In 1987, I had this idea that a great way to teach wilderness survival would be to head out into the woods and do exactly that.

Survive.

Now I need the skills because I'd be filming myself alone.

And you, the viewer, would be made aware of that.

And I thought, what a great way to make these skills more relatable to you.

Problem was, the technology was not available for me to film myself beyond the old grainy camcorders as we used to call them.

Well, fast forward to the year 2000, 13 years and indeed the technology became available.

What you're about to watch is raw and real, and not to be confused with reality television.

These are my journeys into the world of survival and around the planet.

These are the skills that can keep you alive and open the doors to nature.

The only reality that matters.

- Maybe you can see behind me, to the west of me, the storm's now coming in.

So, today, which was my day to secure some fire.

I don't know what the heck's gonna happen, because it looks like a real mean storm coming in.

(guitar music) In the summer of 2000, I started something.

They said it would change the way people looked at documentary filmmaking.

That it would change the way people looked at the wilderness.

For some, it would change the way they looked at life.

But, before all of that happened, it would change me.

I knew there was only one true way to film a survival experience if I wanted to share it with a large audience.

I had to do it alone.

This meant no camera crew, no safety line.

Taking myself far into a remote area and left alone to my own devices without water, no food, no survival gear.

Just a backpack full of camera equipment with which to record my survival ordeal.

(plane engine revving) I'd been flying over the remote bush for years, and I've always gone in very prepared, ready for anything really.

To go in with nothing voluntarily didn't leave me with an easy feeling.

And the pilots, they thought I had a death wish.

Farther and farther, we fly into a remote spot on the map.

A spot unknown to me.

A place to survive, chosen by a simple throw of the dart.

Only the pilot saw where it landed, and I was blindfolded.

So, I couldn't pick off any advantages from the aerial view either.

Wherever the dart lands, so would I, regardless of the terrain.

This is remote Northern Ontario wilderness.

A magical paradise called Wabakimi.

I'll be nearly 100 kilometers, 60 miles, from the closest person in the environment known as the Boreal Forest, possibly one of the toughest places on Earth to survive.

There's very little art in the cultures that lived here for thousands of years.

- Take it easy.

- They were too busy trying to eat to bother with art.

I was given no advantages.

When the plane left, it left me alone, and I wouldn't see it again for seven days.

It's an ominous feeling.

The overwhelming noise of the engine subsides and you're left in the silence of the deep woods.

When people get lost or stranded in the wilderness, panic is the common denominator amongst them.

But panic kills.

It takes away your sense of reason and it feels as if a big monster is right behind you.

You start to move faster.

You start to run.

And this is how panicking people get themselves killed.

And what do these people do while they're crashing through the bush?

For one thing, they always travel downhill, which, of course, where nobody's gonna see them.

And what they don't do, is they don't tend to make a shelter.

They don't make any signals for anybody to see them.

They don't build a fire.

And if they do, they wait till the very end of the night, just as it's getting dark.

In fact, they've even been known to hide from their searchers.

And in really bizarre cases, they've even shot at the people who are coming after them.

They don't trust their compass.

They doubt, even, the position of the sun.

And the last thing they tend to do as well, is sleep.

Sleep in the middle of the day, just when everybody's trying to find them.

'Cause at night, it's spooky.

I gotta get outta here.

This terrain is very familiar to me.

I've traveled through it for years.

Paddled its rivers.

Hiked through its thick bush.

But then, I had food.

Then, I had gear.

Unlike now, I wasn't forced to survive.

Most people tend to travel all day long on their first day, really limiting their chances for survival.

I'm watching some thunder and lightning rumbling to the north of this lake, which is gonna make me nervous for what I might have to put up with tonight.

For now, I'm gonna do what most people do, which is not right, and I'm just gonna, I didn't build a shelter.

No shelter.

I'm just gonna sit here by my fire all night long.

This is last match.

Here goes nothing.

At the end of a sunny day, one strike of my last match makes it easy, for now.

(low tempo music) (birds chirping) Well, this is pretty much how I spent the night.

