West Virginia Seasonal
Survival Field Manual

SEC 0 How to use this manual

This is Part I of six. It covers what each season will throw at you and what to do about it in the first hour. Part II covers the longer haul: shelter, water, fire, and food. Part III covers travel, navigation, signaling, wildlife, and field medicine. Part IV covers floods, severe storms, landslides, wildfire, and stacked events. Part V covers getting around: air, road, off-road machines, water, and the law. Part VI covers firearms, fireworks and found ordnance, and hunting season.

The high mountains have little in common with the river valleys and the towns below them, so every section splits its guidance where it matters: mountains or valleys, backcountry or road, town or open country. Find your situation and skip the rest. The Allegheny Highlands hold the deepest snow, the coldest air, the steepest slopes, and the headwaters that come up fast. The valleys, the plateau, and the panhandles hold most of the people, most of the deer-collision miles, and the narrow hollows where flooding kills.

The split, drawn. The dashed lines bracket the Allegheny Highlands; the valleys, the plateau, and the panhandles all sit on the other side of the split. Generalized for orientation only, not for navigation; get the real maps in Sec. 10.5.

Print this manual. The page is formatted for paper: navigation drops out, checklists keep their boxes, and the sources in the footer print with their web addresses. Use Ctrl+P or Cmd+P on a computer, or your browser’s share or print menu on a phone. A printed copy works when your battery doesn’t.

0.1 The West Virginia priority order

Nearly every emergency here gets worked in the same order. In the cold months, temperature comes first; in an August heat wave or moving water, the same list still holds, you're just fighting heat instead of cold. Memorize it.

0.2 The rule of threes, West Virginia edition

• 3 minutes without air, or in the gasp phase of a fall into cold water (Sec. 13.2).
• 3 hours without shelter in mountain wind and cold, or in extreme heat. Much less if you're wet.
• 3 days without water.
• 3 weeks without food.
• And build your home for 72 hours minimum, working toward a week. Derechos, ice storms, and hollow floods knock the power out for days at a time, and the crews can't reach every ridge and hollow at once.

0.3 When something goes wrong: S.T.O.P.

0.4 Before every trip, every season

• File a trip plan with someone reliable: route, vehicle, who's along, when you're due back, and when to call for help. More people get found because of a trip plan than because of any piece of gear they carried.
• Carry a way to call for help, and know that cell coverage quits in the hollows and behind the ridges. Text before voice when the signal is weak (Sec. 11).
• Check conditions: the National Weather Service for your area, remembering that four offices cover West Virginia (Charleston, Blacksburg, Pittsburgh, and Sterling), so your county's forecast may not come from the one you expect, WV511 for the roads, and Ready WV before storm season.
• Dress to spend a night out, not just to finish the plan. That goes for every person in the party and every seat in the vehicle, and it goes double at elevation, where it's colder and wetter than the valley you left.
• Ask locals. Conservation officers, the West Virginia DNR, and the people who live up the road know the creek and the slope better than this or any book. A crossing that was fine last week can be gone.

SEC 1 · SPR Fire & Flood Spring

1.1 Hazard index — Fire & Flood Spring

1.2 Immediate actions — fire in the open

A grass or leaf-litter fire on a spring afternoon moves faster than people expect, and it runs uphill faster still. The full evacuation doctrine is in Sec. 17.2. This is the first hour.

1.3 Immediate actions — severe storm warning

1.4 Immediate actions — water over the road

Spring fills the creeks from two directions at once: rain on ground already saturated, and snowmelt coming off the high country. The full flood drill is Sec. 14.1. This is the first hour.

1.5 Mountains vs. valleys — spring notes

SEC 2 · SUM Storm & Heat Summer

2.1 Hazard index — Storm & Heat Summer

2.2 Immediate actions — heat stroke

Heat rarely makes the news here the way the floods do, and it kills anyway. It kills hardest when the power is out: after the June 2012 derecho, West Virginians sat through a stretch of 100-degree days with no air conditioning and no fans, some for more than two weeks (Sec. 15.3).

2.3 Immediate actions — flash flood in a hollow

This is the West Virginia disaster. Steep ground sheds rain into narrow valleys with one road and one creek, and the water comes up in minutes. In June 2016, eight to ten inches of rain fell in twelve hours, the Elk River crested at an all-time 33.37 feet, and 23 people died. The rain that drowns you may have fallen on a ridge you can't see.

2.4 Mountains vs. valleys — summer notes

Statewide, the summer sun burns skin faster than people expect, worse on the water and worse at elevation. Cover up, wear a hat, and use sunscreen on a long day out; a bad burn is a real injury and it stacks on top of heat and dehydration.

SEC 3 · FAL Harvest & Frost Fall

3.1 Hazard index — Harvest & Frost Fall

3.2 Immediate actions — after a deer collision

3.3 Immediate actions — tree-stand fall

3.4 Mountains vs. valleys — fall notes

SEC 4 · WIN Ice & Cold Winter

4.1 Hazard index — Ice & Cold Winter

4.2 Immediate actions — stranded in the cold

The vehicle is your shelter. Most people who die after a winter stranding die down the road, on foot, after they left it. On a West Virginia mountain road that walk can be miles, in the dark, with no signal.

4.3 Immediate actions — the cold house

4.4 Mountains vs. valleys — winter notes

SEC 5 Shelter

Shelter is the priority that buys you time in every season. In the cold it keeps you alive by the hour; in an August heat wave it's shade and moving air. The rule is the same: get out of the weather before you're desperate, not after.

5.1 Site selection — all seasons

• Out of the wind first. Wind is what strips your heat on a ridge and drives a fire or a storm at you in summer. Drop off the ridgeline, find the lee of a hill, a treeline, a building.
• Off the creek bottom in storm season. Never make camp in a dry creek bed, a low crossing, or the floor of a narrow hollow. Water comes down those fast and at night (Sec. 14).
• Not under the slope, either. The trade-off is real here: the hollow floods and the steep bank above it slides. Set up on a bench or a gentle rise, away from cut banks, fresh cracks, and slopes that have shed rock before (Sec. 16).
• Watch what's overhead. Dead limbs and leaning trees come down in wind, wet snow, and ice. Look up before you settle.

