Survivorman's Secrets of Survival s01e05 Episode Script
MacGyverisms
This program is intended for mature audience only.
Some scenes may contain graphic content, language and nudity which may not be suitable for all audience.
Viewer discretion is strongly advised.
Tips, tricks, little secrets, big secrets.
Methods to help me survive that I call "macgyverisms.
" For the next hour, I'll give you my top five that have worked for me in some of the harshest environments on the planet and helped me to survive.
But before we get into the list, here are some of my favorite tips and tricks that have been my secrets of survival.
That'll do.
ONE MAN ALONE NO FOOD NO T.
V.
CREW Survivorman Secrets of Survival: MacGyverisms these are the components of survival that almost make what I have to do seem fun.
They have their roots in primitive skills, ingenuity, desperation.
These tricks and tips, these macgyverisms, help me to survive.
But it's been a road of frustration.
I don't think like an engineer.
Most of my inventions happen by sheer luck, a fluke of an idea that worked.
When they really work well, they've been ideas taken from existing earth skills or suggestions from survival experts from around the world.
But I'm the one who has to live them out.
There is one tip that's all my own, though, and I call it my three zones of assessment.
Okay, the key to surviving a situation like this is the same as every situation.
You got to assess -- what I like, sort of the -- I call it, like, the three zones, I guess.
Zone number one is what you have immediately on your body.
I know that I've got a bit of food, and I know what clothing I have.
Zone number two is what you have in your immediate surroundings.
So, in this case, it's gonna be the car, and I still have to check that out.
And then zone number three would be in your extended surroundings and what goes beyond that.
When I have those three assessments done, then, and I think only then, can I make a proper and informed decision on how to survive a situation like this.
An extremely useful secret of survival for traveling without the use of a trail or compass is to draw my own trail map based on doing a reconnaissance mission.
I head out with the purpose of mapping my area.
It's very simple.
Combining the logging of the time it takes to travel in one direction, or even by counting my steps, I make a rudimentary map of the area.
Each easily identified landmark becomes a point on the map where I take stock of how long I've been walking and which direction I'm going next.
Because of this map now, I can find my way to and from the small river, the creek with the flowing water, whenever I need to fill up and get a drink and get rehydrated.
This way, I can find my way there and back even when I'm not feeling really good, if I'm disoriented.
And if I was with somebody, I can say, "here.
Here's the location to the water.
" They can take it, head out to the water, and find their way back.
Being able to boil water when you don't have a pot, it's extremely difficult.
But often, ingenuity comes to the rescue.
By pulling these hot rocks in and basically trying to boil the water in my hat.
Fortunately, the hat is a heavy, heavy cotton, I think, so it's holding the water okay.
Just keep doing this -- you keep replacing hot rocks until you bring the water to a boil.
All right.
I've been drinking that muddy water so far.
But I'm gonna show you that you can boil water in a plastic bottle if you really had to, if you really needed to purify your water.
When I did this for the very first time in africa, I even surprised myself.
It was one of those methods I had only heard about.
I tried it before with birch bark successfully, but I had figured using plastic was gonna be a long shot.
In the absence of fresh, clean water, doing this at least made me feel like the dirty water was safe.
The secret is to not let the flames lick up under the part of the plastic without the water on the inside.
Ahh.
That's pretty cool -- getting water to boil in plastic.
I've always believed that fishing is still one of the best things you can do to help your very survival, so it only goes to follow that coming up with all kinds of tricks to get hook and line and bait into the water becomes my go-to macgyverism secret of survival.
All right.
Let's get busy.
Well, I need a fishing line, and this is all I've got.
All I have to do is split it apart.
Getting better.
So, I've got the fish out on its hook, the thin line that goes up to the big rope, the big rope that goes up.
And I've got a float that I found lying around here.
While I left the line out as the tide came in, I decided also to find a way to get closer to the fish.
And rather than risking flipping the kayak into the frigid water, I figured it best to make extra floats for the kayak.
I'm much more secure and stable now, especially because I'm putting a camera mount up high, making the kayak top-heavy.
Safety first, married within ingenuity, makes for much better survival.
Okay.
Mmm.
Any self-respecting fish would love to have that for dinner.
There are salmon jumping on either side of me.
Nothing taking my bait, though.
Oh.
Well, here.
Here's my bait.
Nice, big hunk of fish guts there for you.
Let's see what I can do with some of the pack contents I brought in with me.
I have been taking that piece of credit card.
And I've just been cutting it into a spoon shape.
Next thing I've got is my bubble gum.
So, what I want to do is poke holes into this little spoon here.
Put the rope through the spoon.
Some sort of little, old spring.
Take my spring.
Tie that off.
The hooks with the leech bait on there.
The spoon, which really I would use if I was more, you know, jigging for fish.
But this will still help to attract them, I hope.
Now, lastly My gum.
Wrap that around the line.
So, then, I've got a fish float.
Let's try it.
The bubble-gum bubble is just floating, just beneath the surface there.
I'll leave that.
And who knows? I could get lucky, catch me some dinner.
In the amazon jungle, I tried for not only a standard sort of hook and line, but also had a way to make my own fish net.
If the fish aren't gonna come to me, I'm gonna go to them.
The secret here is to remember that any idea is good if it keeps me proactive and keeps my mind working.
Boredom, which can be a killer, is conquered by action.
There you go.
And you got a little grip handle here.
I got myself a fishing net.
It's not how well these little inventions work.
It's simply the act of making them and then trying them.
My mind leaves the thoughts of dangers and instead concentrates on the task at hand.
In labrador, a little bit of pre-trip ingenuity made for an ideal way to carry along a survival kit.
I still think that your best survival kit is what you can have in your pockets.
But if you hunt, your rifle can be a survival kit, as well.
All I did was take a drill and drill out some holes in the stock itself.
Okay.
I'm able to fit about 10 extra bullets in these holes, which are good 'cause you don't want to run out of bullets.
The other thing I have in there -- from a q-tip, some cotton tinder.
And then, as well, a little fire striker.
And you've got a little survival kit built right into the butt of the gun.
Let me give you an important little secret about survival kits -- always know the contents.
In fact, forget the all-in-one store-bought kits and make up your own from scratch.
Most importantly, check the dates on things that can expire.
Remember, a survival kit is meant to keep you alive and get you home.
And if you what you carry in it is out-of-date, well, all bets on your survival are off.
From the current survival kit, flares.
Oh, you're kidding me.
Well, that's gnarly.
I pulled the wire right out of the flare, and nothin'.
That's not a lifesaver.
Wow.
You got to check these things.
I'm looking at this.
It says "1993.
" That's just dumb.
Ugh.
Nothin'.
When it comes to survival-kit items, they got to be up-to-date.
Often, my little tricks, tips and macgyverisms are for a single purpose, meant to answer one need in survival.
And for my number five, I give you the one all of the books like to show but is often the least effective.
I know I've seen their tracks around here, but I figured it was a real long shot to whether or not I could actually catch one.
Now that I know that they're here, I'll set out a trap tomorrow.
