Survivorman | Pilot Episode | High Rez Version | Winter | Les Stroud

i'm at least 100 kilometers from the nearest snowmobile trail or or seoul last night it was -40 i have no matches and only one energy bar per day where is the most difficult place to survive is it the arctic the jungle the desert the deep forests which of the world's environments makes survival a precarious thing and forces you to exist on a knife edge between life and death it's not a place it's not an altitude or a particular type of topography it's not dry or wet it always comes down to temperature and what temperature is the most difficult the cold hands down it's always the cold [Music] [Music] in the year 2001 i filmed myself surviving in the far north of canada and it struck a chord with anyone who saw it so i was asked what else can i do and before i could stop the words from leaving my mouth i foolishly answered how about the winter and so in the middle of january in canada's far north in a deep cold snap in the year 2002 i set off a game and a survival endurance test to take on the challenge of coping with nature's best and worst during the most unforgiving time of the year flights like these are always anxious and foreboding they're filled with fearful thoughts and doubts what am i getting myself into this is foolish how do i survive out here completely alone devoid of human contact or help in the most difficult survival situation of all deep core this is crazy i can hear the sound of trevor's plane just off in the distance now it's about minus 30. now what [Music] it's mid to late afternoon and uh i don't have the time to get picky so best bet is to get out of this wind it's not even a strong wind more like a breeze but in these temperatures it feels like tiny razor blades cutting across the exposed flesh of my face [Music] see if i can find a good little shelter here somewhere there comes a time well the time is pretty immediate actually you've got to make one important decision stay or go most importantly is just the realization that you have to make that decision yeah if you stay you have a chance to build camp uh make signal fires and uh maybe start hunting you might have a situation where you're simply waiting for a better chance to travel like waiting out a storm or perhaps waiting for freeze up or maybe there comes a time when you realize they ain't looking for you anymore and it's time to get out of here no one will be looking for me for at least seven days so whatever happens out here is entirely up to me i have only choices as limited as they are but i still have to make the right ones my very survival depends upon it [Music] home i guess i don't have a lot of options here you know in the survival books they always show some guy in an emergency quick emergency shelter you can get under the bows of a spruce tree or something and there's a little cubby hole yo well i've looked around this is about as best as i can do for immediate natural shelters but there is a lot of bowels and stuff we'll see i got to get in here and just hopefully make sure i'm protected from most of the wind that's really important so get out of that wind i looked around and saw a couple of other possibilities but they uh if you sit and watch for a while you notice a little spanish moss hanging down you could see it moving so you knew there's a breeze working through there when i sat for a while i looked at this spot here everything's still so hopefully i'm in a little protective cove i just did a big no-no put my axe down on the ground huge huge mistake to do that do not put your axe on the ground especially in the wintertime because you'll lose it in a mere second the benefit of this shelter is it's sort of a natural shelter all i'm doing is grabbing chopping off the tops of trees little spruce trees here and filling up a wall in the holes here sort of like a makeshift lean-to i guess [Music] oh it's just feeling cozy already [Music] i got to keep my humor up because [Music] it won't be there at 3 i could get into doing a big elaborate shelter but i only have probably another hour and a half of daylight and i know that in making a shelter like that i'm going to start sweating you sweat you die so i don't want to sweat [Music] yeah this is this is possibly dangerous you better know how to wield an axe before you start doing this any injury out here is deadly you don't have to use your axe don't break things off you want to save the axe keep it sharp now all of that said i actually did bring a file with me because i rarely take an axe along without a file strap to it because the dull axe makes you work a lot harder these bows are going to be good insulation for the shelter both underneath me and all around me try and make like a cocoon [Music] it's always good to know how many hours you've got left in the day and a great and easy way to do that is to outstretch your hand towards the sun and on an average hand each finger represents about 15 minutes so if you just touch the bottom of the sun and then count down to the horizon you get a good approximation of just how many hours are left in the in the daylight and that's always important to know especially when the sun setting is followed by brutal cool temperatures gonna light the fire i have one match so after i get the fire going all i'm gonna do then is reinforce shelter a bit and try to get as much firewood to hear on hand before it's too dark for me to be moving around in the bush i don't have a lot of time though here we go last match of the week ah birch bark birch bark is got to be the best fire starting material out here [Music] [Applause] well it was definitely a cold night i kept the fire going and i was able to just keep feeding it all night a lot of shivering very little sleeping that's uh it's warmed up a bit it's about minus uh 17 right now so it's not so bad let's find out what i've got