Is anyone else hyped for the new season of Dual Survival? Discovery has started posting teasers online and one of them is a doozy. It shows Cody Lundine sterilizing his little Mora fixed blade in a fire and then handing it to Dave Cantebury who proceeds to stab his arm and drag it across his flesh, opening up a would maybe 4″ across. If that was not enough, he starts pulling apart the sides of the wound so that it bleeds as much as possible. Around the wound goes moss and in the wound goes black powder from a rifle round. The video cuts away as Cody prepares to ignite the powder, intending to cauterize the wound.
I have mixed thoughts on the demonstration. On one hand, it is an effective way of showing how you can treat a bleeding wound with materials on hand. On the other, Dave Cantebury slices open his arm on purpose. Hopefully that part does not need further explanation. I have to give Dave some props for the guts to do something like that, but as someone taking one of his survival courses next month, I am hoping that my course proves far less adventurous.
Is anyone else watching the Walking Dead on AMC? Their other shows are phenomenal, so I have been watching the series from the beginning. No, I do not think the zombie apocalypse is coming, but that series literally hit close to home.
The series is filmed in metro Atlanta, my home since 1998. I recognize most of the landscape in the outdoor scenes, but the quarry was new to me. I thought it must have been in some remote area in rural Georgia, so I started investigating its actual location. Lo and behold, it is located right next to downtown Atlanta. That area is kind of a sketchy part of town (getting better), but I lived about a mile away for seven years. I worked 1/2 mile away for two years. I went to school a mile away for five years (yeah yeah, I took a year off). I rode my bike by that place probably a thousand times and drove by it every weekday on the way to work at a couple of different jobs for a few years.
Atlanta is in the process of turning the quarry into the city’s largest park. I don’t know if it is public yet, but that looks like a really cool place to check out. The metro area has a surprising amount of parks tucked away that I only started discovering when Google maps became close to what it is today.
My point is that I had absolutely no idea that it was there, even though I was right next to it for many years. When I lived and worked in the area, my friends and I actively explored the city around us on bike and on foot, regardless of whether or not we were allowed to be in the area, and we completely missed it.
Not only can these little furballs modify a giant leaf for a shelter, but they are also ridiculously cute. If vampires transformed into these guys, they wouldn’t have had such a bad reputation for so long.
If a flying fluffball can use nature to make its own shelter, so can you!
Thanks to fujita yuji on bladeforums for the link.
First off, let me say that for those of you that do not do much backpacking, this is in no way a common occurrence. That said, I have run into guys like this in the past, but you can be darn sure that I camped nowhere near them and slept lightly at night.
Basically, a mother is with her daughter for an overnighter on the AT and comes up to the shelter where a guy is with his dog and is drinking heavily. Things start out well enough, but he starts verbally abusing them and eventually threatens violence. They head out in the darkness, cops are called, and they find out that the guy was following them back to their car.
Again, I want to reiterate that this crap is not even remotely common. Millions of trips are taken each year without incidence, and bad experiences are not on the rise, but we do tend to hear about them way more often thanks to the Interwebz.
So, what can we learn from this? Here is what I think should be taken away from a story like this:
1. Take spare batteries and probably a spare lighting source as well. Unless you are in Alaska during the summer, it WILL get dark at night. You cannot avoid this and you never know when you may need a light of some kind.
2. Use some common sense. I like to believe in the decency of my fellow man, because the average person is a decent human being, but our instincts are there for a reason. If something does not feel right about a situation, remove yourself from it.
3. If you decide not to remove yourself from a situation, be prepared to deal with possible outcomes. I completely understand why someone would not want to carry a handgun, but at least grab a big stick and keep it near you. If you do take a weapon, get the training for it.
4. Do not be afraid to call the police. They are there for a reason. This is one of the things I think they did very well.
That’s all I have for now. I am very interested to hear what some of you might have to say about this.
I watch every survival show that comes on TV. Some of the guys in the shows have bought stuff from me, so I’ll use the excuse that I am doing market research.
Lately, I have been watching all of the Beyond Survival episodes. I was a huge fan of Survivorman and even liked the show Les Stroud did on Cartoon Network, but I am having trouble getting into BS (coincidence?!?). I don’t know what it is, but Les’s commie hat (I know they are in fashion, but I still hate them) and Ed Hardy looking shirts bother me. Not exactly a valid complaint, I know.
