Will to Live: Dispatches from the Edge of Survival

by Les Stroud

  Like so many survivors, Jim sang songs as he walked, both to keep himself company and keep his pace. Although the temperatures were dangerously low and Jim’s hands and feet were freezing, he could have helped his situation by wiggling them as he moved, which would have increased blood flow.

  Jim fought to stay awake as he trudged through the snow, knowing that if he fell asleep, he might never wake again. For many survivors, having a nap in the bright sunshine of the day often seems like a good idea, until you consider that this is the time when rescuers are most likely out looking for you. Sleeping will also cause your core temperature to drop, increasing the risk of hypothermia. Jim hiked all day and eventually found his way back to the truck that night. Unfortunately, the battery was dead and he was not able to start the engine. But the truck provided at least some shelter for Jim to get a bit of sleep.

  As the seventh day of their survival ordeal dawned, Jim set out again, this time to the west, back down the fateful road they had driven on a week ago. He was more than fifty miles from the nearest town, had no food or water, was woefully underdressed for the weather, and had hardly rested for days. Yet the thoughts of his infant child and wife dying out in the desert motivated him to push on at any cost.

  Incredibly, Jim stumbled along County Road 8A for almost twenty-four consecutive hours, frozen and cold, but fueled by the knowledge that he was the only hope for his wife and child. He would later say that one of the most difficult things he had to face during this time was loneliness and isolation, two very dangerous emotions during a survival situation, because they can bring on more negative thoughts, which may ultimately lead to depression. And when people feel depressed, they start to give up. Their focus shifts from improving their situation to convincing themselves there is nothing to be done. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Defeating this misery rests squarely on your ability to be proactive and do something, anything, to better your situation.

  By the time Wednesday morning, January 6, rolled around, Jim was near the end. His strength was sapped and frostbite had taken hold of his hands and feet. He had even started to hallucinate the sound of Jennifer’s voice around him. Then, sometime shortly before noon, when all hope seemed lost, he looked up and saw what he thought was another illusion. A truck in the distance!

  David Peterson, a supervisor with the Washoe County Road Department, first thought Jim was a cow out of pasture, but soon realized his dire predicament. Jim was covered in snow, his hands and feet were frozen, and he was ravenously hungry and dehydrated. But after walking some sixty miles though the snowbound desert, Jim had made it—alive. The only thing left to do was rescue Jenn and Clayton from the cave.

  * * *

  Preventing Frostbite

  As Jim and Jennifer would learn the hard way, trudging through the snow with improper clothing is an invitation for frostbite, the process by which human tissue freezes after prolonged exposure to extreme cold. No part of your body is more vulnerable to frostbite than your extremities: hands, feet, and face.

  Turn-of-the-century explorers treated frostbite by rubbing the affected area with snow, a strategy we now know to cause more harm than good. A much better approach is to immerse the affected area in cool water, a very painful—but necessary—process.

  Don’t ever thaw out frostbitten flesh if there’s a chance it may be refrozen again soon. Freezing, thawing, and refreezing will cause even more damage to the tissue.

  Although many people confuse the two, frostbite is distinct from hypothermia, a condition that occurs when core body temperature drops below 95°F (35°C), which is required for normal metabolism and body functions.

  * * *

  David took Jim back to his house and began to organize the search, an uncertain undertaking given that yet more snow was in the forecast. After providing detailed information regarding the location of the cave, Jim was taken to a hospital in Cedarville. Meanwhile, David and his friends headed out in search of mother and child. They searched for hours, to no avail.

  Then, shortly after 5 p.m., one of the men saw something odd in the distance, a flash of color on the otherwise bleak horizon. It was Jim’s sweatshirt. They approached the cave cautiously, worried about what they would find inside, but were relieved to hear Jenn answer their calls. They were cold and hungry, but alive. The family was reunited several hours later at the hospital in Cedarville.

