One good thing about snowy survival scenarios is that ground-to-air rescue signals are easy to spot on the white background. One terrible thing about that same scenario is that a little more snow can hide your signal completely.

Any rescue signal needs to be huge if it is to catch the attention of aircraft, regardless of the situation. This will be true on a desert island or deep in the snow-covered backcountry. While the snow does create a blank canvas for you to build a high-contrast signal for aircraft to spot, the snow also has its share of problems.

A wintertime wilderness emergency can leave you with a lot to worry about. Fortunately, making a bed to get you up off the frozen ground is one of the easiest problems to fix—if you know how to make a bough bed.

I am sure that beds and mattresses like this go back to antiquity, but they became common in the later days of the fur trade era in the northern U.S. and Canada. To make a bough bed you don’t need much in the way of tools—just a pair of gloves should do it.

Perhaps it is the way that this survival kit hangs from your backpack, ready to be grabbed at a moment’s notice. Or maybe it’s its size and shape. Either way, the Rocky S2V Survival Grenade is a novel approach to survival kits. It’s not just another sardine can full of matches and fish hooks.

Frostbite can be a common injury during the winter months, especially in northern regions, at high altitude, and under windy conditions. Frostbite occurs when ice crystals form in your skin and underlying tissues. The intense cold that causes this type of injury also masks the damage. Skin will often go numb before the frostbite damage occurs. It’s only when the tissue thaws out that you feel the intense burning pain resulting from the sharp ice crystals that damaged your cells. How do you detect frostbite?