Alone Season 2

why would anyone need more tarps than the 20x20 and the 10x10? That's plenty, altho you'd have to know to cut up the 20x20 into more useful sizes. You'd of course also have to know to straighten out a fishhook for use as a needle and sew the cut edges with one of the inner strands from the paracord. Guess that's way too much knowledge and work to expect of anyone these days.
Season 3 in Patagonia was much easier, because they were on a lake instead of a sea shore, with much less in the way of wind and rain.

Season 4 was back to Vancouver, but they lasted 9 days longer, in spite of the producers having made the challenge much harder. They only got 2 lbs of rations each, instead of 5-10 lbs the gillnet size was cut from 6x25 ft to 5x15 ft, and the mesh size was reduced to a much too small 2" to a nearly worthless 1.5". One of each pair had to hike for 8 days to find the "camper" and the camper was limited to what he could do because he was waiting on the hiker and because half of the gear was in the hands of the hiker-partners.

Season 5 is supposedly someplace in Mongolia?
 
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for season 1, you could only take 1 5 lb ration. For season 2 and 3, you could take 2, if you wished. For season 4, the max you could take was 2 lbs per person, which was a total crock.
 
So far, I have seen almost zero in the way of relevant skills. It's silly to waste time and calories on building a 'long term" shelter when you're starving. You need to get set up to feed yourself adequately, have at least 100 lbs of preserved food, and then worry about the "heavy duty" shelter. Otherwise, you'll just starve out before you have any need of such a shelter (as all have done so far). They need to be making and using lots of netting. Fish are the only food that's abundant enough to provide the 5 lbs of (ready to eat) food that they need to eat per day (to be active out in that cold, wind and dampness all day.) Perhaps, with a net weir catching live fish all day, and a bear arrowed and its flesh preserved, you would not need to be out in the weather more than about half a day, every other day. That would definitely reduce the amount of food you'd need to eat, assuming that you had sense enough, and mental fortitude enough, to just lie around in your sleeping bag.
 
all it takes to learn about kelp is a google search and some reading. And mike didn't even trouble himself to notice that kelp only offers 50 calories per POUND. So eating it wont do you any good. You have to juice it, or you'll get the ripping trots before you consume enough of it to do you any good.
 
Dunno why you'd be out of food in 3 days, when you can carbo load before you go, which is good for 2 days, and you can take 10 lbs of pemmican and gorp, which will feed you really well for a week (almost 4000 calories per day). Of course, you have to take the proper other 8 items, which nobody has done. They waste their picks on stuff like a ferrorod, axe, big saw, hooks and line, a third tarp, etc. Man, when they give you a 20x20 tarp and a 10x10 as well, why would you pick a 12x12 as one of your 10 items? Cut up the 20x20, straighten out a fishhook and "hem" the cut edges with some of the inner strands of the paracord.

A simple google search shows that only 1/4 of a crab's live weight is edible flesh, and crab meat, ready to eat, offers only 400 calories per lb. You need 4000 calories per day, out in that cold, damp, windy environment, scrambling over slimy boulders, etc. I sort of doubt that "natural" crab traps provided you with an average of 40 lbs of crabs per day. So how many fish per day were you averaging with your field-made gillnet, and what was the average size of those fish? Cause only half of a fish's live weigt is edible flesh and other than salmon, they offer almost zero fat and average being only 800 calories per lb (ready to eat). To lose no weight during the second half of your stay on the island, you'd have had to average catching 6 lbs of fish per day, and 12 lbs of crabs. EVERY day. Many days the weather just doesnt permit such foraging, so some days, you'd have to catch twice as much.
 
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they're basically instructing us how to lose one of your basic tools on the field. :D
and both of them already HAD a fire going when they lost their ferrorods. Why can't you arrange a cover over your fire, bed the coals down in a dakota pit, in ashes and dirt, and never need to start a fire again (from scratch) ? Cause they were starving and wanted a face-saving way out, since they are trying to make money as "survival instructors". :) When you have a fire, you can saw or chop some rows of shallow cuts on a flat of wood, char it, and have something that easily catches a spark. Then any sharp, hard rock and any carbon steel tool will give you fire. you can also dry bark, harvest pine resin, force-dry tinder and kindling, have ashes, all which are a big help at starting a fire. Keep them dry in bags that you've made with the duct tape and your gaiters, chunks of tarp, etc. Cut up the big tarp, use a chunk of it to make chaps and a poncho to tie around you. The sleeves and the pantlegs of that rainsuit are priceless waterproof containers.
 
keep a small fire down in a dakota pit, and a tarp 7 ft up over it, and you need not worry about your tarp. Never leave the area for more than a very few few minutes without putting the fire "to sleep" with ashes and dirt over some hot coals, of course. To have 7 ft high poles over which to stretch your tarp, cut some 3 ft long stakes. Use a ball bat sized baton to drive them a foot deep into the ground. Then lash your 7 ft long poles to the 2 ft of above-ground stakes.
 
Perhaps she 'exaggerated' may mean the time she spent off-grid and fighting forest fires. I don't know, and it can be a weird thing to speculate on, but she did look as though very little use of an axe ever occurred.

A big problem with 'Survival Instructors' today is the Reality TV and Youtube aspect of it. How many of these respected bushcrafters are using edited footage to promote themselves and make money off of sleek videos rather than actual skills? It seems from comments that most do edit their footage and rarely show mistakes. Basically anyone can go out for a day hike, grab some various footage and edit it to make themselves look like experts. If one were out there with them the whole time though we might see that they are in the novice category in many of the attributes of survival. "Alone" basically proves this to be true as we see very few of them at a level of comfort that would suggest extensive time in the woods and the mindset that goes along with testing oneself.

