In 1987, I had this idea that a great way to teach wilderness survival would be to head out into the woods and do exactly that.

Survive.

Now I need the skills because I'd be filming myself alone.

And you, the viewer, would be made aware of that.

And I thought, what a great way to make these skills more relatable to you.

Problem was, the technology was not available for me to film myself beyond the old grainy camcorders as we used to call them.

Well, fast forward to the year 2000, 13 years and indeed the technology became available.

the take home information.

And the skills that you would learn from this series would make you more confident in nature.

You'd stay warm, dry and safe, and therefore you'd be able to reconnect to the natural world.

What you're about to watch is raw and real, and not to be confused with reality television.

These are my journeys into the world of survival and around the planet.

These are the skills that can keep you alive and open the doors to nature.

The only reality that matters.

(tribal music) As soon as I realized that, I was afforded the ability to pick where I wanted to go to carry out a survival ordeal.

I was going to pick my favorite places jungles, mountains, deserts, and sooner or later that would lead to going to the Canadian Arctic.

Now, if I just say the Canadian Arctic, that brings up a different picture in anyone's mind.

It is so vast and powerfully beautiful.

40% of Canada is the Arctic wolves, caribou, muskox, whales, polar bears, birds of all kinds.

It's the land, the time for God.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I got there, so I was given advice on what clothing to wear and what the temperatures might be, and the fact that I've got to deal with polar bears.

each location where I would go and film survival alone for 5 to 10 days had its own set of unique beauty and dangers, advantages and challenges.

And the Arctic was the extreme of all of those.

This time on "Survivorman", I'm headed to the top of the globe.

Baffin Island, high in the Canadian Arctic.

It's about an eight hour flight straight north into the ice and snow, and a small Inuit community at Pond Inlet.

A place where basic existence depends on your ability to survive the harsh environment.

I'm gonna have to find my way back to this community seven days from now.

For ten straight hours I'll push that snowmobile farther and farther into the barren arctic.

Where I'll be left alone to survive.

This is the Arctic at the top of our world.

It's a changing landscape of barren land, snow covered mountains and vast expanses of constantly shifting ocean ice.

In the wintertime, the Arctic is immersed in months of frigid darkness, but in the short, full of summer, it's daytime all the time.

Temperatures here, well it's the Arctic.

It's cold.

It's one of the lowest population densities in the world.

To go out on the land, you ride the knife edge of trouble.

You can get disoriented by whiteouts and get lost.

You can fall through the ice in the freezing water.

Traditionally, they use dog sleds to get around, but for the most part, this is the modern, slightly noisier way to get from one place to another.

Of course, dogs don't break down.

At any given time, there's about 10,000 of these icebergs floating around in the eastern Arctic waters.

Most of them come from Greenland or Ellesmere Island.

(chews) Mmm.

You know what they say?

It's just the tip of the iceberg.

It's just the tip of the iceberg.

Apparently there's another nine-tenths of this guy right underneath me.

(crunches ice) Mmm.

Not salty, nice and fresh.

Later on in the summer, this guy's gonna float right past Newfoundland.

Making my way up the iceberg.

This isn't just a a flight of fancy.

In fact, the Inuit In fact, the Inuit used icebergs to watch out for polar bears, to look for seals on the ice, to determine their route.

to determine their route.

They use them quite regularly to get a view on all of their surroundings.

And that's what I'm gonna do too.

This is actually pretty exciting.

There's a seagull and I'm level with him.

That's cool.

This is absolutely breathtaking.

I mean, there's not a soul around for miles.

This is about as alone as you can get.

Wow.

I can see polar bear tracks and a lot of icebergs.

And I can see my route out too.

And I can see why the Inuit climbed the glaciers to look around.

Even if it was just for the view.

All right, this is Les sleeping in the sun.

Even though there is good weather now, my stomach reminds me that I've had four long days with only a few bites of meat and very little sleep.

You know, the fascinating, beautiful, and actually quite dangerous aspect to this time of year is that it can go aspect to this time of year is that it can go from kind of a scorching hot sun to minus 30 from kind of a scorching hot sun to minus 30 from kind of a scorching hot sun to minus 30 in just a few hours.

I could even get a sunburn out here right now.

Anyway, this is a nice break from that freezing time in the ice cave.

Few days of nothing but cloud and snow.

Well, I'm not hanging around here.

This is thick polar bear territory.

I have three days left to survive.

