Off Topic: 'Alone' History Channel Series on Netflix — Wilderness Survival in the Arctic
I have fairly extensive outdoor experience, enough I think to judge a show’s authenticity. And I’ve been to the Thelon Wilderness, where trees survive only on eskers.
Series like Win the Wilderness on Netflix were silliness for city dwellers who might think it “real”—but no need for real survival skills there. Eager and nice likable people for sure, but all totally unskilled for any real survival challenge. More power to them, but absolutely not a survival challenge versus Alone.
And so I came across the History Channel series “Alone” Season 7 on Netflix (the only season Netflix offers). It has its weaknesses, but with participants really and truly alone and slowly starving to death, film production values necessarily are pretty basic.
In Alone season 7, 10 participants are each set down separately in a remote area near the arctic circle, sites chosen by draw roughly comparable but with some better than others, with no food and only basic survival tools (10 picks from an approved list such as knife, axe, pot, fire starter steel, bow & arrow, but no guns). Each isolated with about 5 square miles to survive on, or “tap out” with the sat-phone. Which some quickly do.
It’s the real deal with these folks dropping 20-30 pounds of body weight within 50 days—just half of the 100 days needed to win the $1M prize from October through the bleakness of December—near the Arctic circle. Not an easy place to survive.
I found the series fascinating because it was a true survival challenge, the real deal. I was able to use my own outdoor experience to gauge the participants. I wanted to see early on if I could predict who would make it and how long each participant would last. I did remarkably well, although I could not predict early “tap out” of one participant from an unexpected injury. And I was dumbfounded at the rudimentary mistakes of some participants—for example not having a robust shelter even half-done 2-weeks-in is a guarantee for tapping-out. Duh.
Could I make it those 100 days, say 10 years younger? Maybe if I learned how to make a gill net and snare rabbits (illegal most everywhere so never learned), in addition to my hunting background. And I’d need to learn mushrooms and plants for the arctic. But I expect that my hands/feet would succumb to frostbite all too quickly, and contact lenses would be a nightmare. And you don’t know what you don’t know, so I’d probably not make it. I think my psychology would hold up, but no one really knows until put to the test. Psychology is what makes the series interesting, together with the skills side.
And in the end, even the most skilled can make at most a very few minor mistakes along with needing dumb luck. Because there is only one way to make it work: killing a very large animal and storing the fat and meat safe from wildlife. It’s simple math: burn through 4000 to 6000 calories a day and you have only a few weeks before it’s over unless you get a lot of fat, which only a large animal can deliver. Barring a 7-year-high of rabbits or some crazy-good fishing I suppose.
