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.

(guitar music) In the summer of 2000, I started something.

They said it would change the way people looked at documentary filmmaking.

That it would change the way people looked at the wilderness.

For some, it would change the way they looked at life.

But, before all of that happened, it would change me.

I knew there was only one true way to film a survival experience if I wanted to share it with a large audience.

I had to do it alone.

This meant no camera crew, no safety line.

Taking myself far into a remote area and left alone to my own devices without water, no food, no survival gear.

Just a backpack full of camera equipment with which to record my survival ordeal.

last match.

Here goes nothing.

This looks like it could be a good spot for a shelter for me.

I spent the entire night, last night, being bombarded by a forest worth of mosquitoes.

I'm gonna start looking for some things to get my fire going.

Can you hear that plane overhead?

I wish you'd drop me down some matches.

Gotta keep trying.

Ah.

This isn't gonna work, I'm gonna have to take another shot at this.

This is getting silly.

Part of it is this socket, it's too small.

Oh, my god.

All right, well, now I'm in trouble.

I've doubled the boot lace to, hopefully, make it stronger.

Boy, this is one of the toughest I've ever had to do.

And, you know, I've done hundreds of these fires, but this setup is not optimum.

It's not working for me for some reason.

(low tempo music) Five hours, but I can't give up.

Oh, God.

So close.

(fire bow spinning) Gotta get it this time.

I got to take a break.

String broke.

Down to one string.

It's been six and a half hours, and the temperature is soaring to a heat wave of 42 degrees Celsius, 101 Fahrenheit.

(fire bow spinning) I'm going back to the drawing board.

I'll use new wood and a string that I'm making by cutting a strip off the bottom of my shirt.

It took a long time to get this split and this into shape.

Basically, I was dealing with a branch that was this big.

Come on, now.

Take this time.

I'm into my ninth hour, but I can't bear the thought of surviving out here without fire.

It's the key to life.

Oh, my god.

I'm so close.

So close.

The wisps of smoke betray the existence of everything I need for a fire, fuel and heat by friction.

(low tempo music) Come on.

It's been well over 10 hours of struggle.

And even without me noticing, a small coal has formed.

But it won't be until I take my boot off the wood and allow a bit of air underneath.

Will the combination work?

That's the best one so far.

Hang on.

That one's really close.

Got my spindle slipping all the time.

Fuel, heat, and oxygen together will make the magic, will make fire.

Well, now I gotta work on this again.

Oh, man.

You aren't gonna believe this.

It's very important here that I don't jump up, because I could kick everything flying, it's very tender.

Okay.

All right.

I gotta be really gentle.

(low tempo music) Yes, yes, yes!

Ha, ha, ha!

Oh, my God, that was tough.

I've never had so much trouble getting a fire going.

Oh, yeah.

Woo!

I have created fire!

Oh, yeah.

I'd like to thank the academy.

I'd like to thank cedar.

I'd like to thank poplar, birch bark, and Spanish moss.

Yes.

What a difference this is gonna make.

Couple of things, psychologically, heat.

And, now, if I'm able to catch any, well, if I have to eat leeches, or snails, or anything, at least I can cook them up, kill any parasites that might exist with them.

But, now, I'm gonna try my hardest to catch some fish.

Or maybe a mouse or something like that.

Oh, man.

That was tough.

(harmonica music) I was expecting to spend last night laying out on the rock and being tormented by mosquitoes as I have every other night.

So, I decided to come up and sit by the fire, and sit in the smoke, and, hopefully, they wouldn't hassle me too much there.

But, something surprising happened.

The temperature seemed to drop just a bit and the stars came out, and the mosquitoes cooled off a little bit, and left me alone.

So I just laid here by the fire all night long.

And, I discovered something, a sense of familiarity.

Now, it's deeply psychologically comforting to have a sense of familiarity out here.

I'm certainly not familiar with laying on the rocks and letting mosquitoes torment me all night long.

Heck, at one point, I even looked up and there was northern lights on one side of the sky, and a full moon on the other side of the sky.

It made a big difference for me to get through a night like that.

Having some form of cordage out here is pretty important.

In fact, whenever I go tripping, I carry tons of excess rope.

