This desert survival tip boils down to statistics and probabilities.

The good news is your odds of dying of starvation is a desert survival situation is very low. Why? Because you’ll likely be long dead from dehydration, injury, or rescued before starvation sets in.

A relatively healthy person can survive at least three weeks with no food. Your body will begin by using your fat reserves and then stealing your muscle fibers to keep you going.

Since death by starvation is a slow process, save your energy for other survival priorities.

Now with that said, don’t be an idiot and pass up a free lunch if one happens to present itself. If you stumble on some bird eggs, snatch a rodent passing by or can quickly kill a snake then, by all means, eat up.

But if a food source doesn’t readily present itself, try to ignore the grumbling noises coming from your stomach. You got more critical survival issues to worry about right now.

Learn How To Make A Solar Still

If you often travel in or near a desert, do yourself a favor and stash some thin plastic in your survival pack or vehicle. Why? Because this gives you the ability to make a solar still. And if you can craft a solar still, you can collect some much-needed water.

Solar stills are ingenious yet simple survival contraptions. They’re designed to create a miniature “greenhouse”. Heat enters through the plastic vapor barrier but gets trapped and cannot escape.

This increasing heat forces the moisture in the soil to vaporize. Creating a trapped humid atmosphere under the vapor barrier.

Then once night comes, the temperatures will drop and the moisture in the air will condense on the plastic. When setup properly you can collect this condensed water in a small container.

Here’re the basic steps to create a desert solar still:

Dig a round hole a few feet wide and a few feet deep

Setup a small collection pit at the center of the hole using a plastic sheet

Stretch your thin sheet of plastic across the hole

Find some moderately heavy rocks to hold the plastic sheet in place around the hole

You want the plastic sheet up off the ground but with a slight drop to the middle of the hole. Do this by adding a medium sized rock to the center of the sheet.

Now the plastic sheet will help collect the moisture. Water will slowly build up on the plastic sheet and as it builds, it will run towards the center of the plastic.

Then once the water collecting in the center of the plastic sheet get heavy enough, it will drop into your small collection pit.

This desert survival tip might seem a bit counter-intuitive at first. Because if you get stranded in a desert with no water, shouldn’t seeking water be your number 1 priority? Deserts are hot, and water is hard to find, right?

Yes, that’s true. However, wandering in the deserts brutal heat searching for water will increase your dehydration rate.

Or another way to think about hydration is using a very simple math equation. [Water In (-) Water Out].

Where [Water In] equals Water Consumed and [Water Out] equals Water Eliminated through waste and sweat.

So dehydration begins when this equation gets out of balance. When [Water In] is less than [Water Out] for a significant period of time. And if this balance is not eventually corrected it will lead to death.

Now, using this basic hydration equation, there are two ways to reduce the speed of death by dehydration.

You can either find and consume water (i.e. increase [Water In])

Or mitigate water losses (i.e. decrease [Water Out])

And in a brutally hot North American desert, in the middle of the day, mitigating water loss is the smarter choice. A better survival option than stumbling around searching for an oasis that probably doesn’t exist.

The risk/reward of searching for a rare water source with the sun beating down sucks. You are guaranteed to lose a lot of water through sweat. While, there’s only a slim chance of finding enough water to replenish the amount you lost.

That’s what I call a suckers bet.

Instead, seek shade, and get some rest during the hottest part of the day. You’re going to need it since you’ll be strategically active in the evenings when the temperatures drop. That’s when it’s time to travel, search for water, food, and build a solar still.

Also, avoiding sitting directly on the hot ground. Desert ground that’s been baking in the sun for hours will retain that heat. Instead, try to find ground that’s been in the shade for a while.

By Gary Paul Nabhan

To the untrained eye, a desert is a wasteland that defies civilization; yet the desert has been home to native cultures for centuries and offers sustenance in its surprisingly wide range of plant life. Gary Paul Nabhan has combed the desert in search of plants forgotten by all but a handful of American Indians and Mexican Americans. In Gathering the Desert readers will discover that the bounty of the desert is much more than meets the eye—whether found in the luscious fruit of the stately organpipe cactus or in the lowly tepary bean.