Survivorman | Season 1 | Episode 2 | Arizona Desert | Les Stroud

there he is yeah it looks like a bark scorpion an awfully big one no that's the kind of guy I want to pop him off alive even nipping onto my finger there like I said they're actually quite tasty [Music] bordering both North and Central America the Sonoran Desert stretches from Mexico to Colorado taking in both Arizona and California at best it may see 10 days of rain for a year in the desert rivers have no water plants are still spying that you dare not reach out to catch your fall the dry heat and wind suck the moisture out of you quicker than you can replenish it the animals here have to be prepared to survive the experience there is nothing average about this place this is the American Southwest a desolate rough and rugged landscape stranded out here has only two or three days to find water before they die of dehydration the unwary traveler the death can be deadly one small mistake can turn an afternoon off road drive tragedy [Music] after the crew shoots the opening scenes they'll leave me alone with a broken-down dirt bike in the middle of the desert it's something that could happen to anyone but in my case at least I know that seven days later my support crew will come looking for me yeah all right oh the bike well the camera crews took the good one left me alone with this piece of junk alone for seven days one dead motorbike [Music] this is not the place you want to get stranded sunsetting quick I've got some warmer clothes in the pack I'll put on it's just way too late in the day now to make any kind of shelter oh man so I'm just gonna sit here for the night it gets really hot here during the day hot enough to dehydrate you quickly but at night it still gets below freezing day two six more days to go well I certainly didn't sleep much last night got pretty cold enough to put frost on the bike everywhere else - I see you've got my camera gear I've got basically just the clothes on my back enough enough water for a couple of days anyway a few days although it's getting up to 80 degrees and 90 degrees every day and I should have just one snack bar well let's see what I can get off of this bike anyway Suns been up for barely 10 15 minutes already it's getting hot you know if you're lost in the middle of the desert with little chance of rescue there's no point in being squeamish about your equipment I'm gonna have analyzed this thing see what I can use [Music] I could come in handy a couple more of those all this wiring could make great cordage rope when you're lost or stranded managed to scrounge up a few things off the bike got some volt material maybe make something for digging out of this and I got these prongs and not prongs I've got these spokes which I can use like a three-pronged spear I've got the I'll probably do something with the seat but the only thing I left back there was the rubber tires and I can cut them off later and either burn them for black smoke as a signal fire or make strapping out of them but this area has no shade for me and it's brief dusty and it's getting hot so I'm gonna see if I can find a better location and also maybe some food this is also new to me below freezing at night and intensely hot during the day and as far as I can see rocks and cactus it's gonna be tough to find water here you know walking down through this wash hears about the flattest area I can find whenever I thought of the desert I always thought of it being pretty flat you know flat and sandy back it's anything but it's all rock and Hill some of them quite steep and just about every single plant that you pass stick you with something time I step over one of those little plants makes us sound like a rattler snake I'm just gonna stroll the ways it really doesn't matter where you look around here it's just desert as far as you can see here let me show you what I'm seeing more than a hundred thousand square miles that's the Sonora Desert these wash is a good place to find different variety of plants for eating it's not the snakes and scorpions that worry me it's running into a pack of wild peccaries they're vicious little guys and their tracks are all over this place they're kind of like pigs or wild boars and they may have terrible eyesight but their sense of smell is excellent and they'll attack you in numbers in an unorganized and wild fashion these Christmas Choya look like they'd be nice and juicy and you just pick some off and rub off the fluffy hairs on them and pop em in your mouth and they'd be good well in fact it's true they are good to eat they were even part of the traditional diet in this area what they're covered with are little spines called buckets and if you don't get if you miss one block it and leave it on there and pop that in your mouth you're gonna know about it for days it sticks in your tongue and it just aches so you really have to clean them off and on it goes until it's completely clean of all the glock 'it's okay there I just spent like maybe 10 minutes just trying to get all the tiny tiny little hairlike glaucous off of this Christmas joy that's good just a lot of work [Music] I gotta find a way of staying warmer tonight getting up off the ground and protected from above this grass should go a long way towards helping me stay warm when I'm using my gloves cuz what makes me really nervous here is this is perfect place for rattlesnakes to be laying they like the heat of the grass there must be some moisture under the ground here for all of this Carrizo cane