Les Stroud's Survivorman

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.

the take home information.

And the skills that you would learn from this series would make you more confident in nature.

You'd stay warm, dry and safe, and therefore you'd be able to reconnect to the natural world.

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.

- Ah, man.

(panting) (chuckles) Whoo-hoo!

Awesome.

Oh, yeah.

(wind whooshing) (bicycle rattling) (Les groans and grunts) Whoa!

(upbeat music) (Les vocalizing) (invigorating upbeat music) (singer vocalizing) (dramatic upbeat music) As the reality of filming survival in various locations around the world began to sink in.

It occurred to me that I would need more and more narrative mechanisms for how a circumstance might occur to bring about a survival situation where you find yourself lost and alone.

When I was in the boreal forest, I did it based on a canoe mishap.

Make sense?

Ocean kayaking in Costa Rica.

That also makes sense.

At some point, it occurred to me.

What about mountain biking?

Where would I do that?

Utah is a Mecca for mountain biking.

Moab, Zion, Bryce Canyon.

The Escalante.

These places are stunningly beautiful.

And they make my top three list for the most beautiful places I've ever been on the planet.

The Canadian Arctic.

The high end is at Peru and the Utah canyonlands.

- Today, on "Survivor Man," I'm in southern Utah and it's among the most mysterious and unexplored regions of the American Southwest.

Ancient cultures have survived here and vanished in the breathtaking but brutal canyonlands.

I'm going in for seven days, alone.

(helicopter whirring) I could probably bike out of here in about three days.

But hey, this is a survival show.

(air hisses) Let's make it a week.

Can you hear the jet-way up there?

Right now, those people are eating lobster.

(air whooshing) I gotta make a long fire that I can feed from one end, There we go, there we go.

Burn baby, burn.

That little magnesium stick is definitely a winner in my book.

'cause it is chilling down really quickly, soon as that sun disappeared.

I can't find any water in this area at all, and yet, there is a creek down in the canyon cut.

And guess what, I can't get to it (sighs) Well, it was some night.

(groans) I must have slept better because both my fires went out.

The little one up in the cave is out and cold, but this one just has a little tiny bit of residual heat.

Maybe I can turn it back into a flame.

Remember this guy?

Ooh.

If I just blow on the ashes, they'll all fly away and that'll be the end of it.

But when I slip this small tube from my bike down through the middle and focus it into the last hot bit of ash, I can gently coax the surrounding charcoal back into red embers once again.

This way I don't use any more of my magnesium stick, saving resources wherever I can is the survivors code.

(exhales sharply) Okay, like may be right now.

There we go.

Now I'm gonna put these corn chips in, believe it or not.

All that effort and a couple of corn chips was worth it.

The chips keep the first flames burning well, thanks to the oil they're cooked in.

I'll show you what I mean about those corn chips.

Look, see that?

And it holds its flame just like a little, tiny candle.

So if you don't have much tinder and you happen to have some corn chips in your pocket, like I did, then it's a great way to help get your fire going, 'cause that grass went out quick on me.

Ow, ow, ow!

Then you can transport your flame to wherever you need it.

Or you can eat 'em.

(gentle bright music) Well, on my trail down into this canyon, along the way I mentioned that I was following a cow trail, so I decided to grab myself not just your ordinary cow patty.

Well, okay, it is your ordinary cow patty, but it's got a special job.

Cow patty like that, given that it's a little bit damp, may smolder for as long as an hour to an hour-and-a-half, which is a good thing if you wanna keep the coals going in your little fire pit and not burn up your wood.

(upbeat music) It's already day four and I haven't had a decent drink of water yet.

Well, I've been searching up and down this creek and all I'm finding is damp sand.

It's wet but it's not wet enough.

(Les sighs) (dramatic music) Hunger is nothing compared to a quick approaching death by dehydration.

Well, finally promising.

A little touch of water here.

Just one little puddle, and by the signs of the mouse poop close by, they drank out of it, too.

So I wouldn't advise drinking out of a puddle like this with mice around but I've got to have water.

Oh, my gosh.

You gotta be really careful entering these canyons.

Even the bigger ones, too, not just these slot canyons, if there are storm clouds in the air, or if there's been a lot of warm weather like I'm getting, it might melt the snow up on the mountain tops.

You could find yourself stuck in the middle with a big wall of water coming at you and no escape.