The number-five macgyverism tip for survival -- making a funky trap.
There are hundreds of different types of traps you can make in a survival situation, each one of them ideally suited to the area it was invented in, some of them meant to catch something small and some of them meant to catch something big.
Either way, they often took a great deal of ingenuity to design and build.
Some I would take out of books.
Others I'd make up as I went along Because it was all about one thing -- keeping active and trying to fill my stomach with actual food.
In papua new guinea, I had the opportunity to go after something big -- a jungle pig.
And for that, I had my hopes resting on a classic, quick-kill trap right out of the books.
Now, the tricky part -- setting this thing without stabbing myself.
Let me show you how this thing works.
This is the path that the pig has been walking, okay? He's gonna run into that string.
When that happens, this releases.
And this is the spot here that's holding the spear back.
This releases, and then this whole spear will just shoot.
And hopefully, if I'm lucky, it'll stab right into the heart of the pig, and I'll be cooking up bacon.
A quick-kill trap like that may appeal to the mountain man in us all, but the reality is snaring is much more effective and more likely to actually work.
And in northern ontario, I had to set them with one arm in a sling.
So, I see there are some fresh tracks right here.
And you can kind of see that they all converge on this same one spot here.
If you find a place where the rabbits are already naturally funneled into a certain spot, and you just reinforce that funneling and put the snare right in the middle, you stand a much better chance of catching one.
That should be pretty good.
So, I've got this one guy ready to go.
You can see the loop.
Now, I've just got to put my noose in place.
There we go.
Birds can be a significant challenge in survival.
They're always around, but catching them is difficult.
And even though I knew they would taste horrible, I decided to take a shot at seagulls in the high arctic by modifying a traditional pole snare and adapting it to go after birds.
Taking a couple of leaders here, strung them together, couple of small hooks around the bottom.
So all I have to do now Is put some bait on it.
Some whale blubber, a couple of small hooks.
With any luck, the seagull will just go for a big gulp.
Now, these traps can be very effective.
Hopefully, they'll come in, and I'll have myself a bird dinner.
Rigging up traps for rabbits and large game, and even birds, seems like it's obvious, but I knew there would be turtles about in the swamps of georgia.
Easy to pick up, but I had to find a way to invite them in first.
So, basically, I've got to make kind of like a weir of some sort, a funnel trap.
So, I'll make this a tight weir and then a funnel with a little opening, like a big "m.
" And then I'll have all the bait up in there.
What I'll do is put a few more sticks kind of poking inward like that, which helps to kind of dissuade him from coming back out.
I'm just going to dig this out a little bit.
There's this passageway to come in but not to go out.
All right.
I'll see how that works.
Another secret to trapping is patience.
From hours to days has to be allowed.
You won't believe what I caught in the trap.
I got myself a good, full meal.
Well, I'm gonna try something that you definitely won't find in the books.
I'm gonna see if I can make a different kind of trap using my guitar.
All right, so, if I put this like this, and I can get the animal to go down into this tube, then hopefully, the squirrel or the mouse will not be able to jump out.
Okay.
What do you think? Mouse goes in, can't come out.
Long shot or not, you just got to go for it sometimes and take the chance.
You never know how lucky you might get.
There we go.
I got to say this is a first.
I don't think anyone's ever made a guitar trap before.
There is yet a purpose to all of these tips and techniques that can be more important than catching food.
Next is my vital number-four bag of tricks.
Reward.
Did this once before about 10 years ago.
I'm gonna do it again.
The number-four macgyverism tip for survival -- anything that keeps you alive.
It's all the extra little bits of knowledge that can really matter, ways of looking after injuries, ways of protecting yourself, things you might have to do that are even illegal, finding your way out, and last-ditch methods to deal with cold or heat so that you don't succumb to the elements.
All are tips, tricks, and macgyverisms that really matter.
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 6.
" Cold is my nemesis in survival.
And one of my own personal favorite macgyverisms, which is the act of turning one thing into another, was to have blanket coats made out of old, wool blankets to stay warm in the winter.
It wasn't much of a fashion statement, but it works.
If you're wondering why I've got such strange-looking clothing, when I knew I was gonna be having to survive in the canadian north in the middle of winter, for me, it's got to be wool.
It keeps about 80% of its insulation value even when it's soaking wet.
But the best part is you can get real close to a fire and you don't have to worry too much about sparks or anything like that.
It's not gonna melt on you.
So it's got to be wool.
It's rugged.
It's tough.
Works for me.
It's heavier, but it works.
I would, over the years, learn tip after tip for ways to keep warm.
Why is this so important? Because there was no warm hotel to go to at night.
Once I was out there, I wasn't going home.
And becoming hypothermic would have ended my career as a survival instructor years ago with certain death.
So I tried everything I could to keep from chilling down and risk dying from exposure.
It's also important to vacate your bladder in a survival situation, especially the cold like this.
Your body spends a lot of time trying to heat up that liquid inside your body, inside your bladder.
So get rid of it before you are gonna try and curl in for the night.
That's what I do.
And I find it makes a big difference.
And if I've got any food at all, it's good for me to have a little bite right before I try to sleep so that the heat inside my stomach, the digestive heat, warms up my body through the night.
Another way I was able to keep myself a little bit warmer, help get me through the night, were these guys -- hot rocks.
Ow! Ow! That's hot.
I know you can't really tell just by looking, but these rocks here are actually very hot to the touch.
In fact, they're too hot to the touch.
And what I'll be able to do is lie on these rocks on the smooth side.
Fire in front of me, hot rocks underneath me, and just this heat will just be coming up into my body.
You warm them up by the fire.
Now, you don't want to get them red-hot, of course, and burn yourself.
But you do want to just warm them up enough.
And then the hot rocks store the heat, and then they let all the heat go off again.
So, I have a few in the fire warming up.
I pull them out, and I tuck them in around me back inside the shelter.
Put some down by my feet, up in the lower part of my back, and around my chest.
And as those ones cool down, I put them back in the fire and pull out the new batch.
Freezing to death was never an issue in the deserts and jungles of the world.
It was quite the opposite -- overheating.
If we're picking ways to die in the wild, heatstroke's not quite as bad as freezing to death, but it's close.
Probably one of the best things I can do in this kind of heat is get a cool bandanna on me.
But one of the best places to put it really is not up around your head and your face, but actually, if you can, wrap it around your neck so that your carotid arteries take the coolness.
And this is the only way of bringing your body core temperature down -- completely immerse yourself.
Because I am way overheated.
I'm too dangerously close to a heatstroke.
Looks like a good place to have a bath.
Keeping clean in the jungle is not an option.
It's a necessity.
Fungus can develop rapidly out here.
In the jungles, I have to deal with the combining forces of heat and humidity.
And that makes it a great place for developing all kinds of body sores and infections.
There we go.
That's what I'm looking for.
If I can smoke the termite nests, I can put my feet over top of that smoke, and it'll help to cure the foot fungus that I'm dealing with.
Let's do this.
The smoke from this termite nest is said to ward off jaguars, said to help keep away the bugs, and help to cure foot fungus.
