Survivorman | Oregon | Les Stroud

you know when you're stuck in a survival ordeal and you have to sit through pouring rain when do you get out to get food when do you go collecting wild edibles or catching game the answer is you don't you sit and wait because the last thing you want to get is cold and wet being cold and wet is what nearly killed the kane family [Music] [Music] you know it's really easy to sit on couches and judge other people's experiences of survival or tragedy yet few of us can actually say i know what that feels like i know what they went through didn't think i'd ever get lost you know i was too smart for that to happen me and him woke up usually every morning soft and wet i had frostbite on my feet but not near as bad as his i took my shoes off while the skin came off my foots we want to do that again safe and warm in our houses the actions of others in a survival ordeal they don't even seem to make sense as couch-sitting judges we hurl questions into the air out loud like why didn't he build a fire why didn't she walk out why didn't they make a shelter well i've said it many times unless you were there you can't know you see they came out right here i'm barely a mile from where they had to endure six days of survival hell worst thing in the world to hear your kid tell you i'm dying and the part of the story that i didn't expect comes down to their love for each other you see it was that love that kept them together and kept them alive yet paradoxically it was also that love that nearly caused them to perish in my search for survival knowledge i look to the real life stories of people who've survived those who've suffered terribly but made it out and those who've died trying i'm attempting to mirror the story of the khane family a father mother and son that nearly perished only 1700 feet from their car i'll be taking along my own surrogate family near the west coast of oregon to experience only a little of what the kane family did we'll survive here as a group of three to see where and how i would have done things differently [Music] my kane's because they were out mushroom hunting had buckets with them unfortunately along the way i guess they they were tired of carrying them and they left them behind i had two she had two and then he had one how big did you say they were there they were four gallons each and we have them taped together and have the lids so we can keep them sheltered i just got tired of beating myself carrying all of them through there that might be one difference that i correct right now is i don't think we'll get rid of these because i think we can use these for survival when you want to go off and do things like mushroom hunting berry picking gathering blueberries whatever it is you're getting out in the bush most of the time you got to go off trail and that's what the kane family did it's so easy to venture off the trail and not watch where you're going one good patch of mushrooms leads to another and then to another until finally you realize you haven't looked back in hours you're hopelessly turned around and possibly lost i've done it myself picking blueberries so right now what we'll do is we'll walk into the dark the reason being rather than stopping and making a shelter and all the rest is because that's exactly what happened to the kane family we do have one advantage over the kane's well actually we have a few but one big one is it's not raining right now it poured this morning so everything's sulking wet but uh they had rain hit them on their first night we were walking in the dark it was raining getting wet his back was starting to bugging so he found this little thing that went up and around it was a rock cliff and we built a hookah brush i broke hundreds of those off and piled them into an igloo and you guys just laid inside of it and got stopping wet came out they really did come out incredibly unprepared i don't hold that against them i mean it's just it's just the nature of the beast you know you really think you're only going to be going out for a couple of hours get a few mushrooms and go home the store is actually not unique i mean who wants to carry around rain gear and backpacks when you think you're only going out for about three hours they had been taught how to mushroom pick what to look for where to go and unfortunately all of that worked against them in the end so we're gonna make some of the same mistakes that they made on purpose to test out this kind of survival surviving as a family but i'm also going to fix some of the mistakes as well and hopefully we won't have to suffer as much as they did now i've given both monica and sam their own cameras so that they can record their experience as they go through this as well i can tell you that they're both nervous neither one of them has done anything like this before so they might be with me and i'm sure they're confident in that fact but that doesn't mean something might not happen to me they might be the ones who have to affect rescue so wow you know why why i wouldn't really want to stay right here i mean this feels good right because it's open and the sun's shining through but in many ways we're kind of very vulnerable here we're at the bottom of a big bowl so anything like a predator like a cougar that might be interested in us a mountain lion all of that area all of up there is all the advantageous spot for it to be and we're kind of sitting here like this now we've got some downside on this side but yeah i don't know that i wanted to stay out here in the open if we go down too low though it'll get really cold so [Applause] an often quoted statistic is that the majority of lost victims are found within two miles of their own house or car when someone gets lost coming out into the bush basically involved in an activity that they enjoy and relaxed in whether it's mushroom