Back in 2009 I wrote this article about a near deadly fiasco where a British television host almost died in the wilds of the Yukon because he was unprepared. In pre-show press packages the host Ed Wardle told the public he’d spend 12 weeks eating fish and other animals because “meat is easy to come by” in the wild. Five weeks before the filming ended he called in an emergency distress. He was starving to death basically. I watched some of the show to he was being stalked the whole time by bears.
For our purposes I just want to use this to illustrate that anyone can say they’re a survival expert. It also has some useful pointers about bugging out in the wild. It also was part of a series about Manliness that I wrote because I was arguing with the early “manopshere” a lot and my issue with them then and now is that they promote gender based grievance mongering as a philosophy rather than helping men improve themselves. Thus the post is a bit mean spirited as at the time I was partially making podcast appearances myself where I was mean spirted and makes some references to my Robert Heinlein-esque arguments about what a man should be able to do. All the world’s a stage after all. Enjoy.
Got to love those armchair survivalists, you know the ones who wax philosophical on the Internet about how they would basically rule the world post TEOTWAWKI with their Ruger Mini-14, and AK clone and some handgun they can’t fire without getting hairline fractures in their wrists. For the last couple of years my precious survivalist websites have been filling up with these walking corpses who do nothing but wildly speculate on the lethality of various calibers and form “survival strategies” that sound suspiciously similar to the plot from Dawn of the Dead.
I blame the influx of two groups into survivalism for this sort of caviler belief that survival is simply a matter of buying a gun and a camp purifier and using Dies the Fire as a study guide. The first are the Alex Jones set, who are convinced that in the future they and their homegrown militia be fighting off the armies of the anti-Christ which will consist largely of hordes of people zombified by the evil vaccine lobby and their super-science. The second group are lefties who think that they are smarter than the average survivalist and thus better equipped (intellectually) to survive. This second group consists mainly of urban dwellers who have little experience with either outdoor living or “roughing it” in general but think that a few Google searches and a trip to Eddie Bauer will prepare them for anything.
Which brings me to the story of “adventurer” Ed Wardle. Channel 4 in England contracted this scion of manhood to basically go camping for three months in the admittedly inhospitable Canadian Yukon. Hilarity then ensued:
Seven weeks after striding out into the rugged forests of western Canada armed with a rifle and a fishing rod, Mr Wardle had to be airlifted back to civilisation suffering from starvation.
He sent out a distress call five weeks before he was due to finish filming his one-man survival programme Alone In The Wild for Channel 4.
[…]
Mr Wardle lived off berries and any animals he could catch while trekking between hand-built shelters made out of fallen trees.
At first he appeared to be weathering the challenge, despite his lack of survival training.
He had been confident of finding regular food, telling the Daily Mail prior to setting off: ‘I imagine I have a long future of fish-eating in front of me. It’s going to be trout and grayling for 12 weeks.
‘But meat’s a relatively easy thing to get your hands on too. There are hares, squirrels and gophers. They’re good to eat because they’re fatty.
‘The porcupines are easy to catch because they don’t move very fast. As long as you’re careful with the spines, they’re a good source of food. You hit it with a big stick, roll it over, slice it open and peel the skin back, the same as you would any mammal.’
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.
Two weeks ago he tweeted about losing weight rapidly, saying his muscles were ‘disappearing’. Most alarming of all, he counted his heartbeat at just 32 beats-per-minute. A healthy range is between 60 and 100 beats per minute.
Meat is actually not easy to come by at all, which is something anyone who has ever been hunting or fishing would have told Wardle if he asked. Any outdoors, woodsloafer or even the blogger with the world’s most neglected survival blog could tell you that even in pristine wilderness you will not be successful hunting or fishing everyday. Hunting is, in fact, the very worst survival strategy since it is a time consuming, calorie burning endeavor that is not guaranteed to pay off in the long run.
For gathering meat, by far your best course of action is to run a trapline (using snares and dead-falls that require minimum equipment, as found in books like The Trapper’s Bible) that you can check after foraging for other food stuffs, and hopefully you’ll come across animal trails you can follow occasionally. You should therefore probably carry a few pounds of some sort of food stuffs to keep you going.
These are things an “intrepid adventurer” should know. You cannot simply be dropped off into a forest and suddenly become Grizzly Adams. Even the Mountain Men who opened the west made occasional contact with civilization to purchase staples like flour, coffee and whatever useful items they could afford. A real survivalist is a person who maximizes their chances at living through a situation, which takes practice, planning and common sense. Weekends camping in England won’t prepare a person for weeks of surviving in the Yukon. Relying on the hunting ability of a an urban dweller from a country where most people don’t even have any shooting experience is a recipe for disaster.
The planning for this trip was asinine. Wandering from point to point burns precious calories when setting up a semi-permanent camp and staying put would have given them all the footage they needed. Why they didn’t set him up a short distance to a water source (where animals will be likely to visit) with a tent (which even historical trekkers, those hardy souls who camp and wander using only 18th and 19th century era equipment, consider a near necessity of long stays in the wild) is beyond me unless this was some convoluted scheme to try to collect his life insurance. This trip was clearly planned by people who had no idea just how hard on man nature is. The “expert” in fact had no experience in woodcraft at all:
 Mr Wardle was chosen for the project because of his ability as a cameraman and producer, and his experience of filming in the North Pole and on the summit of Everest.
He has worked on shows for Channel 4, ITV, BBC and Discovery.
But he had no specific training for living alone in the remote territory, 80 per cent of which is pristene wilderness.
A man should be able to survive a few months in the woods, but to do so requires planning out your stay and dropping the childish fantasy you’ve developed from watching movies. Take the time to learn how to live in the wild, not by taking a few classes offered by the same experts that helped Channel 4 put this fiasco together, but by studying and practicing the skills you would need to do so. A man knows that he is not the great hunter for whom animals will willingly give up the ghost so that he can eat, and that in places like the Yukon a pound of Bisquick is worth its weight in gold. At the very least he should know that fishing with rod and reel is a hobby, not a survival strategy. Unfortunately, we have progressed to a point where most men not only don’t know that, but have no way of knowing that.
Tragedy is too often the result of that ignorance, and our separation from nature.
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Author Rob Taylor
