Survivorman | Romania Part 1 | Les Stroud

no no no no no no no give me a way down i almost actually went over the cliff it's a moment where i started sliding down 35 years of survival i'm still making mistakes huh [Music] [Music] in romania the argesh mountains have two thousand two hundred and eighty square kilometers of wild mountain area with four main mountains fuguresh has another one thousand square kilometers more in the three neighboring counties there's nothing but pure nature here if we're talking about the romanian carpathians the entire mountain chain is more than 1 000 kilometers with an average width of 70 to 100 kilometers this is a mountain hiker's paradise but when it comes to surviving there will always be a fine line between paradise and hell [Music] you know the name conjures up just one image dracula but that fictional character is far from the reality of a region that in my eyes is one of the most beautiful places on earth bugaresh is the romanian name for what most of europe calls the transylvanian alps it's a wonderfully varied mountain landscape it's home to about 6 000 brown bears every hiker that comes here does so knowing that they're coming to one of the world's best kept natural secrets as it is with so many beautiful places and especially mountains it has its dark side it's dark history but that history does not belong to the natural splendor it belongs to those individuals who do not take their own safety seriously who take unnecessary chances and risks who underestimate the difficulties and overestimate their own abilities the group of highly dedicated volunteers called salvamont literally translated means mountain rescue i'm going to head up into an area as well off the beaten path and give salvamon a chance to test and hone their skills while trying to find and rescue me hopefully before i succumb to the elements while surviving here in the fugaresh mountains of romania [Music] the first part of my journey will take me across the ridges and mountain tops along established trails for the love of the hike alone my team will start this journey with me the trails here are sometimes obvious and other times they disappear or remain obscured by the dense fog that can roll in without any warning it's a fog so thick it leaves many hikers gripped in fear of moving forward but the view is worth it it's a long grueling day given the fact that i don't do this every day and it's here at the top my team leaves me alone to wander down into the tree line and off the established mountain trails [Music] [Music] where i pick up the story from here is at the foot of an old sheep farmer's cabin uh that might sound luxurious but uh they don't usually leave these places in very good repair so take a quick look see what i'm dealing with oh yeah that's what i thought it's filthy really bad i don't know if you can see it or not yeah there's nothing here and there's nothing that i even want to make use of that's the way it is i suppose if it starts to storm i could come in here and put a fire going in here but you know what it's damp and oh moldy and wet in here sometimes i get lucky when you find a survival camp cabin that's uh maybe even meant to be for survival like i did in labrador or it's just there but it's you know it's decent enough you can sleep in it like what happened in argentina sometimes you uh come across a cabin like this and frankly rather stay outside than inside sometimes a ready-made shelter or cabin can have food and supplies other times they're barely worth using but i won't look a gift horse in the mouth there's lots of wood to scrounge it's been over nine hours of mountain hiking and i've got to somehow gain back a lot of lost energy still split wood even when you don't have an axe [Music] now these old sheep huts some of them are active and you might have a shepherd to come along many others are like this one abandoned and there may not be somebody back here for a year there's no guarantee that you're going to be rescued but a good place to uh to pull into and to survive if you have to at least for a while because you've got some protection oh boy oh here we go come on there you go there you go give it a little bit of oxygen probably the hardest thing to do is to patiently light a fire when you're cold and exhausted [Music] people have died waiting for rescue at a camp or cabin that no one is going to come to exhausted or not i need to stay warm and dry tonight to be able to think clearly tomorrow and get a bearing on what i should do next using a rain poncho instead of a rain coat gives me more versatility in sheltering myself from the wind or rain i wanted to do a real quick zone of assessment number one which is everything that i have on me i went with instead of a jacket a rain poncho the other thing i brought along was my own personal survival kit i want to see how it fares in circumstances like this does it make things a lot better or just a tiny little bit better does it get me through the day or is it mostly useless i want to find that out in a scenario like this and what that scenario is that i've set up for myself is essentially the lost hiker someone who's come