to be growing here I've got my blanket with my grass I use this kadhi soaking for for my mattress I hope I was hoping to turn this bed into something comfortable Sun setting pretty quickly as always oh yeah when I do finally settle in it'll be something like this who knows might even be might even be warm I sure hope there's no spiders in there Black Widow that is well comfy I knew that see to be good for something I was pretty warm for most of the night underneath that grass last little bit of the night the frost came in and started to get a bit chilled then and with the Sun coming up it actually doesn't hit down in my gully soon enough so I'm up here to catch some morning rays I'm gonna see if I can weave that met that grass together into a mattress and into a blanket and see if I can maybe get a fire going as well okay now strip to strip to part all of the wiring that I had taken off of the motorbike and now I'm just gonna make all this grass into these lawn long sort of cylinders here and I'll start to tie them together in bundles sort of you just come through make a bundle like this and then go around the next one in the opposite direction and basically I'm gonna pull the hair thing together and weave through my wiring to tie this whole bit of grass together and then what that'll do is give me a basically a good portable mattress and a good solid mattress that'll hold together well for me wire to make a bed I'll try for some fire now this seat cover will work as a good base for my fire starting to keep things out of the sand first I'm gonna give a good effort to get fire going by using traditional method of this area the hand drill very primitive method what I've done is first of all like I got on my tinder bundle my grass together by hammering it with a rock and making some powder and putting a powder in the middle then you kind of wrap it some other grass and I actually used one of my wires from the motorbike to tie it off and make myself a fire bundle here I found this spindle just while I was down getting the creosote cane it's a piece of seep willow and the baseboard that I'm using is one of the ribs of the sororo cactus all dead and dried out and I've just sort of whittled it down to be the right shape for me to work with here the other thing I did was make this fire lay over here ready to go just a stick stuck in the ground and then all the other the heavier would put on top and that way when your grass goes underneath to to light up the heavy wood doesn't crush it and you you can get a nice good aerated fire to get it going now to get to do this right first I had to just find the right place and and once I've got the the spindle settling on the baseboard I cut out a little notch and that'll give a place for all the hot dust to fall down into now what I was showing was to try and keep this motion going if you do the kind of the itsy bitsy spider move you practice that for a while to get the motion right of what it is you want to do while you make this thing spin when you're spinning really hard if you're just spinning in one spot like this and you're just doing little short ones it's tell a lot tougher to get it going so that's the motion I want to try and keep happening the last thing is as you can see I've been practicing it's from these blister marks it's really easy to get blisters doing this and so when you as soon as you you're sort of stopped you smack your hands together really hard saw her that it hurts but that rushes the blood back into the skin and helps anyway to to prevent the blisters from coming on let's give this a try [Applause] [Music] you really have to suck up the pain as your hands get hotter and hotter [Music] [Music] there we go [Music] put it in bundle ah carefully yeah baby hahaha doesn't that look good woo no cool no more cold nights for me oh it's gonna be a warm night and it's gonna keep the peccaries and the mountain lions away from me this brings in a whole new element of psychological comfort you know the beauty about fire in the desert is that there's just dry firewood everywhere under the mesquite trees and and different all everything's gnarled and dried up and dead so I'll be able to keep this fire going for a good long time this is great [Music] there he is yeah it looks like a bark scorpion an awfully big one he wants to sting me that thing good way to eat these guys what you want to do hold him down I just cut off the stinger like I'm trying to sting that so once you can get the Stinger cut off there okay now you shouldn't be much of a problem Wow see him nipping onto my finger there he's out make the pinch onto your tongue like I said they're actually quite tasty hmm not bad at all can't believe I just did that not bad at all mmm definitely a bark scorpion nice and tasty all this creosote bush is a great plan of the desert I can use it to make a smudge fire that actually declares myself it's also good as about the only thing you can really kind of use when you gotta go to the bathroom creosote bush has 69 different chemicals that that bugs and fungus and and different bacteria don't like so it's a very good powerful plant for an awful lot of uses there may be no water for washing up out here but you can still feel fresh sweet smoke of the creosote bush actually kills much of the bacteria that causes body odor most fear is born of ignorance the sound of the desert seems benign it's spooky like a jungle at night here it's birds chirping the dry breeze but scorpions black widows and rattlesnakes that's