hunting or berry picking it's that relaxed nature that often gets us into trouble because we're just just not thinking survival so the kane family hiked right into the dark but not in an aggressive way they were they were picking mushrooms and then it just got dark and they couldn't find their way out so there's like no problem we'll just like you know huddle and sleep for the night they did get rained on and hopefully that won't be our case because it's starting to get late now the sun's starting to drop i'm gonna stop us right here so at this point we're in for the night nearly all survival stories when they happen to average everyday people rather than extreme explorers or adventures seem to start off rather benign so it's getting dark no big deal let's just huddle together and enjoy the experience of staying out all night it'll be an adventure and tomorrow morning we'll walk out of this place no one at this point is expecting a horrific six day ordeal [Music] you curled up the first night under the huck bushes buckle brush you curled up it was pouring down rain you're getting wet now but it sounds to be seen some daylight we got up and started walking okay we headed up again headed up to see if we could see any type of road or clearing or anything and how did how did it just got thicker and thicker and harder and harder and i got down i couldn't move he was literally crawling up the hills when we decided to send him up farther and we decided to start building a shelter there were some trees that had been falling over so we thought it would be a bright ideal to throw other small trees on top of it and then throw a huckabrush the kane family didn't have a lot of supplies belinda had two folding knives mike had a folding knife dan had a belt knife and a folding knife you've got two folding knives okay i've got my folding knife and also actually the exact same belt knife that he had they did not have any food now that's understandable in a lot of cases you think well you're only going to be out for two hours i'm fine i never go out without at least something so you've got what i have a nice app so you've got an apple and right so that's pretty normal for someone to head out and have something as simple as this and what i've got i'm trying a new bit of jerky so between the three of us that's essentially our food that's not a lot what i wanted to do was add in a couple of other components of survival and see if it makes any difference at all first of all simple garbage bag i thought about them getting cold tonight and i grabbed one of those emergency space blankets little mini survival kit i rarely would ever go out on a hike without at least one of these guys dangling from my belt this was something that the kane family did not have they did not even have a a water bottle mike and belinda had a little sandwich size baggie of toilet paper and so we've got two of those that made a big difference to their survival let's see how it helps ours with monica and sam acting as my surrogate family for this experiment i'm interested to see how things play out for a family of three in a survival situation here in oregon the kane family attempted to make a bit of a shelter out of hucklebushes they had much rain to deal with my surrogate family of monica sam and i have been lucky so far no rain so i've directed them to simply gather as many ferns as possible to see if we can create a large blanket of insulation it's much too late in the day to be thinking about making a roof or a substantial shelter so perhaps just by creating a massive sleeping bag out of the hundreds of ferns available we may be able to stay warm through the night not every wilderness location has material that can be easily gathered by the armload and used as insulation this is actually an aspect of survival with a group that i rarely get to experience and that's the advantage of having more than one person to gather the supplies sam is gathering as many ferns as she can and monica's up clearing the area where we're going to sleep so there becomes a bit of a teamwork going on the best part of that is psychologically it's really comforting because it's going to be a long miserable night i'm already sort of sensing some apprehension with the with monica and i'm trying to you know get them to understand that survival requires remaining calm so doctor said just go sit in the sun just relax and just wait it out for a bit so we can always get back to more friends later but for now bring your your energy down bring your level down and just relax and remain calm that's really the first thing is to remain calm or to become calm so that's what i'm sort of putting on them right now [Applause] [Applause] even gathering them with small knives is extremely easy for an able-bodied person the three of us are bearing down and getting to work albeit mostly under my guidance in other areas dry leaves can work incredibly well if you have a tarp a rain poncho you can gather leaves on the tarp to move to one spot to become one big pile then all that's needed is to squirm into the pile and there's a good chance it'll be warm and even protecting from the rain it comes down to your own ingenuity and the luck of having abundant material with an insulation like loft to work with once you're in you're in so we've waited until the last possible moment to get inside the pile to try to get a few moments sleep so this kind of shelter is the one that i believe in a lot it works really well with with leaves but they've got to be dry leaves so you know that's tricky uh sometimes in the fall on the right day if you happen to be lost on that day you can get a big pile of dry leaves you crawl in them like it's a cocoon and it's dirty it's filthy but you keep all your body warmth in with you so what i've got happening is behind me is sam's on the one side monica's