I've had all kinds of cuts and blisters and rashes that I rarely show.
But I have to deal with them just the same.
And a wilderness-survival scenario is not friendly to little injuries.
I'm just clearing away some of this skin.
I cut one off a little while ago, and it seems to be doing better.
This one here is still looking bad.
I'm gonna need these blisters to be healed up, or I'm not gonna be able to walk in these boots.
The secret is prevention.
Trying to tough it out is foolish because most injuries and ailments won't disappear that way.
They tend to get worse when you're out on the land.
And the only way to keep surviving is to stop yourself from pushing so hard, you make matters worse.
There's something bothering me just on the bottom side of my foot.
It's always critical in a long hike to get rid of any hot spots or anything that's gonna bother your feet as you go, or it just can wreak havoc later.
You know the old saying -- it's not the desert that'll stop you.
It's the grain of sand in your shoe.
A survival tip I enjoy employing is combining primitive knowledge with modern materials, like plastic or metal.
It's especially useful to do this when treating injuries.
This was already nicely bruised from being in my pocket.
Ah, yeah.
These blisters on my feet have been pretty bad.
But I can really increase the healing speed.
So, I'm just going to get it set and put my foot in it.
Oh, that's hot.
Wow! I added hot water to it.
That's really hot on the foot.
I'm gonna let that soak for a while.
And as long as I can -- I'll probably sit here for a good hour or so.
Biting, stinging, bloodsucking insects have been known to drive large animals out of the bush running wild just trying to escape the agony.
And I've had to go into an almost zen-like state just to defend myself and not go crazy in the process of surviving the bugs.
There's a lot of old, dry cow patties around here.
So, I've grabbed one or two and put them on the fire.
And the added benefit is it got rid of all the mosquitoes.
The only other way to protect myself from these hoards of mosquitoes that are coming in right now is if you cake yourself up with mud like this, they can't bite through it.
Lions, bears, snakes, sharks, alligators.
I've been chased by elk, had to climb a tree to escape a bull moose, and run out of the jungle by a jaguar.
I have no idea if all the spears and sharp points I've made would truly protect me against an african lion.
But at least it feels good making something, even if it gives me a false sense of confidence.
Time to test my line of defense.
If something comes at me from the front, here's what I can do.
Oh, yeah, baby! So many skills I've learned from friends and out of books or just figured out on my own.
But my next on the list is a grouping of methods and techniques that came from thousands of years of experience.
When I was out here training with the hewa guides, they showed me how to take down a tree, or at least how they take down a tree out here if you don't have a bush knife.
Maybe it takes years of living in the jungle.
The number-three macgyverism tip for survival -- primitive earth skills.
These are the tricks and tips for skills that have already been tried and tested and proven themselves to be invaluable to surviving in harsh climates and rough terrain under all circumstances.
These are the skills I can say I truly love to utilize.
All of the guesswork has been taken out of them.
And the secret is that rather than wondering if they're even going to work, all I really have to concentrate on is mastering them.
And thankfully, my teachers were often the masters themselves.
This is when I learned that in many instances, the same skills exist on different parts of the planet.
Working with palm leaves was working with palm leaves no matter what jungle you're in.
And the differences in the way people close to the earth utilize them were very small if there any differences at all.
The same weaving methods that I find all around the world when it comes to using the palm fronds.
Doesn't change here or halfway around the world in the amazon jungle.
Jump over to papua new guinea, here in malaysia -- exact same weaving method to make these thatched roofs.
And the joy of using some of these primitive earth skills is that they're still used today for living wild.
While learning from the huachipaeri of peru, I had the chance to put into practice one of the most baffling methods of survival I've ever seen.
Still now, I wish I could know how someone figured out to combine multiple ingredients of plant leaves and roots to make a mixture that would poison fish enough to catch them, but not so much that you couldn't then eat them.
You got to wonder how fishing using poison can just evolve in jungles thousands and thousands of kilometers apart.
One jungle, and then you go halfway around the world to another jungle, and they both have peoples that catch fish by combining ingredients and poisoning them.
No one here seemed to know.
So all I can do is guess that the poison either kills the fish outright, irritates them in some way, or suffocates them so that they come to the surface and eventually start floating.
Either way, it's magic, and it works incredibly well.
Ah.
Got one.
Aha! Now, that's what I'm talking about.
Tracking and trail following is an ancient skill as old as living in a cave is.
Whether finding our way or tracking game, the primitive skill of reading the signs of the wilderness is vital for survival.
You know, being able to follow a trail is as much intuition as it is common sense.
You just got to really pay attention.
I've been walking along here.
There's a very, very slight indentation.
It's just a gentle, you know, one-inch depression here sculpted along this way here.
And that's all I'm following.
Sometimes that's all you need, just little slight recognition of what looks like a place where people or animals would go.
And when that happens, I always sort of project, well, where would I go? You know, where would the animals go? And this trail, whether animal or human, is definitely a trail.
Now, if you come up here and check this out -- lookit.
You see -- all these branches here, they're all broken off.
They're broken off all evenly and in line.
And they're all broken and sort of flattened down on the trail, as well.
And it's all leading to where I want to go, so that's a good sign.
I approach survival skills in a very holistic kind of way.
Primitive earth skills, military skills, boy scout methods, hunting and fishing trips.
Every little nuance of survival is, to me, another tool in the tool kit to keep me alive.
But the masters remain the ancients and the people of the land.
This whole area here is just rich in artifacts.
Pottery shards everywhere.
There's a piece right there.
Look at that.
You can still see the burn on it from the fire hardening.
It's a good sign for me that people have survived here before because I'm surviving here.
And it means that I'm on the right path, too.
They would have always taken the path of least resistance, always camped in areas that were good for human beings.
It's just what we do.
Rich in history and rich in artifacts.
A lot of archaeology is based on what they find in terms of stone tools, rock tools, things that are chipped into other things.
And the paiute around here -- and the anasazi -- were both terrific at what's called flint knapping.
This is a piece of rock just from laying around in this area.
And this is a hammer rock, which is an actual artifact from this area just laying on the ground.
You can see the chipped end.
It was used for turning big pieces of rock into little pieces of rock into knifepoints, arrowheads, and spear tips and those kinds of things.
I'll see if I can use it.
And here's the secret -- one trick leads to another, and eventually, the result is simply survival.
Aha! Success! See that? That little guy is very, very sharp.
Working with plants is very much a big part of utilizing primitive earth skills.
No matter what the need, there is always a plant or a rock or an insect or something that'll be able to be utilized for surviving, even for sewing your clothes together.
It's a great truth that the forests of the world hold the secrets to our very survival.
And if you're careful, it has a neat trick that you can do.
You can actually pull yourself out a needle and thread.
That spike on the top of the agave plant -- and I just bit below it to break the fibers, and then I got a really strong chord here.
Super strong.
I mean -- I can't break that, no matter what.
And, I mean, that can be used as a suture if you've got a bad gash or certainly for clothing or anything you need sewn together.
