Matt Graham - Epic Survival: Extreme Adventure, Stone Age Wisdom, and Lessons in Living From a Modern Hunter-Gatherer

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Gallery Books

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New York, NY 10020

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Copyright 2015 by Matt Graham and Josh Young

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Gallery Books hardcover edition July 2015

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Interior design by Robert E. Ettlin

Jacket design by Daniel Rembert

Jacket photograph by Ace Kvale

Author photograph by Todd Puckett

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4767-9465-5

ISBN 978-1-4767-9468-6 (ebook)

This book is dedicated to anyone who is willing to view the natural world as a gift and to appreciate, enjoy, preserve, and learn from it.

I live a life that is far different from that of most people I know or have read or heard about. Yet it is a life upon which our society was built. While most peoples lives are calibrated by ones and zeros, the daily beat of city streets, and the frenetic demands of modern-day living, mine is dictated by the wild. At first glance, mine is far more dangerous.

For the past twenty years, I have all but ignored the digital age and pursued a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, living as man did many thousands and even hundreds of thousands of years ago. This has taught me that the wilderness is a place of truth that will accept and enhance the life of any person who is ready to live on its terms.

Many people who try hard to enjoy life end up feeling empty and cannot figure out why. For me, the solution to happiness has lain on green meadows, rocky passes, and flowing streams. The wilderness needed to be explored and better understood. Once I made that decision, I felt released from the chains of society. My legs would take me to the places I needed to go. If they couldnt carry me there, I didnt need to be there.

Ive walked into the wilderness wearing only a loincloth and a pair of handmade sandals and carrying a blanket, a stone knife, and a bag of chia seeds. Once I lived there alone for half a year and tested the limits of what a person can endure physically and mentally. My body went through amazing physical changes. The caked tartar flaked off my teeth and my breath became sweet, and my thinning hair filled back in. I also adapted physically. After my body virtually crashed while eliminating toxins, I bounced back and could run like a wild animal and spear a fish from twenty yards. All my senses were heightened, and I found that the more my body was tested, the more energy I was able to draw from the land to sustain me.

For most of my life, I have lived off the grid in traditional-style wickiups, pit houses, and primitive structures with no electricity or plumbing, remote places all, ranging in location from the mountains of Utah to the bottom of the snow-covered Grand Canyon to the jungle of Kauai in a hut built out of banana leaves. I have made fires out of bark, vines, sagebrush, tamarisk twigs, and a cows anklebone to stay warm and cook my food. To survive, I became a proficient hunter using the atlatl, a device for throwing a spear that gives it greater velocity, and was accomplished with it to the point that I once beat the world atlatl champion in competition.

I have run thousands of miles exploring every piece of the wilderness in the western United States that called to me. On these treks, I wear handmade sandals constructed from yucca fibers to keep me closer to the earth. Ive run through the Sierra Nevada mountains, the Mojave Desert, the Sonoran Desert, the Grand Canyon, Death Valley, and up the middle of California. In these explorations, I interacted with the plants and the animals. I was in no hurry. I didnt want to be just another alien visitor. If I sensed I had something to learn from a particular place, I would stay for days, or even weeks at a time, and listen to what the land had to offer.

But I dont mean to brag in the least, nor do I want to push my lifestyle on anyone. I am interested in sharing my explorations of the land. I want to show what the human body and mind can do when pushed to its utmost limits, and how nature can help take care of it. I hope to add a dimension to peoples lives through what I have experienced and what I have seen.

One of the most important things Ive learned from living off the land is that it makes you more observant. Today in our livesand I know because I have stepped out of the wilderness for periods of timewe can become desensitized to the point where we stop looking around and appreciating the simple things that are right in front of us. We drive home or walk through a city and cant even recall half the things we saw on the street. When you live off the land, you are forced to be hyperaware of everything. I believe that achieving this level of hyperawareness makes people more complete because in addition to getting to know themselves better, they also develop a greater understanding of their relationships with other people.

While living on the land, everything becomes critical. If you dont pay attention, then you die. It sounds dramatic, but its that simple. Being out in the wild strips away the artifice so that when you reenter society, you dont have the same distractions. I find that when Im talking to a friend, I am immersed in their story and give them my full attention rather than worrying about who is texting me. (Yes, I do own a cell phone.)

Being in a survival situation teaches you what it takes to live. That connection is very powerful. All your senses become more developed. You experience heightened hearing and clearer eyesight. It can be highly addictive. When you live in such a way, you realize the potential of what you can be as a human being on a physical level, and it makes you want to return for more.

I see this pull in students I take on survival courses. We will go out for a month, and they will develop themselves in ways they have never experienced. Sometimes they push themselves so hard they feel enlightenment, but at the same time, they are craving a cheeseburger and an ice cream sandwich. They return to their city lives and get all those things they were dreaming about on the trail, but when they lose that wilderness boost, they return for more.