I would say that David, Mike, Justin, Tracy, and Jose seem the most comfortable out there and have the mindset of people who have done this - truly being able to call themselves 'Survival Experts' or "Survival Experts In Training' (no offense to them intended, but I suspect they mostly fit the 'in training' category). Having a survival school or being a survival instructor doesn't really tell us anything, as there is no real system of credentials for this, and many survival instructors would be at a school to focus on specific areas of expertise rather than survival as a whole.

Again, this isn't meant as disrespect at all, I'm no expert either. I just mean to say that we should consider an aspect of what might be called the 'survival division of labour' to keep a realistic outlook on these people. Some may lack skills, or lack skills in certain areas; or they may just run into a bit of unlucky environmental circumstances which show that testing survival and real survival are not the same thing.

However, there is a system available to test the extent of one's survival knowledge and suitability for instruction. Mors Kochanski's "Grand Syllabus" is probably the best example, and may be the only true system out there to guide one's knowledge and skills path. A true survival expert would have to know all of the skills in that book and have thoroughly tested them in various situations and environments.

When we compare survival experts to the ideal set out in such a book we see that most will be lacking in certain areas. It seems to me that clothing, shelter, and axe work are the areas most lacking for the most people. I think this is largely due to the shift in technology and the amount of time spent out in the wilderness. Frankly, people do not spend nearly as long out on trips as they used to. I think this, again, is proven in the show "Alone". The fact that people are homesick within hours or days suggests how infrequently people are out on long trips, or that their trips are taken in convenient areas where technology keeps them in contact. High-tech clothing prevents any real understanding of clothing and the care necessary over long trips. And similarly, tools are now geared less towards skill and necessity than convenience within camp.

An example. No one really needs to baton, but it looks really good on camera to have an aesthetically pleasing fire. Never mind that it is inefficient, low-skill, and disproportionate with the true necessity of fire - it looks good on a screen! And never mind that one could be better using their time to improve their axe or knife skills - it's what everyone is doing!

Understanding your clothing, shelter, water collection, and tool techniques comes before fire in real survival importance. But due to the skewed understanding of spectacle bushcraft (spectaclecraft?) everyone believes fire-lighting is much more important than it is and so they focus on it rather the primary needs which would lessen the dependence on fire anyways. It is a vicious circle because the lack of fire then compounds all of the improper knowledge regarding clothing, shelter, water collection, and tool use. The potential for error increases as the individuals realise they had all along been focusing on the wrong things. Or in other words, once their fire-lighting technology is gone they realize that their understanding of primary survival tools come up short.

You lost your firesteel? So what? You should already be dry and have enough clothing/shelter to keep you warm. It's raining out and you should have had your shelter set up to assist with water collection, or a second tarp to collect it. You should have been using your tools to prepare a continuous fire and backup such as tinder fungus or char. What is the first thing one does when going on an extended trip? Ensure they have enough supplies and that the loss of a supply does not result in a survival scenario. One should not wait until they break an axe handle to create an axe handle, they rough one out asap. Similarly, one should not wait until they lose a firesteel to come up with a plan - they should immediately secure a backup. Not allowed to take a lanyard? Then find one, make one, or come up with a compromise. Setting a blank down on the ground should never have been an option in the first place.

Similarly, one should not wait until they encounter a bear before looking for a means of defense. Get your bat and spears made beforehand, carry the axe with you. And this may be the biggest reason for a continuous fire, a good shelter and a continuous fire creates a significant barrier between you and predators. In many cases, especially lean-tos, fire is part of the shelter and should be treated as such. I think that in a survival situation it would be a good idea to treat fire as many indigenous people did during sacred events: keep it going for the entirety of the event, if the fire goes out you are testing the gods.

Lighting and establishing a fire is much more time-consuming than keeping a fire going, and in survival you are opening yourself up to the chance of losing the fire permanently. As such, the ability to keep a fire going is more important than being able to hold onto a firesteel, especially in trying conditions.

This brings us back to tool choice. I think that the axe is one of the items that one must take, but even if it is not, it is the number one tool and one would generally take it regardless of knowledge. The tool, however, is rendered useless if one does not know how to use it - a void is left in its place, making survival that much more unlikely. In true survival there is no 'two is one', there is only the knowledge you have and the humility to understand that nature can take that last tool from you at any time.


There is zero need of an axe, or big saw on the Alone show. The producers will never let it go past 3 months, cause it cuts into their profit margins too much. NOTICE how they made it MUCH harder for season 4, after Carleigh made it 85 days without doing anything but lay in her sleeping bag? Any woman as fat as Tracy was, who did the same would last 5 months, minimum. You are forbidden, on the island, to cut green trees of more than 6" OD. You are NOT out there to "homestead" Instead, you're out there to catch 800 lbs of fish, fowl and bear in 8 weeks, and drunk 60 lbs of kelp juice. If you do that, you'll be administratively just given the win, cause everyone else will have lost at least 30 lbs, and have no preserved food at all. So how could they hope to beat someone who's maintained their body weight, and has 200 lbs of preserved food? All you'd have to do is lie around for another 3 months. So you would not get hurt. The producers desperately want to stop the expenses of the show, as soon as they've got enough video to make a dozen shows. They will jump at the chance to (quite reasonably) end the show "early".
 
I still don't understand Tracy taping out. I think she was scared and is just putting on the tough story to cover the real reason. I usually try not to pass judgment on these shows but it just seemed strange


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Tracy became distraught by what she interpreted as anger/aggression with the mama bear and cub. The reality is due to her past trauma, she experienced the same traumatic feelings she spoke of in the factory shooting she responded to. She was experiencing fight response of fight-or-flight. But the non-logical part of her reaction flashed back to previous trauma. Her reaction isn’t logical to her or to viewers but, PTSD response isn’t logic based. I hope she’s in a peaceful place now.
 
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