In 1987, I had this idea that a great way to teach wilderness survival would be to head out into the woods and do exactly that.

Survive.

Now I need the skills because I'd be filming myself alone.

And you, the viewer, would be made aware of that.

And I thought, what a great way to make these skills more relatable to you.

Problem was, the technology was not available for me to film myself beyond the old grainy camcorders as we used to call them.

Well, fast forward to the year 2000, 13 years and indeed the technology became available.

the take home information.

And the skills that you would learn from this series would make you more confident in nature.

You'd stay warm, dry and safe, and therefore you'd be able to reconnect to the natural world.

What you're about to watch is raw and real, and not to be confused with reality television.

These are my journeys into the world of survival and around the planet.

These are the skills that can keep you alive and open the doors to nature.

The only reality that matters.

- There he is.

Yeah, it looks like a bark scorpion, an awfully big one.

Don't know if that's the kind of guy I wanna pop in my mouth alive.

See him nipping onto my finger there?

Like I said, they're actually quite tasty.

(intense rhythmic music) As the reality of filming survival in various locations around the world began to sink in, I realized that I would have to have some kind of narrative mechanism that would make sense for why someone would be lost and alone, stranded in some location, forced to survive for the very first time I did it, it was with a canoe in northern Ontario.

Makes sense.

Another time it was ocean kayaking in Costa Rica.

Also make sense?

Well, then I found myself thinking about going to the Arizona desert.

What makes sense there?

Dirt biking.

which I am not so good at, so getting the opening scenes that took some doing, but it still made sense that being stranded on a dirt bike in the desert could happen.

Bordering both North and Central America, the Sonoran Desert stretches from Mexico to Colorado, taking in both Arizona and California.

At best, it may see 10 days of rain per year.

(rhythmic music) In the desert, rivers have no water.

Plants are so spiny that you dare not reach out to catch your fall.

The dry heat and wind suck the moisture out of you quicker than you can replenish it.

The animals here have to be prepared to survive the extremes.

(bird squawking) There is nothing average about this place.

(rhythmic music) (motorcycle whirring) This is the American Southwest, a desolate, rough, and rugged landscape.

(motorcycle revving) The hottest of the North American deserts.

Anyone stranded out here has only two or three days to find water before they die of dehydration.

For the unwary traveler, the desert can be deadly.

One small mistake can turn an afternoon off-road drive into a tragedy.

(dramatic music) (motorcycle whirring) After the crew shoots the opening scenes, they'll leave me alone with a broken-down dirt bike in the middle of the desert.

It's something that could happen to anyone, but in my case, at least I know that seven days later, my support crew will come looking for me.

(motorcycle banging) Yeah, right.

Oh, the bike?

Huh.

Well, the camera crew took the good one and left me alone with this piece of junk, alone for seven days, (motorcycle banging) and one dead motorbike.

(gentle music) (Les chuckles) (motorcycle whirring) This is not the place you wanna be stranded.

(gentle music continues) Sun's setting quick.

I've got some warmer clothes in the pack I'll put on.

It's just way too late in the day now, to make any kind of shelter.

Oh man.

So I'm just gonna sit here for the night.

It gets really hot here during the day, hot enough to dehydrate you quickly.

But at night, (zipper zipping) it still gets below freezing.

(wolf howling) (air whooshing) Day two, six more days to go.

Well, I certainly didn't sleep much last night.

It got pretty cold, enough to put frost on the bike and everywhere else too.

Let's see, I've got my camera gear.

I've got basically just the clothes on my back.

Enough, enough water for a couple of days anyway, a few days, although it's getting up to 80 degrees and 90 degrees every day.

And I should have, yeah, just one snack bar.

Well, let's see what I can get off of this bike anyway.

(rhythmic music) Sun's been up for barely 10, 15 minutes.

Already, it's getting hot.

You know, if you're lost in the middle of the desert with little chance of rescue, there's no point in being squeamish about your equipment.

I gotta vandalize this thing, see what I can use.

(upbeat music) Ow, geez!

(upbeat music continues) Ooh.

That could come in handy.

And a couple more of those.

(upbeat music continues) All this wiring could make great cordage.

You always need rope (exhales) when you're lost or stranded.

(upbeat music continues) All right, I've managed to scrounge up a few things off the bike.

Got some rope material, maybe make something for digging out of this.

And I got these prongs.

They're not prongs, I've got these spokes, which I can use like a three-pronged spear.

I'll probably do something with the seat, but the only thing I left back there was the rubber tires.

And I can cut them off later and either burn 'em for black smoke as a signal fire or make strapping out of them.

But this area has no shade for me, and it's pretty dusty, and it's gettin' hot.

So I'm gonna see if I can find a better location, and also, maybe some food.

(gentle music) This is all so new to me, below freezing at night and intensely hot during the day.

And as far as I can see, rocks and cactus.

It's gonna be tough to find water here.

(air whooshing) You know, walking down through this wash here is about the flattest area I can find.

Whenever I thought of the desert, I always thought of it being pretty flat, you know?

Flat and sandy.