to work with here first thing uh very valuable in survival situation rope uh a thousand one uses flare well we're gonna try out a flare never had a chance to do it before so we're gonna try it out this week and see how that works signal mirror excellent we'll uh i'll take them it's stuck in there but take my word for it inside there's a small mirror can used not only for signaling airplanes but you can also check your face and see if you've got any white spots in case you've been out in the wind make sure you're not getting frostbitten anywhere ah a hot hand that's got to help me out at night uh for sure only one unfortunately and there's seven nights to deal with a whistle vital you can go behind a tree in the bush even in the summertime especially in the winter yell your lungs off no one can hear you a whistle helps uh to cut through the dense forest cover a lot better same thing with trying to go across rapids very difficult to hear a human voice flint striker i'm going to get into that later for fire starting excellent item to keep with you you can drop this thing in the water pick it up a year later and it still works aha garbage bag not just any ordinary garbage bag an orange garbage bag i've got a shelter cover i've got a raincoat i've got a signal light device because orange orange is going to show up a lot better than dark green if you can take a garbage bag make it an orange one fishing line and some lures to go with it and what's important with these lures as well is that uh i've purposely chosen winter fishing lures and that's another thing that's key when you set up your survival kit make it something that's conducive to the season you're in so in this case something for winter with my first zone of assessment considered what i'm carrying it's time to see what's around me now these tracks here are woodland caribou tracks unlike its counterpart up in the arctic they tend to be a very solitary animal very difficult to see in the boreal forest especially in the summertime but in the winter time they will come together in small little communal groups the great thing about what you can see here is the difference in time in these tracks these two tracks here beside me who knows maybe a couple of days old or so but it's been windy for most of the day and those tracks over there aren't wind blown at all so we know that an animal has come through here pretty recently further on up there you can see where there's some bit more snow muscled up there mushed up what happens is they will often come together in little groups out in the middle of lakes and who knows what they do just hang out and talk but they do tend to come together out there walk around this is probably more than one animal as i see some other tracks around the area here but animal tracks are nothing more than that tracks you can't eat them and they won't keep you warm and the truth about the wilderness is that it's not crawling with available game and easily caught food this is brutal this is why you want to stay away from hills as much as possible this is where the hole in the snowshoe this is what it's all about my toes are slipping down into the bottom of the or through the hole of my snowshoe and it's my toes that are gripping the hill to help push me up which is a difficult in this powdery poofy slippery snow again that's why i so much prefer using moccasins rather than boots i can feel the ground with my toes i can get that little extra grip in there it's not easy though either way oh what have we here in the summertime i did a similar survival situation where i uh where i came and stayed right here in this location right in this spot but uh let's take a look and let's hope there's no bears that used it for a den because it's a perfect size there's even that even frozen as if there was like an air hole coming out here make no mistake about it bears do hibernate but many hunters know it doesn't take much to wake them up and have them come popping out in the middle of winter very angry yeah i suppose it would make a good emergency shelter if i had to get in there a little rock and everything is there but it took me a long time to uh to dig this snow out even though it's covered over and everything the way the winds blow and whip around here they've just blown snow in there there's at least uh there's at least almost a foot and a half or two feet of snow in the shelter reaching all the way in so uh take me a bit of work because as i said this it's definitely not the ideal location anyway be freezing with that north wind the irony of travel in the winter is that in some ways it's easier i can walk across the lakes at least that's the thought the reality is that i'm wearing many pounds worth of clothing and pulling toboggans with my gear in this case it's all my camera gear even in the wintertime you've got grass just sticking up out of the snow if the snow's not too deep sometimes it's always almost always nice and dry i love it for getting for getting a fire going it gets a lot tougher to get a fire going in the winter time i know in the summer i love the option of having a really big fire and dropping big logs even punky logs on it because they'll burn all through the night in the wintertime all your punky logs are buried and frozen to the ground and buried by the snow so you're left to whatever you can sort of grab and break anything small and dead like this off the bottoms of trees uh help a lot but certainly the bigger fire i can get going the better i'll feel [Music] you know when i was first dropped off by the airplane i could have swore that towards where the sun is right now was due east i was sure of it turns out it's actually due south now how did i find this out without a compass pretty simple my watch it's not that difficult if you take your watch you point your hour hand directly at the sun halfway between your hour hand and 12 