I work for an international company, and my business unit has been undergoing rapid growth over the last 18 months. As part of that, we have been hiring through our internal processes, so have a high number of ‘new-to-Canada’ team members. Home countries are quite varied - Vietnam, Africa, Australia, many parts of the US, etc.
Today our team held a team building exercise called ‘Snowstorm’. In the exercise, you are in a helicopter crash and have twelve items you have to rank in order of priority. I’m sure some of you have completed a similar exercise. Anyway, as part of the discussions, it was surprising to us winter-weather folks that many of our warm-weather expats did not realize you should never eat snow in these types of situations, or even in situations where you’re outside all day and eat a large amount of snow for whatever reason.
So, can the warm-weathered members guess why you shouldn’t eat snow in these situations? Please spoiler your answers for the first while to keep the answer a surprise.
After being told I shouldn’t do it and asked why, I answered the question correctly. However, if I was given the Snowstorm situation, I probably wouldn’t think about that risk enough to say I shouldn’t eat snow. I’d be more concerned with dehydration. All of this is to say, your question is a bit leading and probably not representative of how we would actually respond to the situation.
-fourth generation from the Deep South (Georgia and Alabama)
Just to clarify a bit, why this came up is because one of the items was a pot, and these individuals ranked it as a low priority, where those of us familiar with this knew we’d need a pot to melt the snow to drink so it was in the top three on average, behind fire sources.
I’m with Red Stilettos: This probably wouldn’t have occurred to me in a real-life situation, but I inferred because you asked “why not.” In these parts, dehydration is the big danger!
With the option of a pot, I probably would have answered correctly. I was envisioning being stranded in the wilderness with nothing but your clothes. Then, I’d probably choose to eat snow unless there was a pretty obvious alternative.
(Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that dehydration isn’t a risk in cold weather. But I probably would’ve chosen a pot, too, since water likely needs to be purified before drinking.)
IIRC the method I’ve heard recommended is to put a small amount of snow in your mouth and let it melt and warm up a bit before swallowing it.
Have a look at the map here on Wikipedia. The area of Australia that gets regular snow for *maybe *4 months of the year is very small compared to the country as a whole so it’s probably not that surprising a lot of people aren’t up on cold-weather survival.
I guess a similar thing for here is the overseas tourist who’s car breaks down while travelling in remote areas, who aren’t carrying extra water and try to walk out for help and don’t make it.
Either another traveller will be along in a day or two and find the car and report it or the police/search & rescue find the car, usually within a day or two of the person being reported missing or overdue. Long before they find the corpse (if they do).
If you stay with your car the chances of being found alive are far, far higher.
Trouble is, snow is mostly air - a lot of ‘cold’ for not a lot of water.
A method I heard about was to scoop some snow into a container (bottle, strong plastic bag) and place it inside your outermost layer of clothing - it will be melted by body heat that you were losing anyway.
I would assume it’s because eating snow as-is would bring your body temperature down too much, putting you at risk of hypothermia. But presumably it’s still ok to gather and melt snow to drink the water?
Twas never clear to me, whether it will lower your overall body temperature, or damage your mouth and throat. But I know it’s OK if you can find a way to melt it, like what the Andes survivors did.
Actually both are a possibility, snow can be well below 32F (0 C) and can potentially cause damage to the mouth and throat but…
… In times of high energy exertion, such as hiking uphill and to the point that the body is going off too much heat many people who know this will eat snow intentionally to cool down, hydrate and most importantly not to sweat. Les Stroud of the Survivorman series often does and expresses his reasoning usually as ‘if you sweat you die’, but does comment that he does not do so when approaching a stopping point or low levels of activity as that would cool down core temp’s too much.
