If I am out on a day hike, and get stuck out overnight, it is an unplanned and uncomfortable overnight hike. It does not kill me.

I try to hammer that concept into the boys in the troop all the time. When we are on what we think is a day hike, I always make sure they have thought about what they would need to have with them if they had to spend the night out.

I learned the hard way as a youth. Some college buddies and I had "hiked" into a fairly remote stream to do some trout fishing. Great fishing, but, one of my buddies was trying to get out into the stream to cast into a certain swirl... well, rocks in streams are often slippery. The rest of his mishap is blurry, because we were actually laughing at him until we realized he had done something bad to his lower leg, and couldn't get out of the water the way his ankle was jammed. In the end, he was a nasty mess, with a couple body parts going in wrong directions, but, nothing compound, so it was only a nasty mess, not a bloody mess <img src="/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" /> We were already in early evening. We had figured we might be walking the end of the trail in the dark on the way out, but, we had all been here before, and didn't worry about it. Now, however, the three of us were down to 2 able bodied and 1 who couldn't walk. Fortunately, in our tackle bags, we had enough stuff to lash together some sticks to immobilize the leg, and used a couple of bandanas to wrap his ankle. We decided to spend the night, and walk out at first light, rather than trying to walk Jim out in the dark on a hilly trail. (We really didn't want to stay that night, we were afraid how painful his leg was going to get, but, for some reason, he was ok if he was able to keep it still.) I remembered RICE, rest, ice, compression, elevation from my Scouting days, and although we didn't have ice, he did put his leg in the cold mountain stream for 15 of 20 minutes each hour, and it seemed to help.

We had a lighter, bait knife, some junk food, and a stream. We made a nice fire, dried out our clothes, built up some soft bedding from pine bows, and really didn't suffer too much. We even cooked a couple of trout fillets wrapped around sticks over the fire. I can remember parts of that night like they were yesterday.

It was really not such a big deal now that I think of it, but, at the time, we all felt pretty stupid about several things. We hadn't told anyone where we were going, we didn't really have any food, or water to speak of, just a couple candy bars and the soda bottles that we used to get water from the stream. (Back then we didn't know about filtering that stuff.)
We had no extra clothes, and it's a good thing it was summer. We didn't have even the most basic of first aid supplies with us, or even a whistle to signal if we had needed to. I think between the three of us we had one flashlight, and that was by accident, it was in a tackle bag. We improvised a bunch, and that was good. I guess the most amazing thing was that none of us "lost it" during this. We were certainly in an unplanned situation, but, we all had done a lot of "planned" camping, and so the outdoors wasn't really a scary place for us.

Ever since then, I have been far more aware of the "ten essentials" and having them with me... I knew what they were back then, from my days as a Boy Scout, I always had that stuff with me on my "planned" overnights... but, I hadn't really taken them to heart until I had my own unexpected night in the woods. I guess that's why I work so hard to help the boys in my Troop learn the lesson too.