Alaska Experiment Episode 2 – “Starving in the Wilderness”
About one month into their Alaska experiment, each volunteer has already lost around 10 pounds. The groups have been surviving mainly on dry rations, and have very little protein and fat to supplement their diet. They barely have enough food to survive at present- what will they do when winter comes?
Survival expert Paul Claus comes to Flower Lake to teach the three friends about hunting. None has ever shot a gun before, and when Tim fires his rifle for the first time, he gets “scope eye,” a cut on his face from the powerful recoil of the gun. Tim redeems his amateur’s mistake by shooting a snowshoe hare. Claus shows the group how to skin and gut the rabbit carefully because if the organs are cut, the meat could be spoiled. Later, the group goes trekking for food. There is a buffalo in the distance, but the rifle Claus gave them isn’t powerful enough to take it down. Walking further they see birds –a sign a carcass is nearby. They find a dead buffalo and are able to harvest still-fresh meat from the bones.
The Wise family has managed to can a fair amount of salmon and to stock up on firewood. They are even saving their urine to splash around the outside of their cabin to keep wild animals away. Neil Webster comes by to teach the family how to hunt moose. Carolyn and Webster go off on a four-day moose hunt, hoping to shoot down North America’s biggest land animal. Moose cause more injuries in Alaska than bear, and using a moose call to attract them is especially dangerous. Moose who respond to the call are either expecting to find a mate or a male to fight with so they arrive in state of agitation. Unfortunately, Carolyn returns empty-handed.
Greg and Bernice Pierson are luckier. They shot a goat earlier and are in the process of preserving it. That means leaving it outside on a tree to dry first, an especially risky move because the smell of meat carries for miles. Pretty soon they spot wolf tracks. He’s been circling the cabin and stalking their glacier-top home for days. Besides the threat of wolves, their water sources are dwindling. Temperatures are below freezing –good for meat storage, bad for finding running water. They must hike for hours to find a stream that hasn’t frozen over. They walk over slippery, frozen rocks and over unstable ice before they hear water running beneath them. They must use ice axes to access the water.
Jeff and Elizabeth are running very low on food. They didn’t manage to store salmon before the salmon run ended, nor have they been able to kill any bigger prey. And it’s not any more settling that a brown bear makes regular visits to camp. Jeff builds some crab traps, and they look for good places to set them, arguing all the while. The original locations of the crab traps proved unsuccessful, but Jeff is uncomfortable walking out into the sandy shoals (where crabs are more common) due to the dangers of quicksand. They face further failures. Elizabeth created a sort of refrigerator by partially burying trashcans, but after several days of rain, the stream has risen many feet and flooded their camp. They do, however, build a successful toilet –outside, far enough away it can’t contaminate their food.
Food supplies are low, and tensions are high. Planning and teamwork are two of the most important tools for survival in the wilderness and are two things that each team needs to work on if they hope to survive the Alaska Experiment.
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