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.
Has anyone watched this show? My wife and I could not make it past the first half of the first episode. For those of you who have not seen it, Ed Wardle goes in to the Yukon for three months by himself, with only a knife, cooking pot, and clothing, or something like that. The first episode is a kind of test run, where he is fully equipped with gear so he can see what the conditions are like.
I’m trying to remember everything I saw, but I can at least recall a rifle, fishing rod, hammock, bug net, nice clothing, fishing gear and clothing, and a whole lot more. This looked like quality stuff, not the crap that they gave the group on the Alaska Experiment. The premise to me sounded like a really sweet vacation, minus not having my wife there, of course ( I LOVE YOU SWEETIE PIE).
The guy is out there on his own, filming everything himself Les Stroud style. Now, Les was known to complain every now and then, but he usually had legitimate gripes, such as “I’ve subsisted off of maggots for a week,” or “the jaguar that stalked me and tried to eat me frightened me a bit.” Mister Ed does not seem to be able to go three seconds without complaining about how terrible the whole situation that he willingly entered into is. He has an irrational fear of being attacked and eaten by a bear, which I supposed I can let slide, since a phobia by definition is irrational. Early into the episode, he complains about how hungry he is and how the extreme hunger (from one day) is causing him to fail at basic tasks like walking and breathing ( I might be slightly exaggerating, but not by much).
Discovery had Les Stroud and still has Bear Grylls. Les knew what he was doing, was pretty entertaining, and conveyed a lot of useful knowledge. Bear gives a lot of really terrible and dangerous advice, but he is really entertaining and is willing to do [i]anything[/i] to keep people watching his show, including drinking elephant poo juice, wrestling a live boar, drinking his own pee out of a snake (that he killed) skin. National Geographic’s answer to those two gentlemen is looking quite pathetic. Someone please let me know if the next few episodes were any better.
I take customer confidentiality very seriously, but I can’t contain it any longer. Les Stroud (or his assistant) ordered a Badger firesteel from me a couple of weeks back. I could tell from the shipping address and email that the order was legit. I sent him about 20 times the value of the firesteel in all kinds of other stuff, so maybe you’ll see a Going Gear product for 1/10th of a second on one of his future shows.
Well, looks like ol’ Bear Grylls is in the news for teaching a kid something that was actually useful. A 9 year old was separated from his group on a hike and said he used what he learned on Man vs. Wild to handle the 18 hours out in the wild while rescuers were searching for him.
From the article:
Grayson created a small shelter overnight under a fallen tree. The next day, he decided to follow a creek in hopes of finding help.
“I (thought I) might find the lake, that there might be somebody at the lake,” he said.
He made a couple of bad decisions like not staying put and tearing up his rain jacket to use for signaling, but, much more impressively, he didn’t freak out and was able to keep a level enough head that he could try to think through his situation. Sure, he could have done things a little differently, but his actions were better than half of the adult search and rescue stories that I read.
I imagine that Ray Mears wanders through the woods, sipping tea in his cup made from riverbank clay, making bird calls, and generally being at ease in the wilderness. He is like the polar opposite of Bear Grylls, and while both have their entertainment value, Ray’s advice is usually much easier to trust and follow. In the below video, Ray shows how to select an axe and then safely use it. Even if you have been using an axe since you were a toddler, the video might teach you a new good trick or two.
Wired has an interview up with Neil Strauss, a best-selling author that likes to immerse himself in a new (to him) world to learn new skills or gather material for his books. His latest effort is Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life, in which he heads into the woods with just a knife, gets locked in a trunk while being handcuffed, and generally spends time in situations that would make most peoples’ sphincters pucker right up to lean how to survive various situations. The interview talks about his thought process in approaching and researching the book, but the real gem of the article is the video where he shows how to make a knife out of a cigarette. The how-to portion is mildly entertaining, but the goat that takes center stage and eats all of Neil’s props is the real winner.
He also discuss the “philosophy of the sphincter:”
The basic idea is that, in a high-pressure situation, the first thing that happens is people get nervous and uptight. And as soon as your sphincter tightens, as the metaphor goes, it cuts off circulation to your brain. So one of the best survival skills you can have is the ability to quickly and coolly assess a situation rather than panicking and doing something stupid.
After that interview and video, I’ll definitely be picking up the book in the near future.