5.2 Winter shelter — the effort ladder

Work from least effort to most, and stop when you're warm enough. Sweating in the cold soaks your layers and turns them against you.

• Your vehicle is the best winter shelter you'll usually have. It blocks wind, holds some heat, and searchers can see it (Sec. 4.2).
• A building, a barn, an outbuilding, a dense stand of timber. Anything that breaks the wind beats open ground, and this state has more standing shelter per mile than most.
• Get insulation under you. You lose heat into snow and cold ground faster than into the air. Boughs, leaf litter, a pack, seat foam, anything between you and the ground.
• The pit under a big conifer, a rock overhang, or a dug snow trench works in the high country when there's nothing built. Keep any snow shelter vented with a fist-sized hole and watch for carbon monoxide if you run any heat inside (Sec. 7.1).

5.3 Warm-season shelter — shade and air

• Shade and moving air beat any structure in a heat wave. A porch, a tree canopy, the shaded side of a building. If you have air conditioning or can reach a cooling center, that's your shelter (Sec. 2.2).
• Rain and lightning send you to a solid building or a hard-topped vehicle, not a tent or a picnic shelter (Sec. 2.3).
• Bugs are part of shelter here. Netting and a zipped tent keep the mosquitoes and ticks off you at night (Sec. 12).

5.4 Houses and existing structures

• In a winter outage, shrink your world to one small room, doors shut, blankets over the windows, everyone together (Sec. 4.3).
• In a heat wave, do the opposite: the lowest, shadiest floor, shades drawn against the sun, and get to cooling if the house won't cool.
• Know your utilities. Where the water main shuts off, where the gas shuts off, and how to open the garage door by hand when the power's out.

SEC 6 Water

West Virginia has water everywhere, and almost none of it is safe to drink untreated. Creeks and rivers carry bacteria, parasites, and runoff, and in the coalfields they can carry mine drainage and worse. Plan on a gallon per person per day, more if you're working or it's hot, and treat everything that didn't come from a tap you trust.

6.1 Treatment — the reliable methods

• Boiling is the gold standard. A rolling boil for one minute kills what makes you sick. That's also exactly what a boil-water notice is telling you to do.
• No way to boil? Unscented household bleach, about eight drops (a scant 1/8 teaspoon) per gallon of clear water. Stir, wait 30 minutes, and a faint chlorine smell means it worked. Double the dose for cloudy water, and settle or filter it first.
• Filters and tablets work to their rating; read the label. A filter handles parasites and bacteria; chemical backup covers what a filter can miss.
• Never drink floodwater. It's contaminated with sewage, chemicals, and whatever it dragged in, and it may hide live wires (Sec. 14).
• Treatment kills germs; it can't remove chemicals. You can't boil chemicals out of water. If a source shows an oily rainbow film, an orange stain on the rocks, a fuel or chemical smell, foam, or an odd color, or if it sits below a road, a mine, a dump, or a treated field, no boiling or bleaching makes it safe. Mine drainage is common in the coal counties and it paints the streambed orange. Find a different source.
• Read the source, then rank it. Best is rain caught clean. Next is clear, cold, moving water taken upstream of people, livestock, roads, and workings. Then the clearest still water you can find. Muddy or stagnant water is the last choice: let it settle for a few hours or strain it through clean cloth, then boil or treat it. Everything still gets treated; a better source just lightens the load.

6.2 Winter water

• Melt snow or ice, don't eat it. Eating snow costs you core heat you can't spare and barely dents your thirst. Melt it first, over a stove or on the vehicle's defroster.
• Keep water from freezing: carry bottles inside your layers, store them upside down so the top doesn't ice shut, and insulate the container.
• Dehydration sneaks up in the cold. You don't feel thirsty, but you're still losing water with every breath, and it speeds up hypothermia (Sec. 13.1).

6.3 Storing water at home

• Store a gallon per person per day, for 72 hours minimum, building toward a week (Sec. 0). Floods and ice storms take the water and the power out together, and rural systems can stay on boil notices for days after.
• Before a storm you can see coming, fill containers and the bathtub for washing and flushing.
• Under a boil order, assume the tap is unsafe until officials say otherwise. Boil for cooking and brushing teeth too, or use stored and bottled water.

SEC 7 Fire & warmth

Warmth keeps you alive through a mountain winter, and the ways people make it are the same ways they poison and burn themselves every year. Get shelter and insulation first (Sec. 5). Then warmth, done so it doesn't kill you.

7.1 Carbon monoxide — the silent one

Carbon monoxide is the killer people never see coming. It has no smell, and it kills quietly in blacked-out houses, idling vehicles, and campers, and it kills here after every derecho and ice storm, when the generators come out.

7.2 Heating a house safely

• Space heaters get three feet of clearance on every side, plug straight into a wall outlet, never a power strip, and never run while you sleep.
• A wood stove or fireplace needs a clear chimney and a cracked window for air. A blocked flue is a carbon-monoxide emergency, and wood heat is common enough here that chimney fires are a season of their own. Get the flue cleaned before winter.
• Working smoke alarms on every level, and a way out that everyone knows. House fires spike in the heating months.

7.3 Fire in the field

• Carry two ways to light a fire that work wet and cold: a lighter and a ferro rod, kept where your body heat keeps them warm.
• Gather more than you think you need before dark, dead standing wood and dry bark from under the canopy, and build small. A small fire you feed beats a big one you can't.
• A survival fire is lawful in fire season if you clear every bit of burnable material at least ten feet back from it (Sec. 1.2). Do that anyway, in every season. In cured spring grass and dry fall leaves, a fire gets away fast, and it runs uphill faster than you can. Drown it dead before you leave (Sec. 17).

7.4 Warmth without fire

• Insulation does more than flame. Dry layers, a hat, something under you, and getting out of the wind will warm you when a fire won't start.
• Share heat. People together in one small space, wrapped together, hold warmth far better than each alone.
• Move, but don't sweat. Gentle activity makes heat; sweating soaks your layers and costs you more than it makes.