Mosquitoes came in pretty good at one point and, for I don't know how many hours, pretty much just tormented me.

All I could do was hide under my jacket and hope for the cool weather, which finally came.

Not the cool weather, but the temperatures dropped somewhere in the middle of the night, and the mosquitoes kind of left.

Of course, then I spent the next part of the night shivering every once in a while, whenever the fire would die down, I'd wake up shivering.

So, with the sun just about to rise, all I feel like doing right now is sleeping some more.

Which is pretty classic, because that's when the rescuers are gonna be coming for me, is now.

And, yet, I'll be off in the sun feeling comfortable with the darkness gone and sleeping.

Stay true to form, I'll let the fire die.

That was my last match last night.

So, from this point on, I'll be matchless and fireless.

I've gotta keep myself in the role of a true lost victim and make the same mistakes so I can find my own answers to survival.

It's day two and, likely, you're going through a whole new set of emotions.

Perhaps, guilt, stupidity, maybe even embarrassment over the predicament you're in.

But it's time to sit down and take stock of what, not only what's around you, but what you have on your person.

Looking at my predicament here, I've got my wallet.

Well, first of all, I've got a good container here that I can use for gathering berries, perhaps, even scooping water and drinking it.

Yeah, heck, even the zipper can be broken off and filed into something sharp against a rock.

I've also got this little paperclip that's holding the money together.

Well, instant fish hook.

Instant sharp implement.

A set of keys, pretty much ditto for that.

I can take the keys, file 'em down.

I can't stress enough that if you're gonna be out in the bush, take a Swiss Army knife with you, some sort of knife.

Of course, I've got a couple of blades, can opener, that sort of thing.

This saw blade's gonna come into great use when I'm working on the shelter later on.

Lastly, of course, the favorite of all of this is the food I've got.

I'm planning on having, or I'm hoping on having people come to look for me within the next seven days.

So, knowing that, I'm gonna divide this food up and ration it, so I've got one piece for each day.

It's gonna be a small energy boost, but probably, more than anything, a real psychological boost.

So, that is pretty much what I've got to work with.

(upbeat music) This looks like it could be a good spot for a shelter for me.

for a shelter for me.

I've got this big natural wall on the side of me from where a tree has fallen over and lifted up the root system.

I'm close to the water.

I'm close to firewood.

I'm close to some, a few blueberries and other berries as well.

And that's very important, if you've gotta go a long ways to get your firewood, or your food, or your water, then it's not a good location for your shelter.

I've got a nice, smooth kind of rock situation here that's fairly level for making my bed on.

I've even got a cubby hole here where I might be able to put a little fire inside.

The only downside is, is it looks like it's kind of a runoff area for when it rains.

But, if I lift myself high enough off the ground to protect from that, I should be okay.

I think this is gonna be home.

(upbeat music) Too often, people making a survival shelter, they get the roof up quick, 'cause that's their primary concern.

They go to crawl inside and all they've got to lay on is the cold, damp ground.

That can get to you really quickly.

So, the best thing to do is to get your bedding down first.

You're gonna want to use a lot of bows, because, basically, three feet of bows, when you get in, it gets compressed down to about six inches of bedding by the time morning comes along.

To help kill the hunger pangs that are already affecting me, I'm guzzling a good eight ounces of water every half hour, religiously.

It tricks my stomach into feeling full.

This is where the saw comes in really, really handy.

I'll tell you, it makes a big difference.

If I didn't have this saw, I'd be spending a lot of calories trying to break this branch off, or other branches, or only be able to use smaller trees.

Man, what a difference it makes to have a knife.

(mosquitoes buzzing) (clouds rumbling) As far as I can tell right now, I've got a thunderstorm coming in on me fairly soon.

I've gotta find a way of making that shelter dry, and I don't have a tarp.

So, anything can work and you can find lots of different barks, or a big pile of leaves also works really well too, to shed the rain.

But, there's nothing that works as well as birch bark.

And this guy is a beauty.

This is when you're really happy you've got a knife, I'll tell you.

You can make a split right down the center.

Just follow it, and that's gonna peel off as one big shingle.