out not expecting to be overnight not expecting to be multiple days just afternoon gonna do a nice long day hike and be home by night that's the scenario that i set up and that's what i've done an extremely long day hike and a very tiring one and and i i didn't make it home uh so getting to this spot in the trail and there is a trail that i can roughly follow it's very difficult to follow the trails here are some of the trails here in the case of this one it's a very old one hardly anybody ever uses it if if in fact no one within any given year and so trying to follow it's going to be going to continue to be real tough this becomes that first night at the end of a long day of hiking when you think you're supposed to be home but you take a wrong turn and you don't make it home now to get through the night and rethink everything tomorrow morning i often try to simulate the circumstances that anyone else might find themselves in in order to figure out how survival would or could play itself out successfully or poorly it's not the first time i've slept on some pretty hard ground but as long as it doesn't rain this is a pretty warm spot to be actually i don't really want to sleep just yet i try to wait to sleep until it's dark so that i try to so that i sleep through the night but [Music] too exhausted to wait that long and in survival you gotta sleep when you can sleep never comes easy in a survival situation [Music] in the fugue mountains of romania i'm alone at the top of the tree line the morning after a grueling day of hiking the mountaintops before i carry on with anything i'm going to slow myself down and think things through properly and one of the best ways to do that is to stop and just simply center yourself with a bit of meditation let's do a little bit of a recap on my situation full long day of hiking uh the mindset that i've set out for myself is that it was only supposed to be one day supposed to be home last night in my mind i know as a hiker i'm thinking well fine i'm just going to keep walking down and i'm going to get out of here today and so with that mindset what do i do next to start with one day of hiking just some beef jerky now am i going to ration it or am i going to just eat it all i think a lot of times what happens is in a situation like this someone just goes for it and they eat it all because well i'm gonna be home hopefully even within hours i'll be home and i'll be happy and i'll be eating lunch and i'll be fine so i'm not gonna ration i'm gonna eat the whole thing right now and then that'll be it'll have no food i forgot that i also brought this along one day hiker make a little bit of tea with some wildflowers or something like that so i found this it's just it's an ultralight cook kit so thought i'd bring it along it does require fuel instead of using the fuel bottle to make this little mini stove work i brought my own little flask i threw in this rope survival kit i'm just going to hook it onto the back of my pack but in addition this time i also brought my own survival kit i'll use up the items for this kit as i need to use them and in fact i will start with the compass because i've got to make my way through some pretty thick forest and i'm going to try and find an established trail that's here but it's really old no one uses it so i'm going to need the compass to keep me on track that's the other thing about heading out when you have maps of the area you've got to make use of them you've got to get them in your mind so that if you lose the map or anything goes wrong you can you'll remember oh there's a trail there there's a cabin over there there's a highway over there there's a road there's a you know here's where the river goes those things are really important to know on any outing you've got to know your escape route now i'm just going to walk out and walk home that is the mindset that happens so often with people when they're lost well i'll be out tomorrow i'm going to maintain that mindset to see what kind of mistakes i make hopefully none oh boy eating this is not a mistake notwithstanding the pristine reputation of this wild area it's also home to logging oftentimes illegal but whether legal or illegal long winding roads are cut into the forests many of which seem to start and ultimately lead nowhere they exist as just abandoned and unhealed scars on the landscape an easy place to get lost all right well most importantly before i get underway here when i did my sort of zone of assessment number two and checked further afield from where i was at this uh sheep hut i found something vital and uh to me it's still probably the most important thing you need to find in a survival situation ooh there's all kinds of maggots hatching down in the bottom end of this water but that's below where the stream comes out all right here's my idea it actually falls right in line with my philosophy on what to do with survival gear anyway i'm taking my personal survival kit and taking out of it items that i would rather have on my body like in my pockets but once you start having things around your neck in your pockets on your belt like this fire strike would be perfect to go on my