in the middle and i'm here and so using this little space blanket this emergency blanket is laid over them first and then throw all the ferns on well that's pretty cool because now we're not we've sort of got this layer between us and the ferns which is protective and um that way if it also if it comes on to rain probably huddle underneath this sort of in fetal position it won't be comfortable but we might stay dry and that'll be vital so it's heavy having all this fern material on top of us but yeah i mean like i feel i was getting cold and i i feel warm up like up against you guys i can feel heat underneath here yeah definitely okay so we're not chilled anymore right no okay only 12 hours to go the nights in the rainforest are damp and cool no matter what time of year the tree that we were in it leaked but it was spongy enough that you could take your thumb and actually push up on the tree and plug it but the ground was wet me and him woke up usually every morning soft and wet whenever side was touching the ground we were wet all of the ferns keep kind of slipping off of the three of us because we're on a slight angle it's just which is that's good to know for the next time keep things nice and flat so it doesn't fall obviously and fall off and wake up pretty chilled my toes are pretty cold monica's doing not so bad in the middle and say i'm sort of up and down sometimes chilled sometimes okay their feet are okay but we're making it through the night that's the important thing should i tell you i just heard a big massive tree fall over i heard that too what was that i want to ask you probably bigfoot are you being funny only half [Applause] so this is the advantage of of being in a survival situation when you're more than one person two three people the the work gets spread out i i never could have gathered this many ferns on my own and created this kind of big bed to crawl into like this but with monica and with sam you know we just share the workload and it just makes survival that much more possible [Applause] [Music] so we made it through the night relatively decently off and on awake the ferns clearly worked really well because whenever they would fall off of me or i would slip out from underneath them it was noticeably colder it's amazing this little tiny blanket actually made a big difference i'm just walking to warm up my feet which is an idea sam had this morning it's a good idea oh some sunshine oh there we go this is truly rationing food when two other people are looking at the same pile of cut up apple and wishing they could eat it all and not share a bite what do you guys want to do about these buckets i'd say keep one and ditch their ass keep going a bit or everyone carry one because having one isn't so bad that's not a bad idea if we each take one but we strap it to our pack and so there is another difference as compared to what the kane family did they dropped their mushroom picking buckets out of simple frustration a decision would come back to haunt them and contribute to almost costing them their lives we'll carry one each so what we're doing this morning is we're changing up the story a little bit to suit us to suit our circumstances in terms of leaving behind the mushroom gathering buckets we decided to take just three of them strap them on the back of our packs now we're not holding with our hands and carrying them so they're not a pain sam had a really good idea to actually take all of the duct tape off of the last two buckets and bring that with us just in case the kane family were very very close-knit so it's not hard to accept that every move they made individually was a move that was made to benefit the others but that can also be very dangerous and i think there was a potential for danger starting on their second day dan's back began to give out on him he had some back issues and he got real tough for him on that second day now rather than head out just go for it and leave his mom and his dad mike opted to do reconnaissance missions but still never quite leave them it's hard to leave your parents i couldn't i couldn't make that choice no i wouldn't we thought about what if i can't find him again i mean that'd be on my mind forever so it's a hard choice to make my advice would have been to have mike head out to look for help but make a very visible trail along the way by marking trees with his multiple knives so that he could indeed find them again as much as i want to criticize his decision though i wasn't there and i'm not them they did what they felt they needed to do to survive both physically and emotionally this trail that we're walking right now it's just an old it's an old cat trail it's exactly what the kane family found now you should be home free you'd think at that point follow that trail and it'll eventually lead to another trail into a road and out we kind of went for a shortcut too and it wasn't a shortcut his back was hurting so we thought we'd go up and catch a cat trail that goes through there and the castro usually has the road either at the top or bottom but there was no road at top or bottom or no landing it was uh really it'd been grown over oh grow a long time long long time ago this is a classic example here we're on this old cat trail that's exactly what happened to the kane family it just it just ends it doesn't go anywhere it doesn't get us out of here it doesn't lead us home it just stops mirroring the actions of the lost kane family in the forests of oregon i'm taking my surrogate family of monica ward and sam monge with me to see what things we might do differently i think the difference between what we do tonight and what happened last night was last night was darks coming in get a bunch of ferns and do exactly as we did but tonight since we're still out here what we really should do is stop a little earlier it's the biggest