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.

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.

- I'm at least a hundred kilometers from the nearest snowmobile trail or, or soul.

Last night it was minus 40.

I have no matches and only one energy bar per day.

(whimsical music) Winter, it's the perfect paradox.

Beauty, silence, and stillness, unequal.

Starkness, solitude, and danger, unquestioned.

So why challenge it?

Why question it, or rather why question my ability to survive it?

Where I come from, surviving bugs, heat, thirst, and storms are tough, but surviving the cold goes well beyond a test.

(suspenseful music) (shovel scraping) (suspenseful music) (airplane engine revving) In the far north they call you a greenhorn until you go through the frigid right of passage.

And that test is not surviving the winter.

It's freezing an appendage, and having the black dead skin to prove it.

It's the winter's version of a battle scar.

I've been here before.

Dropped down in the middle of this remote wilderness, and left to survive alone.

The personal prayers of safety I utter here will be about warmth, about just making it through the night.

Warmth during a time of season when forgiveness for mistakes doesn't exist.

One wrong decision, one moment of apathy, a lack of vigilance, and this wilderness will not forgive me.

It'll remain unmoved by any cries of pain from frostbite, unchangeable by any moans of hypothermic chills.

It'll just be what it is, a frigid, deadly landscape, helping only those who help themselves.

I can hear the sound of Trevor's plane just off in the distance now.

It's about minus 30.

Now what?

(suspenseful music) It's mid to late afternoon (groans).

And ah, I don't have the time to get picky, so best bet is to get out of this wind.

(suspenseful music) In the dead of winter, even the lightest of breezes is enough to chill you down, and slowly kill you with hypothermia.

(suspenseful music) See if I can find a good little shelter here somewhere.

There comes a time, well, the time's pretty immediate actually, you've gotta make one important decision, stay or go.

Most importantly is just the realization that you have to make that decision.

If you stay, you have a chance to build camp, ah, make signal fires, and maybe start hunting.

You might have a situation where you're simply waiting for a better chance to travel, like waiting out a storm or perhaps waiting for freeze up.

Or maybe there comes a time when you realize they ain't looking for you anymore, and it's time to get outta here.

(suspenseful music) Shelters don't usually come ready made, and there are a lot of variables to finding the right location.

In a case like this, I'm literally looking for a spot where otherwise I won't freeze to death.

But if there's one thing I've learned about the wilderness, it's that you can't go there with expectations.

You can only deal with what you actually find.

Home, I guess.

I don't have a lot of options here.

You know in the survival books they always show some guy in an emergency, quick emergency shelter, you can get under the boughs of a spruce tree or something, and there's this little cubby hole?

Yeah, well I've looked around.

This is about as best as I can do for immediate natural shelters.

But there is a lot of boughs and stuff, we'll see.

I gotta get in here, and just hopefully make sure I'm protected from most of the wind.

That's really important.

So get outta that wind.

I looked around, and I saw a couple of other possibilities, but ah, they ah, if you sit and watch for awhile, and you notice a little Spanish moss hanging down, you could see it moving, so you knew there's a breeze working through there.

When I sat for a while and looked at this spot here, everything's still, so hopefully I'm in a little protective cove.

I just did a big no-no, put my ax down on the ground.

Huge, huge mistake to do that.

Do not put your ax on the ground, especially in the wintertime, because you'll lose it in a mere second.

(suspenseful music) Benefit of this shelter, is it's sort of a natural shelter.

All I'm doing is grabbing, chopping off the tops of trees, little spruce trees here, and filling up a, a wall in the holes here.

Sort of like a makeshift lean-to, I guess.

(suspenseful music) Oh, it's just feeling cozy already.

I gotta keep my humor up, because it won't be there at 3:00 a.m.

I could get into doing a big elaborated shelter, but I only have probably another hour and a half of daylight and I know that in making a shelter like that, I'm gonna start sweating.

You sweat, you die, so I don't wanna sweat.

There are a lot of deprivations I'm willing to put up with in the name of survival, but going without an ax, in the middle of a Canadian winter, isn't one of them.

It changes the possibilities immensely.

It can enable a lot more effective survival.

But in the hands of someone without skill, one slip and you've just put the ax into your shin, and the odds against you.

I'm protecting my eyes by closing them at the last second of the chop.

Being blind out here wouldn't be good.

Yeah, this is, this is possibly dangerous.

You better know how to wield an ax before you start doing this.

Any injury out here is deadly.

(ax thudding) If you don't have to use your ax, don't.

Break things off.

You wanna save the ax, keep it sharp.

Now all of that said, I actually did bring a file with me, because I rarely take an ax along without a file strapped to it, because a dull ax makes you work a lot harder.

These boughs are gonna be good insulation for the shelter both underneath me and all around me.

Try and make like a cocoon.

(suspenseful music) It's always good to know how many hours you've got left in the day, and a great and easy way to do that is to outstretch your hand towards the sun, and on an average hand, each finger represents about 15 minutes.