  The following day, the young family was transported by ambulance to Washoe Medical Center in Reno, Nevada. Amazingly, baby Clayton suffered little from the ordeal, other than from severe dehydration and diaper rash. During their time in the cave, Jennifer had nursed Clayton often, but felt she wasn’t producing much milk for the infant. To keep Clayton hydrated, she had taken to drooling melted snow into his mouth. She also used bits of clothing to soak up water from the small puddles that had formed in the rocky crevices around her. From what I can tell, they were the best decisions she made during the ordeal.

  Yet where Jennifer fell short was in keeping herself active and warm. Even if she found it impossible to walk, she could have turned to the muscle tensing/relaxing technique I often use in cold-weather situations, which is incredibly effective at warming the core. It shows that moving and generating blood flow is the best way to stay warm in cold-weather situations.

  There was nothing that could be done for their feet, though. Jim and Jenn’s trek through the frozen desert had taken its toll on their extremities, especially their toes and feet, which suffered third- and fourth-degree frostbite. Two weeks later, Jim and Jennifer had all their toes and parts of their feet amputated.

  * * *

  Jim & Jennifer Stolpa

  ELEMENTS OF SURVIVAL

  Knowledge 10%

  Luck 60%

  Kit 5%

  Will to Live 25%

  The Stolpas had little else on their side other than luck. Knowledge was minimal, which I find surprising in light of Jim’s military training. Their kit was woefully inadequate, a difficult shortcoming to forgive, since they knew what they were getting themselves into. Their will to live started out fairly weak, but finally kicked into gear when they thought Clayton might have died in the suit bag. Luck saw them get stranded on a road instead of the middle of the wilderness, helped them find the cave when they did, and ultimately brought Jim in contact with his rescuer, David Peterson. This is a case where the joined additive forces of good luck and will to live came to the rescue.

  * * *

  Chapter 10 - Surviving Sharks (Part Two)

  A few miles off the south coast of Australia, I don my 7-millimeter wet suit and slink into a steep reinforced cage just big enough for my body. The cage is lowered into the water, and I immediately start to panic as I discover that my breather tube is being pinched by the cage lid. I am about to drown eight inches below the surface in the cold ocean water. With no air in my lungs, I repeatedly punch up hard on the lid until they finally pull me out, asking what’s wrong. The crew quickly learns of my excellent command of life-threatening expletives! Back in the water, air now flowing freely, I float in a one-person shark cage, waiting for a great white.

  There are sharks, and then there is the great white. Sometimes called the white death, the great white has earned much of its ass-kicking reputation from the book Jaws, which was subsequently made into a movie by Steven Spielberg. In more recent times, the shark specials on cable television channels have done much to overdramatize and focus solely on the attacking and killing power of sharks rather than the benign reality. I have come to regret my involvement with some of these programs over the years. Yet the great white also comes by its reputation honestly. Great whites are carnivores, feasting on anything from fish to seals to dolphins. Despite their well-deserved spot at the top of the food chain, they are stealthy beasts, typically ambushing their prey from below.

  And from my vantage point inside the cage, beast is the correct description. Two sixteen-footers come in again and again, swimming right past the cage and taking bits of bait the
crew has been throwing off the boat.

  Then it comes. An eighteen-foot behemoth that swims into the scene with the confidence only an apex predator of its size could exude. The two sixteen-footers take off and are not seen again. The sight of this huge animal coming straight at my tiny cage from the unending depths below is one I will never forget. The trick of its size is actually not its length, which is terrifying enough, but its sheer mass and girth. It could, quite simply, open its jaws fully and take my entire body in one bite, or maybe two! It rises slowly, with barely even a torque of its body, as if it can just think its way through the water. I can’t help but think of the two flimsy ropes that hold the cage to the boat. This shark could rip the whole boat apart, never mind my little cage!

  Over in the much larger filming cage, my buddy Mark Rackley, the extreme videographer, is running his camera when the big beast suddenly makes a run straight for me. Were I in the bigger enclosure, I could slink to the bottom, or even back up a couple of feet. In the solo cage, my face is inches from the opening, out of which I dangle bait by hand. There is nowhere to go, no place to hide.

