The Globe and Mail has posted an article detailing a recreation of the last few hours of the Survivorman fan who tragically perished during a "survival" trip in the woods near Huntsville.
Read about it HERE.
I'm obviously no expert, lets get that straight. I created this blog to detail my journey learning these skills, but I still think it's important to discuss some of the lessons to be taken away from this tragic case:
(1) Know your terrain. He traveled out into the woods in the winter in Ontario without snowshoes or even making some temporary ones from spruce bows. This meant that he would have been covered in snow from the waist down which would have sapped the heat right out of him and melted right onto his legs from the body heat he generated. Cold and wet = death.
(2) Proper preparation. Looking at the gear he took with him, it was clear that he wasn't dressed properly for the winter climate. The key thing here is layers, and the specific lack of wool. Layering allows for precisely controlling the temperature you need to avoid sweating in the cold. Les Stroud himself has commented "you sweat, you die". Secondly, wearing wool would've given him a distinct advantage even if he had changed nothing else, as wool retains 80% of it's ability to keep you warm even when wet.
(3) Fire skills. This is crucial! Even in other seasons of the year, having the ability to make a proper fire does so much. In the winter, this become even more of a priority when hypothermia can set in, in just a few hours of exposure. It would've been even more important to dry off the soak clothes he was wearing from his trek in and keep his core temperature from dropping.
(4) Not recognizing early enough the severity of the situation. Very often a group of people can be hit with a storm and think "the road/cabin/safe area is only an hour or two away, if we just push on we can make it out of this storm". In reality the best thing to do, is hunker down and set up camp to ride out the weather. You save precious calories and keep yourself sheltered from the elements. The important thing is to recognize early that pushing on is not the best course of action, which can be hard since many times it can be wrongly equated with inaction.
In the case here, a map with information detailing almost exactly where he would be and when he was expected to return. He needed only wait a day or two and rescuers would've been on his location. Instead he decided to try and walk out which means it took an extra few days to follow him, and by then it was too late.
(5) Things can go bad because...of a lot of little things put together, not always because one bad event occurred which turned things into a shit-storm. In this particular case it was a combination of all the above factors that resulted in his death, and anyone of them could have been crossed off the list to give him a better chance at surviving.
I'm sure that someone with more experience than myself could point out even more flaws but if a novice like myself can point these out, then they're worth noting. Survival isn't a game, it's the difference between life and death. If you're going practice these skills, do it in a way that you're safe. There's no need to
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