.
Search
Email this articleE-mail this story  Discuss this articleWrite letter to editor  Discuss this articleOrder a classified ad

From sea ice to land adventures

This is the second in a three-part series by guest columnist Bill Gawor on the adventures of Survivorman. Gawor is a long-time Nunavut resident and prospector.

Northern News Services

Rankin Inlet (Apr 13/05) - After nine hours of travelling over the sea ice, he pretends his Ski-Doo breaks down.

TV's Survivorman, Les Stroud, takes an inventory of his assets and proceeds to salvage what he can to help him survive.

He rips up the black seat cover and makes what looks like a poor excuse for a Lone Ranger's mask.

These are actually his snow goggles to prevent snow blindness.

Not bad. In fact, in that situation, it would be a possibility.

But, when he soaks a section of seat foam in the gas tank for future fire making, as you can imagine, the gas evaporates and does not work.

The fumes must have been heady, however, since he ended up using the seat foam as a mattress to sleep on.

And, for some reason he ends up pulling a 14-foot qamutik (he claimed it was to carry all his camera equipment).

Seven days of such pulling burns up calories at a tremendous rate and, with no food intake, he just ends up weakening himself needlessly.

If there was a need for a sled, he could have made one from the machine's skis since, as we will see later, he had a multi-purpose tool in his pocket.

In all his other trips, he always managed to pack the gear in a backpack with no problem.

Since his mukluks got soaked, Survivorman came ashore to make a fire - Peter Freuchen style.

After gathering up some dry grass and driftwood, he proceeded to take apart a bullet with his multi-purpose tool.

He then reloaded the rifle with the blank and blasted his firewood and grass to smithereens. But no fire!

After experimenting with lesser amounts of gunpowder, he finally succeeded after the sixth shot.

But then again, the piece of kindling that caught fire was off camera!

Peter Freuchen claimed this fire-making method was the simplest to perfect when out of matches.

It seems what Les omitted to do was spread half the gunpowder under the kindling before firing the gun.

He also would have increased his chances by stuffing a wad of caribou fur into the blind cartridge.

Not only would the wad had kept the gunpowder from spilling out when the gun was pointed down, it would have most likely added to the flame.

When it came time for Les to find shelter and sleep on the second night, he came across an ice cave.

But, as he was soon to find out, that was a bad choice.

After the failed cave experiment, he tried building a shelter out of snow blocks in the lee of a hill.

It was easy to see by its sugary condition that the snow was not the kind needed, and Les was definitely not in the right location.

We'll see how it all turned out next week.