All, I am providing stories of real world survival incidents, good examples and bad, to my scouts and their parents. I have mined this forum for everything I can find a link to that works, but all new stories you can find are appreciated. Thanks.

The book Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales is about this very topic. Good place to start.

Great book.

I have that one as well and loved it. I just want to present current, real stories to the scouts and their parents to demonstrate the real world relevance of what we teach the scouts. I am not just interested in survival stories either. Emergencies that happen, how people handle them (good or bad) and how they come out. Especially stories about kids. These just arouse more feeling and will be considered more relevant to the kids. There are not many of such stories that make it into the national press, most of them stay at the local level. Since we have so many members spread out over such a broad area, I thought that we were well suited to pull together these stories that would otherwise not get seen by me and many others.

Search "boys life stories of survival" will yield plenty of links to age-appropriate emergency response and survival yarns, ranging from Boy's Life Magazine to Reader's Digest to others that trend sort of grisly (cutting off arms to escape slow death). These are teenagers, I hope you try to keep it more upbeat than that..

Have you run across this - "Death Clouds on Mt Baldy," by Cathy Hufault? The tragedy occurred over fifty years ago, but there is still a shrine present to the three boy Scouts who lost their lives.

Full disclosure - became involved in the operation as a college student and it changed my life...

Seconded!

Not seen that one, thanks.

nys ranger rescues

lotsa what-not-to-do stories.

Montanero, I highly recommend the book 'Lost in the Wild' by Cary Griffith for your project. It is a very detailed parallel account of two unrelated incidents in the Boundary Waters area near Canada.

Story 1: A Scout group's very experienced guide steps into the bush alone with no gear looking for a canoe portage, gets lost, and disappears for days. The two adult Scout leaders have to carry on and extract their young charges from the wilderness then initiate a search.

Story 2: An inexperienced solo hiker gets lost after veering off of the Pow Wow Trail and through futher blunders finds himself separated from almost all his gear.

The book is quite well written plus it includes photos and maps from each incident, both of which are very relevant to this ETS discussion.

A short account including these stories is on the Minnesota DNR site.

How about the book "Lost on a Mountain in Maine" by Donn Fendler? It's the story of a boy who got separated from his group on a hike of Mt. Katahdin and had to get himself out, which he succeeded in doing.

+1. Agreed.