[ethan]

[ QUOTE ]
Psssh. Four days in the wilderness should be a cakewalk for any Boy Scout worth anything.

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I'm not even a scout, and I did three my junior year of high school. I'm not sure I'd do particularly well if left in the desert, but Western Massachusetts in late April didn't pose much of a problem. The weekend stuck alone in the woods was a final for a class I took - yes, for H.S. credit - called Survival Living. It was great. We got to bring a bottle for water and whatever we could fit in a 12-oz peanut can. I defininetely did not lose weight while I was out there.

An Eagle-Scout friend of mine took this class a year before I did, and ended up catching somewhere around 50-60 ~6" trout over his weekend. Apparently the smoker he built cooked them nicely. He also made a bow-and-arrow and shot a grouse. (Sure, they're easy to shoot, but he still got one and I didn't.) Then he went to the Air Force Academy, graduated at the top of his class, and last I heard the government was giving him a few million per year and he couldn't tell anyone where he was disappearing to every few months.

However, he has nothing on Rolf, the Norwegian exchange student who was also supervising my class. He had done his required military service, but decided he also wanted to volunteer for a high-altitude survival experiment. He was left at 14,000 feet (in [censored] Norway) with something reminiscent of a garage-door-opener...if he pushed the one button, the people in charge would assume he was dying and come get him. Otherwise, he was going to stay there for a month. The people in charge were going to be pretty goddam pissed if he pushed the button and wasn't 99.99% dead. It took six days for him to start a fire because all the wood nearby was rotten. The only food he had available was lichens, and to eat those he had to boil them in a succession of progressively less-basic baths. So, he'd find an indentation in the rock around him, put some ashes in it, fill it with water and then keep adding hot rocks until it was warm enough to cook his lichens. Then find another, add less ashes, and re-boil the lichens. He was out there for 30 days...he started around 150lbs and ended around 110. He's about 5'10", and was reasonably skinny at 150.

Rolf also cross-country skiied across Greenland in record time for someone his age when he was 15-16 or so. A polar bear spent a few hours following him and eventually got too close, so he shot and killed it. And then knew which parts not to eat in order to avoid Vitamin A poisoning. I swear I'm not making this up. Norwegians have scared me ever since I met him.

In short, four days ain't [censored].