belt i'll do that whistle in my pocket then i end up with this pot which i can use as a water carrier all right it's really important that i hyper hydrate here and just drink as much water as i can i'm way better off to sip water all day long than doing what i'm doing right now which is guzzling big amounts because this will just wash right through my system all right so that's a good amount of water right there i completely forgotten that uh ziploc bags were part of the kit that i've made up there we go you know what i may want to do just in case is double this bag rather than taking two and having them break all right that gives me not a not a bad amount of water to travel with in an emergency situation this boy the worst thing is to become dehydrated and the temperatures are hot during the day and i don't know if i'm going to pass a lot of streams or no streams at all and if that's the case then i've got a supply of water to take with me now as i head down into the tree line i have only the faint markings of an old trail that i'll try to follow this is all i've got to work with so as i head down further deeper into the forest i've got to keep finding these if i don't i lose the trail but that's why i have the compass because i think generally speaking all i want to do is head straight east and the couples will if i lose the trail the couples will help me do that wow i can see that going this way to my right it really drops off far there's got to be some cliffs on that side so at least that'll keep me from going too far to the south if there's cliffs there because there's no way the trail goes down cliffs as i hike down off the mountain tops it gets increasingly difficult to find any trail markings it is after all an abandoned trail but you wouldn't know that from the map that shows it as established as any other trail this is the failing of trusting only a map maps lose their accuracy on a yearly basis [Music] big thing is looking down for markings but also looking back up oh i see a marking okay so they're pretty faint i guess it means going down that way we've got a lot of trees that have fallen over as well so that doesn't help it changes the trail i'm not only seeing too many markings but i'm kind of using my nose i want my instinct at the moment there we go not a marking okay oh that's marking is quite a ways back okay that didn't take long to get lost all around me are pathways and old trails and roads all useless and more confusing than anything else just follow the roads downhill can be death sentenced advice to a lost hiker see now this is when you follow a trail and it kind of does you know good because you end up at the fork in the road i can go that way i can go down that way so i'm gonna have to go on instinct because there's no markings anywhere these are just remote roads probably used for logging at some point i'll keep going down i'll keep going east using my compass gotta make an executive decision here i'd love to see him but it's been oh a good hour since i saw any markings walking so slow and so quietly i wouldn't be surprised if i scared up mama bearing some cubs but actually talking to the camera actually helps because my voice is being projected out there and anything up ahead that doesn't want to run into a human is going to get out of the way at least that's the theory so many little bits of advice for a lost victim can be so misleading what sounds good in theory is often a recipe for disaster and practice and for every rule of thumb and survival there's an exception to that rule it's confusing to be in the midst of so much evidence of past and present human activity [Music] all right so this is one of those times where you feel like you're so close and yet so far there's all kinds of old logging activity here around me but i can't find the right trail down anymore this is when you start burning yourself out in a survival situation you spend extra energy double backing which is what i'm doing right now i'm going back up to see if i can find a trail marker anywhere otherwise i just got to kind of head down and hope hope i'm going in the right direction which the compass will keep me going east but that doesn't mean i'm not going to hit cliffs or problem areas that i i can't even get out of so i don't see any markings anywhere i was looking good there for a while but even my own cousin was lost for three days on logging roads three days and you're on a road you'd think you'd be able to find your way up that's not the case so this looks like a comfort zone because it's wide and open and it's human activity but i i don't know where to go next wow i'm coming to some pretty steep areas that's for sure i gotta head down there huh there's some fresh running water all right i'm gonna stop look at my compass have a drink of this water try and figure this out decision-making with low blood sugar or even a little bit of dehydration is a frustrating and even debilitating experience add in exhaustion being cold or hot various fears and you can be gripped with a panic that keeps you from doing the right thing from affecting the right kind of survival in this situation i'm losing precious