And you got yourself one good strong needle and thread.
And in the dryer areas here, just a little bit outside of the swampish spots, this sweet gum grows and helps my hygiene.
Good for cleaning the teeth.
Hmm.
Almost a little bit of a -- almost a menthol kind of feel or taste to it.
There is a part of survival I usually don't look forward to.
But my next macgyverism has helped to make it a bit more doable over the years.
I always put an orange garbage bag in my survival kit.
Number one, it's great for signaling, raincoats, catching water And, in this situation, for a waterproof roof.
There we go.
Amazing what you can do with a garbage bag.
The number-two macgyverism tip for survival -- shelter-making tricks.
Shelter building is the single most energy-depleting survival action I'll ever have to take.
So anything at all that can help take the effort out of building shelters is very much an advantage in my books.
Incorporating a little macgyverism ingenuity becomes an important secret to survival.
Here in revelstoke, british columbia, I've been battling constant cold rain.
And I had made it all the way down the mountain to a secluded little beach by a river.
I got the idea to rip apart my camera tripod so that it could become the frame part of an a-frame style shelter.
And this is one of the secrets of what I refer to as macgyverisms.
It's the act of turning one thing into something else, a very useful method for survival.
I used a survival blanket, incorporated the clove-hitch method for tying little stones into the shelter to act like buttons And in the end, without planning on it, had actually made what was quite possibly the warmest and most secure shelter I've ever built on an survivor ordeal.
It kind of had it all -- macgyverism, actual survival items, a little bit of ropes and tying knowledge, and, finally, the bush and the sand.
As well, even the tape ripped from my camera gear became part of my scheme to keep myself warm and dry after many days of soaking-wet nights and zero sleep.
A little tape.
A little button rock.
But for something to be a true macgyverism, you got to be willing to sacrifice -- to break something or otherwise destroy what it is and turn it into something else to aid me in surviving.
In shelter building, I get the chance to combine it all in the act of keeping myself comfortable.
Home, sweet home.
Sometimes, there's good reason to destroy an item.
And usually, it's because it has already become useless anyway.
In mexico, with a sailboat that can't sail anymore, it meant that the sail material itself was fair game, and I could do with it what I wanted.
I went around and liberated some more rope from the camp.
And I got to thinking about my sleeping arrangements and how I can make them better.
A sleeping bag is, after all, a form of shelter, and, for my money, a real good one.
Okay, you can see this is gonna take a while.
So, leave me to it, and I'll show you what I've got when I'm done.
In the act of inventing survival implements or using some little trick to get water, catch food, make a shelter or signal, I'll often find that old skills from childhood or previous careers or just life in general will rise to the surface and become usable in a survival situation.
In my case, I learned how to sew in grade 8.
Look at that.
That's gonna work.
Sweet! Very likely, the largest survival item I will ever have to make is my shelter.
And incorporating a macgyverism approach to building one here in the high arctic meant actually turning an existing shelter into, well, a shelter.
The problem is that as it stood, it was rotten and useless, so I really only had to do some remodeling to make it work for me.
It would become smaller and more confining, but protective and very useful.
And I do like finding plywood when trapped on a beach like this.
A day's worth of work is avoided with one hunk of old plywood.
Well, don't look so surprised.
There's not an ocean side in the world that I've been to yet that doesn't have refuse on it.
After a couple of days in one spot, I go further down the beach, and the same scattering of useful junk would make a second shelter for protection from the harsh and cold winds of the arctic.
If there's one place to incorporate little tricks like this, it's got to be the ocean side.
Not so bad.
Quarters are a little tight compared to the last shelter.
But, in fact, with any luck at all, they won't be as windy.
And I think I should be fine for rain, as well.
I think I'll be all right in here.
For my number-one survival trick or trip, I turn to the kind of action that I think is the essence of macgyverisms.
There's the regulator.
I'm gonna sacrifice it.
I can't use it anymore here anyway.
Would you destroy what you have so that you could live another day? Would you rip apart something that was a cherished gift or a tool just so that survival was secured and you could go home to see your family again? I sure would.
And just as in survival, I look at an animal in terms of which parts I can eat, I look at my items in terms of how many other things it could be.
It simply becomes a storehouse of supplies.
And the number-one macgyverism tip for survival -- ripping things apart.
It's my number-one because it accomplishes so much all at once.
It feels good to be doing something, anything that is meant to make you more comfortable and help you get through another day or night.
It makes otherwise useless items into something invaluable.
It takes my mind off of worries and the problems I'm living with daily.
And if I'm really lucky, it just might hasten my rescue.
But most of all, it's fun.
In norway, my item of choice was my actual shelter, my car.
Don't get excited.
Trying to rip into and tear apart a car with just a multi-tool is a fool's game.
The real secret is sticking with the parts that are easy to undo or cut out with a knife.
I'm still concerned about my feet and them getting soaking-wet and getting frostbite.
It'd be good to have a pair of mukluks.
I'm gonna have to make them out of the car.
Okay, well, that's got some promise.
This is a well-built car.
The whole point of this is that my feet are more important than the car.
My toes are more important than the car.
And my life is more important than the upholstery.
Fortunately, I actually used to make my own mukluks running dog teams.
So I've got some idea of how it should work, but I'm not gonna be cutting out any patterns here.
Won't be pretty.
But if it saves my toes, I don't care.
I wouldn't mind using some of this foam for insulation inside them.
It almost looks like this was ready-made -- bottom, side, toe.
The secret is looking beyond what it is and into what it could be.
Well, it might look silly, but so would my feet with a few less toes.
In the high arctic, I found myself stranded with a dead snowmobile.
In norway, I could work inside the car.
But here, I had to work on my ideas and fight the cold at the same time.
Let's see what I can get out of this guy now.
There.
Maybe I can make use of some of this, these pieces from the snowmobile.
One of the problems I'm gonna have out there is the Well, snow blindness basically.
It's so very, very bright.
I'm always squinting.
Take a couple of these wires and some of that crappy, old seat cover.
There.
Not so bad.
Not really certain what it is I'm doing here.
Maybe this'll work.
And that's another secret.
When you don't know what to do, just get busy doing something.
Keep your mind active.
Give yourself a task.
Just a ton of rope came out of this balloon.
This is good.
The plan is to make myself a hammock.
I now have a hammock.
Now, this is survival.
Eventually, the sacrifice of what I have to rip apart will cut close to home and I'll need to destroy an old friend.
Hmm.
It's time to make the ultimate sacrifice.
Oh, say goodbye to a good harmonica.
You see what I'm getting at here.
Okay? So this is gonna be my spearpoint.
It once was a blues harmonica.
Now it is a spearpoint.
These thousands of little tricks, tips, techniques, and ways of macgyver'ing one thing into something else are the thread that weaves throughout the act of making it through to another day.
They are the glue that keep your mental faculties together, keep your hands busy, your muscles from atrophying.
They keep your mind sharp and active, and you must keep thinking.
You must escape boredom while surviving.
What's the secret to all these survival tips? Well, it's this -- if you stop thinking, you'll stop trying.
