Filled with real-life encounters, Outdoor Safety & Survival by local author Mike Nash is a full-colour guidebook with photos and important how-to information designed to help keep everyone safe in the great outdoors year round.
"This is my fourth book and looking at the whole picture there's a story there in as much as the books are all interrelated in ways," said Nash, who wrote a newspaper column in PG This Week for ten years. "Along the way I had accumulated outdoor experience and safety experience both in the workplace and outdoors. When I first came here 35 years ago I was a member of the Search & Rescue group for five years."
Nash earned several Industrial First Aid tickets in the 1980s, leading to his wilderness first aid seminars at UNBC in the early 2000s to prepare staff and students for their field research work, he explained.
"In the process of preparing for those seminars I did a lot of digging," said Nash. "I then realized how much material I had and a couple of years after that I was invited to speak at a Safety Day for the forest district here. Arising from those two events the idea came about to put together a book, which I self-published in 2007 and it did quite well."
Outdoor Safety and Survival in British Columbia's Backcountry got his his feet wet with self-publishing.
When he unveiled another book, The Mountain Knows No Expert: George Evanoff, Outdoorsman and Contemporary Hero, at the International Mountain Book Festival in Banff, Nash was in discussion with Rocky Mountain Books. They decided to publish an updated version of Outdoor Safety & Survival with a much wider reach, he said.
"In this book I've added sections on desert safety, ocean shoreline and stuff like that," said Nash. "One of the things that sets this book apart from a normal safety book, which could be a fairly dry read, is I've put a lot of personal stories in the book, both mine and others, which I called reality checks. So the book is intended to be readable. People can pick it up and hopefully find some enjoyment just in reading it and quite often when you learn what other people have done that can help you when you're in a tight spot."
Just in time for summer, Outdoor Safety & Survival makes its debut Tuesday at 7 p.m. at Art Space, above Books & Co, 1685 Third Ave.
