Nicodemus,
All,
Thanks for the warm welcome. I will certainly make a point to share my other storied adventures with the forum. I am somewhat surprised by the lack of climber/mountain sport/backcountry types in posting in here. There is certainly a wealth of seriously hardcore, ruthlessly analyzed, extreme survival information out there being published by mountaineering organizations. Take "Accidents in North American Mountaineering" for instance. They help discover and analyze what made the differance between survival and death. In many mountain sports a "survival" situation is not some distant and romantically remote possibilty, but merely a poor decision away. There are many who go out time after time and beat the odds, paring down the kit until they are almost naked. When things go bad I have learned however that having a "Margin" is better even if it means slower. I did not fully understand this until the ill fated 14er... I don't want to give mountaineering a smear... I climbed rock and mountain (still do) for 15+ years before ever getting in overnight trouble. But now my alpine speed climbing years are over and I like to plod up "easy" day trip stuff.
Off to feed the servers...