Mashable recently posted a great round-up of iPhone Apps for the Great Outdoors. You can download guides to trees, wild mushrooms, birds, and butterflies, not to mention ‘scat and tracks’ and the constellations overhead. Given our survivalist ‘what would I do if?’ sort of mentality, we love the US Army Survival Guide ($1.99) which blends a little of everything, from Edible and Poisonous Plants to Temporary Shelters and Basic First Aid: the full book downloads onto your phone so you don’t need to be connected to read it. We browse through it when we have a few minutes on the subway or in a waiting room and always find useful info. Today  on the E Train, we read about “Field Expedient Cooking and Eating Utensils” (useful for camping in woods, and at sparely equipped cabins), and “Direction Finding” (we especially love “Making Improvised Compasses” ), and “Clouds, Foretellers of Weather” which would be helpful anytime. Pretty cool.

We especially love the section called “Improvise”:

“Learn to improvise. Take a tool designed for a specific purpose and see how many other uses you can make of it.”

We just heard about the highly rated SAS  Survival Guide ($6.99) which includes videos of the author, a former SAS instructor, showing techniques…

Many of these apps also exist as real books, like the U.S. Army Survival Handbook, Revised or SAS Survival Handbook, Revised Edition: For Any Climate, in Any Situation

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