>Question - "Besides, how many people - including Olsen himself - would be capable of surviving in the Great Basin desert, or the Northern Boreal Forest, for a full 12-month stint?"

>Answer - I believe thousands have done exactly this as this was home to many primitive Native Americans for many generations.

This is the obvious answer, and the one I was expecting, but is it really true?

I just finished a 7-day wilderness survival course with my fellow Canadian Mors Kochanski. He said and demonstrated many things - far too many for me to recount in a single post, in fact far too many for me to even remember them all. But he talked about how the USAF, in an attempt to help downed airmen survive in the desert, sent researchers to North Africa to study how the Bedouin survived in the desert.

Their conclusion was that the Bedouin didn't know squat about surviving in the desert - they just lived there <img src="/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

there are two ways to look at this:

1. As Kochanski explained it, most "survival" courses will teach you how to keep yourself alive for 3 or 4 days - maybe a week or two, maybe more, but this probably depends on the benignity of the climate. More advanced survival training will expand your range of knowledge, to the extent that you can be quite comfortable for several months. However, to make it to the next level, you go beyond the concept of "survival" to that of being at home in the environment. To people who've spent all their lives in the desert, the concept of "survival" is foreign - just as the concept of "surviving" in a shopping mall (absent terrorist attacks or other disasters) would be nonsensical to most of us.

2. A movie that Kochanski and several of the other students recommended very highly was "Atanarjuat" (English title - "The Fast Runner"), filmed in the Canadian arctic in Inuktitut (the native Inuit/Eskimo tongue) with native actors. I bought the DVD and watched it (with English subtitles). It is generally regarded, I understand, as a very realistic portrayal of life in the arctic before the arrival of the white man. I may have misinterpreted it (I've only had a chance to watch it once) but it seemed to indicate that even the Inuit/Eskimo regarded the thought of being alone on the land, cut off from family or tribe to support them, as the ultimate horror, and I wonder how long many of them could have survived without that support? They were certainly capable of surviving for days, weeks, and months by themselves, and almost certainly did. But eventually, their luck would run out. A hunter who was a member of the village who had a run of bad luck could count on the other villagers helping him out, knowing that he in his turn would share his good fortune when his luck turned. But a hunter alone on the land had no-one to back him up when things went sour.

Two hunters could split up and double their chances of finding game. Or they could work together to bring down a large animal such as a caribou that would outmatch a single hunter. And if they had wives who could skin and cook the catch they brought back, and children who could gather birds eggs or seaweed, they could have a very comfortable time of it. But I think if one hunter were lost in the wilderness, even one that he felt comfortable in, getting unlost would still have been one of his main priorities.

In any event, though, I wasn't questioning whether it was POSSIBLE to survive for extended periods - just how many modern men/women are capable of it. The answer, I suspect, is very few. That being the case, I want my survival manual to have a chapter on getting back to the tribe before my luck runs out for good. That's all.

It's a very good book - I admitted that - but because it contains no information on getting rescued, it's not one I'd recommend for a backpack.