survivin' celebs

i just finished working a private custom course for a woman who is a professional hunter and host of a tv adventure show. she wanted to test herself backpacking and also learn survival and primitive skills. she was impressed that some of our instructors (not myself) have been consultants to les stroud of "survivorman" and bear grylls of "man vs. wild". it was fun but also a very different dynamic having only one student.

we kept her impact phase short as she was only with us for a week. but that first night of no food and no blanket was pretty rough. even though i slept curled up to the other instructor, i got very little sleep--too cold. it was so cold that we stopped trying to sleep and just started hiking again before the sun was even up. by the time it was light enough for me to check the temp, it was still only 34F.

teaching the thermo regulation lesson was a bit different than usual. normally after discussing heat loss, we tell the students we slept a bit warmer than they did the previous night because the instructors "spoon" to conserve radiant body heat. we then encourage the students to do the same with each other. it felt really awkward to suggest that the sole student sleep with us. so we didn't. we gave her a blanket for the second night.

we taught her friction fire, cordage from natural plant fibers, bunch of local edible and otherwise useful plants, water procurement, navigation with a topo map, knife use (though she pretty much knew that), making stone blades, catching fish with her bare hands which got her very excited and she caught a trout. also taught traps and snares, though we didn't try to catch any critters because we had enough food by then. did a sheep kill--no big deal for her, but she wasn't used to skinning and butchering so showed her that stuff. i even did the silly but kinda cool trick after we gutted the animal of blowing through the trachea to inflate the lungs. kinda interesting to see.

this woman is a big game hunter and big fish fisher. she has great stories about being stalked by hyenas, charged by hippo, attacked by elephant and mauled by a grizzly bear. she sounds like a bad-ass, but we kicked her butt hiking. enough that she called me the bad-ass. nice.