I have never gone that long without food or water, ever.
This portion of our program was taught to us by Jon Merrit, survival expert. Jon felt that in order to have a real survival experience we ought to know what it feels like to be truly deprived of food, water, sleep and warmth. Also, to make this a real experience there were only two "things" that you were allowed to bring (other then clothes). The list of things consisted of a knife, a cup of peanuts, a headlamp, a book and a garbage bag. I forgot my headlamp and only brought my knife. A day before our adventure, starting at noon we were not allowed to eat in order to get an idea of what it is like to try and think clearly without anything in your stomach. The next day we started bright and early at the school and jumped in the vans to get to our back-country solo survival sites. Let's not forget that at this point we have not had anything to eat for about 20 hours, and now we are not allowed water for the rest of our survival experience. Needless to say, we were a little grumpy. Off we went to our solo plots to spend the day alone in the mountains building our shelters and trying to pass the time. Around 6pm we were taken away from our survival shelters and brought together in small groups of 3 or 4 to build a group survival shelter. We were given a match or two to try to start a fire and warm ourselves up a bit. At about midnight (we don't know the actual time, no watches) just after getting comfortable in our group shelters we were again taken away for another survival exercise, trying to keep warmth in your body with no shelter or fire. So my group of 4 found some cedar boughs and made a make shift bed to try and lie down and spoon for warmth. We rotated positions so that everyone got some time as the "little spoon" and that kept us relatively warm. After what seemed like ages until we were told we could make our way back to our original shelters. A short 15 min hike and we were back in our plot of shelter sites. Now around 3am we were to spend the rest of the night in our original shelter, sans fire. I wish I would have knows that before I built an open concept fire heat reflecting shelter (see photo below). So I did jumping jacks every ten minutes to keep my feet from freezing and counted the trains going by until morning. That morning, after having no food for about 48 hours, no water for 24 hours and next to zero hours of sleep, we did a deep woods navigation exercise in order to find the vans and get home.
This portion of our program was taught to us by Jon Merrit, survival expert. Jon felt that in order to have a real survival experience we ought to know what it feels like to be truly deprived of food, water, sleep and warmth. Also, to make this a real experience there were only two "things" that you were allowed to bring (other then clothes). The list of things consisted of a knife, a cup of peanuts, a headlamp, a book and a garbage bag. I forgot my headlamp and only brought my knife. A day before our adventure, starting at noon we were not allowed to eat in order to get an idea of what it is like to try and think clearly without anything in your stomach. The next day we started bright and early at the school and jumped in the vans to get to our back-country solo survival sites. Let's not forget that at this point we have not had anything to eat for about 20 hours, and now we are not allowed water for the rest of our survival experience. Needless to say, we were a little grumpy. Off we went to our solo plots to spend the day alone in the mountains building our shelters and trying to pass the time. Around 6pm we were taken away from our survival shelters and brought together in small groups of 3 or 4 to build a group survival shelter. We were given a match or two to try to start a fire and warm ourselves up a bit. At about midnight (we don't know the actual time, no watches) just after getting comfortable in our group shelters we were again taken away for another survival exercise, trying to keep warmth in your body with no shelter or fire. So my group of 4 found some cedar boughs and made a make shift bed to try and lie down and spoon for warmth. We rotated positions so that everyone got some time as the "little spoon" and that kept us relatively warm. After what seemed like ages until we were told we could make our way back to our original shelters. A short 15 min hike and we were back in our plot of shelter sites. Now around 3am we were to spend the rest of the night in our original shelter, sans fire. I wish I would have knows that before I built an open concept fire heat reflecting shelter (see photo below). So I did jumping jacks every ten minutes to keep my feet from freezing and counted the trains going by until morning. That morning, after having no food for about 48 hours, no water for 24 hours and next to zero hours of sleep, we did a deep woods navigation exercise in order to find the vans and get home.
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