The skills shown are interesting, especially the complex methods that they go through to make poisons for hunting and fishing. I can’t imagine how many hundreds or thousands of years the tribes took to refine those recipes, considering how intricate the poison creation is and how seemingly rare the ingredients are. The trial and error process that they surely went through would make an interesting show all by itself, if only there were a way to tell that story.
I do think Les is coming across as overly preachy though. Why do we need to save these ways of life? Has anyone asked these tribes living in abject poverty if they would rather have a house with running water and central air? I have noticed in each episode that the people seem to want a better life, but do not have a way of achieving one. The Gypsies mentioned wanting to live on land and have houses where they were not swimming in their own fesces (literally). I agree that preserving knowledge is extremely important, but given the choice, do the people even want that? I suppose that if they ever are given the choice, we will find the answer to that question. Judging from their dwindling numbers, maybe we already have.
Discovery is apparently seeing solid viewership with their survival shows since they recently premiered yet another survival show, this time titled Man, Woman, Wild. The premier episode was last week and was filmed in the Amazon, while this week’s episode was based in Africa. I just caught both episodes and the show, like every other survival show they have, is pretty entertaining but not exactly chock full of really useful info. The show features a married couple, Mykel and Ruth Hawke.
It took me about 15 minutes to get over Mykel Hawke’s (real name) voice, which sounds like it should be voicing over an action movie’s trailer. His constantly furrowed brow matches his always serious tone quite well. He does seems to know his stuff, has a respectable background, and is not a complete drama queen like Monsieur Grylls. The show paints his wife as clueless, but her background indicates that she has been in some pretty crappy places in her life as a journalist, so she is no slouch either.
I have seen several people on the Intarwebs comment that the wife cries too much and is overacting. My response to that is that those guys are obviously not married. As a married man, I can 100% say that my wife would negatively react to my wanting to slaughter a cute puttering turtle, having animals infiltrate our shelter in the pitch black night, hacking the leg off of a freshly killed wildebeest while a lion is prowling about, seeing her husband wrestle a boa constrictor, etc. Most dudes I know would cry just as fast. She is not a survival expert, so I will have to throw some respect her way for doing all of that in the first place, even if there is a camera and support crew out there with them. After watching the behind the scenes episode for Man vs Wild, the camera crew is not really any better off than the people on camera.
I will keep on watching, even if just for the sheer entertainment value. I will say that if you decided to have a drinking game based on how many times Mykel says “baby,” you would be passed out drunk in about 10 seconds.
George over at Modern Combative Systems has posted a nice article about the 10 Essentials that he carries on a daily basis in his self described “Bag of Evil.” He works as a self defense and tactical trainer, so the list is a good look at what a professional carries with him at all times. The list is not necessarily for camping, hiking, or anything outdoors, but it is a good look at some key items to carry when your regular life takes you to some sketchy areas.
My dog is a total goofball, but he has always protected my wife and I when he thinks we need protection, so the video below got me a little teary eyed.
A 68 year old woman in Colorado was driving along a mountain road, swerved to avoid a herd of deer, and tumbled 350 feet down the side of the mountain.
She broke eleven ribs, cracked her vertebrae and punctured her lung. Stranded alone in the ravine, she says that thoughts of her family motivated her to stay alive.
She stayed alive for five days like this, using a golf club as a cane and crawling on her face in an attempt to get help. Five days is a long time without food and water, you say? Yes, yes it is.
She was alone in the woods for five days, basically crawling on her face, through a cold front of rain, sleet and hail. This moisture would prove to be life-sustaining, as she sucked on her hair to keep from becoming completely dehydrated during her ordeal.
I like to think that I could handle a situation like that and make it out alive, but I really have no way of knowing until actually in the situation. No matter how old you are or how much knowledge you have, what this woman did is awfully impressive and once again proves that the right mindset is as or more important than the right gear.
Well, I complained in my last post regarding the Alone in the Wild show on Nat Geo about how unprepared and unskilled Ed Wardle appeared in the pilot, and I was more right than I wanted to be:
However, friends following his progress on Twitter – including long-term girlfriend Amanda Murray who lives with him in Islington, North London – became increasingly concerned when he appeared to start losing his grip on reality, hallucinating and talking to insects as starvation set in.
I don’t feel that anyone should have to go through something like that, but what on earth were the producers thinking? Anyone who has even a passing knowledge of Alaska or ANY survival situation would have known that this result was a likely outcome. Hopefully next time they’ll send someone who has at least watched an episode or two of a Les Stroud show.