hours walking back and forth just trying to figure out what to do which way to go this is one of those times you know when people ask me about how much time i spend filming survival versus actually surviving and they say you know the filming takes up a lot of the time but then there are those times when i don't have complete control of the survival situation and i have to kind of stop worrying about running these cameras and concentrating on my own survival and this is one of those times so try and trust my instincts here and hopefully they prove out right sometimes they do sometimes they don't can see old tractor or not tractor but um cart cartwheel tracks from horse-drawn carts on the road so this road is used and in a survival situation that's a good sign you want to you want to know you're on a on a road that people frequent one way or the other these cart tracks are actually made by a shepherd with a horse-drawn cart two dogs and in the back and a horse he was pulling how do i know that because i saw him he came by and he actually offered to take me out of course i had to decline and he didn't speak in english so how do i say no i'm actually here to survive and film so leave me here he looked a little puzzled but he went on his way my whole point of that story is to show you that were this not survivor man and were in a real situation that would have been my out right there and yet i had been opting to take that trail down to the cliff that nearly killed me so tough to make decisions during survival and a lot tougher to say no to a ride home probably think something nuts well the good news is this is a lot easier walking this is the trail i'm going to take a chance on bottom line it either keeps going takes me in the right direction i'm gonna have to climb all the way back up [Music] in the middle of this thick forest i'm lost and even the trails i find offer me no solid answers [Music] oh [Music] this is not a good sign i think i'm coming to the end of the trail here and nothing maybe i should have taken the road no markings the only markings i see a red ones from old logging which just means cut this tree i think i took a wrong trail [Music] now there's a big load of bear poop clearly there's a lot of bear here all right at this point i'm lost when i film myself surviving sometimes i know where i am and where i need to go sometimes i don't sometimes i go too far i've lost the trail there's still various chunks of logging around here but that's not helping me i'm trying to figure out how to get to where i've got to be just way down there you know what i see down there is water i can see water through the trees there's a river creek so if i'm going to be stuck anywhere i want to be stuck beside water i can even see this there's logging roads way over there on the other side of the valley going way up i mean i'd never go up to those and then it just goes on forever there's a lush green valley all right well check the batteries on the camera stuff and take a break and then head down as i i'm not going back up when i know i'm going to be doing a bit of a trek i have to slim down quite a bit and not carry too many cameras other times i have beam bag mounts and multiple cameras in this case i'm trying out a new wrist mount see how that works and then of course i got to check and make sure the battery is still good so i have to do all of this with batteries and cards the whole reason i'm on this side of the world is because of this little card right here so if i drop this or do something stupid with it i lose the show you know that i'm trying to film right now so what i do is i when i pull it out i have a ziploc bag that i triple and i put all my cards in here and then i shove it away deep and down deep and dark in the pack and hope that's all it takes to keep it safe a little piece of green tape on the battery like that when the battery is spent and i pull it out of the camera i take that tape and i put it over top of the connectors throw that in the bag now i know when i grab another battery i say oh not that one it's already used and little things like that just help me to kind of get through my weeks out here okay so right now i got to change the cards on you another thing i do is i always make sure that the beeps are enabled on all of my camera gear because it's just a little reminder that oh yeah i just turned it off i didn't turn it on or i turned it on i didn't turn it off it just it helps me because after a few days of that food and little sleep it's hard to keep focused fresh card decent amount of battery okay the card battery card battery card and battery let's see what have we got yeah enough time on the battery so i've got to do all of this before i go light a fire try to catch a fish build a shelter or hike down a very steep hill so that i'm lined up and ready to go and don't have to think about the filmmaking i can concentrate on not breaking my legs in the meantime i'm already going to dip into the energy bar that came with my survival kit it probably would be good to ration but as i say i i like to mix up what i know about survival and what i should do to make sure survival is i mean to