problem if you want about building a shelter is is uh you can't start building it at four o'clock you gotta you gotta start building it at like two o'clock at least because it takes a long time and so you miss half your day because you're building a shelter but then again you get through the night without getting rained on so that's going to be our dilemma for today well i hear water this is the type of creek that everyone talks about there's water up there coming down then it disappears and it reappears down there these creeks here in this part of oregon they're very very dangerous they wind around under the ground you can be following the creeks here you'll drop in over the top of your head and then you know by yourself and you're just pretty much out of it i went to jump over a creek in the bank gave away i was just pretty much wet all six days i'm going to have the girls drink as much as they can and just sort of keep water going into our system to help take away the hunger pains when they begin better to be kind of bloated with water than have an empty stomach this is good fresh clean water we can drink as much as we need i may be the one with all the experience but i can still make bad decisions that could affect us all group dynamics is a greatly underestimated part of survival that can lead to safety and rescue or down a road of panic tragedy and peril i've used animal trails a lot of times in my bush trekking but you just never know where they're going to lead to or if they're just going to peter out so animal trails game trails are not the best indicators of a way out there's some cougar dropping right there there's lots around here lots of wildlife the other problem with the game trails is they they can veer off into multiple directions and that's all these always about which one do you take you're trying to find your way out do you go left or do you go right what direction she would have went with south which wouldn't have been a good direction at all and like he said though yeah i was going to walk out but i was going to go down what would have happened if she'd gone south in the deeper woods it's true downhill is not always the right way to go it's like saying moss is always on the north side of a tree that's only a general rule of thumb and not always correct a compass wasn't an issue because we all know where the sun comes up and which way it falls down but if you don't know which direction you've got to go to get out of there it just don't matter so guys this is all yellow wood sorrel we've had the apple for breakfast and that's it and now we're hiking we've got very little food left fortunately there's lots of this i wanted to show it to you so we can eat some of it now and now wherever you see it you feel like munching it you don't have to ask my permission just grab what you need if you taste it on the tip of your tongue it should taste lemony sometimes knowing just a few simple wild edibles can help you get through the day and make you feel a little bit a little a little better at least psychologically i can see that in having two other people here to survive with it it's a good thing for me to actually since i have some experience to show them certain things so they can start relying on themselves and and i won't have to worry about them as much that's something i never really considered before that to survive with more than one person if you're the one with the experience start passing that experience on in survival knowledge should always be shared as always it is an incredibly beautiful forest now even if it stretches when you're on a survival ordeal that's still really beautiful it's a nice clearing here never ceases to amaze me how often you can be in the middle of the forest and find a beautiful clear open field just just in the middle of nowhere it's a place to get sunshine get warmed up i mean it's almost like a campground there's firewood plenty and there's ferns but not as many but then we have a fire right so that helps there's still ferns though and there's all that brush down there so it's not a bad spot but i vote we keep moving yeah anyway one thing is we know this spot is here depending on how far we hike we can always come back to it it wasn't that hard to get here yeah so if we don't find any other place is sort of worthy of surviving in we know this place is here ah this is more what i'm talking about [Music] on a comparison survival study in the forests of oregon where the kane family were lost for six days of a hellish experience i'm trying to get my own surrogate family of monica and sam to work with me on how we as a family of three survive under similar circumstances but after only a couple of days i can see the lethargy in their faces and i know what they would really rather do is sleep and eat and we'll take a short break but i have to keep them moving if we're going to be warm and dry tonight i mean it's all rocky and stuff but it's nice and open have this whole sky at night open to us all we'd have to do is sort of clear an area here like probably right where you are and we sort of clear all these rocks just clear make it flat and then we drop down you know our all of our bows and ferns so we make a bed the only thing is it's right out in the open it'd be nice to be hidden under a tree but if i can get enough branches we can make almost like a big a-frame that we can all squeeze in and then cover over to be bluntly honest i don't like being the leader here to be the one to give the orders but this is in my wheelhouse not theirs and i have to keep them motivated for their own good i know we can all settle into a rhythm and accomplish the task at hand much better than if i were out here alone so once again we separate and get to work all right well the girls are working on the uh the tarp this was the space blanket thing we've got when you