noon on the face of your watch will be south of course the opposite is going to be directly north knowing direction can help me protect myself from the prevailing winds i can build my shelter taking this knowledge into consideration that's the one i wanted you kind of have to think like an animal sometimes when you build a survival shelter in this case it's like a bear seeking to hibernate well i've been spending the day just adding to this shelter as much as possible i need to close it all in tonight i'm still in the same scenario i was in last night where i've got to sit here and buy a bigger outdoor fire the best thing to do is to create like a cocoon that you can get right inside so even if you didn't have a fire at least there's some residual heat in there from you but if you can have a fire that's also protected and inside your shelter way better especially in the winter so i've just been weaving me i've just been weaving these branches into my shelter to keep me warm and to keep me up off the ground right now there's a quite a white out happening on the lake so you know what that means means that satellite phone gps two-way radio none of these things will do me any good at this very moment with a white out like that nobody can fly in that nobody can land here to help me out [Music] [Music] like the proverbial devil disguised as an angel the winter is beautiful but deadly it's time to make fire again this time i'm going to use basically the traditional pioneer method they didn't have their packs of matches or lighters to carry around what they did have was steel something with a high element high carbon element uh and rocked and let's now get into what different kinds of rocks you can spark with if you're lost just find a rock that'll spark if you happen to be lucky enough to have some steel with a high carbon element in it haven't done this in a while the last thing you need is a way what what's happening here is you're coming down and shaving off tiny little slivers of metal and they're shooting away melting melted and they need something to land on so what you need is something to catch that little spark and then hold a glow what i've what i've got here is charred cloth basically you take 100 cotton oops don't get it in the snow and uh you put it in a tin close the lid of the tin put it in the fire so you've chicken before the egg you got to have a fire to make this stuff and uh i'll show it later but you'll pull the tin out and open it up after a while and you've got this charred chart cloth the point is it's charred not burnt so you try to get the spark to land on it oh boy not a good start oh boy lots of good sparks but the cloth cloth isn't holding it that's not a good sign remember uh jeremiah johnson robert redford sat there in the bush trying to get a fire going this is exactly the method he was using got her all right what i've got now is this piece of charred cloth it's just holding a little ember a little glow i think you might be able to see that that gives me some time to put it in my tinder bundle which is this collection of dried grass and spanish moss cedar bark that's been all shmucked up there sort of broken up in that and try to make yourself a little furnace here close make sure you got all your other tinder ready and of course birch bark is a perfect tinder full of oils even when it's soaking wet it'll burn well oh and you're in business now why should you bother carrying a piece of rock and steel you might ask well true enough you'd rather i'd much rather carry matches than a lighter but the point is what if you only have a few matches left or you run out of fluid in your lighter all you have to do is figure out a way to make your charred cloth if you don't have 100 cotton which is what it takes so you can use the bark from from a punky tree you can make charred cloth if you found a way to get a spark like that you can extend the life of your lighter and your matches and not even have to use them and that may matter a great deal if all you have is a handful three or four matches on your on your person fire is my greatest defense against the brutal cold [Music] ah well welcome to my chalet well i made it through another night obviously i must have got enough sleep for my fire to die is that ever vital one thing that should be part of your plans for surviving is getting sleep getting rest if you get to the point where you're slipping into exhaustion fighting hypothermia becomes extremely difficult even if all you get is is uh 20 minutes at a time which is about maybe 15 which is about what i got last night that's that's fine at least at least you're getting some sleep you need that rest to be able to think clearly the only way to stay warm now without burning up all my available firewood is to keep exploring keep moving but slowly and cautiously without sweating [Music] well these are fresh martin tracks how fresh well he's behind me in the bush that's how fresh didn't seem to want to poke his head out to be filmed but i watched him run up here just now as i came along i've been walking the shore going into different areas trying to find rapid tracks and that bush is so thick everything sounds so easy in a book you know find yourself some rabbit tracks and set your snares and blah blah blah yeah right [Music] now i gotta head back before it gets too late and uh add to my shelter some more get that fire going stock up my firewood for the night don't forget when you go to stock up firewood in a survival situation plan on needing close to five times more than what you think you need make a pile look at it and say okay i need five more times the wood than what i have here right now and you'll have enough to get you through the morning through to the morning i think i'll just uh let the sweat dry a bit and warm up in the sun know how your lips get all frozen you can't really speak the wind