Hmm, just re-read my post. Hope I didn't come off saucy. Certainly not my intent.
No offense taken. Sorry for not responding sooner, my son told me to check the site since he noticed this over the weekend. For my part, I was out hunting blacktail deer this weekend. More about that (it's relevant to the discussion) later.
I just basically mean that sometimes the sum of the parts isn't the same as the whole, cuz on paper, many would have died out in the woods here by starvation if they read this, yet they didn't..
FWIW, this is
not a paper exercise in the slightest. In fact, the source of the kind of analysis I presented originally were inspired by real life (and real death). Analyzing calorie needs and calorie expenditure is something historians do to analyze things like the deaths of the Donner party, of the needs of Indian cultures and how anthropologists analyze ancient people.
In other words, the study of this is based on the real world. It's not abstract at all. Plus, this kind of analysis is exactly what people do when planning expeditions -- particularly difficult ones.
However, I think we're kind of talking about different things, but first a couple of notes on your comments...
Calories for hiking - 1500 for a 4 hour hike. This would be close if you were speed hiking or out for a jog, but if I burned 1500 calories hiking for that long, I would be much thinner.
Bear in mind I wasn't talking about an unloaded hike, I was talking about carrying a 30 pound load. And the numbers are the numbers are pretty much dead on. People study this stuff closely and measure it -- and it's averaged out for different terrains.
The range for backpacking goes from 400kcal per hour for very light loads to close to 700 for very heavy loads. I chose a nice middle ground.
You can search on the net and find plenty of support for my numbers. Here's one handy site that has collected lots of numbers:
http://www.nutribase.com/exercala.htm (the numbers there are for 30 minutes)
With respect to your personal experience, if you were to backpack with a 30lb pack for 4 hours a day and
eat no more than you do now, you would lose a little less than half a pound a day and if you did this for a full week you would lose about 3.5 pounds. Doesn't sound so surprising when you put it that way, does it?
...There are lots of edibles, especially berries....
That's good for a portion of the year, and even when I lived in Alaska (berry rich) the fact of the matter is that you couldn't count on them for continued sustenance -- plus they're mostly sugar, which is not what you need out there.
There's a good chance a bear will come right to you if you are drying fish. You may even get more meat than you want or need. One moose will last the winter, plus the hide can be used for clothing, footwear, etc., and other projects through the cold snaps to keep you busy.
OK, remember we're talking about someone alone in the wild here. There are a lot of mistaken assumptions in the quote above. Some people made similar statements in the thread about "Alone in the Wild.." -- "if Ed could have shot that moose he would have been OK the whole time..."
It's not true. In fact it's a happy hallucination. Take it from someone who has hunted moose.
Here's why: An adult bull moose weighs anywhere from 900 to 1500 pounds. Unless you've field dressed a moose in the wild, you have no idea how much work it is. Imagine working a 1200 pound carcass
alone for a minute...
And typical hunters concern themselves only with field dressing and quartering the moose, letting the meat cool and packing it out (usually with help) to get to a processing plant or freezer as fast as possible.
Remember, we're talking hundreds and hundreds of pounds of meat. It's
hard to handle it alone.
Alone you've got deal with dressing it, skinning the moose, quartering, cooling the meat and then preserving it before it goes bad.
Before you can preserve it, you've got to do the butchering too. This is non-trivial on an animal as big as a moose.
You're not going to make 900 pounds of jerky -- not enough racks. So you've going to have to build a smokehouse -- more work! OK, so now you've going to build a smokehouse (an enclosed shelter big enough for all the meat and a fire) and then you're going to collect wood and make the fire and hang the meat... and you're going to do it all before the meat goes bad.
Not a chance. The native peoples work in
teams -- there's that word again! -- when processing big game (moose, bison, very large elk) is because there's too much to do in too short a time. Alone in the wild, you're looking at 90% or more of the meat spoiling.
Shooting a moose isn't a solution unless you've got a group.
As someone who has killed plenty of moose, the idea of actually processing, butchering and preserving a whole moose alone in the wild makes me shudder. It's a fantasy -- you'll just watch the meat go to waste...
Much of what Proenneke did was ideal. He did have some resupplies, but with a few small changes, they were not necessary, but did help with the emotional and psychological components.
Not true. Proenneke's own diaries demonstrate that he got more than 50% of his core food from outside supplies.
And he wasn't foraging for the rest -- he had full and productive gardens (particularly in the later years). Anyone who has grown a garden in Alaska knows they can be incredibly productive in a short season. In the circumstances we're talking about, you don't live long enough to grow a garden and harvest the results...
And of course. Proenneke hunted -- but remember, his hunting situation was different. He had built a cold storage locker (in permafrost) and a smoke house and an elevated meat storage locker
even before he moved in
In other words, he was fully set up to avoid just the scenario above of having to process everything in too short a time.
Plus there's this: Proenneke selected his site specifically after scouting for a good game area, good water, good fishing and he spent more than a year building his cabin (and not living there all year round) before he moved in.
So by the time Proenneke actually took up residence, he had a massive amount of the calorie burn already done -- and done under safe and well supplied circumstances. He spent a full two years preparing for residence.
And even then, more than half of Proenneke's food came from supplies. In other words, he actually proves the case -- under the absolutely best of circumstances with an established cabin and food storage capacity in a well studied area with plenty of game and lots of personal experience in the area -- Pronneke still would have starved without supplies.
Lastly there's this -- hunting is hard and unpredictable. I've been hunting since I was 10 or so and I've hunted all over the most game plentiful areas of Alaska when I lived there and guess what -- you can still come up empty handed.
This weekend, I went out to an area I know well to hunt blacktailed deer (I didn't get the draw on for mule deer this year). I know the game trails, I've scouted the area well and I've taken plenty of deer there. And I came up empty handed. The weather's too warm and the situation is odd, several other guys I saw were scratching their heads too..
See, that's not surprising to a hunter. You come home empty handed lots of times.
And that's the point -- if you are alone in the wild you minimize your chances and over time, you'll die up there.
ust my opinion, but I have many friends here who have gone out and done this in their lifetimes, with nary a glitch.
This is why I think we're talking about different things. I'm talking about someone alone exposed completely to the wild in the subarctic for many months -- they die over time, simple as that.
When you're talking about your friends, I think you must be talking about people who are living in cabins off the land. Homesteading, whatever. Different circumstances entirely.
In Alaska, there are tons of top notch outdoorsmen and I don't know anyone who just picks up a little gear and wanders out in the bush and lives off of what they find for six months on their own.
I don't know any serious hunter with subarctic experience who would parachute into an area without resupplies and expect to walk back home in six months.
And no native peoples in the North American arctic or Nordic arctic do this alone either -- alone in the subarctic wilds you die over time. It's unavoidable.