use that as a roof and uh just that whole brilliant idea of taking the duct tape off the buckets and is working out i'm actually able to strip the duct tape into little tiny pieces here and use it to help tie the shelter together so every little thing helps just because it's sunny now there is no guarantee bad weather won't come in soon and even though for their mental state i did allow the girls an hour of sleeping we continue to build and prepare for the night using such seemingly insignificant advantages as the garbage bag [Music] we're all now feeling results of not eating very much if you're going into the wilderness anytime no matter what you don't have an option you've got to take something so we've got a few things a few items a little bit different from the kane family just to see what kind of a difference they all make and so far a few items that we have are making a big difference [Applause] hmm there's a spot up there that's actually got some nice running water of course has to be thorn bushes doesn't it [Applause] what a difference this makes the kane family had nothing more than two ziploc baggies if they had brought their toilet paper in i understand why the krone family wanted to get rid of their buckets they're pain in the butt to carry and they were already worried and nervous and wanted to get home so forget about the buckets drop them let's go but in the end that one little decision would cost them a lot i guess they would have helped a lot for the water that's what we thought afterwards there's like after our second day there and going up now i wasn't able to find that again either i was like man we should have kept at least one bucket you know but you know i was lucky i had the ziploc baggies or else we would have had nothing because when we got there we would all had to go down to the creek and try to drink out of the ice cold freeze instead of carrying up a substantial amount of drinking water for each of them they could only drink one at a time from a tiny little sandwich baggie water that the sun had to carry up from far below at the mountain creek my surrogate family and i won't suffer the same fate hmm so what do you want to do we need all now or no we should say you want to save something because we're out now all right we've got no food left this is this is the end yeah let's hope we can catch something okay this is the thing you know it looks like a nice full baggie of food but there's three of us here and we're not going to be sustained on the wood soil so we're rationing out the last little bit of food that monica had brought we've got 30 almonds here and a few tangerines but once you count that out and say well let's try to make it last for three days it's not a lot this is dinner this is like the amount so the kane family didn't have any food at all so even this little bit makes a massive difference and that's part of what i wanted to see by comparison coming out in a similar area being three people what if you had just these few things what difference would it make i know a lighter would make a huge difference but we didn't bring a lighter but threw in a garbage bag and a space blanket threw in that little tiny survival kit we each had a bit of food makes a huge difference [Music] a bit of survival instruction i try hard to get across is just take something anything if you're going to head out into the wilderness what can it hurt to have a few items in your pockets if they might save your life i continue to motivate the girls to keep working and i'll hope to get a fire going using a generic off the counter survival kit i found in a store somewhere this is just one of those little very inexpensive survival kits but it does have a little striker in it tiny tiny little thing unfortunately we walked by a little pond with some cattail and uh and i grabbed it i wasn't gonna leave that behind so not knowing that i was gonna have this striker that was a smart move so there's some the toilet paper that was in the little ziplock baggie just like the kane family had but this was some cattail that i found so the idea here is i'm going to add just some of the lip balm to the toilet paper because it's wax and it'll hold the flame a little longer and now i've got my cattail fluff so i want to fluff up this cattail nice and fluffy that's the spark wish us all luck here there we go simple as that i think we're in business for the night here it can never be understated what a difference it makes during survival to have a fire warmth signaling and overall comfort is one of the most important things the kane family said they would have hoped for and in my case it's a way to give monica and sam more confidence and comfort while we survive out another night in the oregon forest that was the hardest thing not having a lighter we got stuck out there like really we don't have a lighter no lighter no match it becomes miserable yeah i had frostbite on my feet but not near as bad as his and we were both hypothermia and cold you don't think right and it's hard to move hard to walk and you didn't even want to take your shoes off or you too couldn't hardly get them to take them back off i took them off the skin came off so i wasn't going to take them off again you freaked out you got to take them off everything i mean it hurt all that skin ripping off so well he didn't take his off until friday so that's where the trench and everything set in it's just our feet were soft or i don't know why our boots were so wet but our boots were soft yeah he's still got bad feet yes yes surgery from it the loss of the use of your feet in a survival situation will take that situation downhill incredibly fast one of us is um up most of the time to uh just keep the fire going so we can come out and get warm bite if we need to and then the other two will try to sleep in shifts it's still a bit chilly