Third season of Survivorman
Friday Nov 7th 9pm ET/PT Discovery Channel in the US.

In the third season of SURVIVORMAN Stroud travels the world and sets up real-world scenarios in which he must survive. This year Stroud finds himself in: the frigid Arctic tundra where he finds a resourceful way to start a fire; Temagami in Canada where SAR (Search and Rescue) is deployed to find Stroud; the unforgiving Australian Outback where temperatures can fluctuate drastically and water is sparse; Papua New Guinea, one of the world’s least explored countries, where undiscovered plant and animal species are thought to exist; rugged Sierra Nevada as a lost hiker; and Colorado where he has to find food and water for himself and his horses.

The Sock

I wonder if he will have the brains to carry "a few basic tools" this time?

Thanks for pointing this out! I've had my Dish DVR setup with a "Dish Pass" to find all new episodes of this show. I checked the guide, and sure enough, there it was on Nov 7th, but NOT SET TO RECORD!

I reset my timers and it is now scheduled to record.

Thanks for telling us about this. I would have missed it due to whatever bug there is in Dish Network's software that didn't find it in the guide to automatically record.

I'm really looking forward to the Colorado episode. Since that's where I live. It will give the show a "local flavor" for me!

As opposed to England's favorite, poo water drinking son?

Yes. I have got a bet on as to how long it is before El Survivorman gets himself Darwined.


Oh and re Bear. I am given to understand that it tasted better than the local beer.

While I admit to watching both, I really don't like the "SET UP" feel of the brit's show.

You mean other than the sat phone he normally carries?

What makes the show interesting is the senerios he sets up where someone mind find themselves without a lot of survival tools and has to use whatever's at hand. If he went into it with a full survival pack then it'd be kind of boring just watching him go out camping for the week.

Maybe ETS could send him a PSP.

*laughs* For some reason, I think Les is aware of that option.

For people who want him to always have X, Y or Z, remember that stupidity, carelessness or bad luck can take them all away from you.

I'm excited for the new season of Survivorman, and was glad to hear that it is starting soon.

I like how he handles it when things don't work (like when his igloo fell in one season). Comforting to realize not everything is going to work just so, and survival involves making do. My first flight on Southwest Airlines for instance--during the preflight instructions they were telling how to use the oxygen masks, and they said, "When everyone stops screaming, you take the mask. . . ." and I found that really comforting. I figured the first thing I would do is start screaming.

It would be fascinating to hear Les' evaluation.

What an awesome episode! This had to be by far his best work. Lots of good referential info. This is precisely the sort of thing folks need to see. It's amazing how effective SAR can be. I would've prefered that he not destroy his headlight to start a fire, but it is a good example of thinking out of the box.

This should be a good season.

That really was a good episode...that guitar trap was pretty weird.

Hear, hear. Just watched it myself. One of the things that makes the show work (but always gives me a headache) is that someone who is ill-prepared (as built-in by his scenarios) can improvise so much of what they need. I think in many ways this show is spiritual kin to MacGuyver.

Concur. Killing your headlamp for a fire is a rough call, not sure I agreed with it. But other than that, I was really glad to see someone using a mirror for once. The aerial view of a signal mirror was something I'd only seen in stills before.

I do think he missed a golden opportunity to give good advice on being prepared (slip a mini bic in your pocket) and how to react when things go wrong (backtrack to last known position). Also, a simple itinerary could have started a search much earlier.

But then the show would have only been 5 minutes long. I think he's trying to teach things to do in a bad situation. Avoiding the situation in the first place or carrying the gear to be prepared for it is the best idea, but that makes for a very short and boring TV show.

I suspect that there will be an abundance of more good information like this given out through the rest of the season.

Kudos to Les. I was a bit shaken that he destroyed his guitar, but he made a good point. Now if he ever destroys his harmonica again, I am gonna cry.

I know why he killed his light as a demonstration- but he was shorting two wires until they got hot enough to ignite cotton. He could have angled them away from the case, and saved his light. Or used the guitar strings, if metal, to extend them just enough.

I'm just saying, there could have been more optimal solutions.

One thing about shorting out batteries is the risk of the battery gassing out and possibly exploding. It is rare, but it can happen, and the last thing you want is a spray of alkaline solution on your hands or maybe even your face out in a remote location. I've popped a couple of portable radio battery packs by inadvertently shorting the contacts for an extended period. Not fun.

Yeah, the show is crap, but I don't think that's Bear's fault, he has a contract and has to do as told, I'm sure. He could refuse to do the show and be out a couple million bucks, but how many people would take that kind of a moral stand?

Okay, I'm going to say something that might make me a pariah on this site but then hopefully, I'll explain my way out of it...

I like Bear's show. I like Les' show. I do know that both of these are TV shows that must entertain to stay on the air. That makes TV a less than ideal place learn survival but I still enjoy watching them.

I'm fairly certain that if most people, even very fit folks, tried to do anything that Bear recommended they would die a quick violent death. Climb down a tree to avoid a cliff? Scale a cliff to get a better view? Shoot rapids to rapidly move downstream? All these are just plain silly activities to undertake in a survival situation. But it's vastly entertaining to watch him do it.

Okay, maybe schmuck is a bit strong, it just seems that early on Bear's show was touted as another survival demo, and that seems quite misleading given the type of activities he undertakes. Maybe his is a delineator of just how far you can go to survive, assuming you have the constitution and elite training to do the things he does. That's what seems to me to set Les apart. He gets in more realistic scenarios and his examples are much more mundane, focusing more on reasoning your way through and tolerating discomfort rather than extreme risk activities and consuming things that would make the average person seriously ill. Is Bear's show entertaining? Obviously it has a following, and I even prefer to watch him over the usual pablum selection of primetime junk. When I watch him, my mind is usually trying to come up with less risky alternatives to his efforts, or to try and identify all the things wrong with his approach that could spell disaster for the average adventurer.

With this last season of Survivorman shaping up as it is, the contrast between the two grows even more. If Bear's objective is to entertain and amaze, then Les' seems to be more to give people more practical knowledge and demonstrate the difference between what can and can't be tolerated in a survival situation.

Well hopefully this isn't too far off the track, if it is just jump back into the flow of the thread, but comparing Les and Bears shows, of which I watch both, made me think of Josh Bernstein.

If Les is the true outdoorsman and Bear the happy extremist, then Josh is certainly the bonafide adventurer, running a Outdoor living School, (BOSS) and being a member of the Explorers club.

While his shows are not in the same vein as Les and Bear, I want to compare his two shows like I think is being done in this thread. His first series on The History Channel, "Digging for the Truth", I thought was brilliant. His current show on Discovery "Into the Unknown with Josh Bernstein", not so much. Same guy. Almost the same shows with the current series having less archaeological bend to it. However I think the current show is not as good. Its missing something.

My point is that Les and Bear have different shows. I like them both. But it appeals to different extremes in the outdoor world and what we all enjoy is the overlap stuff in the middle.

That sounds like a scene from the original Rambo movie. Except Johnny didn't exactly "climb down" in the typical manner. But Rambo was a fun popcorn movie. Maybe Bear's show is the same. I've never seen it, but it now sounds fun, in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 sort of way.

I know I'd rather be with Les than with Bear in a real wilderness survival situation. Or maybe Jessica Alba ...

Jeff

I'd rather take one of my best friends- short fiesty redhead, who knows her way around most weapons, hunts, fishes, camps, knows survival and bushcraft pretty well, and is a very good mechanic (cars, motorcycles and light aircraft) along with being a paramedic.

*laughs*