And if you stop trying, you'll die.
Some scenes may contain graphic content, language and nudity which may not be suitable for all audience.
Viewer discretion is strongly advised.
Tips, tricks, little secrets, big secrets.
Methods to help me survive that I call "macgyverisms.
" For the next hour, I'll give you my top five that have worked for me in some of the harshest environments on the planet and helped me to survive.
But before we get into the list, here are some of my favorite tips and tricks that have been my secrets of survival.
That'll do.
ONE MAN ALONE NO FOOD NO T.
V.
CREW Survivorman Secrets of Survival: MacGyverisms these are the components of survival that almost make what I have to do seem fun.
They have their roots in primitive skills, ingenuity, desperation.
These tricks and tips, these macgyverisms, help me to survive.
But it's been a road of frustration.
I don't think like an engineer.
Most of my inventions happen by sheer luck, a fluke of an idea that worked.
When they really work well, they've been ideas taken from existing earth skills or suggestions from survival experts from around the world.
But I'm the one who has to live them out.
There is one tip that's all my own, though, and I call it my three zones of assessment.
Okay, the key to surviving a situation like this is the same as every situation.
You got to assess -- what I like, sort of the -- I call it, like, the three zones, I guess.
Zone number one is what you have immediately on your body.
I know that I've got a bit of food, and I know what clothing I have.
Zone number two is what you have in your immediate surroundings.
So, in this case, it's gonna be the car, and I still have to check that out.
And then zone number three would be in your extended surroundings and what goes beyond that.
When I have those three assessments done, then, and I think only then, can I make a proper and informed decision on how to survive a situation like this.
An extremely useful secret of survival for traveling without the use of a trail or compass is to draw my own trail map based on doing a reconnaissance mission.
I head out with the purpose of mapping my area.
It's very simple.
Combining the logging of the time it takes to travel in one direction, or even by counting my steps, I make a rudimentary map of the area.
Each easily identified landmark becomes a point on the map where I take stock of how long I've been walking and which direction I'm going next.
Because of this map now, I can find my way to and from the small river, the creek with the flowing water, whenever I need to fill up and get a drink and get rehydrated.
This way, I can find my way there and back even when I'm not feeling really good, if I'm disoriented.
And if I was with somebody, I can say, "here.
Here's the location to the water.
" They can take it, head out to the water, and find their way back.
Being able to boil water when you don't have a pot, it's extremely difficult.
But often, ingenuity comes to the rescue.
By pulling these hot rocks in and basically trying to boil the water in my hat.
Fortunately, the hat is a heavy, heavy cotton, I think, so it's holding the water okay.
Just keep doing this -- you keep replacing hot rocks until you bring the water to a boil.
All right.
I've been drinking that muddy water so far.
But I'm gonna show you that you can boil water in a plastic bottle if you really had to, if you really needed to purify your water.
When I did this for the very first time in africa, I even surprised myself.
It was one of those methods I had only heard about.
I tried it before with birch bark successfully, but I had figured using plastic was gonna be a long shot.
In the absence of fresh, clean water, doing this at least made me feel like the dirty water was safe.
The secret is to not let the flames lick up under the part of the plastic without the water on the inside.
Ahh.
That's pretty cool -- getting water to boil in plastic.
I've always believed that fishing is still one of the best things you can do to help your very survival, so it only goes to follow that coming up with all kinds of tricks to get hook and line and bait into the water becomes my go-to macgyverism secret of survival.
All right.
Let's get busy.
Well, I need a fishing line, and this is all I've got.
All I have to do is split it apart.
Getting better.
So, I've got the fish out on its hook, the thin line that goes up to the big rope, the big rope that goes up.
And I've got a float that I found lying around here.
While I left the line out as the tide came in, I decided also to find a way to get closer to the fish.
And rather than risking flipping the kayak into the frigid water, I figured it best to make extra floats for the kayak.
I'm much more secure and stable now, especially because I'm putting a camera mount up high, making the kayak top-heavy.
Safety first, married within ingenuity, makes for much better survival.
Okay.
Mmm.
Any self-respecting fish would love to have that for dinner.
There are salmon jumping on either side of me.
Nothing taking my bait, though.
Oh.
Well, here.
Here's my bait.
Nice, big hunk of fish guts there for you.
Let's see what I can do with some of the pack contents I brought in with me.
I have been taking that piece of credit card.
And I've just been cutting it into a spoon shape.
Next thing I've got is my bubble gum.
So, what I want to do is poke holes into this little spoon here.
Put the rope through the spoon.
Some sort of little, old spring.
Take my spring.
Tie that off.
The hooks with the leech bait on there.
The spoon, which really I would use if I was more, you know, jigging for fish.
But this will still help to attract them, I hope.
Now, lastly My gum.
Wrap that around the line.
So, then, I've got a fish float.
Let's try it.
The bubble-gum bubble is just floating, just beneath the surface there.
I'll leave that.
And who knows? I could get lucky, catch me some dinner.
In the amazon jungle, I tried for not only a standard sort of hook and line, but also had a way to make my own fish net.
If the fish aren't gonna come to me, I'm gonna go to them.
The secret here is to remember that any idea is good if it keeps me proactive and keeps my mind working.
Boredom, which can be a killer, is conquered by action.
There you go.
And you got a little grip handle here.
I got myself a fishing net.
It's not how well these little inventions work.
It's simply the act of making them and then trying them.
My mind leaves the thoughts of dangers and instead concentrates on the task at hand.
In labrador, a little bit of pre-trip ingenuity made for an ideal way to carry along a survival kit.
I still think that your best survival kit is what you can have in your pockets.
But if you hunt, your rifle can be a survival kit, as well.
All I did was take a drill and drill out some holes in the stock itself.
Okay.
I'm able to fit about 10 extra bullets in these holes, which are good 'cause you don't want to run out of bullets.
The other thing I have in there -- from a q-tip, some cotton tinder.
And then, as well, a little fire striker.
And you've got a little survival kit built right into the butt of the gun.
Let me give you an important little secret about survival kits -- always know the contents.
In fact, forget the all-in-one store-bought kits and make up your own from scratch.
Most importantly, check the dates on things that can expire.
Remember, a survival kit is meant to keep you alive and get you home.
And if you what you carry in it is out-of-date, well, all bets on your survival are off.
From the current survival kit, flares.
Oh, you're kidding me.
Well, that's gnarly.
I pulled the wire right out of the flare, and nothin'.
That's not a lifesaver.
Wow.
You got to check these things.
I'm looking at this.
It says "1993.
" That's just dumb.
Ugh.
Nothin'.
When it comes to survival-kit items, they got to be up-to-date.
Often, my little tricks, tips and macgyverisms are for a single purpose, meant to answer one need in survival.
And for my number five, I give you the one all of the books like to show but is often the least effective.
I know I've seen their tracks around here, but I figured it was a real long shot to whether or not I could actually catch one.
Now that I know that they're here, I'll set out a trap tomorrow.
The number-five macgyverism tip for survival -- making a funky trap.