inside the shelter and i think what's going to be needed is a door on this front end here because it's actually warmer to come out and sit by the fire we're all using hot rocks now i actually heated up my water bottle so i've got like a hot water bottle and then i heated up rocks and putting them in my lap and just sitting here and it's actually it's incredible how how warm it gets you some of them that are not too hot you can tuck right into your body uh i usually like to put a couple between my legs and just hold them there and then uh there's one or two that were too hot to touch your body but then you put them right beside you and you can feel the heat kind of rolling off onto your face so but we're up because we're cold because everything cooled down so restoke the fire and i want to try this again [Applause] we were all pretty soaked to the bone it's not so much of being lost as being medically stranded he was going down the time we got him in there he already had the fat breaking down from hypothermia it was just starting to eat himself himself is what was already starting that's how they explained it worst thing in the world to hear you can't tell you i'm dying she's right they weren't so much lost as they were medically stranded every decision they made was based on either daniel's or michael's injuries and now i have to make decisions based on the lethargy i see creeping into the faces and the body language of monica and sam the way you survive a situation like this even with three people it just goes back in steps right now we've got 10 we can boil water in which we can do that because we have a fire we can do that because i grabbed a cheap little survival kit we could do that because gathered some cattail and tinder along the way to help we had um we did have a little bit of toilet paper which the kane family also had so one thing always leads to another in a survival ordeal and hopefully you want one thing leading to something better leading to something better and so we're staying put and we'll better this shelter but we have the advantage of we don't have frostbite on our feet my i don't have a bad back uh and the kane family did have as they put it really very astutely they were not they were sort of lost but they weren't super lost they were medically stranded and medically stranded is a tough ordeal to go through we'll stay here tonight with this shelter because we can build it up a bit we can make it better and hopefully we can build it up to the point where we can fall asleep in it and um and even if the fire dies we'll still be okay we'll be warm in there in the meantime i think i think maybe what we'll do is if we start if we get you guys concentrating on building up the making this door like this this is just more ferns and vows it's all it is ferns and vows i'll um i'll go hunting i'll see if i can find some food okay because we're running out quicker [Applause] i suggest you um find some wood soil today too yeah and maybe try if i'm not around me try picking some mm-hmm bring it back i don't think it's like mushrooms i don't think it'll wilt instantly or anything like that i still have to get monica and sam through another night and i can already tell that my energy level based on my ability to understand how to survive is much stronger than theirs so i've gone out looking for other survival advantages and i found a great one i know exactly what you're thinking where in the heck would you find a piece of plywood in the middle of the bush that's the irony to the remote wilderness well in my case i thought i'd go back down some of the trails while the girls are gathering all the spruce boughs and ferns and look around old deer stand i find hunting stands all over the place and rarely has it been a time when i could actually make use of it and either stay in it as a shelter or in this case what i did was i've grabbed this hunk of plywood has come back and there's a couple of pieces of lumber that i can bring back just for burning i guess major score and hopefully will help us tonight to stay a little bit warmer i mean it's a big hunk of plywood it's got to help oh yeah it's a bit of a payoff i mean we lose the heat from the fire but we gain keeping all of our body heat inside and certainly if any wind picks up or rain starts pouring down we'll be well protected in the meantime i can also drape it over top of the fire to keep the rain off of it so it's going to serve two purposes this is a huge score there's no such thing as garbage in a survival ordeal only useful items so we've just got rain coming on right now unfortunately i mean it's just we're talking little tiny bits of spitting is all that's happening but clouds are dark and man i was just about to go out and try some grouse hunting i might venture a little bit but i also don't want to get wet so we're going to just try and get organized crawl into our little shelter and thanks to finding that piece of plywood protect the uh the fire it's always weather [Music] rain is holding off but threatening yet i can't hold off motivating monica and sam we need food and it's better they stay active during the day so they're exhausted enough to sleep through the night in tight and uncomfortable quarters so it's getting really stormy looking it's about to rain and sam and i are off to get some wood sorrel so that we have something to eat today yeah it's weird because yesterday there was so much where we were and now that we want to collect some you can't seem to find it anywhere we don't want to get caught in the rain then we'll be soaked at some point we have to think about calories spent versus calories gained right so if you guys are gonna hike all over the place just to get a few wood sore leaves it's not gonna be worth it why don't you ease off on your energy expenditure hang back at camp if the rain comes in you'll