is a great enemy to my skin anything exposed at these temperatures freezes quickly yet i have to keep moving keep exerting survival efforts i can never stop and that's what makes the cold so difficult which is why a fire is not just important it's vital to life without it death by hypothermia or worse death by freezing is only a few hours away there we go i see i'm ready with my tinder if you're not you're cooked so to speak or rather you're not cooked you want to have all your tinder bundle ready ready to go ah now another thing that's important actually before i get to that i'll just mention i'm going to now put maybe put some logs over but i'm going to fortify this shelter a bit more maybe so i can enclose my fire in a bit i don't have to keep it so big all the time and uh i'll be able to uh get more of the heat from it into my shelter well it's end of day three and uh oh man it's cold if the full moon brings with it clear skies then it's going to be very bitterly cold tonight too i hope not [Music] i can do nothing fast speed means sweating and that's dangerous working too fast or too hard means burning up calories i can't stop but i can't work too hard either i have two cameras with me a large one and a smaller one big one's just frozen up it's just takes a long time to heat it by the fire i'm reduced now down to one small camera i was able to stay warm last night well let's just say i was able to stay alive last night just by mostly feeding the fire and sitting by the fire the full moon helped me to be able to see the trees around me i stock myself up good with firewood before the night fell but i also used another trick involving these guys which thanks for the axe helped me to help me to have access to i can't believe how cold it's getting -37 was just brutal last night so other than uh getting up and jumping around and stomping on my feet to keep me warm uh another way i was able to keep myself a little bit warmer help help me get me through the night were these guys hot rocks basically you get them by the fire uh usually about a dozen you'll need about a dozen uh to do this well or as many as you can get i suppose you'll warm them up by the fire now you don't want to get them red hot of course and burn yourself but you do want to just warm them up enough and then the hot rocks store the heat and then they let all the heat go off again so i have a few in the fire and warming up i'd pull them out and i tucked them in around me back inside the shelter put some down by my feet up in the lower part of my back and around my chest and as those ones cooled down i'd put them back in the fire and pull out the new batch and it's a neat little survival trick to know it's hard to find if you're losing me in the smoke yeah sorry about that it's hard to find rocks in the wintertime for sure but overturned trees often will have them exposed on their root system and i found these down by the uh down by the side of the lake and uh well it's working so far but uh my goodness the knights are brutal just brutal [Music] i'm just making myself some spruce needle tea pine needles spruce needles cedar boughs i make well they call it a bush tea but it actually has kept people alive and kept them from scurvy in the past and throughout history and the explorers they're uh they're loaded with vitamin c some people have died of scurvy meanwhile they were sleeping on cedar bows and spruce bows at night and didn't realize that they could have made tea out of it and gotten the vitamin c that they needed it's uh tastes not too bad and mostly gives me a nice warm drink to sip on help keep me keep my body warm and a little bit of nourishment often all it really takes is a drink of hot water to make me feel human again it's taking mostly everything i've got just to stay warm [Applause] you know you always hear about stamping out help or sos and sure enough those will work if you stamp them out in the snow but it's a lot less effort just to simply stamp out a triangle which is a sign for help international distress signal and then stick some trees on the three corners and turn those trees eventually into your signal fires gotta keep moving gotta keep moving that's what they say in the north well my three signal towers are up next thing is to get lots of birch bark dried grass whatever i can find it'll burn quickly and just shove it inside and reinforce those a bit so i make sure that they don't fall down in the wind or anything and i just realized after dropping around out here and setting all this up that i've been out here the whole time without my ice grips on in case i fall through very foolish very foolish indeed maybe i need some food usually someone trekking through the winter wilderness needs from six to seven thousand calories per day to handle the tough going walking in the deep snow and dealing with the cold temperatures i'm getting zero calories now the power bars i started with are long gone so it's easy to become exhausted in these circumstances [Music] well end of another day it was good to get my signal stamped out in that triangle i've heard it suggested to do x's of course sos help whatever but the triangle is the easiest to do and the quickest i think it's good to get that done and uh the importance of layering my clothing really counted today i didn't overheat it all i could take off and put on as as i needed to and it's just uh that's 40 below what else do you need to know well i'm about 100 kilometers from the nearest soul out here one thing about the winter at least is the traveling can be easier forget about it going through the thick bush unless you've got snowshoes but at least you can get out on the lake and move around i know when i've done summer survival simulations you can be trapped in one one little location unable to get past swamps unable to get past the lake at least in the winter you've got a little bit