There are hundreds of different types of traps you can make in a survival situation, each one of them ideally suited to the area it was invented in, some of them meant to catch something small and some of them meant to catch something big.
Either way, they often took a great deal of ingenuity to design and build.
Some I would take out of books.
Others I'd make up as I went along Because it was all about one thing -- keeping active and trying to fill my stomach with actual food.
In papua new guinea, I had the opportunity to go after something big -- a jungle pig.
And for that, I had my hopes resting on a classic, quick-kill trap right out of the books.
Now, the tricky part -- setting this thing without stabbing myself.
Let me show you how this thing works.
This is the path that the pig has been walking, okay? He's gonna run into that string.
When that happens, this releases.
And this is the spot here that's holding the spear back.
This releases, and then this whole spear will just shoot.
And hopefully, if I'm lucky, it'll stab right into the heart of the pig, and I'll be cooking up bacon.
A quick-kill trap like that may appeal to the mountain man in us all, but the reality is snaring is much more effective and more likely to actually work.
And in northern ontario, I had to set them with one arm in a sling.
So, I see there are some fresh tracks right here.
And you can kind of see that they all converge on this same one spot here.
If you find a place where the rabbits are already naturally funneled into a certain spot, and you just reinforce that funneling and put the snare right in the middle, you stand a much better chance of catching one.
That should be pretty good.
So, I've got this one guy ready to go.
You can see the loop.
Now, I've just got to put my noose in place.
There we go.
Birds can be a significant challenge in survival.
They're always around, but catching them is difficult.
And even though I knew they would taste horrible, I decided to take a shot at seagulls in the high arctic by modifying a traditional pole snare and adapting it to go after birds.
Taking a couple of leaders here, strung them together, couple of small hooks around the bottom.
So all I have to do now Is put some bait on it.
Some whale blubber, a couple of small hooks.
With any luck, the seagull will just go for a big gulp.
Now, these traps can be very effective.
Hopefully, they'll come in, and I'll have myself a bird dinner.
Rigging up traps for rabbits and large game, and even birds, seems like it's obvious, but I knew there would be turtles about in the swamps of georgia.
Easy to pick up, but I had to find a way to invite them in first.
So, basically, I've got to make kind of like a weir of some sort, a funnel trap.
So, I'll make this a tight weir and then a funnel with a little opening, like a big "m.
" And then I'll have all the bait up in there.
What I'll do is put a few more sticks kind of poking inward like that, which helps to kind of dissuade him from coming back out.
I'm just going to dig this out a little bit.
There's this passageway to come in but not to go out.
All right.
I'll see how that works.
Another secret to trapping is patience.
From hours to days has to be allowed.
You won't believe what I caught in the trap.
I got myself a good, full meal.
Well, I'm gonna try something that you definitely won't find in the books.
I'm gonna see if I can make a different kind of trap using my guitar.
All right, so, if I put this like this, and I can get the animal to go down into this tube, then hopefully, the squirrel or the mouse will not be able to jump out.
Okay.
What do you think? Mouse goes in, can't come out.
Long shot or not, you just got to go for it sometimes and take the chance.
You never know how lucky you might get.
There we go.
I got to say this is a first.
I don't think anyone's ever made a guitar trap before.
There is yet a purpose to all of these tips and techniques that can be more important than catching food.
Next is my vital number-four bag of tricks.
Reward.
Did this once before about 10 years ago.
I'm gonna do it again.
The number-four macgyverism tip for survival -- anything that keeps you alive.
It's all the extra little bits of knowledge that can really matter, ways of looking after injuries, ways of protecting yourself, things you might have to do that are even illegal, finding your way out, and last-ditch methods to deal with cold or heat so that you don't succumb to the elements.
All are tips, tricks, and macgyverisms that really matter.
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 6.
" Cold is my nemesis in survival.
And one of my own personal favorite macgyverisms, which is the act of turning one thing into another, was to have blanket coats made out of old, wool blankets to stay warm in the winter.
It wasn't much of a fashion statement, but it works.
If you're wondering why I've got such strange-looking clothing, when I knew I was gonna be having to survive in the canadian north in the middle of winter, for me, it's got to be wool.
It keeps about 80% of its insulation value even when it's soaking wet.
But the best part is you can get real close to a fire and you don't have to worry too much about sparks or anything like that.
It's not gonna melt on you.
So it's got to be wool.
It's rugged.
It's tough.
Works for me.
It's heavier, but it works.
I would, over the years, learn tip after tip for ways to keep warm.
Why is this so important? Because there was no warm hotel to go to at night.
Once I was out there, I wasn't going home.
And becoming hypothermic would have ended my career as a survival instructor years ago with certain death.
So I tried everything I could to keep from chilling down and risk dying from exposure.
It's also important to vacate your bladder in a survival situation, especially the cold like this.
Your body spends a lot of time trying to heat up that liquid inside your body, inside your bladder.
So get rid of it before you are gonna try and curl in for the night.
That's what I do.
And I find it makes a big difference.
And if I've got any food at all, it's good for me to have a little bite right before I try to sleep so that the heat inside my stomach, the digestive heat, warms up my body through the night.
Another way I was able to keep myself a little bit warmer, help get me through the night, were these guys -- hot rocks.
Ow! Ow! That's hot.
I know you can't really tell just by looking, but these rocks here are actually very hot to the touch.
In fact, they're too hot to the touch.
And what I'll be able to do is lie on these rocks on the smooth side.
Fire in front of me, hot rocks underneath me, and just this heat will just be coming up into my body.
You warm them up by the fire.
Now, you don't want to get them red-hot, of course, and burn yourself.
But you do want to just warm them up enough.
And then the hot rocks store the heat, and then they let all the heat go off again.
So, I have a few in the fire warming up.
I pull them out, and I tuck them in around me back inside the shelter.
Put some down by my feet, up in the lower part of my back, and around my chest.
And as those ones cool down, I put them back in the fire and pull out the new batch.
Freezing to death was never an issue in the deserts and jungles of the world.
It was quite the opposite -- overheating.
If we're picking ways to die in the wild, heatstroke's not quite as bad as freezing to death, but it's close.
Probably one of the best things I can do in this kind of heat is get a cool bandanna on me.
But one of the best places to put it really is not up around your head and your face, but actually, if you can, wrap it around your neck so that your carotid arteries take the coolness.
And this is the only way of bringing your body core temperature down -- completely immerse yourself.
Because I am way overheated.
I'm too dangerously close to a heatstroke.
Looks like a good place to have a bath.
Keeping clean in the jungle is not an option.
It's a necessity.
Fungus can develop rapidly out here.
In the jungles, I have to deal with the combining forces of heat and humidity.
And that makes it a great place for developing all kinds of body sores and infections.
There we go.
That's what I'm looking for.
If I can smoke the termite nests, I can put my feet over top of that smoke, and it'll help to cure the foot fungus that I'm dealing with.
Let's do this.
The smoke from this termite nest is said to ward off jaguars, said to help keep away the bugs, and help to cure foot fungus.
