Posted on 06/23/2009 5:28:35 AM PDT by DemforBush
SALT LAKE CITY – When he realized he'd been separated from his family on a weekend hike in a northern Utah forest, 9-year-old Grayson Wynne's thoughts turned to television.
Grayson watches "Man vs. Wild" on the Discovery Channel every week with his brothers and his dad. On the show, host and adventurer Bear Grylls strands himself in the wilderness and then shows viewers how to survive the sticky situations.
That's where Grayson says he learned to leave clues behind to help searchers find him...
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Nice little story. Always great when a missing child turns up unharmed. Pretty neat how resourceful the kid was, too.
Happy Father’s Day, indeed!
Smart kid!
Now watch all these survival reality shows change their advertising to say “Watch this show!! Your kids life could depend on it”
Thank you for a great post.....
What a neat kid!!! His parents raised him well.....One of the best Fathers Day this family has ever had......
Following that show the kid is lucky.
Bear Grylls is a big fat fake. That show is a joke to anyone who has spent time in the wilderness.
Survivorman rules!!!
So, he learned how to find a hotel, contract a support crew and unnecessarily climb things?
I’m surprised the kid survived.
Les Stroud is the real deal.
My daughters (7 and 9) watch “Bear” for the laughs.
When he starts climbing things, just because that’s all he knows how to do, you get the idea.
Hilarity, all around.
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The kid lost not just his backpack but his own horse? Or did he kill his horse and shelter inside the carcass for the night to keep from freezing?
If his parents had put him in Cub Scouts instead of in front of the boob tube, he could have learned the first rule of what to do when lost/separated/temporarily misdirected/whatever. Anybody know that rule??? Bueller? Bueller?
Stop moving around and make yourself easy to find: mirror signal, whistle, etc.
“Following that show the kid is lucky. Bear Grylls is a big fat fake. That show is a joke to anyone who has spent time in the wilderness. Survivorman rules!!!”
Both shows are a joke. One guy does a bunch of risky stuff that will get you killed in the wild. The other goes out and films himself starving for several days while eating a few bugs and the occasional frog or rodent he can catch until they pick him up. If you are hopelessly lost in the woods, stay put, make a rudimentary shelter to stay dry and wait for someone to find you.
Yup, man vs wild is a joke. Example: http://m.youtube.com/watch?desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D3UpSlpvb1is&v=3UpSlpvb1is Grylls also often takes unnescessary risks that would be insane in a real survival context (ie without a crew and support staff on scene).
Survivorman on the other hand ROCKS!
If you take your kids hiking or anywhere else where they might get lost and hard to find, put a whistle around their neck. The sound carries farther than their yelling and it takes far less effort. Most survival packets include a whistle.
“If you are hopelessly lost in the woods, stay put, make a rudimentary shelter to stay dry and wait for someone to find you.”
Um, that’s pretty much what you get from Survivorman, except on shows where part of the scenario is that he has to get somewhere. And then he always emphasizes that normally staying put - once you are in a place where you can access the necessities - is preferable. (Saw one excpetion, but part of the show was basically a practice exercise for real rescue workers, so he tried to emulate what a normal person might do in terms of getting more lost.)
From Survirorman, it is easy to see these basics: (1) Make shelter, (2) find water, (3) fire is a huge advantage if you can make it (and he’s shown tons of ways to do so), (4) find food, and finally (5) keep your will up by staying as active as caloric intake allows (because lonliness and poor caloric intake leads to bad decissions such as “I’ll try moving over there/find my own way out/etc.”). Seems pretty good to me...
This is the most important part. Stay friggin put unless you really MUST move. That, and then if you can, SIGNAL. Have a mirror handy. Build a smoky fire. I watch both shows for other informational purposes, I like watching them make shelters, light fires, and do other stuff. But for the vast majority of lost people, your best bet is NOT to trek around, as both men do.
BTW, you don’t need a compass to find North, just a working watch: http://upschitzcreek.blogspot.com/2007/11/how-to-find-north-with-your-watch.html (Something that makes intuitive sense once you see it, but I just learned this a few months ago. Thought it was pretty cool.)
““If you are hopelessly lost in the woods, stay put, make a rudimentary shelter to stay dry and wait for someone to find you.””
“Um, that’s pretty much what you get from Survivorman,”
Right, but once you know that, the show is just watching him build a shelter, fail to catch food, griping about being cold, wet, hungry or thirsty, then leaving his shelter to walk out. Since I already know how to go into the woods, starve for days and complain, I decided not to watch anymore.
And remember "The Rule of Threes": You can survive 3 minutes without air, three hours without shelter, three days without water, three weeks without food,and three months without hope.
That will help you avoid panic and help you prioritize your survival actions. Like the idiots who rationalize looting (i.e. Katrina: "those poor people just needed food. Funny, I don't remember seeing any of them walking around with cases of drinking water), too many people fixate on finding food, when safe shelter and water are of much higher priority.
Nice story about the kid though. Whether or not you like Grylls or Stroud, at least the kid had some presence of mind. That's more than most adults would have these days.
I do like the commenter's point about the kid learning more in Cub/Boy Scouts than on TV. That's spot on. It certainly helped me. I learned how to make, break, and transport my own camp by the time I was about this kid's age, and besides having a very "outdoorsy" family, many years in Scouts had a lot to do with that.
As a man, I can sense magnetic North simply by harnessing the power of microscopic trace metals present in my body. It’s innate.
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