And this beauty goes up about another five feet.

So, this is gonna help a lot for the shelter.

There's a bunch more like this kind of lying around on the ground as well.

This one broke off at the top, but there's more lying on the ground and this is gonna keep me dry, I hope.

Just peel it around.

Off it comes.

Yeah, there's a lot of holes in it and stuff, but there's a lot of places where there's no holes.

You slip your hand in behind.

Good place to find grubs and other such things that you might want to throw in the stew pot later on too.

Although, it's also a good place, sometimes, to find things like hornet's nest.

And I hate when that happens.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Look at that.

(low tempo music) I can flatten these out just by getting some heavier logs and laying them down on it to try to get a better pitch, better angle to this roof.

You don't want it too flat.

The water just percolates through.

You want it to drain down.

Once you've got the roof secured, for rain, or at least you think you do, after that, I usually put on a couple of heavy rotten logs to deflect more rain and to weigh down the shelter.

Keep these guys flat.

And then, basically, anything you can throw on there, throw on.

Moss, leaves, branches, whatever you've got, just start throwing stuff on.

I've been sweating profusely all day doing this.

That's the downside of when you make a shelter, you start burning up a lot of valuable, valuable calories.

And you've gotta be careful.

But, by the same token, to be caught out in the elements is worse.

Being caught out in the elements can kill.

It doesn't take long for hypothermia to kick in.

A state where your body is trying too hard just to stay warm.

But, right now, it's not the cold that's my enemy.

I spent the entire night, last night, laid out on this laid out on this flat rock.

flat rock.

Just laying there with my hat over top of me being bombarded by a forest worth of mosquitoes.

being bombarded by a forest worth of mosquitoes.

Storm never came in, it didn't cool things down.

In fact, it just got hotter.

So, I sweated inside my rain jacket all night long.

Oh, man.

I sleep here listening to the sound of the mosquitoes.

Usually tuck my hands in my pocket just to get them away from the bugs.

Oh, and it's a brutal experience.

You can hardly breathe inside this thing and you just sweat constantly.

In all my years of wilderness tripping, that is the worst experience of mosquitoes I've ever had.

I don't think, I got, maybe, a good solid 15 minutes in total of sleep all night long.

And now, I think maybe you can see, behind me, to the west of me, the storm's now coming in.

So, today, which was my day to secure some fire, I don't know what the heck's gonna happen, because it looks like a real mean storm coming in.

In survival, no matter where on the planet you are, the greatest danger is the weather.

You're either hiding from it or preparing for it.

Take it for granted, and it can cut you down in shorter time than it took for you to get into trouble in the first place.

(rain falling) I don't know if you can see that, but it's really coming down.

That's huge chunks of hail.

Thunder's cracking pretty good.

Lightning.

I'm just gonna wait this out.

Of course, every cloud has its silver lining.

Oh, man.

Even these big chunks of hail.

And these guys have already been melting for about 15 minutes.

They were probably, well, the ones I saw bouncing were three or four times this size.

Even these guys, it tastes good right now.

Oh.

Just to feel something cold in your mouth after two and a half days of intense, intense heat.

Oh, that's great.

Let's go see if we can find some berries.

Here's the two less commonly known ones, right together.

The bunch berry.

And this little guy, here, is creeping snowberry.

Not huge, but a nice little taste power punch.

Almost minty like.

This is my one and only raspberry plant that I can find so far.

Again, just like the blueberries, you can take the raspberry leaves and boil them up for tea, for an extra source of nutrients.

The problem of being lost and not having any food is that many of the berries look very tasty to you.

Yet, this one here, nice, and blue, and juicy, is poisonous.

It's clintonoa borealis.

Mm, blueberries.

I'm lucky.

There's not a lot of berries in this area, but there are about five different kinds of berries fairly close to me.

I'll eat 'em up pretty quick, because, as I said, there's not too many.

But I'm not gonna eat them now.

I'm gonna leave them till about day five or so.

Because, right now, I'm still living off my fat reserves and a little bit of energy from before.

So, I'm gonna need those berries in a couple of days a lot more than I need 'em now.

