The Most Useful Survival Knots Everyone Should Know

Survival knots are an essential skill for outdoor recreation and emergency preparedness. They provide reliable and versatile ways to secure gear, build shelters, and climb safely. These knots include a variety of hitches, bends, and loops, each with specific applications and strengths, making them crucial for safety and efficiency in wilderness survival scenarios.

Why Learn How to Tie Survival Knots?

Knot-tying is one of those skills that never go out of fashion—especially for outdoorspeople, but really for anyone who wants to become more resourceful on the off-chance they find themselves in dire straits. A simple piece of rope becomes far more useful when you know how to tie the right knot. With a few core knots, you can handle tasks such as:

• Building shelters
• Securing gear
• Joining ropes or webbing
• Creating anchor points for rescues
• Adjusting tent and tarp lines

If your experience in the art up till now has been restricted to tying shoelaces and the occasional in-a-pinch overhand knot, knots can seem like a difficult challenge. But while there are many kinds of knots better- or worse-suited for all sorts of situations, you actually can get by fine for most everyday applications, learning just a handful.

6 Outdoor Survival Knots to Learn

The following are some of the basic, tried-and-true knots with real value on camping, backpacking, or river trips. That includes practical matters such as setting up a tent or “lining” a kayak through risky rapids, as well as all-out survival situations, such as hastening to erect an emergency shelter in the teeth of a dangerous storm or trying to hoist an injured companion up or down a cliff face. 

This guide focuses on what each knot is used for and why it’s helpful. For each one, we link to step-by-step instructions and clear illustrations so you can practice tying them with confidence. (A picture's really worth a thousand words when it comes to demonstrating knot-tying.)

Important to note, in a disaster situation, knot-tying skills work best as part of a broader preparedness plan that also includes emergency food, water, and shelter-building skills. 

The Clove Hitch

The Clove Hitch—also called the Double Half Hitch—certainly ranks among the best knots to learn due to its versatility. A hitch refers to a knot used to attach a rope to another object. The Clove Hitch is a handy way to tie an anchor to the middle of a line and to tie something down to a post or stake with the ability to easily adjust the tension. It’s a classic knot for securing guylines, and thus useful to know for both everyday tent or tarp setup and the quick assembly of an emergency shelter when the elements are bearing down on you.

The Clove Hitch has many applications for climbers—attaching oneself to an anchored carabiner, passing an object along a length of rope—and can tie up a boat in quick fashion. But it can slip under load, and when pressure on it shifts direction, so it’s more of a temporary or quick-fix option in these cases: not a knot to absolutely depend on.

Clove Hitches in combination with Square Knots (see below) are used in the Square Lashing method of tying together poles—a very useful knot system to learn for jury-rigging shelters, for example.

The Square (or Reef) Knot

The Square Knot, used for binding, is also known as the Reef Knot because it’s a go-to way to “reef” a sail—that is, to reduce its area when winds pick up. (Sailors also employ the Square Knot in furling.) In outdoor settings, use the Square Knot to secure a bundle or tie off a long rope to store in or over a pack in a mountaineer’s coil, or in a butterfly coil secured directly to your person.

The Square Knot is great to know, without question; it’s also downright notorious because many people incorrectly use it as a bend: a joining of two different ropes. While it may hold temporarily, it isn’t designed for that purpose and can slip or capsize (i.e., pull apart)—especially when the ropes are of different sizes or materials. For situations where rope strength or safety matters, it’s better to choose a more secure knot, like the Sheet Bend, designed specifically for joining ropes.

The Sheet Bend

Use the Sheet Bend knot to join two ropes, even those of substantially different sizes. If they are different sizes, use the thicker rope to make the bight (loop) of the knot, and the thinner one to tie in. If the ropes or lines are of substantially different thicknesses, you can increase the security of the union by making two turns of the thinner rope around the bight (thus forming a Double Sheet Bend).

There are innumerable situations in the backcountry where you might use a Sheet Bend to fix together two ropes, including mending broken lines and creating a longer length to haul something. The Sheet Bend can also be used to securely anchor the corner of a tarp when rigging an emergency or ultra-light shelter.

The Bowline

Often referred to as the “king of knots,” the Bowline (“bo-lin”) forms a non-slip but easy-to-untie loop at the end of a rope. You can fix a bowline knot with one hand, which could come in “handy” (sorry) in any number of tricky situations in which you need to lasso yourself with a tossed or dangled rope end.

The classic mnemonic for learning the slightly complicated steps of the Bowline involves a friendly woodland creature: a “rabbit” (the working end of the rope) emerging from its “hole” (the loop) and going back of and round the “tree” (the rope’s standing end) and then back into the hole. (For all of you movie buffs: The Bowline is the knot Captain Quint reaches Chief Brody in the 1975 classic Jaws—the one Brody successfully ties just before the great white shark they’re pursuing makes a sudden, gaping appearance. In Quint’s seaman version, the rabbit’s an eel.)

The uses of the Bowline are myriad, including anchoring a rope to a tree or pier and hoisting a bear bag safely off the ground. Double and Triple Bowlines increase the knot’s security for use in rescue situations. Besides wrapping around a person’s trunk, a Bowline loop can also support a rescue victim as a seat or a foothold.

The Bowline on a Bight, sometimes called the Portuguese Bowline, creates a well-secured loop in the middle of a rope and is often used in wilderness rescue to tow an emergency litter or stretcher.

Double Fisherman’s Knot

The Double Fisherman’s (or Grapevine) Knot makes a strong bend for tying two ropes together, commonly used for rappelling by climbers (and thus useful to learn for any backcountry rambler, in case descending a steep face becomes critically necessary). It’s also a vital knot in the securing of Prusik Hitches (see below).

The Prusik Knot

The Prusik Knot is one of the great, trusty mountaineer’s knots, used to make slidable slings by which a rope may be climbed up and to reinforce safe rappelling. It’s also an excellent emergency hitch to learn in case you need to hoist yourself or somebody else from a glacial crevasse, cliff ledge, or whitewater.

Practice Makes Perfect

Like anything, mastering a knot takes practice, but the time you put in can pay off enormously out in the field—and someday you may genuinely need one of these bends or hitches. By using the resources we’ve shared here and others, take time to learn the exact sequence and structure of these knots, as even a seemingly small variation can completely undermine their security. 

You do not need a heavy rope to get started. Lightweight paracord is easy to pack and works well for many common outdoor tasks, from setting up tarps to securing gear. Keeping a short length of paracord in a backpack, camping kit, or emergency bag gives you a versatile tool to practice with and use in the field. Be sure to pay attention to the cord’s strength rating, especially when load-bearing or safety is a concern, and choose cordage that is appropriate for the task.

As David Seidman writes in The Complete Sailor, “No matter how good a knot is, it can’t do its job if it has been tied incorrectly. There are no partially correct knots. They are either completely right or all wrong.”

In addition to the guides linked to in the text, here are a couple of other useful references for knot-tying:

• Alderleaf Wilderness College: Camping Knots for Wilderness Survival
• CMC Rescue, Inc.: Popular Knots & Hitches for Rope Rescue