Randomly flipping through channels, I caught the end of this a few days ago and again tonight. Title is "Explorer: Mysteries of Survival" and goes over three survival stories. One man is in arctic conditions, with a broken leg, another is in the desert, and another is in the woods with a temperate climate.

Interesting results. The show concentrates a lot on the mental aspect; how all three had a will to survive which let them last days longer than most people would expect.

The one in the snow crawled his way for days (eating snow on something like day 8) trying to get to his car a few miles away. He eventually was able to signal SAR that happened by with his whistle (was in too poor a condition to yell for help).

The guy in the desert stripped off his clothes and it cooked him pretty well.... after days of walking, he laid down to die, not aware there were people just on the other side of the hill. He eventually got pissed and let out a scream as he stood up to keep walking, and that alerted the people who came and saved him.

The guy in the woods did the "stay where you are so the rescuers can find you" thing. I didn't catch the beginning, but I guess he was a hiker or something, the reenactor had a tent. He stayed put, got giardia from drinking untreated water, and when he finally decided to move on the 55th day he was too weak and sick from lack of food and giardia that he ended up dying trying to walk out.

Kind of unexpected results! They mentioned that sometimes doing what everyone tells you (staying put) isn't always the best option, and luck played a big part.

'Staying put' does not equal standing with a cigarette in your mouth like some Film Noir siren waiting for your rescuers to show up with Sparklites. That individual should have been proactive, making signals, boiling his water and a dozen other activities to survive.

Not to mention coming to the conclusion that an SAR team is only going to search for one person for just so long (an amount of time less than 55 days I'm guessing).

no offense to anyone, including ths adminstr...do we actually know that this 55 day survivor didnt do all that he could?
55 days would be an eternity in relative terms...post humous congrats to the the guy for living so long if he did all that he could!
luck? i dont know...question is always...what would i have done?

There are a lot of people who have not done the "stay where you are and await rescue" and as a result have self-rescued without any fuss, and so we never hear about them. In my view it is a hard judgement call. How to tell when you are so stuffed that you need external help. Which is partly what the STOP is about - sometimes the result of that assessment will be that you find things aren't so bad and you can self-rescue. But you do need to stop and think it through and form a credible plan, and not just continue blindly or stop blindly.