more mobility even if it is freezing [Music] wearing contact lenses in this situation is comical at best i have to warm them up in my pocket just before i put one in you probably can't hear that but there's a big jet going right over top of me don't even bother they're 30 000 feet up and they can't see the biggest signal you can make some cedar bows to add to my bush tee you know wild edible plants in the summer is a great thing but it's another story in the winter time i've been looking around for labrador tea to uh my lips are still frozen uh to add to my bush tea i haven't seen any anywhere rock tripe is another uh that's that black curly stuff that you see on on rocks on the sides of lakes and rivers usually that can also be boiled up and uh and softened and and eaten it's a little hard on the system but uh it does have starch and some nutrients in it if i remember correctly it's what uh franklin survived on rock tripe tripe de roche you know i have an extra disadvantage of being out here my fingers freeze really easily and when i try to work on this stuff which is cutting ah touching the cold bare metal they're frozen very quickly it's very scary because at times your fingers can numb up so badly and be in so much pain you just can't move until you can get them warm [Music] i need food and one answer may be to use that bit of fishing line and lure as i have in the little kit under this ice if i'm lucky could be a storehouse a fresh fish to catch you want to make sure that you hold on to your axe too we're seeing as you go through just in the last second you can shoot your axe right down into the hole and i'll never see it again [Music] you can see as soon as i chop it out the water keeps seeping in from the side it's a race against each other here between me and the water coming in this ice could be only a foot and a half well two feet thick because i'm down about a foot and a half almost two feet now or it could be five feet thick which it gets to up here if it's five feet thick action ox i'm not catching any fish cause i'll never get through it success now the water shut up like that i know i'm through so i just got to make sure i got a hole big enough to get a fish through and if i don't i'll have to get a pole and uh try and make sure the hole is big enough to pull up a fish getting wet was absolutely a bit of a dangerous move so before fishing i did go back to my fire to dry out since i'm having no luck i might as well try to work on my shelter a bit by incorporating my toboggan called a comatic up here i've been making use of my comatic here by just helping to cover up the shelter a bit and then i pull my fire in uh closer to me and i just keep a nice small fire and it's helping me to stay warm at night and beat some of this brutal brutal cold the other thing i'm doing is i take the sled bag that's attached to the other side of it off and i wrap my wrap it around myself and over top of myself trying to try and keep a little bit more body heat in anything you can use for shelter and warmth is a fair game in the survival world in survival methods to obtain food or fresh water or ways of being protected from the elements must be tried and tried again after all what else do you have to do out here other than try to make your situation a little easier on the body you must always be attempting to improve your circumstances while perishing is just around the corner well one thing you can do if you want to keep your hole uh keep your hole from freezing overnight is get a a big pile and just push all kinds of snow over top six feet long and three feet high is not overdoing it at all you want to try and keep it from freezing up you have to go all through the chopping all over again now in my case i've got the axe though so uh so i know at least with an axe it's only going to freeze a little bit it's not a big deal more when you don't have an accident i get worried about it but overnight the surface of this water froze more than two inches [Music] that's how cold it was [Music] maybe i need a new lure [Music] i was supposed to go home this day nature has decided to play games with me perhaps hold me for another night of the cold i can't be sure and i don't know if they're coming to get me you can't fight weather if it's a whiteout it's a whiteout planes are grounded so are helicopters do [Music] finally with a break in the storm i could hear the faint sound of plane engines they were sneaking in in between whiteouts to get me out of here after seven days of winter survival i nearly froze my fingers off lighting these fires and learned quickly that just one fire would have been sufficient [Music] three fires is overkill so i decided to light the flare and i learned quickly that against the white snow it's very hard to see so where is the toughest place on the planet to survive anywhere it's cold you don't see a lot of shows about survival with camera crews and directors played out during the winter because it's too cold for them to film if survival is to be shown and experienced then you have to take the bat with the good show me a tropical island with available fresh water and i'll show you a survival vacation go to where temperatures are cold enough to freeze your skin within seconds and wind is so brutally cold you can't even think and i'll show you true survival winter camping dog sledding and skiing are some of my greatest joys in life but i dread the day i have to once again survive in the winter you

Channel: Survivorman - Les Stroud

Views: 626,288

Keywords: Survivorman TV Series, Les Stroud, Survivorman, Survivorman Les Stroud, Survivorman TV Show, Survivorman TV, winter, bushcraft, bushcraft skills, survival skills, winter survival, snow, northern ontario, canadian winter, survivorman full episodes

Id: O3PDPczIVCo

Length: 43min 14sec (2594 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 07 2022