GETTING A FOOT MESSAGE
With a seemingly unending list of useful survival skills and limited time to master them all, why should you invest your most valuable resource (time) into learning an esoteric skill such as tracking? We can answer this question with one word: versatility. Like any good piece of survival gear, your SHTF training should be multifaceted and applicable across a broad spectrum of activities. Although there’s often a preconceived notion that tracking is following a subject until contact is made and you capture or detain the fugitive, the true utility of this skill reaches far beyond the Hollywood manhunt. Tracking encompasses a wide array of uses, some of which require little effort to employ after the initial cultivation of track awareness.
Let’s talk about a few scenarios in which track awareness could be useful, even when you’re not following anyone (or anything):
› Home/Campsite Security
It’s beneficial to know who has been in or around your area while you were away. Can you definitively ID if the tracks belong to your party or an outsider, and ascertain their intentions in approaching your area?
› Food Acquisition
If you plan on tracking game and harvesting it, track awareness can help ensure you’re not sitting on a “dry hole” or aid in identifying the species, age of track, and level of activity in your daily area of operations (AO). This skill will also allow you to more effectively place snares for small game.
› Bug-Out Planning
When scouting for a safe bug-out rendezvous point (RP) or escape route, it might be of interest to know the level of human activity in the area under normal circumstances, as well as the presence of large predatory