In fact, it's anything but.

It's all rock and hills, some of them quite steep.

And just about every single plant that you pass wants to stick you with something.

Every time I step over one of those little plants, it makes a sound like a rattler snake.

I'm just gonna stroll a ways, see what I can find.

Some wild edibles.

It really doesn't matter where you look around here, it's just desert as far as you can see.

Here, let me show you what I'm seein'.

More than 100,000 square miles.

That's the Sonoran Desert.

(brushes crackling) This wash is good place to find different variety of plants for eating, that's for sure.

(cymbals ringing) It's not the snakes and scorpions that worry me.

It's running into a pack of wild peccaries.

They're vicious little guys and their tracks are all over this place.

They're kind of like pigs or wild boars.

And they may have terrible eyesight, but their sense of smell is excellent.

And they'll attack you in numbers in an unorganized and wild fashion.

(dramatic music) These Christmas cholla look like they'd be nice and juicy.

And you just pick some off, and rub off the fluffy hairs on them, and pop 'em in your mouth, and they'd be good.

Well, in fact, it's true, they are good to eat.

They were even part of the traditional diet in this area.

What they're covered with are little spines, called glochids.

And if you don't get, if you miss one glochid and leave it on there and pop that in your mouth, you're gonna know about it for days.

It sticks in your tongue and it just aches.

So you really have to clean them off.

And on it goes until it's completely clean of all the glochids.

(Les blows) Okay, there, I just spent like maybe 10 minutes just trying to get all the tiny, tiny, little hairlike glochids off of this Christmas cholla.

That's good.

Just a lot of work.

(dramatic music) I gotta find a way of staying warmer tonight, getting up off the ground and protected from above.

This grass should go a long way towards helping me stay warm.

But I'm using my gloves 'cause what makes me really nervous here is this is perfect place for rattlesnakes to be laying.

(snake rattling) They like the heat of the grass.

There must be some moisture under the ground here, for all of this carrizo cane to be growing here.

I've got my blanket with my grass.

I'll use this carrizo cane for my mattress, I hope.

I was hopin' to turn this bed into somethin' comfortable.

Sun's setting pretty quickly as always.

(grass rustling) Oh, there.

When I do finally settle in, it'll be somethin' like this.

Who knows?

Might even be, might even be warm.

I sure hope there's no spiders in there.

(chuckles) Black widow that is.

Oh, comfy.

(dramatic music) I knew that seat would be good for somethin'.

(rhythmic music) Well, I was pretty warm for most of the night underneath that grass.

Last little bit of the night, the frost came in and I started to get a bit chilled then.

And with the sun comin' up, it actually doesn't hit down in my gully soon enough.

So I'm up here to catch some morning rays.

I'm gonna see if I can weave that grass together into a mattress and into a blanket, and I'll see if I can maybe get a fire going as well.

(dramatic music) Okay, now, I've stripped apart all of the wiring that I had taken off of the motorbike.

And now, I'm just gonna make all this grass into these long sort of cylinders here.

And I'll start to tie them together in bundles.

Sort of you just come through, make a bundle like this, and then, go around the next one in the opposite direction.

And basically, I'm gonna pull the whole thing together and weave through my wiring to tie this whole bit of grass together.

And then, what that'll do is give me basically, a good portable mattress and a good solid mattress that'll hold together well for me.

There we go.

Just enough wire to make a bed.

I'll try for some fire now.

This seat cover will work as a good base for my fire-starting to keep things out of the sand.

First, I'm gonna give a good effort to get fire going by using traditional method of this area, the hand drill, very primitive method.

What I've done is, first of all, I got all my tinder bundle, my grass together, by hammering it with a rock and making some powder, and putting a powder in the middle.

And you kinda wrap it with some other grass.

And I actually used one of my wires from the motorbike to tie it off and make myself the fire bundle here.

I found this spindle just while I was down getting the carrizo cane.

It's a piece of seep willow.

And the base board that I'm using is one of the ribs of the saguaro cactus all dead and dried out.

And I've just sort of whittled it down to be the right shape for me to work with here.

The other thing I did was make this fire lay over here, ready to go, just a stick stuck in the ground.

And then, all the other heavier wood put on top.

And that way when your grass goes underneath to light up, the heavy wood doesn't crush it.

And you can get a nice, good, aerated fire to get it going.

Now, to do this right, first, I had to just find the right place.

And then, once I've got the spindle settling on the base board, I cut out a little notch and that'll give a place for all the hot dust to fall down into.

Now, what I was shown was to try and keep this motion going, if you do the kind of the "Itsy Bitsy Spider" move, you practice that for a while to get the motion right of what it is you wanna do while you make this thing spin.

(spindle whirring) When you're spinning really hard, if you're just spinning in one spot like this and you're just doing little short ones, it's a lot tougher to get it going.

So that's the motion I wanna try and keep happening.

And the last thing is, as you can see, I've been practicing, from these blister marks, it's really easy to get blisters doing this.

And so as soon as you're sort of stopped, (smacks hands) you smack your hands together really hard, so hard that it hurts, but that rushes the blood back into the skin and helps anyway to prevent the blisters from coming on.