SEC 8 Food

Food is the priority you worry about last. You can go weeks without it. Where it matters in West Virginia is keeping what's in your kitchen safe through a multi-day outage, and not making yourself sick when the power comes back.

8.1 Food in an outage

• Keep the doors shut. An unopened fridge holds safe temperature about four hours; a full freezer about 48 hours, half-full about 24. Every time you open it, the clock speeds up.
• Eat in order: fridge first, then freezer, then the shelf-stable food. Cook off-grid outdoors only, never a grill or camp stove inside (Sec. 7.1).
• When in doubt, throw it out. Anything above 40°F for more than a couple of hours, anything with an off smell, and anything floodwater touched, goes. You can't taste your way to safe.

8.2 What to keep on hand

• Three days of food that needs no cooking or refrigeration, building toward a week, and a manual can opener. Match it to the water you've stored (Sec. 6).
• Food anyone in the house actually eats, including babies, the sick, and pets. An outage is a bad time to test new rations.

8.3 Living off the land

• Fishing is the realistic field food here, and it's regulated. Know the rules and carry a basic kit (hooks, line, weights).
• Don't gamble on wild plants or mushrooms unless you truly know them. The woods here are generous to people who know them and dangerous to people who guess; the poisonous look-alikes put people in the hospital every year. When it comes to food, hunger is not worth the risk.

SEC 9 Stay or go — and how to move

The most important decision in most emergencies is whether to stay put or move. Move too soon or the wrong way and you turn a bad afternoon into a search. Most of the time, in most West Virginia situations, staying put is the right call.

9.1 The decision

9.2 Rules of the march

• Keep the group together and move at the pace of the slowest person. A split party is two emergencies.
• Follow the downhill water toward roads and towns if you have no better bearing; in this state nearly every creek finds a road, a rail grade, or a house before long. But not in a flood, and know that the going in a creek bottom is brush, boulders, and crossings.
• Old rail grades and gas-well roads thread the whole state and walk far easier than a ridge side. If you cut one, it leads somewhere.
• Dress for the stop, not the walk. Shed a layer before you sweat and put it back on the moment you rest.
• Turn back while you still can. The trip out is only half the effort you have in you, and every mile here has more climb in it than the map lets on.

SEC 10 Navigation

West Virginia is settled country, but it's folded like no place else east of the Rockies. Ridges look alike, hollows branch and rebranch, the canopy hides landmarks all summer, and valley fog erases them the rest of the year. The phone that was going to save you has no signal down in the crease. Set yourself up before you need it.

10.1 Set up before you go

• Know your route and tell someone (Sec. 0). Half of navigation is having told a person where you meant to be.
• Carry a real map and compass for anywhere the trail isn't obvious, and know how to use them. Download offline maps to your phone before you drop into the hollow and lose the signal.
• Carry power. A charged battery pack keeps a phone alive, and the cold kills batteries fast, so keep it warm.

10.2 Keeping your bearings

• Stop the moment you're unsure. S.T.O.P. (Sec. 0.3). Wandering makes you harder to find and wastes the daylight, and in this terrain it usually means dropping into the wrong drainage.
• Handrails and backstops. Follow a creek, a ridge crest, a fence line, a power line, or a gas-well road. Know that a long feature (a highway, a river, a rail grade) lies in one direction so you can't walk past your way home.
• Ridges and drainages are the map here. If you know which watershed you're in, you know where downhill leads. If you don't, climbing to a ridge for a look costs less than guessing wrong in the bottom.
• In valley fog, don't travel. It sits in the hollows through many a morning, and walking blind in steep country is how people find the edge of a highwall.

10.3 Dark and cold

• Dark comes early in a hollow. The ridge steals an hour or more of evening light off the valley floor. Carry a headlamp with spare batteries from fall through spring, and plan to be where you're going before the ridge shadow reaches you.
• A headlamp saves your hands for balance and for keeping warm. Keep the spare batteries in a warm pocket.

10.4 When you have nothing: the sun and the stars

These tell you a general direction, not a precise one. Use them to pick the right handrail and to keep from walking in circles, not to hold a fine line across country.

• Shadow stick, by day. Stand a stick upright, mark the tip of its shadow, wait 10 to 15 minutes, and mark the tip again. The line between the two marks runs east and west, and the first mark is always the west one, everywhere on earth. Stand with that first mark on your left and you're facing north.
• The sun itself. It rises in the east, sets in the west, and at midday sits due south, when shadows are shortest and point north. Not exactly due east or west at the ends of the day, but close enough to tell which way a valley runs.
• A watch, by day. Hold an analog watch flat and point the hour hand at the sun. Halfway between the hour hand and the 12 is south. On daylight saving time, use the 1 instead of the 12. It's rough, so check it against a shadow stick when you can.
• The North Star, by night. Find the Big Dipper. The two stars at the outer edge of its bowl point straight at the North Star, about five times the gap between them; it's a medium-bright star, not the brightest one out. Drop a line from it to the ground and that's true north, all night, every night. When the Dipper sits low, the flattened W of Cassiopeia rides high on the opposite side of the North Star. Mind that in a hollow you may need to climb before you can see much sky at all.
• Forget the moss. The old rule that moss grows on the north side of trees is wrong; it grows wherever it's damp, and in these woods that's everywhere. A truer read is snow: it lingers on north-facing slopes and melts first on the south-facing ones.

10.5 Get your maps

This chapter assumes you're carrying a map. These are the ones worth carrying in West Virginia, and where each comes from. Every source here is free. Get them before the trip: print what you can, download the rest while you still have signal, and mark up the paper before you leave.

The flood tool doubles as the hazard map for Sec. 14; the rest of Part IV is weather, and a weather map expires by the hour.

SEC 11 Communication & signaling

Getting found is often the whole game. Signal early, signal in more than one way, and remember that the strongest signal is the one you sent before you left: the person who knows where you are.