Four days of deadly silence in these canyons, that whole "It's quiet, yeah, too quiet," kind of feel.

Makes you wonder if even the raven is real.

Ah, brother raven is calling me.

I think he wanted to tell me that I was close to something good here.

(Les imitating raven cawing) It's nice to have his company.

I'm happy though because I found some water here.

It looks like it's a seepage of water.

I don't think I even need a drinking tube for this one.

(raven cawing) (Les imitating raven cawing) I'm glad I found some water.

Makes life a little more bearable.

Quenches my thirst a lot better than little bits of snow but I've got to make a real concerted effort to try and get some food.

(upbeat music) (Les sighs) The only realistic meal I can catch around here is rat.

The Paiute string deadfall is amazing.

A simple but deadly bit of ancient technology.

It combines cord making methods with leverage and balance principles.

Pure physics really, a stone cold end to unsuspecting prey.

(soft suspenseful music) See that?

Got that rope tied around my little notch here and tied around this guy here, too.

Yucca, just a single leaf, I guess, from the yucca plant.

Now these little fibers.

So we just use the yucca as a binding.

This is my little bit of energy bar that they so graciously allowed me to have.

But let me show you how we can turn this, well, at least I'm gonna hope I can turn this into a lot more substantial food.

All I need is a little, tiny piece.

Not much at all, just like.

Just to mush it up.

Mm, be careful not to eat it.

There.

Just a little, tiny bit.

See, I don't wanna give these guys food to go away with.

Because I've mashed it into the end of this stick, he's gonna have to work at that to get it.

Now for the hard part.

I can keep my mind off of hunger by doing something proactive, like building and setting up these traps.

Problem is, this activity is all about catching food.

Now I'm even hungrier.

(sighs) Okay.

See the trigger?

You got your top piece, the string, little trigger stick there, which puts pressure on this stick here and it goes up underneath and just sorta lodges onto the rock.

I gotta go make a few more of these.

Wish me luck.

(ethereal music) Another five or six traps should at least better my odds at finally having a meal.

(knuckles rapping) This is a nice discovery.

There's a big pool of water.

It's a good inch frozen on top though.

(rock banging) (ice cracking) Cool.

Ha-ha.

All right.

(upbeat music) The inner tube makes for a perfect canteen.

Now have a look at what I found.

It doesn't really matter where you go, everywhere on this planet somebody has been and left behind garbage.

Mm-hmm.

This looks very promising.

One man's garbage is another man's treasure.

This is Mormon tea.

It's got Ephedra in it and it can actually give you a nice energy boost.

I've been gone a number of hours and that cow patty is still red hot and smoldering.

Just add dried grass and I've got fire again.

(dramatic music) That improves life, significantly.

Even have a lid.

Hee-hee.

I spent time cleaning all the rust out of this tin can with the available sand.

Eating or drinking any wild plant is extremely dangerous unless you know exactly what you're doing.

Cheers.

(Les gulping) Mm.

(sighs) Five days without a meal can play on your mind and this wild tea has got a kick to it.

(Les imitating raven cawing) The solitude, the crazy temperature swings, the long hike down the canyon, it's all taking it's toll.

Maybe this explains all those grizzly canyon legends of lost minds and missing souls where things get unreal.

(ethereal music) Five days without food.

(tube squeaks) (sighs) Well, I'm in trouble once again.

My little puddle that was so fresh and clean is down to, well, I'll drain it out just with this right now.

And unfortunately the closest source of water, other than this, is that one silty puddle, very deep, but it's a half an hour walk away from here.

See these two rocks here?

These didn't just happen by chance.

These were placed here.

They are the perfect fit to each other for a Paiute deadfall.

Exactly the same type of deadfall that I'm using to try to catch pack rats.

Just like this one here, which is one of the five that I have set right now.

But guess what, it sprung.

So, I haven't opened it yet.

I don't know if I've got a meal, but we're gonna find out.

With every failed trap, my hunger grows.

I actually expected to find something under these traps, but they're not even knocked down at all.

I'm just gonna knock this one, just to show you just how effective they can be.

One last trap to check.

I think it's down.

Let's go find out.

No need for a big fanfare this time 'cause the first one had nothing, so.

Whoa!

Well, what do you know.

I'll show you this guy here.