So if you just touch the bottom of the sun, and then count down to the horizon, you get a good approximation of just how many hours are left in the, in the daylight, and that's always important to know.

(suspenseful music) I'm losing my daylight, so I'm gonna light the fire.

I have one match, so hopefully I'll have no problems with that one match.

What the heck is that?

And ah, I've got ah, this big log here, or log, well this tree anyway.

It's a, it's a long one.

I can feed it in throughout the time, so that I don't have to cut it that way.

So after I get the fire going, all I'm gonna do then is reinforce the shelter a bit, and try to get as much firewood here on-hand before it's too dark for me to be moving around in the bush.

I don't have a lot of time though.

Here we go.

Last match of the week.

Ah, birch bark.

Birch bark has gotta be the best fire starting material out here.

Anyone who has ever had to survive will attest to the power and beauty, and the reassuring sound of the first flames of a fire well built.

Without it, survival, any survival is a horrible struggle.

Gonna need this.

(fire crackling) I have a feeling even with the fire, that this big wide opening here, it's gonna be a long cold night.

(suspenseful music) Well, it was definitely a, a cold night.

I kept the fire going, and I was able to just keep feeding it all night.

A lot of shivering, very little sleeping.

It's ah, it's warmed up a bit.

It's about minus 17 right now, so it's not so bad.

Let's find out what I've got to work with here.

First thing, very valuable in survival situation.

Rope 1,001 uses.

Flare, well we're gonna try out a flare.

Never had a chance to do it before, so we're gonna try it out this week and see how that works.

Signal mirror, excellent.

We'll ah, I'll take a, it's stuck in there, but take my word for it, inside there's a small mirror.

Can used not only for signaling airplanes, but you can also check your face, and see if you've got any white spots, in case you've been out in the wind.

Make sure you're not getting ah, frost bitten anywhere.

Ah, a Hot Hand.

That's gonna help me out at night for sure.

Only one unfortunately, and there's seven nights to deal with.

A whistle, vital.

You can go behind a, a tree in the bush, even in the summertime, especially in the winter, yell your lungs off, no one can hear you.

A whistle helps to cut through the dense forest cover a lot better.

Same thing with trying to go across rapids.

It's very difficult to hear a human voice.

Flint striker, gonna get into that later for fire starting.

Excellent item to keep with you.

You can drop this thing in the water, pick it up a year later and it still works.

Aha, garbage bag.

Not just any ordinary garbage bag, an orange garbage bag.

I've got a shelter, cover.

I've got a raincoat.

I've got a signal light device, because orange, orange is gonna show up a lot better than dark green.

If you can take a garbage bag, make it an orange one.

Fishing line and some lures to go with it.

And what's important with these lures as well, is that I've purposely chosen winter fishing lures.

And that's another thing that's key.

When you set up your survival kit, make it something that's conducive to the season you're in.

So in this case, something for winter.

(suspenseful music) (wind whooshing) Now these tracks here are woodland caribou tracks.

Unlike its counterpart up in the Arctic, they tend to be a very solitary animal.

Very difficult to see in the boreal forest, especially in the summertime.

But in the wintertime, they will come together in small little communal groups.

And the great thing about what you can see here is the difference in time in these tracks.

These two tracks here beside me, who knows, maybe a couple of days old or so.

But it's been windy for most of the day, and those tracks over there aren't wind blown at all.

So we know that an animal has come through here pretty recently.

Further on up there, you can see where there's some bit more snow muscled up there, mushed up.

What happens is they will often come together in little groups out in the middle of lakes, and who knows what they do, just hang out and talk.

But they do tend to come together out there, walk around.

This is probably more than one animal, as I see some other tracks around the area here.

(suspenseful music) I'm taking in as much of the surrounding area as I can to see what I have to work with.

It's stage three of assessing my situation.

Stage one is myself.

Stage two is my gear.

And stage three is the environment.

And this is a tough environment.

See this is brutal.

This is why you wanna stay away from hills as much as possible.

This is where the hole in the snowshoe, this is what it's all about.

My toes are slipping down into the bottom of the, or through the hole of my snowshoe, and it's my toes that are gripping the hill to help push me up, which is difficult in this powdery, poofy, slippery snow.

Again, that's why I so much prefer using moccasins rather than boots.

I can feel the ground with my toes.

I can get that little extra grip in there.

It's not easy though, either way.

Oh, what have we here?

In the summertime, I did a similar survival situation where I ah, where I came and stayed right here in this location, right in this spot.

But ah, let's take a look (chuckles), and let's hope there's no bears that used it for a den, because it's a perfect size, geez.

There's even ah... It's even frozen as if there was like an air hole coming out here.

Make no mistake about it, bears do hibernate, but many hunters know it doesn't take much to wake 'em up, and have 'em come popping out in the middle of winter very angry.

Well, I suppose it would make a good emergency shelter if I had to get in there.

A little rock and everything is there, but took me a long time to to dig this snow out.