what lie behind the rocks and in the grass that's what can get into your mind and create fear yet the desert as dry and hot as it is has been called home by humans for thousands of years this is an amazing find all this wall along here is not natural it's man-made man-made over a thousand years ago there's chert here that came from a great distance away through trade networks lots of pottery you know the camera is sitting in a ruin there's ruins in all behind me there this whole hilltop is just one massive multi-room complex some people believe that the pueblos who lived here were actually under a bit of a slavery to the Hohokam then the mountain builders from the east that style of of people's and around 800 years ago they simply got fed up and abandon all of these places went on to put more fertile ground these stones here very obviously brought in this one here you can tell was a bit of a grinding stone you can even see the scouring from the grinding perhaps used to make jewelry of some sort it's fascinating these cactus here are kind of famous it's called barrel cactus and it said that if you slice them open and open them up that they're full of water and you can drink it and in fact you see them all growing often over to the side supposedly that's because of the weight of the water well that's not true at all in fact they're going over the side because they're following the Sun just like many plants and flowers if you do slice them open and try to drink the stuff it's very slimy and it actually ends up being worse for you in the end in fact it can bring your core temperature down which can give you some really bad nighttime chills I suppose that's pretty good in the middle of the day when it's really hot but the fact is that they don't rehydrate you at all it's a very slimy very pasty slimy kind of substance so but what they are good for you can also get the fruits oh that hurt oh that hurt big time sorry because he didn't like me taking his fruit just yet to do is you don't eat the whole thing open this up the inside a whole whole bunch of little black seeds and they're tasty there's no point in rationing water in the desert the moisture is sucked from your body in this dry heat so quick but you can't hope to quench your thirst with only a few sips a day my water is almost gone I've got to find an oasis in this place [Music] he to the day like this all you really want to do is play around in the shade how much left to my energy bar I'm gonna go find some more food yeah these little guys are awesome strawberry pin cushion and by far the most tastiest treat in the desert I think mmm yeah like a combination between a strawberry cross with a Kiwi good bring my blood sugar level up a notch hmm oh yeah this is the plant you want to find excuse me while I Cho down next thing I want to do is take my digging stick the one that I put in the fire underneath the fire to harden and I'm going to turn it into a spear by using these spokes from the motorbike and I can grind them to a point either on a rock or so I want the multi-tool has a great file on it just to get them into a nice sharp point once I've got that happening though take the three of them using the c-clamp that I got from from the motorbike I can strap them onto here probably pretty good pretty tight okay there I now have a very functional three-pronged spear this gives me a confidence boost because it helps me with protection against mountain lions and and peccaries the javelina which at nighttime still always give you a bit of the spook it's always said that people can last three to five days without water but here in the desert the wind is so dry and the heat so stifling that it sucks the moisture right out of you reducing your survival time I can't see making it to five days without water in a place like this I'm finding it really hard to ration my water and I still got four days to go I should really think about maybe finding another water source it's not that it's really hot it's about high 70s or so during the day but it's so dry just sucks the moisture right out here I'm already starting to get dehydration headaches whether I like it or not I'm going to have to leave this little spot if I want to survive the week I have to go up and over a few hills see if I can find a place with some water some areas of the desert you can walk a few miles find some water in other areas you can watch 60 miles enough find it [Music] Sonoran Desert is hundred thousand square miles that's a lot of desert traveling through this desert is anything but easy every plant stabs with its spine every rock ships under my feet when I climb the hills I have to remain ever mindful of not putting my hand within striking distance of a rattlesnake sunning itself in the heat of the day water I've got to find a good source of water all day I've been suffering from fatigue and dehydration headaches if I can spot a valley with a green belt in the middle it may mean running water or maybe even a small River this is tough hiking it's a couple miles since my last camp but I'm looking down there and I think I can hear the sound of water and I think I might have found myself a nice little Gorge to get down into I can see the type of vegetation it's called the riparian zone where I'm starting to see sycamore and and been walking through all this mesquite so there's been a change I think I might have found my new home I can hear the water I can smell the water it smells fresh and clean this little paradise is about five miles