OK, lets get this straight. TV4 says they had an agreement with the lodge to check on Ed in an emergency. But the lodge says they had zero contact with the producers etc. So someone is lying.
TV4 says the lodge was "...10 miles within range..." of Ed's location. Nice bit of wording there -- the whole lake is only 8 miles long. The multiple buildings of the "luxury fishing lodge" are right on the shore (see lodge site) midway down the lake (lodge site).
Daily, the lodge puts boats on the water (fishing lodge, right?) and they wander about.
So Ed could SEE the lodge and boats and people -- less than 4 miles away, no matter what -- and at night can see the lights, hear the music, whatever.
At Dogpack lake the lodge has an encampment to tents on the shore too -- it's a smaller lake so Ed could see them all day too.
Of course he could see the people and the lodge, unless he's blind too.
Ed's real triumph was just resisting the urge to walk into the lodge and instead happily starve for the camera. He could have done this in a city park.
Or you could do exactly the same thing in your backyard....
We've just been fed another lie by television and I, for one, object to it.
On the issue of the armchair critics, that seems like an easy way of way of waving off reasonable criticisms.
For the record, I lived in Alaska. After a year of learning the demands of the place in smaller trips, I did a 3.5 week solo trip where I was dropped in by aircraft.
I lost one of my food caches to an eroded bank and had to struggle mightily against the calorie deficit this caused. (Three week+ trips are no joke up there...)
I have an intimate knowledge of what it means to be in that environment in trouble and alone and I assure you, being within eyesight and earshot of a lodge ain't the same thing. That said, the battle to get to the next cache was one of the best experiences of my life.
I was, for the vast majority of the time more than 200 miles away from the nearest human and without a beacon if I got in trouble. They didn't have beacons at that time.
In other words, my "armchair" was Denali and environs.
(I concede this background might be one of the reasons I find the producers behavior here so insulting... Some people really do this, I guess for Channel4 it's enough to just get some guy to starve on cue and wave some boughs around and call it adventure.)
And for what it's worth I was preparing a calorie/activity chart to post here to acquaint people not used to the arctic with the issues at hand and show how (under the original *fake* terms of the show) the producers had knowingly put Wardle in harms way. You've got to have more than one person to really do this without supplies.
(My other issue with the show is the way it perpetuates bear panic, which is a bad thing all around, but I'll spare everyone those observations on that point other than to say, folks, bears are not your enemy.)
I feel honesty matters a lot and I don't like being lied to as these producers have done.
With that, I don't see that I've got anything else to offer on this topic other than arguing and that's plain bad manners, so I'll bow out beyond this point and spare you all my long posts on the topic.
