Alone and Starved

Vancouver Island

Reality shows today don’t reflect much reality – they are surrounded by Hollywood movie makers in camps and locations not far from civilization and medical help. But one series stands out, Alone, where contestants must brave alone the harshest weather conditions, film their own ordeal, deal with potential health emergencies, wild animals, poisonous snakes, poisonous spiders, frogs, fish and other animals they must hunt and eat, critters which are infected with parasites, and avoid poisonous mushrooms.

Contestants can and make split-second mistakes in the wild, resulting in injuries that require “tapping out.” When they do tap out, they can use a satellite phone to ask to be rescued by boat, ATV, or helicopter, depending on the area in which that particular season takes place and their specific spot.

The locations are carefully chosen, quite beautiful, but frighteningly brutal to survive in: Patagonia, Mongolia, the Canadian Arctic, Vancouver Island in Canada, etc. Ten contestants are dropped off away from potential contact with each other.  Natural barriers such as large rivers, lakes, mountains, and other rock formations prevent them from reaching the others.

The contestants can choose ten survival items from a list provided, a first aid kit, a satellite phone, medications they were taking previously for a diagnosed illness, heavy camera equipment with battery packs, a go-pro, all weighing in excess of 50 pounds, a sleeping bag, a tarp, boots, heavy jackets, a hat, and the clothes on their backs.

The last one standing of the ten survivalists wins $500,000. It is a life-altering sum for most of them. A few contestants claim that they are not doing it for the money but for the challenge - to see how far they can push their bodies and minds before they are forced by different circumstances to give up.

What are some of the reasons that force contestants to tap out? Injuries such as a deep cut on a hand or leg, loneliness, psychological problems stemming from isolation, starvation due to the inability to catch fish, hunt, or forage any plants, berries, trap or snare animals in the area, extreme cold, inability to make a fire, losing the fire stick, parasites from eating contaminated animal flesh improperly cooked, heart attack, broken lower back, broken limbs, extreme fear of bears, and actually being pulled by the medical team which checks them periodically; if the body mass index (BMI) falls below 17, the point when the human body is in the zone of potential organ failure, the contestant must drop out. Some are sad to leave, some refuse at first, and some cry with regret that they failed their goals.

The most interesting case of the nine-season series was a man who starved himself so severely by eating small amounts of a large cache of smoked fish which he was saving in order to last the longest number of days thus being the winner. Sadly, his BMI was too far gone, and he was rushed to the hospital. He described how he could not digest any food for three months following his forced extraction. He left behind a cache of 17 smoked fish fillets.

One young woman was in agonizing pain and fever, having failed to have a bowel movement for two weeks. She was also evacuated to the nearest hospital.

At some point, in every location where the survivalists were placed, the competition became a game of who is going to starve the longest without his/her health deteriorating beyond the ability to survive. Those who came with a lot of extra pounds on their bodies, outlasted everyone else, unless they were plagued by loneliness or by missing their families and friends back home, wives and children.

One female survivalist was bitten by a poisonous spider trice on her buttocks and was able to heal her wounds with medicinal plants and concoctions she mixed, without tapping out.

One military guy tapped out after only two hours for fear of bears; one grizzly was circling his shelter very closely.

An older man broke his leg less than a week into his arctic survival.

One young guy was rescued in the middle of the night after being stalked and charged by a grizzly bear. The rescue team had to travel by truck on log roads for three hours then hike through a densely forested mountainous terrain in order to find him. He was safely rescued.

A prior contestant who survived to the end, just a few hours short of a win, had to tap out on a second location while successfully fishing but accidentally imbedding a fishhook into her right upper hand. No matter how hard she tried, the hook did not budge. It was stuck in her bleeding hand for 56 hours before she was driven to a hospital and two medical personnel in Mongolia were able to extract it.

A man ate infected muskrat and had to tap out with extremely painful abdominal pains, vomiting and diarrhea. His dehydration was so severe that he could not take his heart medication which potentially could have sent him into another heart attack.

A young guy tapped out because he was overcome by guilt and deep emotional remorse for killing his only companion in the Canadian Arctic, a friendly squirrel, and eating it.

A young lady, very accident prone, shot herself with an arrow in the back of the leg after successfully bagging a grouse with a bow. The wound luckily healed.

Hard-core survivalists gave up eventually out of loneliness, missing their spouses and children, longing for talking to people, or realizing that money, even half a million dollars, were not as important as being with loved ones.

Several endangered their health by losing too much weight, too fast, not calling for medical help, and being on the verge of organ failure. Several became so constipated that they suffered in agonizing pain. Starvation caused many contestants to experience intense dizziness, the inability to see, to think rationally, became disoriented, or blacked out in the woods, even dangerously close to a partially frozen deep lake.

One contestant claimed so joyously that she was in “the game” once she found trapped animals like rabbits or squirrels or caught fish. To me, it was not a game, it was human predators trying to outwit animal predators in an area devoid of other humans. It was so unforgiving and isolated in Mongolia that animal predators did not fear the human predators.

In the Canadian Artic, the frigid temperatures made the challenge that much more difficult. One squirrel, injured by an arrow, fought back, and bit the survivalist’s hand badly. The archer bled profusely and needed help.

A healthy and strong military guy tapped out even though he had a nicely built, warm shelter, warm and dry clothes, and enough food for a week and a half, because he realized that he was just buying time, waiting for others to tap out, time better spent with his three children and wife whom he adored.

One successful hunter from Virginia, who had lived with a tribe in Siberia for five years and learned from them excellent survival and hunting skills, killed a bull moose and a wolverine in the Arctic, yet despite eating moose meat protein every day, he lost weight by one pound a day in the absence of fat and other complex carbohydrates.

These people built with rope, knives, and axes remarkable shelters, fires, fished successfully and sometimes unsuccessfully when nature fought back, made tools, wove fishing nets, baskets, carved implements, made chairs, cups, plates, camp beds, built improvised and cleverly constructed canoes in MacGyver style, with spit and dirt, improvised methods to trap animals and catch fish, and scoured the land for berries, edible plants, healing plants, snails, leeches, mushrooms, tree sap, and unusual sources of kindle. All these skills and survival knowledge are lost to us as we live in our modern world where others perform tasks and manufacture what we need in exchange for our fiat money.

Sometimes their shelters caught fire, other times collapsed from the weight of rain or snow, high winds, or other unforeseen miscalculations. Many got flooded and wet in the temperate impenetrable rain forest of Vancouver Island, Canada. Every time it rained, water seeped out of the ground and flooded shelters, fire pits, while survivalists were asleep in sloshed sleeping bags on the ground or on top of makeshift beds of wood and pine boughs.

The winners confessed that they wanted to build a house or pay off an existing house with the prize money. A young winner wanted a house because he and his family lived in a yurt. The last person standing survived anywhere from 46 to 100 days in the wilderness alone. One contestant who remained 100 days in the Arctic and survived relatively healthy won one million dollars.

Most of us today have become soft and weak and could not possibly survive alone in those harsh conditions and wild locations. Furthermore, most humans would prefer to work for their own business and earn the half million dollars without endangering their lives around predatory and poisonous animals. 

Nobody is exactly sure what the long-term effects will be of such excessive and rapid weight loss to the point where teeth were loose and the amount of body fat was dangerously low, or how the survivalists' health will be affected in the future.