I've had all kinds of cuts and blisters and rashes that I rarely show.
But I have to deal with them just the same.
And a wilderness-survival scenario is not friendly to little injuries.
I'm just clearing away some of this skin.
I cut one off a little while ago, and it seems to be doing better.
This one here is still looking bad.
I'm gonna need these blisters to be healed up, or I'm not gonna be able to walk in these boots.
The secret is prevention.
Trying to tough it out is foolish because most injuries and ailments won't disappear that way.
They tend to get worse when you're out on the land.
And the only way to keep surviving is to stop yourself from pushing so hard, you make matters worse.
There's something bothering me just on the bottom side of my foot.
It's always critical in a long hike to get rid of any hot spots or anything that's gonna bother your feet as you go, or it just can wreak havoc later.
You know the old saying -- it's not the desert that'll stop you.
It's the grain of sand in your shoe.
A survival tip I enjoy employing is combining primitive knowledge with modern materials, like plastic or metal.
It's especially useful to do this when treating injuries.
This was already nicely bruised from being in my pocket.
Ah, yeah.
These blisters on my feet have been pretty bad.
But I can really increase the healing speed.
So, I'm just going to get it set and put my foot in it.
Oh, that's hot.
Wow! I added hot water to it.
That's really hot on the foot.
I'm gonna let that soak for a while.
And as long as I can -- I'll probably sit here for a good hour or so.
Biting, stinging, bloodsucking insects have been known to drive large animals out of the bush running wild just trying to escape the agony.
And I've had to go into an almost zen-like state just to defend myself and not go crazy in the process of surviving the bugs.
There's a lot of old, dry cow patties around here.
So, I've grabbed one or two and put them on the fire.
And the added benefit is it got rid of all the mosquitoes.
The only other way to protect myself from these hoards of mosquitoes that are coming in right now is if you cake yourself up with mud like this, they can't bite through it.
Lions, bears, snakes, sharks, alligators.
I've been chased by elk, had to climb a tree to escape a bull moose, and run out of the jungle by a jaguar.
I have no idea if all the spears and sharp points I've made would truly protect me against an african lion.
But at least it feels good making something, even if it gives me a false sense of confidence.
Time to test my line of defense.
If something comes at me from the front, here's what I can do.
Oh, yeah, baby! So many skills I've learned from friends and out of books or just figured out on my own.
But my next on the list is a grouping of methods and techniques that came from thousands of years of experience.
When I was out here training with the hewa guides, they showed me how to take down a tree, or at least how they take down a tree out here if you don't have a bush knife.
Maybe it takes years of living in the jungle.
The number-three macgyverism tip for survival -- primitive earth skills.
These are the tricks and tips for skills that have already been tried and tested and proven themselves to be invaluable to surviving in harsh climates and rough terrain under all circumstances.
These are the skills I can say I truly love to utilize.
All of the guesswork has been taken out of them.
And the secret is that rather than wondering if they're even going to work, all I really have to concentrate on is mastering them.
And thankfully, my teachers were often the masters themselves.
This is when I learned that in many instances, the same skills exist on different parts of the planet.
Working with palm leaves was working with palm leaves no matter what jungle you're in.
And the differences in the way people close to the earth utilize them were very small if there any differences at all.
The same weaving methods that I find all around the world when it comes to using the palm fronds.
Doesn't change here or halfway around the world in the amazon jungle.
Jump over to papua new guinea, here in malaysia -- exact same weaving method to make these thatched roofs.
And the joy of using some of these primitive earth skills is that they're still used today for living wild.
While learning from the huachipaeri of peru, I had the chance to put into practice one of the most baffling methods of survival I've ever seen.
Still now, I wish I could know how someone figured out to combine multiple ingredients of plant leaves and roots to make a mixture that would poison fish enough to catch them, but not so much that you couldn't then eat them.
You got to wonder how fishing using poison can just evolve in jungles thousands and thousands of kilometers apart.
One jungle, and then you go halfway around the world to another jungle, and they both have peoples that catch fish by combining ingredients and poisoning them.
No one here seemed to know.
So all I can do is guess that the poison either kills the fish outright, irritates them in some way, or suffocates them so that they come to the surface and eventually start floating.
Either way, it's magic, and it works incredibly well.
Ah.
Got one.
Aha! Now, that's what I'm talking about.
Tracking and trail following is an ancient skill as old as living in a cave is.
Whether finding our way or tracking game, the primitive skill of reading the signs of the wilderness is vital for survival.
You know, being able to follow a trail is as much intuition as it is common sense.
You just got to really pay attention.
I've been walking along here.
There's a very, very slight indentation.
It's just a gentle, you know, one-inch depression here sculpted along this way here.
And that's all I'm following.
Sometimes that's all you need, just little slight recognition of what looks like a place where people or animals would go.
And when that happens, I always sort of project, well, where would I go? You know, where would the animals go? And this trail, whether animal or human, is definitely a trail.
Now, if you come up here and check this out -- lookit.
You see -- all these branches here, they're all broken off.
They're broken off all evenly and in line.
And they're all broken and sort of flattened down on the trail, as well.
And it's all leading to where I want to go, so that's a good sign.
I approach survival skills in a very holistic kind of way.
Primitive earth skills, military skills, boy scout methods, hunting and fishing trips.
Every little nuance of survival is, to me, another tool in the tool kit to keep me alive.
But the masters remain the ancients and the people of the land.
This whole area here is just rich in artifacts.
Pottery shards everywhere.
There's a piece right there.
Look at that.
You can still see the burn on it from the fire hardening.
It's a good sign for me that people have survived here before because I'm surviving here.
And it means that I'm on the right path, too.
They would have always taken the path of least resistance, always camped in areas that were good for human beings.
It's just what we do.
Rich in history and rich in artifacts.
A lot of archaeology is based on what they find in terms of stone tools, rock tools, things that are chipped into other things.
And the paiute around here -- and the anasazi -- were both terrific at what's called flint knapping.
This is a piece of rock just from laying around in this area.
And this is a hammer rock, which is an actual artifact from this area just laying on the ground.
You can see the chipped end.
It was used for turning big pieces of rock into little pieces of rock into knifepoints, arrowheads, and spear tips and those kinds of things.
I'll see if I can use it.
And here's the secret -- one trick leads to another, and eventually, the result is simply survival.
Aha! Success! See that? That little guy is very, very sharp.
Working with plants is very much a big part of utilizing primitive earth skills.
No matter what the need, there is always a plant or a rock or an insect or something that'll be able to be utilized for surviving, even for sewing your clothes together.
It's a great truth that the forests of the world hold the secrets to our very survival.
And if you're careful, it has a neat trick that you can do.
You can actually pull yourself out a needle and thread.
That spike on the top of the agave plant -- and I just bit below it to break the fibers, and then I got a really strong chord here.
Super strong.
I mean -- I can't break that, no matter what.
And, I mean, that can be used as a suture if you've got a bad gash or certainly for clothing or anything you need sewn together.
And you got yourself one good strong needle and thread.