So, I'm just gonna have just two.

Okay, all right, three or four more.

(thunder rumbling) This is why you get your shelter going.

In the wintertime, there's the odd occasion where a fire takes precedence.

In the summertime, in this area anyway, first thing you want to have up is that shelter.

Should have been up the first night, and I would've been better prepared for tonight.

For today, I guess.

It's up now and I'm gonna hunker in there.

The bugs were insane in it last night, which is why I slept out on the rock.

It's starting to rain just now.

And I can't chance getting myself wet at all.

You let yourself get wet even a bit, hypothermia can sink in.

Even in the summertime.

Even in the fall.

People link hypothermia, usually, only to the winter.

Most cases happen in the fall and in the spring.

And this is August in far, far Northern Ontario, in the Boreal Forest Canadian shield.

I could get hypothermic now if I don't stay dry, which, the rain's here now, so that's what I'm gonna go do.

(low tempo music) I'm fairly dry.

Gotta tuck my legs in to keep them dry.

But it's really coming down out there.

At least I know I'm fairly low.

Not out on a point or attached to a big tall tree.

Pretty important, since lightning's been getting pretty hard.

It's a good thing that I raised the shelter up on top of some rotted logs, and then put the spruce bows down, 'cause, already, I've got a river flowing underneath me.

As strong as my roof is, I've counted more than 50 drips inside.

You have no choice in a situation like this, but to hold tight.

I'm gonna start looking for some things I'm gonna start looking for some things to get my fire going.

to get my fire going.

I've got a ways to walk around and see if I can get the right ingredients for the fireball.

When you start walking through the bush, if you're gonna leave your campsite, you wanna make sure you really notice everything.

Look around all the time.

Walk slowly and deliberately.

Step over top of things, don't jump on things.

Good way to twist an ankle.

And, whenever possible, blaze your trail.

Like, perhaps, either taking a branch and purposely breaking it in a particular direction.

Or if you've got a knife, or an ax mark a blaze on the tree, on both sides.

People mark it usually on the side they're going and they forget to mark it on the side for when they're coming back so they can see where they've gotta get back to.

Both sides of the tree.

Yeah, hopefully I won't get lost.

Now, I need some cedar and some poplar.

(branch cracking) Be careful not to injure yourself when you're doing this.

So, the first thing I wanna find is a spindle, maybe six to eight inches long, and as straight as I can find it.

Get that off.

Okay, so I've got my spindle.

And I'll have to clean it up and carve it a little bit straighter than that.

The next piece of your fire bow is actually the bow part, and, pretty much, any kind of branch will do as long as it's- Oh, boy.

As long as it's strong enough and curved.

Now, right here, by my shelter, all these upturned roots, a lot of them, of course, are bent.

This one's probably a little too weak, but I can try it later if this one doesn't work.

But I like the shape of this guy up here.

So, at last, I've put together the essential elements for a fire bow.

I've got my spindle all ready to go and just, hopefully, shaped nicely and smooth enough.

I've got the fire bow now, which, the root's probably gonna work out.

I carved a couple of notches in, around the end so that I can tie this leather lace on, which came, of course, from my boot.

The baseboard, in this case, is just this cedar branch.

And I've got the hole, you can see I already actually started it a bit just to find out exactly where the spindle is gonna rest.

And, lastly, is the bearing block to hold it down.

This is trial number one, wish me luck.

You know what?

I'm getting smoke.

But my notch is not close enough to the hole, the dust is just scattering around.

Patience is the key.

(low tempo music) Oh, man.

Not getting it yet.

Oh, god.

That's hot.

That's hot enough to ignite.

It's been two and a a half hours, and still no fire.

Oh, geez.

Ah, so close.

All right, my bootlace is broken.

Directly inspired by his own survival expeditions, journeys and challenges.

World renowned survival instructor Les Stroud brings you survive, essential skills and tactics to get you out of anywhere alive.

Available for 19.99.

In addition, the book will to live Dispatches from the Edge of Survival is available, featuring Les Stroud's own top ten survival stories of all time.

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