and a few hills from my first camp and of course because I have too much camera gear I had to hike it twice just to get all the gear here I'll tell you this little desert Creek man this is a sight for sore eyes this is like shangri-la this is beautiful fresh clear cold water yeah it was such a beautiful place that I wasn't thinking as much about survival as I should have been barely noticing that I was only peeing once a day and it was very dark indicating dehydration I may still be losing weight due to a lack of nutrition but at least I can stay hydrated now and keep clear of heatstroke now this is an oasis for survival but I still need to get my fire going well I banked up all these stones and made myself a little sort of pad here I'm gonna sleep underneath this juniper tree it's a great place to sleep it keeps the dew off you at night and there seems to be some sort of residual heat that stays underneath these trees they're great place to sleep underneath when you're out here Sun setting pretty quick of an awfully long day just get in here but I am now in paradise it would seem these age-old traditional skills are helping to keep my mind off my ever-growing how long the small wood in the desert stays burning nicely this the wood I'm getting it from the mesquite trees and it just an armload lasts me all night long in Canada I'd need at least five or ten times that much with spruce and pine so it's great you just got a nice little low fire going all night long and this is a good spot it's frosty cold out everywhere else but underneath this juniper tree it does feel a little bit warmer for some reason and of course I'm not no frost on me ah this is nice now that I'm settled in here I'll just keep drinking tons and tons of water all day to try and kill the desire for food because I am getting I'm just really hungry but that's what I got to go do is start looking for some more food but thankful that the water's there its juniper I chewed on a little sprig of this juniper last night just before bed and the chemicals in it it seems to work on the bacteria I wake up in the morning and mouth tastes pretty fresh actually it also works so well enough so that I can have another smoke bath fresh and clean this agave is a very useful plant and if you're careful it has a neat trick that you can do in case you need a needle and thread if you're really careful oh really you can actually pull yourself out a needle and thread that spike from the top of the agave plant and I just bit below it to break the fibers and then I got a really strong cord here super strong I mean I can't break that no matter what and if I you know one I can peel it apart and break apart just tear apart the fibers and just get it down to one single tiny strong thread and I mean that can be used as a suture if you've got a bad gash or certainly for clothing or anything else you need sewn together and if the edge here is just a little bit to see that edge there if that's just a little bit too thick you can grind it down on a rock and you got yourself one good strong needle and thread very useful plant now also take the one a couple of leaves off because I can pound them and pull five fibers out from the leaves as well that I can use for tying this just breaks apart the agave leaf and as you can see underneath it is all kinds of fibers they're really strong and can be used for great rope cordage material lots of good fibers there all i have to do is get rid of the mush he may not look like much but the Havoline which is like a wild boar is a very aggressive animal and this one is right in my area it was a matter of just being as quiet as I could and staying up high getting onto little rock ledges so that he couldn't see me they can't look up so that's your only defense if you're on the ground with them they'll chase you I find that if I gorge on water it tricks my stomach into feeling fall and at least for a time the possibility of slowly starving to death seems distant but a surprise in this hot dry desert is just how much there really is to eat far more than way up in the boreal forests of the north when it comes to what you can pick or catch year-round of course not all of it is a choice meal yeah we uh little grasshopper what you do get as many of them as you can you just hold them this way you pull off the head which pulls the stomach out with it and this thing which actually stays kick in for a while it is part of a meal for now oh I know what'll do once you get enough of them make yourself a little well it's kind of like it's kind of like a fish stringer there we go and there's one let's see if I can get some more all right yeah sure he gets my shirt there you can see it now there we go it's a nice little feast hey this big juicy guy okay they see they still keep kicking even after their heads are completely gone so there you go there's my grasshopper kabob all right well time for my little grasshopper kebab my little treat of the day now I can roast it beside the fire but this doing it this way on top of a rock like a frying Rock like that is a real cool and easy way to do it I'll just put these guys on there well while I wait for these grasshoppers to roast up nicely on my little rock fire I can show you these guys now I picked these up on my way through from the first campsite these are the beans from the mesquite tree it's the legume family good good food source now these guys can be ground up into a flower or just eaten raw mmm and they're kind of sweet actually had a nice little heart