What If?

You Go From Winter Road Trip to Stranded and Injured in the Middle of Nowhere.

- Tim MacWelch

Hey, we should climb up to someplace high before it gets dark. Maybe the phones will work up on a ridge or something.” Even before you shoot your friend a look that says dumbest plan ever, he looks down at your damaged knee and says “Oh, right. Never mind.” After a few minutes pass, the snowfall seems to increase and another awful plan gets proposed: “You know, if we could stand by the roadside long enough, some hot girls would probably pick us up, especially with you looking like a broken-legged puppy and all.”

The snow was still falling. The light was fading fast. The car was completely off the road and there was no sign of anyone else in the area. Worst of all, your buddy didn’t have his head in the game. Dan was a cheerful guy and a good friend, but right now you just wish he’d shut the hell up. It’s time to come up with a real plan, you figured. Then the first shiver hit your body. Your thoughts darkened. Maybe it’s already too late for a real plan.

Cold is one of humanity’s oldest and most relentless foes. Even by itself, the frigid air can rob our bodies of the heat we need to stay functional (and alive). If you add wind and moisture into the mix, hypothermia (the dangerous chilling of the body’s core temperature) can occur in no time. Of course, anyone with enough sense to come in out of the rain will try to go indoors to warm up when the weather gets glacial. But what happens when there’s no place to warm up?

In this edition of What If?, we pose the question: What if you’re stranded in winter? As our ancestors discovered, there’s more than one way to survive in the cold, so RECOIL OFFGRID asked three survival writers for their own spin on a winter survival story.