11.1 The electronic ladder

• Call 911 first if you can. It rides any carrier's tower, not just yours.
• Text before voice when the signal is weak. A text gets through on a signal too faint to carry a call.
• The terrain eats the signal. Coverage dies in the hollows and behind the ridges, and a big piece of the eastern high country sits inside the National Radio Quiet Zone around the Green Bank observatory, where coverage is thin by design. Climbing toward a ridgetop often buys you the bars the valley wouldn't give. A satellite messenger or a phone with satellite SOS is the backup where there's no cell signal at all.
• The trip plan is a signal you sent before you left, and it works while you're unconscious (Sec. 0).

11.2 Visual and sound

• Three of anything means distress: three whistle blasts, three fires, three flashes. Sound carries up and down a hollow when nothing can be seen.
• Make yourself big and out of place. Bright color against green or snow, a signal mirror flashed at aircraft, motion. Under a summer canopy you're invisible from the air, so get to an opening: a field, a gas-well pad, a wide creek bar. A geometric ground signal gets read as human: V for need assistance, X for need medical help.
• A whistle beats your voice. It carries farther and lasts longer than you can shout, and it works when you're too cold to yell.

SEC 12 Wildlife — living alongside

The animal that hurts the most people in West Virginia is too small to see coming: the tick. Start with what bites and spreads disease, then the stinging insects, the two venomous snakes, and only then the deer and the bears. Ranked by who actually gets hurt, that's the order that matters.

One rule sits over all of it. Leave wildlife alone. If an animal changes what it's doing because of you, you're too close. Distance is the whole technique: give most animals a wide berth, and keep a hundred yards from bears. Never feed anything, on purpose or through a sloppy camp, because a fed animal gets bold and a bold animal ends up dead. A fawn or a fledgling on its own is almost never orphaned; the mother is nearby and coming back, so leave it be. Give every animal a way out, and never get between one and its young. The species below are the ones that need more than that rule.

12.1 Ticks and the disease they carry

West Virginia is one of the CDC's high-incidence Lyme disease states, and the trend line points up: reported cases more than doubled in the five years before 2021, deer ticks are established statewide, and roughly one in eight of the blacklegged nymphs the state sampled tested positive for the Lyme bacterium. Mosquitoes add West Nile virus in late summer. Prevention is the whole defense.

12.2 Stinging insects

• Bees, wasps, and hornets hurt more people here than every snake and bear combined. Back away calmly from a single one; run in a straight line, indoors or into a vehicle, if a nest swarms. Watch for ground nests when you're mowing, brush-hogging, or clearing.
• Many stings at once is a medical emergency even in someone who isn't allergic, from the sheer venom load. Call 911.
• Know the signs of a severe reaction: trouble breathing, swelling of the face or throat, spreading hives, faintness. That's anaphylaxis, and it's a 911 call with epinephrine right now if you have it (Sec. 13.3).

12.3 Snakes

West Virginia has only two venomous snakes, both pit vipers: the northern copperhead, which is common statewide and delivers most of the bites, and the timber rattlesnake, the state reptile, which keeps to rocky mountain slopes and is protected by law. Nobody has died of a copperhead bite here in more than forty years, and rattlesnake deaths are counted in single digits across generations. Most snakes you meet are harmless, and every one of them would rather leave. Still, treat any bite as serious.

• Watch your step and your hands. Rock ledges, talus, woodpiles, and old boards are snake cover. Step onto logs and look down the far side, and don't reach where you can't see.

12.4 Deer and bears

• Deer are the most dangerous animal in West Virginia, by a wide margin, and almost entirely on the road. This state has led the nation in animal-collision odds for more than a decade. Brake, don't swerve, and give the ditches your attention at dawn and dusk (Sec. 20.1).
• Black bears are the state animal and they live statewide, from the high country to the edges of Charleston, on the order of fourteen thousand of them. No fatal black bear attack has ever been confirmed in West Virginia, and the way it stays that way is food. Never feed or approach one, don't run, give it a clear escape route, and keep food, garbage, and bird feeders locked away from camp and porch.
• A bear that huffs, pops its jaw, or bluff-charges is telling you to leave. Back away talking, don't run, and make yourself big. In the rare real attack, a black bear is fought, not played dead for: fight back with everything, aimed at its face.
• A gut pile draws bears during the hunt. Work fast and get the meat away from the site (Sec. 26).

12.5 Traps and snares

West Virginia runs regulated trapping seasons through the fall and winter, and legal traplines share the same public land, trails, and creek banks you walk. The person who gets hurt is almost always a dog. Two habits prevent nearly all of it: keep dogs leashed or close through trapping season, and steer them away from culverts, brushy funnels, baited sets, and anything that smells like a lure. See a trap or snare, leash up and leave the spot. Don't disturb a legal set; tampering with someone's traps is a crime. Report a set you believe is illegal to the WVDNR.

• Foothold trap. Frightening but rarely deadly. Restrain and muzzle the dog first with a leash, belt, or jacket sleeve, then press down both spring levers at once, standing on them on firm ground or squeezing by hand braced against something solid. The jaws only need to open enough to slip the paw out.
• Body-grip trap (the Conibear type). Minutes count. These kill by clamping, usually across the neck, and they tighten as the animal struggles. If you can, turn the trap so the bars aren't square on the windpipe. Then compress one spring, hook its safety catch or lash it closed with a bootlace, and repeat on the other spring; the jaws fall open. The larger sizes beat most people's grip, so learn the leash trick: loop a leash through both eyes of one spring twice, put a foot in the loop, and pull the spring closed, then latch it. This is the reason to carry a real leash even for a dog that runs off-leash.
• Cable snare. The lock only lets the loop tighten, and a struggling dog tightens it further. Calm and hold the dog, find the small lock on the cable, and feed cable back through it to open the loop enough to slip over the head. A multi-tool with a cable cutter is your backup.
• Never try to free a wild animal from a trap. It's dangerous and illegal. Note the location and report it (Sec. 26).

SEC 13 Field medicine

This covers the injuries West Virginia actually produces: the cold ones, the crash ones, tick-borne illness, severe bleeding, and the reactions that turn deadly fast. It is not a substitute for training or for a doctor. When it's bad, your job is to stabilize and get them to help, and help here can be a long time coming up a mountain road.