My meat is almost gone and I still have a long way to travel over the ice to safety.

This is it.

My last bit of seal meat.

After this, all I have is scraping the blubber off the inside of the hide.

I gotta find something else.

You know these Muk Luks, they're frozen solid.

Because they're my own moose hide Muk Luks that I brought from Ontario and they're not supposed to get wet.

I should be wearing seal skin Muk Luks called Kamiks.

Then I'd be fine.

These ones got soaked when I had that day of of sunshine and now I'm walking around in big frozen blocks of ice.

But the hardest part of being out here, it's not the cold, it's not survival, it's not existing without food in my belly.

It's running the cameras.

They are a pain.

To put it lightly.

Oh well, that's what I'm here for.

Damn, I didn't press record.

Well, I'll tell you what, I'll call them sleeps instead of nights because there is no night.

So I've had short sleep in kind of like a snow grave beside the snow machine.

Very windy, very cold experience.

I had short sleep in an ice cave.

I had a little better sleep in the sun when it finally came out, beside the iceberg.

What I've been doing is I've been looking for some better snow, some deeper snow, where I can maybe make an igloo and I think I found it.

So that's where I'm headed.

If a big storm does come in, a big blow up, better that I have a good igloo to protect me and try handling it in the open again.

This might look like a beautiful shot, but I still have to go back and get the camera.

It's cold.

The windshield scavenged from the snowmobile will come in handy.

I've checked around and this snow does feel good.

If the snow is too soft, then it's just gonna crumble on you.

If it's too hard, then you gotta work too much.

And I hate to make this comparison, but it's gotta kind of feel like, like styrofoam.

Okay, this is gonna take me a while, as you can see.

And I've got time lapse camera running and I'm just gonna go to it.

The Inuit have been relying on igloos for thousands of years.

It's the perfect shelter.

Snow is an incredible insulator and the dome shape can withstand severe storms.

Built properly, an igloo is an amazing marriage of function and form.

Well folks, this is it.

I really thought that I'd put on the time lapse and give you a work of art igloo.

But being that this is the first time I ever tried to make one, and according to the local Inuit friend of mine actually, Sam Umiak, this snow is the worst type of snow to try and make an igloo with right now.

And then I just realized that I've been going all night.

I have no idea what time it is, although I'm sure it's close to morning already and I'm exhausted.

Put all those factors together and you got a, a crappy igloo.

So I'm gonna try and sleep.

I got my, my seat cushion from the snowmobile still, and at least I'm protected pretty well from the wind, actually.

Oh, this will have to do.

After almost a week of seeing nothing but rock and snow, I finally found a grassy area not too far from my igloo.

Just to walk up on and touch this grass feels so good after such a long, cold, miserable night working on that shelter.

Oh man.

Oh this is wonderful.

Look at this.

Scraps of wood, some of it not even that old.

I'm sure local Inuit come through and repair their qamutiiks here.

So I've got dried wood, dried grass, and little arctic flowers that have already gone to seed, so they're fluffy.

Sounds to me like the makings of a fire.

There are old whaling stations and Inuit hunt camps everywhere out here.

So it follows the scraps of wood and small metal objects appear as the snow slowly leaves the land.

I don't know if you remember this, stuck this into the gas tank.

Of course it's evaporated from being soaking wet with gas, but it still smells like gasoline.

I still have three matches, but I'll need them later for the qulliq.

And although they said I can't hunt with the rifle, they didn't say I couldn't start a fire with it.

(gun fires) Let's try that again.

(gun fires multiple times) Hang on, hang on, hang on.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Oh, sorry.

Oh man.

I got my kindling blowing all over kingdom come here.

I think I left a little too much powder in that time.

Well, soaking the sponge with gas seems like a great idea now.

And it gives me the chance to finally warm my feet and dry out my Muk Luks.

That little bit of wood didn't last very long, but I can still find ways to melt the snow for drinking water.

In these conditions, I need 6,000 calories per day to survive.

With only four bites of seal meat each day, I'm only taking in 200.

Right now there aren't a lot of animals out here except for seals.

So it's back down into the thick of polar bear territory and on to the sea ice.

The sun being out makes it a perfect day for hunting seal.

You want to keep the sun at your back cause the seals have such sensitive eyes when they come out, they keep their eyes turned away from the sun.

The object is to stand over this hole for a long time and wait for the seal to come.

Like this.

And when the seal comes, you lunge down and pull.