And, you know, you can make cordage from bark.

From plants like milkweed and evening primrose.

Or from basswood trees, but there's none of that out here.

And I've found that, out here, that spruce roots work really well.

And it's very, very strong.

I could never break that.

I've taken the spruce roots and I've tied around from pull, to pull, back up to pull, tied up at the top.

And, for strength, and then I've done a, like a lacing with some more spruce roots across the bottom to create like a net, a mesh, on the bottom, and also on the sides, so that stuff doesn't blow out of the sides.

I'll do the same across the front once I'm done.

But the next stage, basically, is to get all my birch bark and all of my tinder and stuff like that, and to shove it in there and get it all in there with lots dangling down at the bottom so that it's ready to go.

I still think it's a good idea for me to have that fire going all the time, but this is getting tougher and tougher as my energy goes down.

You know, some people have had to do some pretty outrageous things to survive an ordeal.

Consider the person who, if they had a canoe, might paddle across to that island over there and set it on fire so someone would spot it.

Or someone who chops down or burns down a hydro pool, so workers would be forced to come out to find out what the trouble is.

Illegal?

Oh, yeah, definitely.

But survival is about doing whatever it is you need to do to live.

It's not pretty.

It's not comfortable.

It's not fun, it's ugly, and it's never a game.

The old saying is, "Better to be tried by 12 than carried by six."

My energy level is, it's getting low.

The hunger pangs are coming three or four times a day.

It's like, "Ugh, I need some food," and that's kind of a drag.

Actually, you know, toting this carry, toting this camera around everywhere I go and setting it up is really killing my energy level.

It's taken a lot outta me and that plays on my mind while I'm out here, trying to survive and film at the same time.

(water flowing) Now, if I were a fish, I'd be going after this.

Gotta be out there somewhere.

Here, fishy, fishy, fishy.

One nice, beautiful, tasty, key chain.

(low tempo music) I'm really feeling the energy factor right now.

Kind of back and forth, I'm walking around.

I walk from one end of the camp to the other and forget to pick up what I went to pick up in the first place.

It's really strange, actually.

So, I'm trying to occupy my mind and get busy with some stuff.

I'm making a figure four deadfall here.

Gonna catch us some food.

Yep.

Welcome to the Les Stroud Big Game Hunting and Fishing Show.

Today, we're going to catch the most dangerous of all creatures in the Canadian woods, the woodland mouse.

Yes, indeed.

On the end, right here, hopefully, the mouse comes along.

Gives it a little nibble.

And I get a dead mouse.

(low tempo music) Survival is coping.

You know, I felt something really interesting today that I wasn't expecting, and yet, a lot of lost victims do say they feel it.

Boredom.

I was just getting really bored today.

And it happens and you've gotta get your mind occupied.

I mean, the fire was done.

The shelter was okay.

The signal tower was done and the boredom crept in.

And, you know what that can do to people, it can be really dangerous.

So, you need to start occupying your mind.

So, now, I'm starting to whittle away and carve at little dead falls, and snares to set up, and see if I can procure maybe a little bit of meat.

Get a bit of protein into my diet.

Anyway, I can hear the mosquito hums starting again.

So, maybe I'm lucky and I won't, I can be like last night, not have to wrap myself up in this raincoat again.

(low tempo music) Morning of day six, and a little tense this morning.

I had to come out and make sure the fire was still going after I got a bit of a sprinkling last night.

I thought I'd put enough logs, but I wasn't sure.

Just able to keep it going.

There's a mixed bag of weather going on right now.

There's rain clouds and blue sky.

So, the priority is gonna be to keep this fire going, of course, as always.

So, throw another couple big logs on top of it.

(thunder rumbling) The thunder's rumbling like crazy in the distance.

So, I figure I'm gonna play it safe and bring my fire inside.

I actually put a big rotting stump on the outside fire to protect it from the rain and act kinda like an umbrella.

Which is what the- I was in northern Quebec with the Mistassini, in Mistassini with the Cree, and that's what they did.

They take big, punky logs and put it over top of their fire before torrential downpour.

And the fire would keep going.

I've trimmed all of the top here.

Got away all the hanging pieces, things that are gonna burn, stuff like that.