13.1 Hypothermia — treatment

13.2 Cold water, frostbite, and cold injury

• Anyone pulled from cold water gets treated for hypothermia and checked even if they seem fine. Remember 1-10-1: one minute to control your breathing, about ten minutes of useful movement, roughly an hour before you go under. The rivers here run cold enough to matter well into spring and again by October (Sec. 22).
• Frostbite is white, waxy, hard skin, usually fingers, toes, ears, nose. Don't thaw it if it might refreeze, and never thaw feet someone still has to walk on. Never rub it. Get to warmth and let a hospital do the rewarming.
• Trench foot comes from staying wet and cold for hours or days, and these wet woods produce it. Keep feet dry, change socks, and warm them before the damage sets.

13.3 Anaphylaxis

• Trouble breathing, swelling of the face, lips, or throat, spreading hives, or faintness after a sting, bite, or food is a life-threatening allergic reaction.
• Use an epinephrine auto-injector immediately if you have one, into the outer thigh, then call 911 even if they get better. It can come back, and a second dose may be needed.

13.4 Heat illness and tick-borne illness

The heat-stroke drill gets its own first-hour card in Sec. 2.2: confusion, staggering, and hot skin is a 911 call, and you cool aggressively while you wait. The slow-burn illness of these woods is the tick's: a spreading rash, fever, aches, or crushing fatigue in the days to a month after time outside means a doctor visit, and say the word tick when you get there (Sec. 12.1). Caught early, Lyme and its cousins are very treatable. Ignored, they can cost you a season or a joint.

13.5 Bleeding and trauma

13.6 CPR

• Unresponsive and not breathing normally: start hard, fast compressions in the center of the chest, about two per second, and send someone for 911 and the nearest AED. Don't stop until you're relieved or they revive. The dispatcher will coach you.
• In a drowning, give rescue breaths too if you can; the problem is oxygen. Don't waste time trying to drain water. Drowning patients can come back after a long effort (Sec. 22.2).

13.7 The evacuation call

• Call for help early for anything you can't handle: uncontrolled bleeding, a head, neck, or back injury, chest pain, a stroke's signs, severe hypothermia or heat stroke, a bad allergic reaction, or anyone who's confused after an injury. Early matters more here, because the ambulance is coming farther than you think.
• Give the dispatcher what they need: where you are as exactly as you can, what happened, how many are hurt and how, and what you're doing. In the hollows, the road name and the nearest landmark beat coordinates the dispatcher can't picture. Then do what they tell you.
• Nothing by mouth for anyone who's confused, drowsy, or might need surgery.

SEC 14 Flash floods & river floods

Flooding is West Virginia's disaster. The 2016 flood killed 23 people in a day. The 1985 Election Day flood killed 47. Buffalo Creek in 1972 killed 125 when a coal-waste dam let go. In June 2025 it was Wheeling and Fairmont, eight dead in flash floods that rose in under an hour. Steep ground, narrow hollows, and towns built along the only flat land there is, the creek bank, make this the hazard the whole book keeps pointing at.

14.1 Immediate actions — water over the road

14.2 Immediate actions — flash flood in a hollow

Most of the state's flood dead were in narrow valleys when the water came. The first-hour drill is in Sec. 2.3; this is the shape of the thing. A hollow has one road, and the road follows the creek. When the creek rises, the road out is the first thing it takes.

14.3 River floods, dams, and impoundments

• The big rivers crest late. The Ohio River, the Kanawha, the Monongahela, and the Potomac rise for days after the rain, and the flood can arrive under a blue sky. A river flood is slower and gives you time to move; use it.
• Know what sits upstream of you. West Virginia lives below dams and coal-refuse impoundments, and Buffalo Creek is the reason this bullet exists: 132 million gallons of slurry down a narrow valley in minutes, 125 dead. If you live below one, know it, know your route uphill, and treat a failure warning as leave-now.
• Know your ground before the rain. The WV Flood Tool maps the state's flood zones parcel by parcel, on FEMA's official data, and it works on a phone. Their rule is worth keeping: if in doubt, it's not out.
• Ice jams flood in late winter, when breaking river ice piles up and backs water over the banks fast. The same rule holds: high ground, not a closer look.
• After any flood, everything the water touched is suspect: the food, the well, the wiring. Throw out flooded food, boil or treat the water until it's cleared, and don't restore power to a soaked house until it's checked (Sec. 6, Sec. 8).

SEC 15 Severe storms, tornadoes & derechos

The mountains thin out the tornadoes, but they don't stop them. West Virginia averages a couple a year, 2024 set the record with twenty, and the Shinnston tornado of 1944 killed a hundred people in an evening. The wind that hits more often is the straight-line kind: the June 2012 derecho crossed the state in hours with gusts near 90 mph and put more than half of West Virginia in the dark. Treat a severe thunderstorm warning with a tornado's respect.

15.1 Immediate actions — tornado warning

15.2 Derechos, straight-line wind, and falling trees

• A derecho is a wall of wind that runs for hundreds of miles. The 2012 storm covered 700 miles in 12 hours and arrived in West Virginia with barely half an hour's notice in places. When a severe warning says destructive winds, be inside a solid building before it hits, away from windows.
• The trees are the weapon. This is the third most forested state in the country, and big timber came down on houses, roads, and lines across all but two counties in 2012. Don't ride out a wind warning in a vehicle under trees, and don't walk the woods in one.
• Treat every downed line as live. Stay far back, and call it in. After a big blow, assume every road has one across it somewhere.
• Large hail falls under the strongest storms. Get under a solid roof, away from windows, and off the road; hail on a windshield at highway speed is how people lose control.

15.3 The long outage

The 2012 derecho left about 688,000 West Virginia customers dark, some for more than two weeks, in a stretch of 100-degree days. The storm killed three people here; the outage and the heat kept killing after it. The lesson is the home standard in Sec. 0: 72 hours minimum, building toward a week.

• Run the generator right or not at all. Outdoors, 20 feet from any opening, exhaust pointed away (Sec. 7.1). The days after a derecho are West Virginia's carbon-monoxide season.
• Work the food clock (Sec. 8.1) and the water plan (Sec. 6.3).
• Mind the heat or the cold, whichever the outage lands in. Check on the elderly and anyone alone, twice a day (Sec. 2.2, Sec. 4.3).