Let's give this a try.

(Les spitting) (rhythmic music) (spindle whirring) You really have to suck up the pain as your hands get hotter and hotter.

(rhythmic music continues) (spindle whirring continues) Here we go.

Put it in the bundle, ah, carefully.

(Les blowing) Yeah, baby!

(laughing) Woo, doesn't that look good?

Woo!

No more cold nights for me.

(groaning) It's gonna be a warm night and it's gonna keep the peccaries and the mountain lions away from me.

This brings in a whole new element of psychological comfort, yeah!

And you know, the beauty about fire in the desert is that there's just dry firewood everywhere, under the mesquite trees and different, everything's gnarled, and dried up, and dead.

So I'll be able to keep this fire going for a good, long time, this is great.

(gentle music) There he is.

Yeah, it looks like a bark scorpion, an awfully big one.

Ooh, and he wants to sting me.

Look at that thing.

The way to eat these guys, what you wanna do is hold 'em down and just cut off the stinger.

Look at him tryin' to sting that.

So once you can get the stinger cut off, there, okay.

Now, he shouldn't be much of a problem.

Ow, see him nippin' onto my finger there?

He's, ow!

Huh, they like to pinch onto your tongue.

Like I said, they're actually quite tasty.

Mm.

(laughing) Not bad at all.

Can't believe I just did that.

(laughing) Not bad at all.

Mm, definitely a bark scorpion, nice and tasty.

(intense music) All this creosote bush is a great plant of the desert.

I can use it to make a smudge fire to actually to cleanse myself.

It's also good as about the only thing you can really kind of use when you gotta go to the bathroom.

Creosote bush has 69 different chemicals that bugs, and fungus, and different bacteria don't like.

So it's a very good, powerful plant for an awful lot of uses.

(dramatic music) There may be no water for washing up out here, but you can still feel fresh.

Sweet smoke of the creosote bush actually kills much of the bacteria that causes body odor.

(dramatic music) (dramatic music) Most fear is born of ignorance.

The sound of the desert seems benign, not spooky like a jungle at night.

Here, it's birds chirping, the dry breeze, but scorpions, black widows, and rattlesnakes, that's what lie behind the rocks and in the grass.

That's what can get into your mind and create fear.

Yet the desert, as dry and hot as it is, has been called home by humans for 1,000s of years.

This is an amazing find.

All this wall along here is not natural, it's manmade, manmade over 1,000 years ago.

There's chert here that came from a great distance away through trade networks, lots of pottery.

You know, the camera's sitting in a ruin.

There's ruins in all behind me there.

This whole hilltop is just one massive, multi-room complex.

Some people believe that the Pueblo who lived here were actually under a bit of a slavery to the Hohokam and the mound builders from the east, that style of peoples.

And around 800 years ago, they simply got fed up and abandoned all of these places, went on to more fertile ground.

These stones here, very obviously brought in.

This one here, you can tell, was a bit of a grinding stone.

You can even see the scoring from the grinding, perhaps used to make jewelry of some sort.

It's fascinating.

These cactus here are kind of famous.

It's called barrel cactus.

And it's said that if you slice them open and open them up, that they're full of water and you can drink it.

And in fact, you see them all growing often over to the side.

Supposedly that's because of the weight of the water.

Well, that's not true at all.

In fact, they're growing over to the side because they're following the sun, just like many plants and flowers.

If you do slice 'em open and try to drink the stuff, it's very slimy and it actually ends up being worse for you in the end.

In fact, it can bring your core temperature down, which can give you some really bad nighttime chills.

I suppose that's pretty good in the middle of the day when it's really hot.

But the fact is that they don't rehydrate you at all.

It's a very slimy, very pasty, slimy kind of substance, so.

but what they are good for, you can also get the fruits.

Oh.

Ow, ooh, that hurt.

Oh, that hurt big time.

Ugh!

Sorry, I guess he didn't like me taking his fruit just yet.

What you do is you don't eat the whole thing.

You open this up.

The inside is a whole bunch of little black seeds.

And they're tasty.

(Les crunching) Mm.

(gentle music) There's no point in rationing water in the desert.

The moisture is sucked from your body in this dry heat so quick that you can't hope to quench your thirst.

With only a few sips a day, my water is almost gone.

I've got to find an oasis in this place.

Heat of the day, like this, all you really wanna do is lay around in the shade.

Not much left of my energy bar.

I'm gotta go find some more food.

There.

I now have a very functional three-pronged spear.

I'm finding it really hard to ration my water and I still got four days to go.

I have to go up and over a few hills to see if I can find a place with some water.

You can walk 60 miles and not find any.

The javelina, which is like a wild boar, is a very aggressive animal.

And this one is right in my area.

I can hear the water, I can smell the water.

It smells fresh and clean.

There we go, there's a nice little feast.

Look at this big, juicy guy.

Look it, you see?

They see they still keep kickin' Directly inspired by his own survival expeditions, journeys and challenges.

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Survivorman Les Stroud.