The December issue of National Geographic's Adventure magazine has an excellent article on the psychology of people who are lost. A excerpt is online at www.national geographic.com/adventure/index/html

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/index.html<br><br> or<br><br>http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/0111/story.html#story_1

Thanks for the heads up on the magazine article. It was a good article, its a shame some of the survival hints were a little spotty. I really enjoyed the songline hint i've been using it for years, infact it helped our scout troop win the golden tentpeg award one year. The theme that year was survival and the instructor pointed out that most people get in trouble from getting lost and that here in PA your never more than a mile from a road and then he asked them which way was north. I thought he was going to faint when they all knew exactly. I'd been playing some awareness of place games with them earlier and it even shocked me how well it had sunk in.

Spotty is an understatement! The bit about creating sparks with a knife and appropriate stone got me. I learned you need a carbon knife, and a very hard one of 60 rockwell to get sparks. Even then, the result is feeble at best. I left this information in their feedback forum and an invite to equipped.

The links take you an excerpt only. Or am I missing a link to the full story?

I hope they take you up on your invite this is by far the best site on survival. It was obvious that the writer of the hints just plucked info from books and either left things out or chose less than ideal info. Which is a shame since the other info in the main article was excellant. The fire article being an example it was obvious he didn't even know the difference between artificial flint rods and flint and steel.My own experiance has been that carbon steel Moras,Opinels, some axes and files and hacksaw blades with the teeth ground off with out burning the steel work with char,0000 steel wool or tinder fungus when using a hard striker like quartz or chert, if the tinders bone dry and you practice alot. The only thing I haven't tried yet is all natural with fine grain pyrite and tinder fungus. Having said that why would anyone use anything but a flint rod that works on any good tinder and weighs less to boot. Which reminds me a good hint that I learned fron Mors is that the wax soaked wick of the candle in your survival kit ,lights as easily as a tinder cube if you fluff it with your finger before you spark it with you flint rod.I'm suprised the makers of survival tins without good tinder don't mention it.

The exerpt is it. Get the magazine!