SEC 16 Landslides & rockfall

No state pays more per person for landslides than West Virginia. Nearly the whole state rates high for them, tens of thousands of old slides are mapped, and the recipe is everywhere you look: steep slopes, soils that swell when wet, and roads and houses cut into the toe of both. Most slides here are rain-fed. When the ground is saturated, the hillside is loaded.

16.1 Immediate actions — the slope is moving

16.2 Reading the ground

• Saturation is the trigger. Long soakers, cloudbursts on wet ground, and fast snowmelt load the slopes. The days during and after are slide weather, the same days the creeks are up (Sec. 18).
• Old slides move again. Hummocky, stair-stepped hillsides, tilted or J-curved trees, and benches of jumbled ground mark where the hill has already failed once. Don't build, camp, or park below them.
• Cut and fill is where people meet the hazard. Road cuts, house pads benched into the hill, and mine benches all steepen the slope. Freeze and thaw works them loose all winter; rockfall on the road doesn't wait for a storm.
• Watch the small stuff: pebbles ticking down a cut, a new bulge in the bank, fresh soil over the guardrail. Small movement often runs ahead of big movement.

16.3 Living under a slope

• Know your hillside the way you know your creek. If your house sits under a steep cut or on old slide ground, heavy-rain nights deserve the same alertness a flood watch does.
• Water management is slide prevention. Keep gutters, culverts, and ditches moving water off the slope, not into it. A blocked culvert soaks the exact ground you need dry.
• New cracks in a foundation, a driveway, or the yard, doors that stop closing, leaning fences: document them, and get the county or a geotechnical eye on anything that grows.

SEC 17 Wildfire & grass fire

West Virginia burns more than people expect, and not in the season you'd guess. The danger windows are spring, after the snow and before green-up, and fall, when the leaves are down and cured. The law knows it: the statutory fire seasons run March 1 through May 31 and October 1 through December 31 (Sec. 1.2). Careless burning causes most of the state's forest fires, and on these slopes fire runs uphill with a speed that surprises everyone who hasn't seen it.

17.1 Before there's a fire

• Most homes are lost to embers, not the wall of flame. Embers ride the wind up to about a mile ahead and find the roof, the gutters, the woodpile. Clear leaves and needles off the roof and out of the gutters, screen the vents, and move firewood and propane 30 feet or more from the house.
• A house on a slope needs more. Fire climbs, so the downhill side of a hillside home is its front door. Clear it hardest there.
• Give yourself two ways out of any place in fire country, and know both. A hollow with one road can lose it to the fire.
• Watch the danger and the law: the Division of Forestry posts fire danger and the burning rules. In a drought, fireworks are arson waiting to happen (Sec. 25).

17.2 Trapped by fire

17.3 Debris burning — where the fires come from

• Burn legal or don't burn. In fire season that means 5 p.m. to 7 a.m. only, dead out by 7, a ten-foot cleared safety strip around the pile, vegetative material only, and you stay with it until it's cold (Sec. 1.2).
• Never burn on a dry, windy day, in any season. Small piles beat one big one, water and a shovel stand by, and the fire you walk away from is the one that takes the mountain.
• Smoke on the highway is a whiteout of its own. Slow down, lights on, and don't stop in the smoke where you can't be seen.

SEC 18 When hazards stack

The worst West Virginia days aren't one hazard, they're several at once, each making the others harder. The skills are the ones you already have from Parts I through III. This is about seeing the stack coming and not getting tunnel vision on the first problem.

18.1 The derecho summer

The 2012 pattern: a wall of wind crosses the state in an afternoon, the timber takes the lines down in fifty-three counties, and then the heat wave the storm rode in on settles over a state with no power. Now it's falling trees and blocked roads, then generators and carbon monoxide, then heat stroke in the houses that stayed dark, for two weeks. Survive the half hour of wind indoors (Sec. 15.1), then work the long outage like the season it is: CO rules absolute (Sec. 7.1), the food and water clocks (Sec. 8.1), and eyes on the elderly and alone through every hot day (Sec. 2.2).

18.2 Rain on a loaded hillside

The Appalachian stack: days of rain saturate the slopes, then a cloudburst parks over the headwaters. The creek takes the road at the bottom of the hollow at the same hour the hillside lets go across it higher up, and the way out is cut at both ends. Go up the hillside early, on the warning (Sec. 14.2), but read the slope you climb (Sec. 16.2): pick the ridge spur, not the drainage, and not the undercut bank. Then expect to be cut off, and let the Part II standards carry you, shelter (Sec. 5), water (Sec. 6), warmth (Sec. 7), and food (Sec. 8), until the water drops and the dozer gets through.

18.3 Ice, the dark house, and the long cold

An ice storm glazes the ridge roads and takes the lines down with the trees. The house goes dark in the cold, somebody's stranded on the mountain in the same storm, and the generator comes out of the shed. Three killers share the night: the road (Sec. 4.2), the cold house (Sec. 4.3), and the carbon monoxide (Sec. 7.1). Nobody drives the glaze to check on anybody until the salt truck has been through; the phone check comes first.

18.4 The stacked-event mindset

• Fix the fastest clock first. Water, fire, and a moving slope work in minutes; cold and hunger give you hours. Triage by speed.
• Don't fixate. Solving the first problem while a faster one closes in is how stacked events kill. Keep looking up, and keep looking at the slope.
• Assume you're on your own for a while. When a whole region is hit, help is spread thin, and a hollow is the last road the crews reach. The 72-hour-plus home standard is built for exactly this (Sec. 0).

SEC 19 Flying

Most West Virginia flying is small general-aviation planes and the mountain weather that makes them dangerous: ridge winds and downdrafts, valley fog, icing in the cold months, and thunderstorm lines in summer. If you're a passenger in a light plane, you have a job.

19.1 The passenger's job

• Know where the survival gear and the exits are before you take off, and how the doors work.
• Dress for the ridge you're flying over, not the heated cabin. The high country is colder and wetter than the airport you left, in every season.
• Speak up about weather. There's no shame in scrubbing a flight. Pressure to go, get-there-itis, is what puts small planes into mountain weather they can't handle.
• Stay with the wreck if you go down. It's shelter and it's what searchers look for, and under a summer canopy it's the only thing they'll see (Sec. 9.1, Sec. 11.2).

