Desert Survival Tips: Shade, Water and the Vehicle You Should Not Leave

Desert survival is mostly water management and shade discipline. The mistakes that kill people there are rarely dramatic: walking in the heat, leaving a vehicle, and underestimating how much water the day will take.

Stay with the vehicle

A car is visible from the air and from a distance. A person walking is not. It gives you shade, shelter from wind, and a place to store water.

Do not spin the wheels in soft sand — you dig yourself in deeper with every second. Lower tyre pressure for soft ground and reinflate afterwards. Keep water inside the vehicle, not only in a pack.

Travel in the cool, rest in the heat

If you must move, move at dawn, dusk or night. Resting in shade through the hottest hours and walking when it is cool can dramatically reduce how much water you lose, and dehydration takes your decision-making long before it takes your legs.

Shade, made not found

There often is not any. Make it: a tarp, a space blanket, an open car door, a poncho over a bush. Get off the ground too — sand surface temperature runs far above air temperature, so a raised or insulated seat matters.

Water

Carry more than you think. Drink it rather than rationing it into uselessness — water in your body is doing more good than water in a bottle, though pacing it through the day beats drinking it all at once.

Look for water where the landscape says it should be: the outside bend of a dry watercourse, the lowest point of unusually green vegetation, converging animal tracks. Dig in shade, in the cool part of the day, and treat everything you find.

Cover up

Loose, light, long clothing beats bare skin. It slows evaporation from your skin, which is water you keep. Cover your head and the back of your neck.

Flash floods

The strangest desert danger. Rain in hills you cannot see can send water down a dry riverbed under a clear sky above you. Never camp in one. See flash flood safety.

Nights are cold

Deserts lose heat fast after sunset. People who prepared thoroughly for heat and not at all for cold have a bad night. Pack a warm layer.