  The behemoth rams the cage right in front of my face; I bounce wildly, but the cameraman gets the shot he needs, from his safer vantage point. Thankfully, the metal has turned the shark away and he makes no attempt to fit his massive jaws around my tiny cage.

  I am pulled back up, determined to do the rest of my dives in the big cage, where I’m hoping there is a greater margin of safety. But this assessment is soon proven wrong. Mark and I are in the large cage when a great white is mistakenly led to a piece of bait dangling between us and the boat, partially trapping the shark in the narrow space. It thrashes about viciously until it finally cuts through the bait line and smashes its way out, almost ripping the cage off its ropes.

  Tiger Beach

  I’m breathing hard into my mask and regulator as a dozen nine-foot lemon sharks and a few eleven-foot tiger sharks swim around me. Overhead, several tons of steel boat are about to come crashing down on me after being thrown into the air by a ten-foot ocean swell. Bulky scuba gear weighing me down, I frantically swim a few feet out of the way as the boat again threatens to land on me and my two safety divers, Don Schultz and Jessica Templin.

  In the relative safety of the boat, the camera crew is trying hard not to be thrown into the water. “There’s another tiger down there! Hurry up!” one yells at me. All I have to do is utter two short lines from my script—“Just where are the deadliest waters on earth, and more importantly, what makes them so deadly? Let’s find out”—then simply dunk my head beneath the surface and take off on an underwater scooter. Easy stuff in a swimming pool, not in raging seas!

  For the third straight year, the Discovery Channel has asked me to host a Shark Week special. Last year, I floated in a life raft above a group of frenzied sharks, only to puncture a hole in the raft myself and have the cameras watch me sink. Talk about setting your bar high! This year they asked, “Hey Les, how do you feel about jumping out of a helicopter into a frenzy of sharks?”

  To be honest, this one took some convincing. We all have our demons, and mine is heights. Yet here I am, zipping up my wet suit and getting last-minute jumping instructions from the pilot. In fact, both cameraman Andy Mitchell and I will have to jump out, as he is to film from the chopper and would have no way to get back on the boat without jumping himself. He has no problem with heights—he has even been skydiving. Yet it doesn’t escape my attention that he calls his wife right before takeoff. The seas have been rough all week; today they are at their worst. The winds are high, and swells rise to as much as twelve feet in the waters below. The Dolphin Dream, our former shrimp boat turned dolphin and shark tourism boat, is bobbing like a cork beneath us, in an area known as Tiger Beach. Just last year, a man was attacked and killed by a tiger shark here.

  We have been chumming the waters with dead fish for two days to keep the sharks around and ready for my plunge. I make no bones about it, though, and tell the pilot I am scared of heights. This will definitely be a challenge for me. He assures me he can bring me within a foot of the swells if I want. Just when I was hoping we’d cancel due to high winds!

  When you push your limits, you sometimes notice that your mouth goes dry. Mine is like sawdust as I climb into the chopper. I have an hour in the air before we reach Tiger Beach to consider my future. I can see the sand at the bottom, only thirty feet below the surface. At least this is slightly reassuring. “Looks pleasant enough,” I tell myself. I can do this. As we fly over the lemon and tiger sharks, the pilot can’t stop saying, “I don’t care what kind of sharks they are, they’re sharks! You guys are f***in’ crazy!”

  We circle a few times, trying hard to line up the shot for Andy. Finally, my time has come. Andy gets his shots, looks at me with an apologetic expression, and cries out, “Let’s do this!”

  When I used to perform on stage, I always had to deal with nervous bowels. When I first started to paddle class four or five rapids, I always had to pee. Jumping from a helicopter into an ocean filled with sharks for the first time requires an extra boost of adrenaline, though, so for some reason I let out a loud grunt and beat my chest.

  Now, even though I’m not jumping from hundreds or even dozens of feet in the air, there’s still a catch. The pilot says, “Oh, by the way, I’ll have to keep the chopper moving while you jump, and you have to make sure you jump straight out, or the skid will flip up and could knock you out cold before you hit the water.” Great.

