find in the woods, such as saplings, branches, birch bark, and evergreen boughs. With a fire, that was toasty warm during a Michigan February night.
My tent camping was gear intensive, and I liked experimenting with new gadgets. My external frame backpack usually weighed in at, around, 60 lbs, and I carried my .357, as well. I normally had my tent, which was state of the art, at the time, a -20° synthetic fill bag, a compact stove with fuel, a headlamp, a canteen, several dehydrated food packs, a good survival knife, fish line, mess kit, duct tape, soap, repellant, a whistle, my recorder, binoculars, signal mirror, mini lantern, compass, map, a book, inflatable mat, tarp, and other stuff I've forgotten about. All of the preceding loaded on my bike, a Yamaha 1200, and I rode in all seasons. For some outings, I had to pull my bike into motel rooms to get it started, in the winter. When I think about riding on I-35, in the snow, I know I was very lucky. It's definitely one of those: "What the hell was I thinking? " In Africa, I camped near a lake, and a hippo came up to my tent, at night, sniffed it, and I saw his whiskers coming through the material. I was lucky then, too.
I like camping on my land because, being mine, I don't have to worry about a lot of nonsense, but I also have a cabin there so, while my plan might be to camp out in the middle of the woods somewhere, in a primitive campsite, if things were to go wrong, as long as I could make it to my cabin, I could be out of the elements, and sometimes I can get a cell signal from the middle of the cabin. I'm talking about one bar, but that would be good enough for a text message, and once I was even able to get an Internet connection from the cabin. Also, if I am there during a time of the year when I can drive to my cabin, I can bring other supplies to leave in the cabin. I haven't had to resort to that, but it's nice to have the option.
They had good gear and did it frequently. They never even got frostbitten in their escapades. Working with kids winter camping, the biggest danger was actually dehydration, as water was all frozen unless you had a way to keep it a little warm. As soon as we heard a complaint of headache, drinking water was foisted on them. They learned to detect it themselves.
They DID have good sleeping bags. I didn't mean they used only a tarp. I just meant they used the tarp in lieu of a tent or other shelter. If sleeping in a snow cave, the gear needing was fairly light, as the temp inside the cave was near freezing even at -37 F. the coldest temp they ever camped at that I know about. I never slept out at anything much below -10 to -15 or so. As long as you were in a good sleeping bag, everything was fine, but if you had to use the john in the night, you could never get warm until morning.