19.2 Choosing the ride

• A pilot who waits out weather is the one you want. Schedule margin, not schedule pressure, and mountain experience over any other credential.
• File a flight plan or tell someone the route and the timing, the same as any trip (Sec. 0).

SEC 20 The roads

The drive is the most dangerous part of most West Virginia trips. Deer are the year-round story, and no state's odds are worse; the mountains add ice, fog, rockfall, and curves with no forgiveness built in. Check WV511 before you go in bad weather, and any time you're crossing the high country in winter.

20.1 Immediate actions — deer in the road

What to do after you hit one is in Sec. 3.2.

20.2 Driving the mountains

• Slow down and leave room. Ice and packed snow stretch your stopping distance far past what feels safe. Bridges, shaded curves, and the north side of every ridge ice first and thaw last.
• Fog owns the hollows and the ridgetops. When it drops to nothing, slow to what you can see, lights on low beam, and get off at a wide spot if you can't see to drive. Don't stop in a travel lane.
• Grades and brakes: take the long downhills in a lower gear instead of riding the brakes, and give the loaded coal and log trucks the room their braking distance needs.
• Watch the cut banks after heavy rain and through the freeze-thaw of late winter. Rock on the road is a normal hazard here, worst on the inside lane of a cut curve (Sec. 16).
• Carry the winter kit from fall through spring, and keep the tank at least half full so you have fuel to run for heat if you're stranded (App A).

20.3 Other hazards

• Treat every downed line as live and stay far back; report it (Sec. 15).
• Water over the road is a turn-around, every time, no matter how shallow it looks (Sec. 14.1).
• Slow-moving farm machinery and ATVs share the rural roads, especially at dusk, in the same low light the deer are moving in. Close on them slower than your eyes tell you to, and pass only when it's clearly safe.

SEC 21 ATVs & UTVs

Nobody rides like West Virginia, and nobody pays like West Virginia: the highest ATV death rate in the nation, year after year. The Hatfield-McCoy system draws riders from every state, and the same few mistakes drive most of the toll: pavement, no helmet, extra passengers, speed, and alcohol. The machine is not the danger. The shortcuts are.

21.1 The rules that keep you alive

• Stay off the pavement. ATVs are built for dirt; on asphalt the tires grab and the machine flips. State law bars ATVs from any road with a center line or more than two lanes except to cross, and the injury numbers climbed after more road riding was allowed. Legal or not, pavement is where riders die.
• Helmet, every ride. The law requires one under 18; the physics require one at any age. Head injury is what turns a rollover fatal.
• One rider per seat. No passengers on a machine built for one; a passenger shifts the balance and takes the machine over. In a UTV, seat belts on everyone, arms and legs inside; in a rollover, people are crushed reaching out.
• Ride sober. Impaired operation is enforced like DUI (Sec. 23), and alcohol runs through the fatal-crash reports.
• Kids on kid-sized machines, with training and supervision. Operators under 18 need a safety course, and an adult-sized ATV under a child is a rollover looking for a slope.
• Tell someone your route. A crashed rider alone in a hollow is a search problem (Sec. 0); carry the day-pack layer on the machine (App A).

21.2 Riding the trail systems

• The Hatfield-McCoy rules are the safety course in list form: permit and helmet for every rider, eye protection, no one under six on the trails, kids under sixteen supervised within eyesight, daylight only, no alcohol, stay on the marked trail. They're state law on those trails, and good practice everywhere else.
• Ride to your sight line. These trails are blind curves and blind crests over old mine benches and steep sides. Oncoming machines hold the same trail you do.
• Mud, rock, and off-camber are where rollovers live. Slow is smooth; walk anything you wouldn't want to meet sideways.

21.3 Openings in the ground

The rule is the campaign name: stay out, stay alive. West Virginia's hills hold generations of abandoned coal workings: open portals and shafts, highwalls, subsidence pits, and flooded quarries, most of them older than the laws that would have sealed them. There is no safe way into any of them and no survival situation that gets better inside one.

• The air you can't see is the killer. Old workings hold oxygen-poor air and gases that give no warning at all; people take a few steps in and drop. This is the danger nobody expects, and it's why an open portal is not a shelter, not even in a storm.
• The holes you can't see are next. Shafts and subsidence openings run deep, hidden by brush, debris, or rotted covers. Keep kids, dogs, and machines away from portals, highwall edges, old foundations, and any uncapped well, and treat every bench and spoil pile as undermined ground.
• Flooded pits and quarries drown more people than the shafts swallow. The water is deceptively deep and cold, with ledges, cable, and machinery under the surface and steep slick walls you can't climb back out of.
• Old explosives turn up in these places. Don't touch them; that's the 3 Rs (Sec. 25). Report hazardous openings to the WVDEP Office of Abandoned Mine Lands.

SEC 22 Boats & whitewater

West Virginia's water moves. The New, the Gauley, the Cheat, and their cousins built the state's whitewater name, the Gauley's dam-release season draws the world every fall, and the same rivers drown swimmers and paddlers who treated them casually. Two habits prevent most of it: a life jacket worn, and a sober hand.

22.1 The rules that keep you alive

• Life jackets worn, not stowed. Nobody puts one on in the water, least of all in current. The law requires a wearable PFD for every person aboard, children under 13 must wear one while underway, and boats 16 feet and over carry a throwable besides (canoes and kayaks excepted). On the water that matters here, worn is the only version that counts.
• A sober operator. Boating under the influence is enforced at the same 0.08% as driving (Sec. 23).
• The water is colder than the day. Snowmelt and dam releases run cold into summer, and cold water starts the 1-10-1 clock the moment you're in it (Sec. 13.2). Dress for the water, not the air.
• Rivers rise without asking. A storm upstream or a release schedule can change the river under you. Check levels and forecasts before you launch, and get off rising water early (Sec. 14).