  The bite from a Caribbean reef shark is still healing on my wrist, and I realize that chain mail would be nice to wear. Somehow, though, our chain-mail suits were lost during one of the flights. In any event, the chain mail would do little against a lemon or tiger shark, which could rip right through me as an afterthought. Unfortunately for Andy and me, we know that a few small fish thrown in the water to attract the sharks is one thing, but the sound of something large—say, a human body—will bring the big sharks in fast. Tiger sharks determine what you are by biting. You lose an arm while they realize you aren’t actually a fish. Small mistake for them. Big one for you.

  Steady . . . a little slower . . . a little lower. Three slaps of my hand on the pilot’s back, my feet resting gingerly on the skid of the chopper, and it’s time. Out I jump, hoping I can do this without being decapitated by the prop or knocked out by the skid.

  In the end, I surprise myself; the height is no issue. Down I go. Huge swells take me as soon as I hit the water, but my safety divers are there quickly to pull me to safety, all the while watching the sharks below.

  I’m only underwater for a few seconds, but it feels like eternity. Soon I’m up again, choking and spluttering on the salt water. Success!

  This may be difficult to believe, but I don’t take risks. Everything must be calculated; everything must be in place for a great stunt to be only a stunt and not an act of lunacy. We get the shot, and I recite my lines at the back of the boat while trying not to be crushed. Hopefully, we’ve created what will be an opening shot to rival the knife-plunging scene from the year before.

  Sharks are some of the most beautiful and powerful apex predators on the planet. I’m writing this on a plane and will soon be driving on a highway. I feel safer with the sharks.

  Chapter 11 - Top of the World

  IN 1913, ONLY WEEKS INTO A HIGHLY TOUTED ARCTIC EXPEDITION, THE KARLUK BECAME CEMENTED IN THE UNYIELDING GRIP OF A MASSIVE ICE FLOE. FOR MONTHS, THE KARLUK AND HER CREW FLOATED HELPLESSLY THROUGH FRIGID WATERS, WAITING FOR THE INEVITABLE FORCE OF THE ICE TO CRUSH THE OVERMATCHED VESSEL AND SET THEM ADRIFT IN ONE OF THE MOST INHOSPITABLE PLACES ON EARTH. ONLY FOURTEEN WOULD LIVE TO TELL THE HORRIFIC TALE OF WHAT HAPPENED IN THE MONTHS TO COME.

  Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a Canadian born of Icelandic parents, is often considered one of the towering figures in the annals of arctic exploration. By 1913, he had already made two wildly successful ventures to the north. He lived off the land with Inuit people during the winter of 1906�
�07, and in 1910 discovered a group of Inuit—then called the “blond Eskimos”—who had never before encountered a white man. His latest venture, the Canadian Arctic Expedition, which was charged with exploring the area west of the Parry Archipelago on behalf of the Canadian government, was supposed to be his crowning achievement. It was anything but.

  The trip seemed doomed from the start. As Magnus Magnusson so brilliantly states in the foreword to William Laird McKinlay’s book, Karluk: The Great Untold Story of Arctic Exploration and Survival, the expedition was “ill-conceived, carelessly planned, badly organized, haphazardly manned, and almost totally lacking in leadership.” Of all the survival stories I’ve come to know, from the smallest solo journey to grand expeditions, this one is the king of the hill when it comes to unorganized, poorly planned, misguided adventures.

  McKinlay’s first hint of impending doom should have come when he was asked to be part of the Karluk’s scientific team without ever having met the leader of the expedition, Stefansson. In the world of polar exploration, this would be a huge red flag. Invariably, crew members would have had to endure a series of interviews to determine their suitability for the hardships ahead. McKinlay, a twenty-four-year-old Scottish math teacher who had never been to sea, received his appointment via telegram.

  But McKinlay was young and adventurous, and despite the fact that he was given a mere seventeen hours to outfit himself for a journey to the top of the world—a monumental task by today’s standards, let alone in 1913—he soon found himself on a ship bound for Canada.