This past weekend I went on a Wilderness Survival Course in Northern Alberta with the Canadian Rangers. While I have done this course before a number of years ago, there are always new things to learn. One of the takeaways that struck me this time that I perhaps missed the last time around was how quickly a person can adapt to their situation and go back to their usual level of happiness despite not having any "stuff" that they thought they needed.
To start off with, we got bussed north from Edmonton overnight and arrived at a camp the Rangers had set up. The kit list for the course included our warm winter clothing (long underwear, uniform, fleece top and bottom, parka and goretex outer pants), a knife, canteen and cup, and our sleeping bags. The first half of the day was spent getting instruction from the rangers on things like making fire, improvised shelters, making signals, and trapping and preparing food. After that they split us up into pairs (I ended up in a group of three this time due to an odd number of people on the course), put us into skimmers (sleds) towed behind snowmobiles, and brought us out to our respective areas where we were to stay. We were told that the sleeping bags were for emergency use only and they wanted us to try to get through the night without using them.
The second half of the day was what we had to make our shelter, start a fire, and collect enough firewood for the night. This seemed like a fairly long afternoon even though it gets dark at 6pm because we hadn't had anything to eat that day and had to get everything set up before it was too dark to see. At our site we found that they had provided us with an axe, some snaring wire, and old coffee can for boiling water, a flint/magesium fire starter, and one Individual Meal Pack (kind of like the MREs for the Americans) for the group to share for the next couple of days.
Once we got our lean-to shelter and fire set up to our satisfaction and it started to get dark, we hunkered down for the evening and shared the piece of bread that was included in our meal pack. Morale was pretty low at this point and the next 14 hours of darkness were somewhat miserable (for me at least). The night time temperature dropped down to about -30 Celcius, and trying to sleep without the sleeping bags resulted in lying down in the shelter as close to the fire as practical, getting about half an hour of sleep, waking up from the cold as the fire began to dwindle, stoking the fire with more wood and warming up, then trying to repeat the process. We didn't need to use formal shifts for staying up and watching the fire as none of us could sleep very long anyway.
Once morning came, a shift in everyone's mood and attitude was visible. We heated up the desert pack from the meal for breakfast (fruit cocktail, split between the three of us) and somehow that bit of food seemed fairly satisfying. That day the temperature went up to about -18 C and it was sunny, which made for a great day to set out snares, construct our smoke signals, improve our shelter some more, and get more firewood. When chopping down trees with the axe for pine bows to use on our shelter I had to strip down to just my long sleeve t-shirt to keep from sweating. We stopped for a lunch consisting of fairly diluted noodle soup, and we split the main meal from the meal pack for supper. We even made coffee after lunch. Even though this is way less food than we typically eat, I think we had all gotten used to it by then as nobody complained about being hungry. We also went out on a walk that day where we found a lot of wolf tracks, moose beds, and I collected wild rose hips. Although they were dry they made for a good tea in the evening.
When the rangers came by in the evening to check up on us they told us to go ahead and use our sleeping bags that night. This was a stark contrast to the first night - the other two guys went to bed right after it got dark and I stayed up to watch the fire. The time seemed to pass much faster than the first night, and I ended up waking one of the other guys after 4 hours. This worked out well as the 4 hour shifts meant that everyone got a good sleep. Undressing and crawling into the sleeping bag was freaking cold at first as the bag was at -30 C, same as the outside air temp, but once it warmed up sleep came pretty quickly.
The last morning when a helicopter flew by we set off our signal fire, had the last bit of the meal pack for breakfast, and dismantled our camp. Everybody was in good spirits and we were almost sad to leave the area. I found it amazing how used to this we had gotten so quickly. Although we didn't catch anything with our snares, the rangers said that was probably due to the cold and if it were warmer the animals would be moving around more and we probably would have gotten a few squirrels. Although this was a survival exercise and not a sustainable way to live, it just goes to show how little you actually need.
