Steven Rinella - The MeatEater Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival

I DONT CARE HOW often I fly in bush planes in AlaskaI never go more than fifteen minutes without considering the possibility of a crash. My concerns dont keep me out of the skies, but I do try to be as pragmatic about it as possible. I dont like to fly with pilots who show off by skimming treetops or aggressively banking through narrow canyon passages. And Im not into flight-seeing, or flying in single-engine aircraft just for the thrill of getting a birds-eye view of the land. In the words of my older brother, whos logged hundreds of hours in bush planes as a wildlife biologist in Alaska, You get up, you get down, no extraneous messing around.

On a recent September flight, while returning to the village of Tok after a caribou hunt in the YukonCharley Rivers National Preserve, I made an exception to my own rule. I asked the pilot of our two-seater Super Cub to divert our course for the admittedly ironic purpose of flying over the debris field of an airplane crash. The debris belonged to a B-24 bomber that burrowed into the mountainside in December 1943. Four of the five crew members on board were killed in the crash. One man, a pilot named Leon Crane, survived by ejecting through the aircrafts bomb bay and parachuting down into the snow-covered wilderness. All he had on him, besides the parachute, were the clothes on his back, a Boy Scout knife, and two packs of matches. He wasnt wearing gloves or mittens. It was 4F.

Crane made his way downslope to the Charley River. There he wrapped himself in his silk parachute and huddled beneath a spruce tree for a week while waiting for rescuers. None came. He was able to get a fire going but unable to secure food. He chewed vegetation to give himself the sensation of eating but spit it out. He tried killing pine squirrels with a makeshift spear, bow and arrow, and slingshot, but found it impossible. Fearing he would starve to death, Crane started picking his way downstream to the north. Eventually, in a spot we passed along our route to Tok, he found a trappers shack and an elevated cache of survival rations containing food, mittens, a rifle, and other supplies. Again Crane waited for rescue, this time for over a month. Still none came. In February, worried about dwindling supplies, he left the trappers cabin and followed the Charley River to the north and east. He walked for another month, killing some ptarmigan with the rifle and repairing his gear with cords salvaged from his parachute. He eventually came across a fresh set of sled tracks. He followed them and arrived at the occupied cabin of a trapper named Albert Ames. The trapper and his family took Crane in and fed him moose meat and pancakes. Days later, they traveled by dogsled to a camp on the Yukon River where Crane was able to be picked up by a small plane. On March 14, after eighty days in the wilderness of the Arctic Circle, Crane reported to his commanding officer in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Theres a lot to love about that story, and a lot to learn from it. First and foremost is Cranes mental and physical tenacity. After watching his fellow airmen die, he suffers hunger, cold, and loneliness for weeks on end without giving in to despair or making foolish mistakes. Hes calculating in his movements and mindful of when it makes sense to stay put and when its time to pack up and go. When he travels, he does so with purpose and lets the landscape guide his movements. His ultimate salvation is testament to the fact that he doesnt make big mistakes. Finally, theres the absent trapper and his well-stocked shack, which exemplify the payoff that can come from being supplied and preparedeven in a situation where the beneficiary of ones preparedness is an unexpected guest.

A year after his ordeal, Crane led a team to attempt the recovery of the crash victims remains. On that expedition, he was photographed with a smile. If only we could all be so resilient. As we continued our flight, I pondered Cranes story. Its wonderful, but also deceptive. Spectacular survival tales about downed pilots and shipwrecked sailors tend to overshadow far more common narratives about people getting into trouble in the outdoors doing normal, humdrum things. A friend of mine used to work for a guiding company that ran extended mountain backpacking trips for high school students. Their leading cause for medical evacuations wasnt snakebites, bear attacks, or even hypothermia. It was cooking accidents, usually burns involving camp stoves, fires, or boiling water. This mirrors the arc of my own childhood experience with injuries and accidents. We had virtually unlimited access to BB guns, .22s, Rambo knives, double-bit axes, and ninja throwing stars. But what usually got us into trouble was fire. In fact, one of the most memorable injuries I witnessed was caused by a flaming marshmallow that landed on my brothers chest rather than inside his smore.

That anecdotal cooking statistic from my friends guiding outfit doesnt hold true for the general population of outdoor enthusiasts. In the United States, the most likely injuries to require a medevac are sprains and strains from hiking. But the stat does speak to the truth that the greatest dangers in the wilderness are often our own inattention or clumsiness. Ive witnessed two sets of injuries caused by bear spray, though neither involved a bear. One happened when my older brother was unloading his truck and accidentally stepped on the nozzle of his spray canister, breaking the plastic and hosing down everything in the immediate radiusincluding himself. The other occurrence took place as I was struggling through an alder thicket. One limb managed to release the safety latch on my canister as I passed by, and another managed to pull the trigger. Why wasnt I monitoring such a dangerous apparatus when it happened to be strapped to my waist? Maybe I was preoccupied with worries about bears.