And I've got all my twigs and branches and everything ready.

Now, pretty much, stick with small thumb sized sticks for this, maybe long ones.

But, the problem with this fire is, you are having to feed it, pretty much, constantly.

And that's why the big stumpy, or big stump, the big rotting stump, works really well.

That rain is coming.

The sky is very black over there.

Oh, I'm gonna get rained on again.

(low tempo music) I'm in here somewhere.

Just a couple of big punky logs laid over top of my fire and just let to smolder and burn underneath, and pouring rain.

It just poured on me, torrential downpour with thunder and lightning for about an hour and a half straight.

And it has opened up to one big, beautiful sky, all blue.

And my fire's still going.

A lot of survival books go on about catching big game.

I haven't even seen a mouse, let alone a grouse.

And I saw one caribou and a flock of ducks, but they didn't really wanna come over and visit me.

So, you're left with the main fare.

A snail and two leeches.

Or, as I like to affectionately call them, lunch and dinner.

Eating things that crawl can take some getting used to, but it comes easy if you haven't eaten for days.

It's all about getting over plate fright.

But, often, even the most squeamish can handle the grossest, once you're hungry enough.

Here we have it.

Meal fit for a king.

So, this is what's left of my snail after first cooking it on the stick and then putting it on a rock to finish frying up there.

It doesn't look like much, it'll have to do.

It's lacking a little garlic butter.

But down it goes.

Well, I'm stuffed.

How about some leech dessert?

Here we have it, my sun-dried and smoked two leeches.

Ready for the eating.

Well, what are the realities of this situation?

The realities are, that trying for fish or big game, even squirrels, is a very difficult process.

Don't expect to be lost for a couple of days and be bringing home some major meat unless you've got some gear with you.

When you have nothing, it's very difficult.

Fishing with a two and a half foot line twisted off my shirt is not very ideal, even though I just saw a huge pike swimming right beside the shore.

So, you are left with- Well, as I read one time, you're left with the "gots to's."

There's the "wants to's" and the "gots to's."

There's the "want to's," the stuff, it's the stuff that you want to eat.

And then, there's the stuff that you gotta eat because you need sustenance.

Hmm, little crispy.

Hmm.

Tastes like chicken.

(low tempo music) I found a rusty old tin can in the bush and I'll try boiling in my hat.

It's one of the few ways to heat water without a pot.

These rocks have been in the fire for a long time.

They're red hot.

And I'm putting them inside the hat here, full of water.

I've got blueberry leaves, I've got raspberry leaves, I've got some labrador tea leaves.

And I'm trying to get this to boil.

I don't wanna burn my hat.

It's not a rolling boil by any means, but it might be enough to do the job.

Well, I've got about three or four cups of stew here, or liquid.

Anyway, what I would do is, drink the, when it cools, I'll drink the liquid for the tea factor.

I've got the labrador tea in there, the peppermint.

Or, not the peppermint, I wish there was peppermint in there.

The blueberry and the raspberry.

But I also put in this stuff here.

I cut up the, ouch, the pond lily tubers.

So, let's see what that's like.

It's soft, anyway.

Now, see, I had pond lily tubers one time before, it was terrible.

It's very bitter.

We just roasted it in the fire.

That's edible.

Totally edible.

It's kind of bland.

Touch of bitterness to it, but it's full of starch and I could do some of that right now.

(low tempo music) (wilderness sounds) As the plane searches overhead, unsure of where I might have moved to, it's time to see just how well my signifier can work.

I think I'm rescued!

Woo!

The triangle tripod formation held up really well in the storm.

It was blowing on all night, thought it was gonna blow over, but it's good, straight and strong.

The bows helped to shed the rain, so the birch park wasn't so wet, and I couldn't get this.

On this first attempt at documenting a survival ordeal, I've made it through the seven days.

It never ceases to amaze me how I can go through an experience that, at the time, seems like something I never want to do again.

But then, once back to normality, back to civilization and all its trappings, clutter, distractions, and emptiness, I find myself craving the soul filling wilderness all over again.

I miss the challenge.

I miss the sweat.

I miss the stark reality of providing for myself the basic needs of life.

And the desire to test myself becomes strong.

Even insatiable, my desire to survive.

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