Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire 30 YO Alaska homesteader survives 3 weeks

After his cabin burns down.......lucky guy

apparently had enough food to make it till he was resqued

https://kutv.com/news/local/utah-man-survives-3-weeks-in-alaska-wilderness-after-cabin-burns-down

Damn.

Feel for the man losing his dog like that.

I feel sorry for the guy but...no skiis? No snowshoes? 20 miles isn't all that far. Anyone in decent shape could hike that on shoes in a few days. If you want to live in the wilderness, you'd better be prepared. He wasn't. Unless, of course, his shoes got burned up in the fire. The video shows a shed. I'd have a spare pair out there just in case.

Where is the snowmobile or dog sled?

I bush hogged “SOS” in a field one day

I never got rescued

Yeah, but you spelled it wrong.......


Nobody knows what OSO means.

I think there's a lesson there on keeping all of his eggs in one basket.

No skills? The poor guy survived for 3 weeks- that's more skills than a lot of 30 yr old have.

BEAR!

Read the online "story". It will answer your questions, and boggle your mind over some other facts.

Being its -25 up that way, he could have stayed at a Holiday Inn at night.

Seems to me, given the incident, the young man did all right with what he had left after the fire.

I have no idea what his "homestead" plan was, but I think he might have planned better for adversities. I am reminded of watching a video several years ago of Heimo Korth who along with his wife, Edna, had a remote cabin in the Arctic Nat'l Wildlife Preserve. They had a cabin with plenty of "stuff," but Heimo had also built a small storage cabin some distance from the main cabin. In it he and his wife had stored all kinds of survival gear, food, etc., etc., as Heimo said, " Just in case the cabin caught fire and burned, we'd get by with these things."

Perhaps the young man in the story would have been much better served if he'd built a small storage shed at a distance from his "cabin" and placed spare and duplicate survival food and equipment in it.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20 vision. Maybe he'll do that if he returns to his "homestead."

L.W.

Ken Marsh is a Trooper spokesman, not actually a Trooper. He is a really good guy and his book "Breakfast at Trout's Place" is a good read.

The survivor could have made snowshoes fairly easily, but staying in place was absolutely the right move for him.

Key words, "for him"......

So we're all a little different, this guy knew his limits and was lucky enough help showed up before he ran out of food..
Can't let yourself get all ran down and weak from not eating before you decide to break and run for it.

I really don't get why people put themselves in such situations if rescuing themselves isn't a given.
But then, I don't understand why people go out on dingy little fishing boats if they don't know how to swim either.

I was in my 40's and found myself running up the ice on the Kulukak River in SW Alaska on a brand new Polaris Trans-Sport .
It had less than 600 miles on it and I was feeling bullet proof when I'd decided to make the run over to Togiak from Alegnagik by myself. I'd been running a trapline in the Wood-Tikchik State Park all winter and that was better than 100 miles every time I checked the traps. 95% of the time I was alone, it just wasn't a big deal.

I was on my way back to Alegnagik and had just put some pretty good hills behind me and hit the river. It was cold, (10's), sunny and nice. The ice was smooth and I was making time, the entire run is around 80 miles, getting over the hills had been what I guess you'd call "technical" and somewhat slow, my speed on the smooth river ice was making up for lost time.

Suddenly, just outta the blue, my nice new Polaris went into neutral, it was as if I'd thrown a belt, but you'd typically hear that and I'd heard nothing.. As the machine coasted to a stop I unlatched the hood and opened it up, yep, the belt was intact and that wasn't what I wanted to see. I pulled the dipstick from the chain case and found the culprit, little bits and pieces of my chain were clinging to the magnet on the end of the dipstick.

The machine was done for, no on the trail macgyver fix for that.

I pulled out my Garmin 45 GPS and made a waypoint where I was going to leave the machine.
No fancy mapping GPS's back then, just numbers and an electronic compass.
I'm a good boy scout and always carried my topos and a regular compass along with your basic survival gear in a dry bag that was lashed to the machine.

Just as I'd figured I was pretty much smack dab in between Togiak and Aleknagik, 35 to 40 miles either direction.
If I were to make my way back to the top of the hills toward Togiak I'd probably be able to roust someone up on my handheld VHF and maybe get some help.
That would be around 12 to 15 miles but Togiak kinda sucks, just not the best of Native villages and I'd have to hang out until I could get a flight out of there back to Aleknagik or Dillingham.