make sure i'm going to survive and what i know people do wrong the mistake what the mistakes that people do you know those mistakes i'll throw some of those mistakes in to see either how to get out of them and one of those mistakes for me right now would be not knowing that i'm really going to get out here i should ration food but i'm not caring i'm just eating because most hikers in this situation would think i'll be out today it'll be all right so i'm going to eat my power bar boom gone what happens if another two nights have to pass or three or five what i'll do is i'll drink out of the baggie first i also filled up this stove it's not meant to carry water but i made it carry water every little bit helps in a survival situation just about everything gets repurposed [Applause] everyone who climbs knows going down is harder than going up i can see a creek down there so that's where i'm headed i gotta go down to my bum for some of this [Music] ugh [Music] well there you go this is a good time to stop for a treat strawberries i'm not gonna pass them by not when they're right on my path on the way down the hill wow are they ever good all right it's been many hours straight down a very steep mountainside and if i get stopped by a cliff or impasse the only way out will be back up ugh [Music] oh no no no no no no give me a way down no no no no no come on i need a way down [Applause] oh crap there are times when i push too hard cross the line too far and get myself in more trouble than i had bargained for i think i'm coming back to a cliff area here oh boy [Music] ah crap i gotta go back up i'm at a cliff oh no i don't know i can't go down there i'm at the tops of trees hey yay the ground is so steep at the top of the cliff that i can't even get enough footing to sit down and rethink my situation even just to do this i have to climb back up 100 yards or more oh god okay oh my god that's foolish i almost actually went over the cliff it's a moment where i started sliding down i got lucky there lucky that i didn't kill myself i just about lost my footing at the top of the cliff it was slippery and i would have kept sliding now i still have a long walk uphill to get back to where that road was 35 years of survival i'm still making mistakes a small mistake out here could very well cost me my life this is not drama it's real survival i know the camera isn't going to reflect this but this is many hours going back up this hill just to get back to that spot on the road i'll go for five minutes stop for five minutes go for five minutes off for five minutes because it's just all straight uphill no one not my crew or authorities even know where i am now i'm way too far off my original intended trail [Music] my only goal i have right now is to get back to that road i can reassess my situation then if i have to i'll just stay right there for tonight try and start fresh tomorrow if there was ever a time when i needed to get some rest so that i could get my senses about me again and rethink my survival situation is now it'll take me at least five more hours to get back up this mountainside [Music] oh my god i'm at the road i think i'm at the road please let me road after many hours spent on a grueling uphill climb i make it back to the road in the stream but by no means am i in the clear when it comes to surviving out here i drank as much water as i could i've rested for a good solid hour actually long enough so that the sun could dry all the sweat off of my clothing which was it was just soaked and i think what i'll do is i'll i'll head down the road see the whole issue i'm having is leaving that water water's vital to me in a situation like this and i don't want to find myself on you know 75 miles of road without any water the reality of me choosing to walk past this road and keep going straight and ending up at a cliff and you know nearly putting myself in some serious peril is that that's what happens over and over again in survival situations people even have been on the road in their car and they'll get out of the car and then they'll they'll walk off into the unknown rather than going back on the road that they know even if it was 50 miles back my advice you go back whoa something big just ran through the bush very big had some weight to it too so probably a bear i would have thought my talking to the camera would set things off whatever it was it was heavy the good thing about me following this road out is that in terms of search and rescue once they once they get started trying to find me this should be an obvious place to look because anybody who's lost and trying to find their way out comes to a road is more likely to take it and not do the stupid thing i did by uh heading straight down [Music] but the salvamont search and rescue team has not yet received any gps satellite signals from me indicating that i'm lost or where i might be [Music] well it's getting late enough in the day that i'm not going to keep walking come across pretty substantial beautiful spring of water so that's a good place to stop i'm not sure if i've ever done survival along an old dirt road before after getting beat up by going all the way down