Very good points.
A lot of that applies to old industrial sites in the wilderness too.
It is not that they were deliberately booby trapped, it is just that they were full of industrial hazards back then, and then they were just abandoned to decay. They left pits to fall into, and things that could fall. I mentioned old open mine shafts, but even if they covered them you have no way of knowing of the cover will support you. Then there might be chemicals in leaking barrels, or maybe just spread out from the effects of time.
Caution is very important.
As an example you could step into some old shack and fall through the floor into the basement, or the roof could fall on your head.
Large piles of flotsam present the same risks. So do old log jams.
You really need to be careful.

One thing I did not see mentioned was old telegraph or telephone lines. These often went through areas that are no longer inhabited. Old telephone wire is usually about #9 steel wire. It is good if you need heavy steel wire for anything, kind of the big brother of haywire.

Old fence lines can be worth checking along.

I should mention that what I think of as useful in a wild setting is stuff that helps give me shelter, helps feed me or gets me found.

Yes the sides of roads are full of stuff like tools and car parts, but if I am on the side of a highway in a survival situation I would likely be more interested in finding something like a cop car full of cops.

Three reasons to reconsider the old telegraph/telephone lines:

1) Believe it or not, some of the ancient open wire lines (especially near RR tracks) are still in use and it can be high voltage. (I was knocked off an 18' pole once. 480VAC HURTS)

2) The old open wire picks up induction current better that almost any other wire on a pole. If it does not have a path to ground, it has spent years picking up a charge and is waiting for you to be a path to ground.

3) The old open wire sometimes holds a memory of the coil it was in. When cut, it will recoil and could whip you.

Again, just be careful.

Yes, again very good advice, and I mean it.
I often assume people naturally know a lot of this stuff, and I need to be reminded.
If my older brother Tom was not with Lines and Stations Ontario Hydro Northern I doubt if I would know it either.

When I mentioned getting wire I was really thinking about the stuff already on the ground.
Not only do old lines fall down but the old line crews often left coils of wire near poles so they would have something to repair breaks with.
(They were also lazy about carrying all of their junk out)


(1) Don't touch live wires!
Well of course not, if it is still in the air it is still likely in use.
Besides, if you are not using a belt and spurs then poles are not so easy to climb. It would be far too easy to fall and injure yourself.
The odds of having spurs and a climbing harness with you is pretty low.

(2) Even if the line is not in use you can still get zapped!
Very much so, and long runs have a lot of capacitance. You can get high voltages and high currents. Line crews have to use grounding poles to discharge lines after they have shut the power off, the grounds must stay connected as long as they are working near the line. what a lot of people are surprised by is that they need to do the same thing even if the line has never had power in it.
Static electricity is still electricity too and in addition to currents induced by magnetics and ground currents a run of wire in the air can pick up a static charge from the air moving past it. It does not take much of a breeze to create quite the charge.

(3) When cut the wire will recoil!
There are no ifs, ands or buts about that one.
The wires are under an awful lot of tension if they are still hanging in the air and will recoil with a lot of speed.
If you, or anybody else, are in the way you can be cut very badly

Thanks very much for pointing all that out.

There are a couple of other points about telephone and hydro lines.

If it is on your map you have at least one L.O.P. fixed.

If it is strung and seems maintained then it becomes a guideline.
You know it leads to people somewhere too.
Because the brush is cut underneath them they are easier to travel along.
Moose and other large game often use them as travel routes and to feed in because of the shrubs at the edges.
Crews travel the lines constantly and they are often flown over by helicopters inspecting them.
You could just light a fire at the base of a pole or two, burn them down, and wait for a line crew to come and repair it.

If it is a true survival situation I would rather be sued...

Shopes?

Oops, "shoes"

-Blast

Seriously??? shoes? ok. Sorry I find that kind of funny.

Once, on the Highway, north of Superior, near Montreal River, I had to stop a truck on the shoulder and take a short break.
When I got out of the cab and walked around to the side away from the road I noticed a pair of boots.
They were sitting neatly side by side.
Laced and knotted.
They were not large.
A pair of neat and tidy woman's hiking boots.
There were no people around, no other sign of people except the highway and the mine's supply truck sitting there grumbling in the early evening... no tracks into the bushes, nothing in the ditch, not a note or even a gum wrapper...
just me... and that odd, improbable, unexplainable, perfectly matched, neat and tidy, enigmatic, pair of woman's hiking boots, on the shoulder of the road, on a long empty stretch, of the Trans Canada highway.

I wonder why they were set there like that, so neatly, and if she ever returned for them, who ever she might have been.

This is surreal-

As my wife and I drive home from San Fran every day, we have driving game we play called "find the other shoe".

We will see a perfectly good shoe, and try to see where the other one landed. I would estimate that we have seen no less than 20 pairs of shoes in the last 4 months between San Fran and San Rafael, roughly.

Just this evening, by the refinery in Richmond, there were both shoes (sorry, "shopes"), fairly new Vans, about a quarter mile apart (the wifee spotted the #2 shope), if I could have gotten out of the car without risking injury, I'd have snagged them.

Not to wear, but to mount above the fireplace, proudly.

Follow the wind, esp the prevailing wind for the area. (In the wide open areas, that's usually west-to-east most of the day, although sometimes opposite in the morning.

Follow the wind and look for buildings, bushes, mesh or barbed wire fences, logs, rocks, old abandoned vehicles. The wind will blow many things until it finds something that will hold it: plastic bags (usually rotted by UV), paper, bandanas and other cloth items, plastic bottles, cans, kindling, fishing line, baseball caps. I've never seen any shopes, but I did find a knit cap once.

One time on I-5, I saw (in order), a baseball cap, a windbreaker, a long-sleeved plaid shirt, a pair of chinos, a t-shirt, a pair of shoes, a pair of socks, and striped jockey shorts. A whole outfit just for the picking up!

Sue

Once I was taking my fishing dinghy on an early morning trip through the fog from Marina Del Ray up to Point Dume in Malibu. It was eerily delightful with barely-penetrating sunlight illuminating a small area around me, almost like in the old dream scenes in the movies. I could see maybe 20 yards in any direction. The ocean was as flat as a pancake, and in it I spied a floating object. I motored slowly up to it and discovered a very old highly-carved canoe paddle, complete with a laced rawhide handgrip. The blade of the paddle had a large carved beaver on one side, and on the other a complete scene of two canoeists running a rapids with the inscription "A man is the happiest whose pleasures are the cheapest." I thought it was a great find, and it's hanging on the wall in my cabin. I have no idea where it came from, but I estimate it had to have floated quite a ways down the coast because there are no scenes like those carved on the paddle anywhere around here. You often see floating objects out in the ocean miles from anywhere, but this was the coolest thing I've ever found.