Even though it's covered over and everything, the way the winds blow and whip around here, they've just blown snow in there.

There's at least ah, there's at least almost a foot and a half, or two feet of snow in the shelter reaching all the way in.

So ah, take me a bit of work.

Because as I said, this is definitely not the ideal location anyway.

It'll be freezing with that north wind.

(whimsical music) Ah, even in the wintertime, you've got grass just sticking up out of the snow.

If the snow's not too deep sometimes, it's always, almost always nice and dry.

I love it for getting, for getting a fire going.

It gets a lot tougher to get a fire going in the wintertime.

I know in the summer I love the option of having a really big fire and dropping big logs, even punky logs on it, because they'll burn all through the night.

In the wintertime, all your punky logs are buried and frozen to the ground and buried by the snow, so you're left to whatever you can sort of grab and break.

Anything small and dead like this off the bottoms of trees help a lot.

But certainly the bigger fire I can get going, the better I'll feel.

(whimsical music) You know, when I was first dropped off by the airplane, I could've swore that towards where the sun is right now was due east.

I was sure of it.

Turns out it's actually due south.

Now how did I find this out without a compass?

Pretty simple.

My watch, it's not that difficult.

If you take your watch, you point your hour hand directly at the sun, halfway between your hour hand and 12 noon, on the face of your watch will be south.

And of course the opposite's going to be directly north.

Having a firm grasp on where north and south are can be very helpful, for everything from where to put your shelter, to where to ice fish, to which location help should be coming from.

That's what I wanted.

(whimsical music) Well, I've been spending the day just adding to this shelter as much as possible.

As much as possible I need to close it all in.

Tonight, I'm still in the same scenario I was in last night where I've gotta sit here and by a, a bigger outdoor fire.

The best thing to do is to create like a cocoon that you can get right inside.

So even if you didn't have a fire, at least there's some residual heat in there from you.

But if you can have a fire that's also protected and inside your shelter, way better, especially in the winter.

So I've just been weaving the, I've just been weaving these branches into my shelter to ah, to keep me warm and to keep me up off the ground.

Right now there's quite a white out happening on the lake.

So you know what that means?

It means that satellite phone, GPS, two-way radio, none of these things will do me any good at this very moment with a whiteout like that.

Nobody can fly in that.

Nobody can land here to help me out.

(suspenseful music) Even today with all of our technology, I can be stuck and completely out of touch in the remote wilderness, where problems like an appendicitis attack could kill me.

(suspenseful music) It's time to make fire again.

This time I'm gonna use basically the traditional pioneer method.

They didn't have their packs of matches or lighters to carry around.

What they did have was steel, something with a high element, high carbon element and rock.

And let's not get into what different kinds of rocks you can spark with.

If you're lost, just find a rock that'll spark if you happen to be lucky enough to have some steel with a high carbon element in it.

(rock scraping) Ow, haven't done this in awhile.

Last thing you need is a way, what, what's happening here is you're coming down and shaving off tiny little slivers of metal, and they're shooting away melting, melted, and they need something to land on.

So what you need is something to catch that little spark and then hold a glow.

What I've got here is charred cloth.

Basically you take a hundred percent cotton, and oops, don't get it in the snow.

And ah, you put it in a tin, close the lid of the tin, put it in the fire.

So chicken before the egg.

You gotta have a fire to make this stuff.

And ah, I'll show it later, but if you'll pull the tin out and open it up after awhile, and you've got this charred charred cloth.

The point is it's charred not burnt.

So you try to get the spark to land on it.

(rock scraping) Oh boy.

Not a good start.

(rock scraping) Oh boy, it's lots of good sparks, but the cloth, cloth isn't holding it.

That's not a good sign.

Remember "Jeremiah Johnson"?

Robert Redford sat there in the bush trying to get a fire going?

This is exactly the method he was using.

(rock scraps) Got her, all right.

What I've got now is this piece of charred cloth.

It's just holding a little ember, a little glow.

I think you might be able to see that.

That gives me some time to put it in my tinder bundle, which is this collection of dried grass, and Spanish moss, cedar bark that's been all schmucked up there is sort of broken up in that.

And try to make yourself a little furnace here.

(coughs) Ooh, close.

Make sure you got all your other tinder ready.

And of course birch bark is a perfect tinder, full of oils.

Even when it's soaking wet, it'll burn well.

(Les gasps) Aw!

(fire crackling) And you're in business.

Now, why should you bother carrying a piece of rock and steel you might ask?

Well, true enough, you'd rather, I'd much rather carry matches and a lighter.

But the point is, what if you only have a few matches left, or you run out of fluid in your lighter?

All you have to do is figure out a way to make your charred cloth.

If you don't have a hundred percent cotton, which is what it takes.

So you can use the bark from, from a punky tree.

You can make charred cloth.

If you've found a way to get a spark like that, you can extend the life of your lighter and your matches, and not even have to use them.

And that may matter a great deal if all you have is a handful of three or four matches on your, on your person, whew.

on your, on your person, whew.

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