The host of the Discovery Channel’s Survivorman delivers everything you need to know to survive in the wild.
-By John Bolster
In our increasingly computer and cubicle-dominated culture, it’s not surprising that shows like Bear
Grylls’s Man vs. Wild and Les Stroud’s Survivorman have struck a chord. Who among us doesn’t long, at least on some level, to ditch the jungle of office politics for the real thing—man in nature. Stroud anticipated this impulse in 2004 when he approached the Discovery Channel with an idea: Drop me in a survival situation at various remote locales around the globe, with minimal supplies, and see how I cope for seven days. Stroud is entirely alone in each episode, setting up tiny cameras on site to film his travails. Now he’s written Survive! Essential Skills and Tactics to Get You Out of Anywhere—Alive (Collins), a brisk, entertaining how-to book packed with information and killer tips for the novice and the veteran outdoorsman alike.
What’s the most common mistake an inexperienced person makes in the wild?
Panic. The initial reaction to any kind of survival situation is to panic. Your heart races; your temperature goes up. Your thinking becomes confused, and you tend to just start moving. It’s often been described as feeling like there’s something right behind you, chasing you. That panic sends people running into the bush, scraping their face, falling, tripping, breaking their ankle.
How about an experienced person?
Completely the opposite: It’s overconfidence. Yeah, I’ll find my way back. I’ve been down this way a hundred times before—I can get out of here. That overconfidence causes the experienced outdoorsman to not prepare for, say, the big storm that they didn’t realize was gonna come in. Sure enough, 3:30 in the morning, in comes the storm. And you’ve got no shelter, no fire, no firewood.
In the book, you cite an alarming number of times you’ve gotten giardia or some other gastrointestinal menace from contaminated water. How many times have you really battled GI distress?
After all these years, I’ve lost track, but the worst one I ever had was a kind of parasite that lived by eating the lining of my mouth and my tongue.
Ouch.
I had to eat with a straw. I was in, just…agony. I even had a biopsy done, in case it might have been cancer. I struggled with that parasite for a year. And to this day I don’t know what it was. One of the top Third World–disease specialists in the world looked in my mouth—after 40 years in his business—and he shook his head and said, “I have never seen anything like that before.”
What are the most deadly areas on earth?
First and foremost are places without trees. Trees give you so many advantages, that instantly any place without trees, you are at a loss. Places like the Kalahari Desert and the Sahara Desert. I was in the Kalahari when it was 141 degrees, and I remember saying, “Oh, man, the heat is the worst thing in the world.” Then I went to Labrador, in Canada, and did a show in the snow and I was like, “No, no, no—cold wins. Cold sucks, that’s the hardest.” So those places of extremes are very dangerous. And any of the Boreal forests [northern, coniferous forests, stretching from Alaska to Canada and Norway to Siberia and even into Japan] when they’re in the deep freeze of winter, are among the most deadly places. In the summer, you’ve got tons of forgiveness. But when it’s winter and you’re in the Boreal forest, and there’s ten feet of snow and it’s minus 45 degrees? There is no forgiveness in that day. You do everything right or you are going to perish. Then I’d say stuck on a life raft in the ocean—again, a merciless situation—and finally, any place that has a high density of poisonous critters. Like the Amazon jungle or Borneo. All it takes is for you to fall asleep and drape your arm down and have it accidentally hit a scorpion. That’s a dangerous situation.
Judging from the show and the book, you’ve eaten some pretty unappetizing things. What’s the gnarliest?
Well, the rankest thing I ever ate was a snapping turtle in the Georgian swamp. I think that’s where I got that parasite. That turtle was disgusting. But I would have to say spiders—spiders are the grossest things to shove in your mouth and chew on. I like the scorpions, though.
