Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
When you're out in the wilderness, the margin for error is small. A wrong turn or bad decision can quickly become life-threatening. And oftentimes, bad decisions come from harmful survival myths have been passed down for generations. You see them printed in books, repeated in classrooms, and even shown on television.
The good news is that experienced survivalists are pushing back on these dangerous myths. Greg Ovens, for example. He's a self-taught survivalist from Canal Flats, British Columbia. Greg has been studying bushcraft since he was a kid. He's read every survival book he could get his hands on, and has spent over 40 years learning the craft firsthand.
In this video from the Youtube channel, Ovens Rocky Mountain Bushcraft, he goes over 10 survival days that could ruin your day or even cost you your life.
1. Rubbing Snow on Frostbite
This one was actually taught in old first aid classes, which probably led to many people losing fingers and toes. Rubbing snow on a frostbitten area does nothing to help the frozen tissue. In fact, it keeps the area cold and can make the damage worse. The correct approach is to warm the affected area up, not keep it cold.
2. If Birds Can Eat the Berries, So Can You
This myth has likely killed many people. The idea is that if you observe birds eating berries in the wild, those berries must be safe for human consumption. Not true. Baneberries are a perfect example. Birds eat them without issue, but as few as five or six berries can be fatal to a human. Don't use wildlife as your taste-testers.
3. Moss Only Grows on the North Side of Trees
Many old survival books say that if you're lost, just find the north side of a tree by looking for where the moss grows. Greg walks through the woods and points the camera at tree after tree, and every single one is covered in moss on all sides. In dense, shaded forests with enough moisture, moss doesn't play favorites. Relying on this method for navigation could send you in the wrong direction.
4. Drink Your Own Urine When You Have No Water
You've probably seen this one on survival shows (Bear Grylls comes to mind). The idea is that in a desperate situation with no water, drinking your urine is better than nothing. It isn't.
Urine contains concentrated salts that your body has already filtered out as waste. Drinking it will dehydrate you faster than if you drank nothing at all. Save yourself the misery and keep searching for a real water source.
5. You Can Make a Bow Drill String from Plant Fibers or Shoelaces
Bow drill fire starting is one of the most essential primitive survival skills, and the string is the most critical component. Many survival books suggest improvising a string from plant fibers like dogbane, stinging nettle, or milkweed, or simply using a shoelace.
Shoelaces tend to snap before you generate an ember, or they stretch so much that they lose tension. Plant fiber strings can work, but getting one thick and strong enough to actually function can take up to two days of prepare, which is time you simply don't have in a real survival situation. His recommendation: bring paracord. It's durable and reliable.
6. A Plastic Bag Can Reliably Start a Fire
Filling a clear plastic bag or sandwich bag with water to create a makeshift magnifying lens is a real technique, and Greg has actually pulled it off multiple times. But here's the problem: it only works during certain times of year when the sun is intense enough, and it's completely useless on a cloudy day.
In other words, it's a trick that works under a narrow set of ideal conditions. In a genuine survival situation, you're unlikely to have the luxury of waiting for a sunny afternoon. It's a fun skill to practice, but don't count on it when your life depends on making fire.
7. You Can Start a Fire Using Ice as a Magnifying Glass
Made famous by the movie The Edge with Anthony Hopkins, this technique involves shaping a piece of clear ice into a lens and using it to focus sunlight into a fire-starting beam. Sounds cool. Doesn't really work.
The fundamental problem is a catch-22: when the sun is intense enough to start a fire, the ice is too warm and cloudy to form a usable lens. And when the ice is cold and clear enough to theoretically shape into a lens, the sun isn't strong enough to ignite tinder through it. Greg has tried it, and it doesn't work in practice.
8. The Fire Roll Is a Reliable Fire-Starting Method
The fire roll, a technique where you roll smoldering material in cotton or similar tinder, sounds promising but has a critical flaw: it requires ash to work properly. That means you need to have already made a fire to produce the ash before you can use this method.
Greg acknowledges he's come close to making it work and is still experimenting, but points out that it's not a practical solution in a true survival scenario where you're starting from zero.
9. Misidentifying Wild Plants Is Easy to Spot
Greg shows a YouTube video where the host confidently picks what they call “salmon berries”, except they're actually thimbleberries, a completely different plant with a distinctly different leaf, flower color, and berry shape. The mix-up wasn't subtle; the plants look nothing alike to a trained eye.
He also shows a foraging book that misidentifies soapberry, confusing it with tartarian honeysuckle, a plant whose berries are mildly toxic. The takeaway: don't trust a single source when identifying wild edibles, whether it's a YouTube video or a published book. Always cross-reference with other sources.
10. Sweet Berries Are Safe, Bitter Berries Are Poisonous
Another myth pulled straight from old survival literature: you can tell edible berries from poisonous ones by taste. Sweet and pleasant? Go ahead. Bitter? Spit it out. This is flat-out wrong and potentially fatal. Soapberries, for example, are so bitter they're nearly unpalatable, but they're perfectly edible.
On the flip side, some poisonous berries taste just fine. Greg has cautiously tasted several toxic berries (without swallowing) specifically to test this theory, and confirms it holds no water. Taste alone is never a reliable indicator of safety.
Final Thoughts
The common thread running through all of these is the danger of accepting survival advice at face value, especially when it's been repeated so many times it feels like common knowledge. As Greg puts it, do your own research. Test things before you need them. And when in doubt, go with what's proven reliable rather than what makes for a good story in a survival book or movie.
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