22.2 Immediate actions — someone in the water

22.3 Whitewater, releases, and dams

• Run real whitewater with real preparation: a guided trip or solid training, a helmet, the right boat, and never alone. The Gauley's release season stacks big water and big crowds into six fall weekends, and it has killed experienced boaters.
• Scout what you can't see. Undercut rocks and sieves hold and keep swimmers; if you don't know the line, get out and look, or walk it.
• Stay away from low-head dams, the quiet horizon lines on lazy rivers. The recirculating water below one traps and drowns even life-jacketed swimmers, and it doesn't look like anything from upstream. Portage, every time.
• Flood water is not paddling water. A river over its banks is running through the trees, and every one of them is a strainer.

SEC 23 Impairment & the law

Impairment is a thread through most of the deaths in this book, on the road, on the water, and on the machines. This is a general summary, not legal advice, and the law changes. Check the current rules before you rely on any of it.

23.1 On the road, water, and trail

• DUI in West Virginia starts at 0.08% blood alcohol, 0.04% for commercial drivers, and an aggravated tier at 0.15% and up brings mandatory penalties. Impairment by drugs, prescribed or not, counts the same.
• Under 21, the limit is 0.02%, which in practice means none.
• Refusing the test costs the license under implied consent, conviction or not.
• The water and the trails count too. Boating under the influence carries the same 0.08% line, and impaired operation of ATVs and UTVs is enforced as well (Sec. 22, Sec. 21).

Beyond impairment, the registration, safety-course, and equipment rules for boats and machines live in their own sections. The point that ties them together: the machine doesn't forgive the drink, and neither does the river under it.

SEC 24 Firearms & sharp tools

Firearms are ordinary equipment across much of West Virginia, and deer season puts a lot of them in the woods at once. The safety rules are few and they don't bend.

24.1 The four rules

Every gun accident you'll ever hear about broke at least one of these. They're redundant on purpose: when one fails, the next one catches it.

24.2 Carry, storage, and the cold

• West Virginia allows permitless carry for adults 21 and up who can lawfully possess a handgun, with a provisional license path at 18 to 20 and the usual off-limits places: schools, courthouses, and posted property among them. The details are yours to know before you carry; check the current rules with the West Virginia Attorney General.
• At home: locked, ammunition separate, and teach the kids the four rules early and out loud. The trained kid is the safe one.
• In the cold, heavy oil gels and a gelled action misfires. For deep-winter work, run the action nearly dry or use a cold-rated lubricant, and keep snow and mud out of the muzzle; a plugged barrel can burst.
• In vehicles and on machines, unloaded and cased is the habit that prevents the ugly ones and simplifies every stop and trailhead.

24.3 Knives, axes, and saws

• Cut away from yourself, and keep everyone clear of your swing before an axe or a big blade moves. The classic wounds happen to tired people with cold hands.
• The chainsaw earns its own respect. Firewood is a way of life here and storm cleanup is a season; chaps, eye and ear protection, and a plan for where the tree and the bar are going, every cut. A snag or a spring-loaded storm blowdown moves when you cut it.
• Don't cut with hands too numb to trust. Warm them first (Sec. 13.1). The minutes you save aren't worth the artery.
• A deep cut far from help is a Sec. 13.5 problem: pressure, packing, and the evacuation call.

SEC 25 Fireworks, explosives & found ordnance

25.1 Fireworks

• Fireworks rules mix state and local law here, and towns add their own restrictions. Check before you buy or light.
• In fire season or a drought, a firework is a forest fire (Sec. 17). Cured grass and dry leaf litter don't care that it's a holiday.
• The basics don't change: an adult lights them, water stands by, nobody relights a dud, and everything soaks before it hits the trash.

25.2 Found explosives — the 3 Rs

Coal country turns up blasting material: old dynamite in barns and sheds, caps and primers around abandoned workings, and dumped cases in the brush. Old military souvenirs surface too. Old dynamite sweats and grows unstable with age. Finding something is not the emergency. Handling it is.

SEC 26 Hunting season — sharing the woods

26.1 When and where

• The seasons run long here: archery for deer and bear opens in late September, firearms deer season peaks with the buck season around Thanksgiving, and the December bear season carries armed hunters in the woods to New Year's, with turkey, small game, and trapping seasons woven through. The WVDNR regulations summary is the source, and it changes every year.
• From late September on, assume armed people in the woods, heaviest on the buck-season opener, which empties schools and fills every pullout. A parked truck at a gate means someone is out there with a rifle.

26.2 If you're out there and not hunting

• Wear blaze orange whenever a deer firearms or muzzleloader season is open. The law requires hunters to wear at least 400 square inches of it as an outer garment; wear as much whether you're hunting or not, and put orange on the dog.
• Skip white, tan, and brown clothing in the deer woods. A white hat or a flash of tan can read as a deer.
• Stay on trails, make noise, and give the dawn and dusk hours in heavy cover to the hunters. That's when they're out and visibility is worst.

26.3 If you're the hunter

• Tree stands hurt more deer hunters than anything else in the woods. Wear a full-body harness, keep three points of contact, haul the gun up on a line, and clip to a lifeline from the ground up (Sec. 3.3).
• Rule four is hardest in brush and low light: identify the whole animal, never movement, color, or sound. The four rules exist for exactly these moments (Sec. 24.1).
• Unload for every obstacle: fences, deadfall, climbing into a stand, creek crossings, boats, and machines.
• Gut piles draw bears. Work fast and get the meat away from the site (Sec. 12.4).
• Dress for the night out you didn't plan. The high country turns hard in November, and a dragged-out deer or a wrong turn puts you in the dark fast (Sec. 4).

26.4 Certification and land

• Hunter education is required for anyone born on or after January 1, 1975, before buying a base license. It's free, it's where the four rules and the orange law are taught, and the WVDNR runs classes statewide.
• Know whose land you're on. Get written permission for private land, know the public-land boundaries, and check the current regulations before the season, not after an officer finds you.

APP A Kits

If it isn't with you, don't count on having it. Machines roll, boats flip, and packs get left in the truck. The home layer covers the days-long outages of Part IV, where the emergency comes to you. Build in layers: