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Survival Tips for Mushroom Pickers
or How NOT to Become a Search Subject
by Alan Sheehan, Land Search Instructor, Oberon State Emergency Service, New South Wales, Australia
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by Alan Sheehan, Land Search Instructor, Oberon State Emergency Service, New South Wales, Australia
Mushroom picking is popular in the thousands of hectares of pine forests around Oberon during the months of January to May. Each year Oberon SES, and the Oberon Police and Ambulance get called to searches for "lost" or "overdue" mushroom pickers. As part of Oberon State Emergency Service's Preventive Search and Rescue Program, the following tips are presented for mushroom pickers to help them avoid the need for a search.
Use a buddy system to pick in pairs or a group of three. Maintain visual contact with your buddy while picking. Check you have visual contact every couple of minutes, it doesn't take long to lose contact. If you lose visual contact, use voice contact to re-establish visual contact.
Park your vehicle at an intersection, say. Concentrate on picking one block of pines, then return to the vehicle. When all pickers have regrouped, move on to the next block of pines, and so on. If you become separated from your buddy, and/or disoriented in the pines, follow the suggestions given later in "What To Do When Things Go Wrong".
Bright clothes help you to maintain visual contact with each other, and will also help searchers to find you in the event that a search is required.
Be aware of when sunset is and allow enough time to get back to the car. Remember it is difficult to see the sun from deep in a pine forest. Arrange rendezvous times between teams of pickers (if more than two or three people) and keep to those times. This allows you to find out early if someone is missing or injured and this can greatly reduce the area that needs to be searched.
Mountain weather is unpredictable. It can change rapidly and with little warning. With the poor visibility available from within a pine forest, a weather change can be upon you without warning. Warm clothing will also be of benefit after the sun goes down should a search be required.
Probably not many mushroom pickers do this, but a whistle can be useful if you do need help. Three evenly spaced whistle blasts is a widely recognised distress signal. It takes much less effort to blow a whistle than it does to shout or call out. This may not be significant until you are injured by a fall or a fallen branch or a night out in sub zero temperatures. In these situations a search is very likely, and a whistle will help searchers to find you sooner.
Stay where you are for 15 minutes, and call (use voice or whistle) and listen to re-establish contact.
If contact is not made, mark the spot (build a stone cairn, or stick tee-pee), make a mark to indicate your direction of travel (arrow etc), and follow that direction out to the road. If at all possible, when building a cairn or tee-pee, include a small green branch freshly broken from a tree. This helps searchers to distinguish a new cairn or tee-pee from old ones.
Make another stone cairn or stick tee-pee to mark where you encountered the road, then go back to the car.
Wait 30 minutes for your buddy to do the same. If they have not arrived back at the car by that time, search the perimeter of the block of pines. Leave a person, or at least a note (in a stone cairn or stick tee-pee), where the vehicle was parked if the vehicle is to be used to search or go for help. When searching from the road, stop regularly, turn the engine off if using a vehicle, and call and listen.
If still no contact with the missing person after a further 30 minutes or two laps of the block (whichever comes last), send for help: a search may be required.
To raise a search, dial 000 and ask for Police. They have the responsibility for land searches and will organise the necessary resources. When the search starts is when all those stone cairns or stick tee-pees you have built will be of value. They will allow the rapid and accurate determination of the "point last seen".
Hopefully, if you follow the tips given here, you will never need to be involved in a search while picking mushrooms.
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