I decided to just head for Aleknagik, it was home at the time and I wasn't in a big hurry or anything.



I pushed the Polaris into the brush beside the river and buried it with snow the best I could. I didn't want to have it stolen or parted out before I could get back to retrieve it. Of course the tracks lead right to it, if I were lucky it'd snow in the next day or two and cover them up.

I had all the right clothing from my bunny boots to my spotted seal hat, there would be no problem there.
There was a fist full of candy bars, some dried meat and a unopened bottle of blackberry brandy in the dry bag.
Sugar and protein, all was well there.
Being a smoker at the time there was never a shortage of bic lighters around.

I put what I figured I'd need in my day pack, tied my snowshoes on to the pack and started hiking.
The cold temperatures made for great snow conditions, staying on top wasn't a problem.

I got to see some country I never would have if I hadn't been a foot, it was turning out to be an OK adventure.
I just walked until I needed rest and then either slept or rested for an hour or so and then take off walking again....around the clock.

It wasn't like there were alternatives, nobody was going to be looking for me around there or anything like that.
I think it's all in what you wrap your head around and how you approach the situations you find yourself in.

I never did use the snow shoes, the snow conditions held up really well. I'm glad it did, I had a few hills to cross. Going up was a chore but heading down the other side made up for that, I mostly stayed on flat ground where I could which added a couple miles but dodged some climbs.

It took around 50 hours total time including rest stops. I guess that made for around 3/4 of a MPH average.

I never considered it to be a big thing, it was just one of those deals you get into and gotta get yourself out of.

I had a bite or two of those candy bars left when I got home along with a couple chunks the dried meat.

The Brandy was gone.....

Lessons learned from that adventure were by far, never buy a snow machine that has reverse and you won't have a chain to deal with and always buy Brandy in the flat plastic bottles, you might have room for two....

Home sweet home Aleknagik and that fu_ckin Polaris Trans-Port

It seems to me that the guy was just starting the "homestead" portion of it. I'd wage a guess that he wasn't entirely set-up for the long haul as of yet and didn't have the secondary shelter/supplies cached quite yet. Purely speculation on my part.

Great story Jeff. Thanks for sharing.

"Homesteader"? Not so much.

Sounds like he went "Into the wild".

Fugck you Jeff.

From the scribd story ( https://www.scribd.com/document/442461512/Winter-Fire-Survivor-1-10-2020#from_embed ), linked to by the kutv article above:



When I read this, my imagination ran to "this can't be some sort of backwoods Alaskan hoop house". I didn't bother to look at the pictures (like a moron) until just now.

Yep, it was some sort of backwoods Alaskan hoop house.

My previously boggled mind, still boggles.

Thanks, it takes a little bit to put the thoughts stories like these bring to mind into text.

I just find it hard to relate to this guy...




Exactly, except it always seemed to me that McCandless was suicidal, he set off knowing he wasn't going to make it.

This guy wasn't as prepared or as capable as he may have thought, but he didn't intend on dying, not that it couldn't have easily happened.

From his interview that's posted on Scribd he states....

"I knew I didn’t have enough knowledge of the whereabouts....I’ve heard there’s someone at Donkey Creek Lake 5 miles away."

Says he was raising Jalapenos and had some small peppers on his plants.
Jalapeno plants take a long time to produce in the warm climates they are typically raised in.

This guy had been there for months and hadn't taken the time to get familiar with his surroundings or possible neighbors. He may have benefited largely from getting to know others that lived nearby...

"I’m not exactly trained. I’ve just always been in the outdoors. And in the outdoor industry. My first job back in high school for five years I worked at a gear shop, so I was familiar with all the technical, you know, fire starting equipment.....I’ve just always liked to interface with the environment directly to survive. I challenge myself to make fire all the time."

So we got a techie type, loaded with the latest in Mountain Hardware®‎ micro fleece gear, doing the one thing he was good at, starting fires, burning all his schit up and then being at a loss for what to do.

Sorry about his dog and glad he made it out..
He'll probably write the next "Surviving Alaska" best seller......


For some it can be a life or death struggle, for others it's just another day in the neighborhood.