Inuit people could stand for hours and hours and hours perfectly still waiting for a seal to come.

You have to stand completely still and silent or the seal won't come to the breathing hole.

After what seems like hours, my arms and legs are aching.

I can't do this anymore.

When you burn more calories than you take in, your body will literally begin to consume itself.

At first, subcutaneous fat will be burned.

If things get bad enough, your body will start to burn what's left, your muscles.

Something else I can do to try and catch some bigger and more food is taking this bone from the seal left over and, and hopefully a seagull or raven or something might land and go for that.

And if they come for it, I got a chance of grabbing and maybe getting myself a much bigger dinner.

In fact, there's also lots of survival situations where people have eaten their raw hide gloves and Muk Luks and you know anything on them that is a natural, you know, animal part eventually can be eaten in a real dire situation.

I'm gonna hope for a bird.

It's the end of day five of my seven days to survive in the Arctic.

And I've spent all day looking for food without any luck.

Now it's back to the igloo for another night.

I think what I'm gonna do is make my qulliq, this is a soapstone dish and basically to give myself a little bit of a warmth during the night.

Let's see.

I found this little paper towel in with the bag of seal blubber.

So I'm assuming that it's to help with the, the, the qulliq.

The blubber, which I guess if I need to, I could also eat.

This is the part I hate.

Tape's running out.

So I gotta go climb down the hill to the lake, get another tape, come all the way back up and put it in so I can finish, finish this segment.

So what I want to do is scrape this blubber.

Basically you do that until you fill this thing up with the slimy oil.

And add this to the qulliq.

Like so.

Okay well I got three matches here.

Means three qulliq fires.

Ow.

That little flame, which is getting bigger, it's going all the way across, is really exciting.

(harmonica notes) Okay, I forgot to mention I never go anywhere without my harmonica.

You know, it just occurred to me that what I was told, that polar bears are attracted to curious sounds.

And this is where I can say goodnight.

This is where I decided to sleep last night.

Loaded gun by my side.

In the middle of the night with frozen feet, I climbed up to the top of this little mini mountain and decided to sleep up here.

And I think there was a little another layer of, of warmth up here.

Although I feel like a big slab of meat on top of a pedestal in the middle of polar bear country, which is why I kept that beside me.

I'm not really even sure what day I'm at.

With the sun spinning around, I can't figure out what the days are.

Okay.

I'm so hungry, I'm faint.

Now I'm starting to obsess on food.

It's really hard to get motivated with nothing in your system and no calories to burn.

But I only have another day left, and if I don't make it back over the last few miles, the crew will come looking for me.

It felt like I was getting closer and closer to my final destination in town, but around every corner, nothing but rock and ice.

If my travel looks easy, guess again.

I couldn't pull that heavy sled more than 20 minutes at a time without having to stop.

Dizzy from exhaustion and sick from my empty stomach, any food at all would be a relief.

I found some wild edibles in amongst the rocks, willow buds.

Mmm.

Two of them.

Ooh, three.

Wow.

I'm full.

This landscape is incredibly stark, just snow and ice.

This time of year there is very little to support life.

The Arctic has a tragic history of countless explorers and native peoples who have starved to death.

I hope this is my last night out here.

If I'm right, tomorrow I'll be able to make it into the town.

It occurred to me while sleeping here, even with a loaded rifle, if I wake up and a polar bear is breathing down on top of me, I don't stand a chance.

It's the morning of day seven and I'm due back in town today.

Or else the crew will have to find me.

But just as I'm packing up, I spot something out on the sea ice.

(man speaks in Inuit dialect) Sam Umiak, the Inuit hunter who picked me up, offered to take me home.

It turns out, I'm still another two days of travel by dog team back to town.

Along the way, he shot a seal, and offered to me what is considered to be an Inuit delicacy.

Prized by the children and as tasty as ice cream, the eyes of the seal.

I asked Sam when the toughest time was to survive out here.

He said now.

There aren't any eggs to eat because the birds haven't returned and it's become too warm to make a good igloo.

Stuck in between seasons, this goes down as one of my toughest survival odysseys.

Directly inspired by his own survival expeditions, journeys and challenges.

World renowned survival instructor Les Stroud brings you survive, essential skills and tactics to get you out of anywhere alive.

Available for 19.99.

In addition, the book will to live Dispatches from the Edge of Survival is available, featuring Les Stroud's own top ten survival stories of all time.

21.99.

To order, please go to lesstroud.ca, and click on shop