now what I want to do is move that over I'm gonna give these guys just a last roasting just to make sure they're fully cooked because they can carry tapeworms so give these guys the last little roast here but I think they're cooked pretty nicely let's see here mmm and my big big one here I got mmm when you're hungry mmm wings legs and all hmm and there's thousands of those guys all around me so I think I'll keep eating on em for a while what Appetit you know there is one insect out here that I don't want to run into it all killer bees are Africanized bees they are in Arizona back to friend of mine was stung by a number of them not too far from here do you never know what's gonna set them off either a snap twig walk a little too close to their hive whatever it is I don't want to find out my day is drawing to a close the Sun setting quickly I've been able to munch on grasshoppers today and I ate more of those prickly pear cactuses but I'm still not feeling much energy now I'm getting pretty tired and weak starting to get long on me so one more full day when they come and get me I've got back a few needed calories from the grasshoppers and the mesquite beans but it won't be enough [Music] that's the last time I let this fire go out that was easier the first time I tried it there's always the worry that my fire will be out when I return to camp so I'm going to try a traditional method of keeping fire keeping my mind active is still my best path to survival hungry enough now it's time to show you what I can do with these prickly pear because these guys can be eaten as well Wow let's cut off the rim here cuz I don't need it you go around some of the spikes and spines see how difficult it is to work with this type of plant can you believe this is actually what the natives farmed here they would farm this prickly pear cactus because it's fruits are so good and you can also do what I'm doing now I want to try and cut away the skin helps to have a good sharp knife for this just to show you what I can eat on this thing move a few things out of the way now there's still all these little veins these white veins and you don't actually want them either there's actually a little line in between the two veins and that's the edible stuff not only that but if you've got a bad cut you can you can or a burn you can put it on it and it's very cooling to the skin and helps to cool any kind of burns or cuts little piece off like that you can eat this raw or you can put it in gather it all together and put it in a pot and boil it you boil the slime off but you know it's not bad not bad right there [Music] check this out fire bundle worked absolutely perfectly if it flamed up I kind of snuffed it out a bit and now all I have to do is add some twigs and some grass and blow it into flame and and I'm in business work like a charm one big fat cigar hawky this year's your most classic black widow spider web now I'm not gonna make eye contact I'm gonna back away slowly seriously this is the classic black widow spider web it's all gnarly and messed up she's hiding in there somewhere her bite is about 15 times more powerful than that of a rattlesnake it's just such a little bite but it's a potent one you know you can actually take old webs and kind of spin them up and even make a little string out of them it's very very strong strong spun web know about the worst thing about it being December here in the desert is that critters like scorpions are looking for nice warm places to crawl into at night like under some guys sleeping well it's my last full day and it's a frosty frosty morning let me tell you you know what amazes me during this desert winter how much there is to gather and eat in terms of wild edibles up in Canada and the boreal forest you got maybe six weeks to gather wild edibles after that if you don't hunt and you don't fish you starve you know what you can also get some food source from as well it's simple grass you don't actually swallow the the grass blades but you chew on them for as long as you can and get the juices which is essentially chlorophyll or it's very good for our bodies once you're done chewing we spit the glaze out o cold and fresh you know utilizing our natural environment to survive in and doing things like eating live scorpions cutting down live trees are only necessary if you truly have to survive I've shown some ways of surviving a very harsh climate while you're out leave only footprints let's set up some good protected areas so that our grandchildren also have this beauty to enjoy I think the toughest part of the last day was knowing that I had to hike all of my camera gear all the way back to the first location to meet up with the crew and there's like this small thing in the back of my head okay are they gonna be there because I don't want to do another night out here and so I had that to look forward to the fear the crew there aren't they there one way or the other I have a long hike and I had to get all the way back to the first location [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Survivorman - Les Stroud

Views: 377,712

Rating: 4.9101334 out of 5

Keywords: Survivorman TV Series, Survivorman Les Stroud, 'Les, Survivorman TV, Survivorman TV Show, Stroud', Survivorman, Outdoor Survival, Les Stroud, Survivorman - Season 1 - Episode 2 - Arizona Desert, Todd Standing, Logan Stroud, Sam Omik, Uzimann, Joseph McConnell, Bob Wilson

Id: U6hU7d3yW10

Length: 44min 23sec (2663 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 05 2020