be right there you can sort of get protected um i'll go for a bit of a hike to see if i can catch a grass and i'll try not to get lost okay just so you know i'm gonna go this way and i'm gonna just look around on the right in the bush i'll always keep the trail in sight this whole cat trail makes things a lot easier but i think if i'm gonna actually scare up a grouse i'm gonna need to get into the thick of the bush again i'm dragging my feet a lot get me too i'm exhausted today it's very difficult not to feel responsible for monica and sam monica doesn't have experience in the woods at all not even camping sam does but i think they're feeling it i know i know and just chatting with them that as far as going without food they're both feeling that and then in addition it's it's getting cold at night that's that's a big problem this kind of area is good for growth that's not gross that's a lot of cougar the mountain lion population in this area is healthy all i really want to come upon right now is a grouse grouse hunting is not so much about stealth as it is about scaring something up you don't have to move too quiet stealthy and you never know what else i might stir up take a snake at this point might as well make a few just make some marks why not i've got the belt knife that makes it doable something's been eating here of course comes to worst there's some bones here it can always be heated up and ground down and eaten for the calcium that's just always the thing too you know people say things like ah you'll just be able to catch a grouse there should be lots of them there that's not what it's like when you get out here it's not what it's like in a survival situation you don't just come upon you know a whole pack of grouse kicking around standing there ready for you to hit them often you find nothing and you starve our luck with the weather is about to run out and the oregon rainforest is about to live up to its name all of our attempts to make things better come to a screeching and soaking wet halt at the moment the plywood's not doing us any good but it's still daylight and we're just now we're just waiting out the storm and the whole difference here is simply having a plastic garbage bag and that tiny little emergency blanket and those two items have made all the difference in the world when weather like this comes in they weigh nothing to put them in my pocket didn't even notice they were there you know when you're stuck in a survival ordeal and you have to sit through pouring rain when do you get out to get food when do you go collecting wild edibles or catching game the answer is you don't you sit and wait because the last thing you want to get is cold and wet being cold and wet is what nearly killed the kane family [Applause] the first thing i told her is you know what's happening today is that they're notifying our parents and stuff they're getting our family and the sheriff department had told them well we've already searched this area we don't think they're in here at all the helicopter came within them trees right over there from us and was hovering and we were looking at them i mean all of them and trying to get their attention and he did one circle and of course he's flashing his knife and i'm flashing the phone we're thinking as he goes circles away we're taking oh my god he didn't see us we didn't want to move because planes are flying right over us you go to move and then maybe they ain't gonna see him when we seen him kind of fly out he was flying out to do his big turn we're thinking oh my god i just looked at myself he didn't see us the next thing we know he's coming straight at us flashing his lights and that's probably the best feeling in the world and now it's my turn to make a survival decision on behalf of monica and sam this is the reality of a survival ordeal you often make decisions and do things we shouldn't out of fear and panicking so right or wrong we decided rather than just sit and do nothing all night long cramped in that little shelter we're going to make the hike out of here if i take a look at family and give them a kind of a grade on a survival scale i like to do what kind of kit did they have now they score pretty much a zero on their kit what kind of skill set did they have again fairly low score on their skill set what kind of luck did they have they had horrible luck about what kind of shape they were now they were injured so again low score so far on my scale of five indicators the first four are pretty much fails but the fifth one is often the most important one it plays out time and time again in any survival ordeal the will to live the question is what motivates somebody's will to live in case of the kane family i'm pretty sure it was love close knit family love for each other it motivated them to not give up and in the end survive the essence of wilderness survival is simply and completely all about going home getting to safety it really has nothing to do with building elaborate shelters fire starting or hunting i call it a survival ordeal exactly because that's what it is an ordeal a horrible uncomfortable terrifying situation that you want to be out of as soon as possible when you're caught in one you don't care about fire tricks and techniques or different kinds of shelters you care only about seeing your own bed again or about confirming the safety of everyone with you that's survival and that's all the kane family wanted to get out of this ordeal alive to get home to be safe again together as a family you

Channel: Survivorman - Les Stroud

Views: 1,344,057

Keywords: Survivorman TV Series, Les Stroud, Survivorman, Survivorman Les Stroud, Survivorman TV Show, Survivorman TV, survive, survival, Oregon, Survivorman Legends, Conne family

Id: DSI-6wcdtBk

Length: 48min 11sec (2891 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021