to that cliff i want to take it a bit easy on myself tonight not keep pushing too hard there's not a lot of firewood here i think there's enough to get a fire going though and there's a few plants i might be able to make use of actually at least make some tea anyway so as you can see i'm left the road well first things first i want to get a substantial fire going because it does come on to rain i can tell my patience is just shot from being physically exhausted i got flint striker and this and that but i don't have the patience to even pull it out i just got the matches here i'm just going to use the matches it would be better to save the matches because you never know how long you're going to be out here for and how many of these you just might need if i can get fires going alternative ways that last a very long time like using a flint striker it's actually better i'm just tired burned out and have no patience for starting the fire that way i just i don't know what else to say about that [Music] fear exhaustion pain from injuries being too cold or too hot these and many other issues will cause us to make a wrong decision during a survival ordeal we just want it all to get over with it can help to do something that feels familiar to us even if it's silly like shaving or reading or having a hot cup of tea [Music] there are a few things in a survival situation that can make you feel a little more human hot drink is one of them in this case clover tea although maybe i'm feeling really human because because if to feel humbled and beaten is human and i'm feeling it in many ways it's almost like i'm experiencing survival how do i say a little more realistic even simply because i am so exhausted i don't even feel like making the shelter and i probably won't i'm just going to sit here and that's usually the case for some for a lost victim in my case i often have the skill set to do this to do that and i'm focused and i'm zoned in and i got the adrenaline so i build a shelter but i think most of the time for lost victims you feel just like i do right now beaten humbled exhausted the last thing i want to do right now is go around trying to get branches and sticks to build a shelter it's tough enough just getting the fire going 35 years of survival still learning it would seem our greatest lessons come from our greatest mistakes it's an unfortunate reality especially when it comes to survival [Music] there's a lot of good high-tech equipment that you can make use of and should gps that i can send texts with i've got another satellite gps that i can't send text but it's supposed to send signals up of where i am at at all times i've got a satellite phone and my cell phone a they all run on batteries and b they have to connect to the satellites and of the four of them not one has a signal nor have any of them had a signal for the longest time so they aren't anything to me at this moment they're just hunks of equipment that i'm carrying around with me i'm trying to get a message out for search and rescue yes yeah i i typed out a message 45 minutes ago and it's still not sending to say look here's here i am come and get me and none of my high-tech devices are getting that message out even though i'm on a dirt road that doesn't mean they'll look here and it doesn't mean that there's an end to this road anytime soon i've had this turned on for quite a while just still says searching for signal that's the reality of high-tech equipment they're wonderful when they work i don't fear the dark i fear the cold i don't fear the rain i fear the wind i don't fear pain i fear exhaustion and i don't fear big scary animals i fear indecision all of my years of survival skills don't amount to a hill of beans if i make one wrong move one more drastic mistake [Music] it's gonna be a long night sitting and sleeping like this no energy to do anything else i'll sit out the night with no one knowing exactly where i am or what i'm doing even the safety net i currently have the technology is failing me are we too lazy to file a trekking plan with the authorities maybe too adventurous to stick to it and avoid heading off into lands unknown are we too macho to take along a safety net or a hiking companion well no problem then we're not too immune to paying a price no matter how heavy of a price we may be called upon to pay we're never too experienced to not make a mistake here where a simple mistake can turn fatal if we didn't make mistakes out here there would be no need for search and rescue teams but the wilderness is neither against you or for you it only demands one thing from you if you're to survive respect respect the wilderness and you're on the right path to not making a foolish or fatal mistake you

Channel: Survivorman - Les Stroud

Views: 1,273,262

Keywords: Survivorman TV Series, Les Stroud, Survivorman, Survivorman Les Stroud, Survivorman TV Show, Survivorman TV, Romania, Transylvanian Alps, challenging environments, isolation, disorientation, Romania’s Transylvanian Alps, mountain, rugged terrain, travelling alone, survival, survive, King of Survival

Id: sTbdi_aAm5I

Length: 48min 9sec (2889 seconds)

Published: Fri May 14 2021