And in the dryer areas here, just a little bit outside of the swampish spots, this sweet gum grows and helps my hygiene.
Good for cleaning the teeth.
Hmm.
Almost a little bit of a -- almost a menthol kind of feel or taste to it.
There is a part of survival I usually don't look forward to.
But my next macgyverism has helped to make it a bit more doable over the years.
I always put an orange garbage bag in my survival kit.
Number one, it's great for signaling, raincoats, catching water And, in this situation, for a waterproof roof.
There we go.
Amazing what you can do with a garbage bag.
The number-two macgyverism tip for survival -- shelter-making tricks.
Shelter building is the single most energy-depleting survival action I'll ever have to take.
So anything at all that can help take the effort out of building shelters is very much an advantage in my books.
Incorporating a little macgyverism ingenuity becomes an important secret to survival.
Here in revelstoke, british columbia, I've been battling constant cold rain.
And I had made it all the way down the mountain to a secluded little beach by a river.
I got the idea to rip apart my camera tripod so that it could become the frame part of an a-frame style shelter.
And this is one of the secrets of what I refer to as macgyverisms.
It's the act of turning one thing into something else, a very useful method for survival.
I used a survival blanket, incorporated the clove-hitch method for tying little stones into the shelter to act like buttons And in the end, without planning on it, had actually made what was quite possibly the warmest and most secure shelter I've ever built on an survivor ordeal.
It kind of had it all -- macgyverism, actual survival items, a little bit of ropes and tying knowledge, and, finally, the bush and the sand.
As well, even the tape ripped from my camera gear became part of my scheme to keep myself warm and dry after many days of soaking-wet nights and zero sleep.
A little tape.
A little button rock.
But for something to be a true macgyverism, you got to be willing to sacrifice -- to break something or otherwise destroy what it is and turn it into something else to aid me in surviving.
In shelter building, I get the chance to combine it all in the act of keeping myself comfortable.
Home, sweet home.
Sometimes, there's good reason to destroy an item.
And usually, it's because it has already become useless anyway.
In mexico, with a sailboat that can't sail anymore, it meant that the sail material itself was fair game, and I could do with it what I wanted.
I went around and liberated some more rope from the camp.
And I got to thinking about my sleeping arrangements and how I can make them better.
A sleeping bag is, after all, a form of shelter, and, for my money, a real good one.
Okay, you can see this is gonna take a while.
So, leave me to it, and I'll show you what I've got when I'm done.
In the act of inventing survival implements or using some little trick to get water, catch food, make a shelter or signal, I'll often find that old skills from childhood or previous careers or just life in general will rise to the surface and become usable in a survival situation.
In my case, I learned how to sew in grade 8.
Look at that.
That's gonna work.
Sweet! Very likely, the largest survival item I will ever have to make is my shelter.
And incorporating a macgyverism approach to building one here in the high arctic meant actually turning an existing shelter into, well, a shelter.
The problem is that as it stood, it was rotten and useless, so I really only had to do some remodeling to make it work for me.
It would become smaller and more confining, but protective and very useful.
And I do like finding plywood when trapped on a beach like this.
A day's worth of work is avoided with one hunk of old plywood.
Well, don't look so surprised.
There's not an ocean side in the world that I've been to yet that doesn't have refuse on it.
After a couple of days in one spot, I go further down the beach, and the same scattering of useful junk would make a second shelter for protection from the harsh and cold winds of the arctic.
If there's one place to incorporate little tricks like this, it's got to be the ocean side.
Not so bad.
Quarters are a little tight compared to the last shelter.
But, in fact, with any luck at all, they won't be as windy.
And I think I should be fine for rain, as well.
I think I'll be all right in here.
For my number-one survival trick or trip, I turn to the kind of action that I think is the essence of macgyverisms.
There's the regulator.
I'm gonna sacrifice it.
I can't use it anymore here anyway.
Would you destroy what you have so that you could live another day? Would you rip apart something that was a cherished gift or a tool just so that survival was secured and you could go home to see your family again? I sure would.
And just as in survival, I look at an animal in terms of which parts I can eat, I look at my items in terms of how many other things it could be.
It simply becomes a storehouse of supplies.
And the number-one macgyverism tip for survival -- ripping things apart.
It's my number-one because it accomplishes so much all at once.
It feels good to be doing something, anything that is meant to make you more comfortable and help you get through another day or night.
It makes otherwise useless items into something invaluable.
It takes my mind off of worries and the problems I'm living with daily.
And if I'm really lucky, it just might hasten my rescue.
But most of all, it's fun.
In norway, my item of choice was my actual shelter, my car.
Don't get excited.
Trying to rip into and tear apart a car with just a multi-tool is a fool's game.
The real secret is sticking with the parts that are easy to undo or cut out with a knife.
I'm still concerned about my feet and them getting soaking-wet and getting frostbite.
It'd be good to have a pair of mukluks.
I'm gonna have to make them out of the car.
Okay, well, that's got some promise.
This is a well-built car.
The whole point of this is that my feet are more important than the car.
My toes are more important than the car.
And my life is more important than the upholstery.
Fortunately, I actually used to make my own mukluks running dog teams.
So I've got some idea of how it should work, but I'm not gonna be cutting out any patterns here.
Won't be pretty.
But if it saves my toes, I don't care.
I wouldn't mind using some of this foam for insulation inside them.
It almost looks like this was ready-made -- bottom, side, toe.
The secret is looking beyond what it is and into what it could be.
Well, it might look silly, but so would my feet with a few less toes.
In the high arctic, I found myself stranded with a dead snowmobile.
In norway, I could work inside the car.
But here, I had to work on my ideas and fight the cold at the same time.
Let's see what I can get out of this guy now.
There.
Maybe I can make use of some of this, these pieces from the snowmobile.
One of the problems I'm gonna have out there is the Well, snow blindness basically.
It's so very, very bright.
I'm always squinting.
Take a couple of these wires and some of that crappy, old seat cover.
There.
Not so bad.
Not really certain what it is I'm doing here.
Maybe this'll work.
And that's another secret.
When you don't know what to do, just get busy doing something.
Keep your mind active.
Give yourself a task.
Just a ton of rope came out of this balloon.
This is good.
The plan is to make myself a hammock.
I now have a hammock.
Now, this is survival.
Eventually, the sacrifice of what I have to rip apart will cut close to home and I'll need to destroy an old friend.
Hmm.
It's time to make the ultimate sacrifice.
Oh, say goodbye to a good harmonica.
You see what I'm getting at here.
Okay? So this is gonna be my spearpoint.
It once was a blues harmonica.
Now it is a spearpoint.
These thousands of little tricks, tips, techniques, and ways of macgyver'ing one thing into something else are the thread that weaves throughout the act of making it through to another day.
They are the glue that keep your mental faculties together, keep your hands busy, your muscles from atrophying.
They keep your mind sharp and active, and you must keep thinking.
You must escape boredom while surviving.
What's the secret to all these survival tips? Well, it's this -- if you stop thinking, you'll stop trying.
And if you stop trying, you'll die.