I think it's a type of a ground squirrel.

(sighs) I'm gonna call it dinner.

(upbeat music) Remember the spokes from the bike?

This skewer will put distance between myself and the squirrel.

The plague is still a very real possibility down here.

Time to go shopping.

Mm.

Ground squirrel.

I'm gonna need to cook this guy really well, so I'm gonna get him on the fire now, let him cook for a good long time.

Once again, I've been able to use a piece off the bike that's gonna help me cook this little fellow.

Just used a brake cable hooking through his head there.

And now I'm just gonna let him cook good and slow.

What I'm gonna do is singe all of the hair off and cook him very well, just in his own case like that, just to make sure everything is, in terms of diseases and parasites, has been taken care of.

Now look, I don't like to kill anything at all, but this shows you that with a little bit of ingenuity and determination, you can get yourself a meal if you truly are lost and need to survive.

All of this camera work combined with actual survival makes hunting and gathering any food at all vital to my ability to carry on.

Now these juniper berries, while they do taste absolutely horrible, eating a couple of them will help to, because of the chemicals in them, will help to prepare my stomach for eating meat, make it easier to digest.

You know, a lot of archeology is- (fire crackling) I can just hear the squirrel sizzling over there.

A lot of archeology is based on what they find in terms of stone tools, rock tools, things that are chipped into other things.

And the Paiute around here and the Anasazi were both terrific at what's called flint knapping.

This is a piece of rock just from laying around in this area and this is a hammer rock, which is an actual artifact from this area just laying on the ground.

You can see the chipped in.

It was used for turning big pieces of rock into little pieces of rock, into knife points, arrowheads, and spear tips, and those kinds of things.

That's really what flint knapping is, so I'll see if I can use it.

Ah-ha!

Success.

See that?

That little guy is very, very sharp.

This thing is so sharp, just cuts right through.

He's definitely not cooked through yet.

Flip over, use the other side of this flake, 'cause I'm going back up the top again.

And I'm sorry if this looks disgusting, but it's not different than a chicken or a pig or a turkey or anything else.

I'm not satisfied that he is cooked all the way through yet.

So.

(sighs) I'll need to cook it right through to make sure any parasites are dead.

(Les groans) Oops, my squirrel's burning.

Dinner.

(Les sighs) Oh!

He's pretty charred on the outside, but so it should be.

(Les sighs) Well, what I'm not gonna eat is the entrails, being the intestines and such.

But, you know, the heart, the kidney, the liver, all good stuff to eat.

There is my meal.

What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna save all the bones and I'm gonna cook them even more.

I'm gonna have them for breakfast.

Good bout of calcium.

So inside here, I've got.

Yep, looks to be the heart.

Nope, that's the liver.

There is my squirrel.

Good.

Well, tonight, for a little extra warmth, I'm gonna use hot rocks.

I've just taken these rocks, I got four like this, and I'm just putting them close to the fire.

Get good and hot.

I'm gonna tuck these in like this as I sleep and they'll keep me warm, good and warm for quite a long time.

I've got four and I'll just rotate two.

Two heating up, two on my body.

Two heating up, two on my body.

I'm gonna leave that in there, get a little hotter.

So water is still a big problem though.

It's a long way to get it.

(gentle dramatic music) Breakfast.

Mm.

Oh, if anything'll get you up in the morning, it's chewing on some cold squirrel bones.

(bones crunching) That was a cold night.

You know, I'm just not sure what the toughest part is, the constant search for water or this huge fluctuation between very hot days and bitterly cold nights.

I don't think I could do another night like this though.

The food made me even thirstier, but at least cleared my mind.

Maybe these canyons had beaten me.

The outlaws used to lure law men in here to starve them out and they called it box death.

Film or no film, I need more water to survive.

All right, you know what?

(panting) I'm not gonna do another day.

It's gonna take me all day just to hike out of this canyon, climb all the way back up.

(panting) I'm getting out of here now.

Survival is ultimately about getting out.

In my case, I'm still strong enough to do so, so I'm heading back while I still can.

Well, of course I had to come back for the camera.

What did ya think?

So now begins my long climb up out of the canyon.

And you know what?

This time I'm making the crew come back and pick up this camera.

See you next time.

(gentle dramatic music) (dramatic music) 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.

21.99.

To order, please go to lesstroud.ca, and click on shop