I’ve skied for over six decades. I’ve skied dozens of makes and models. I’ve watched ski manufacturers come and go. I’ve witnessed multiple generations of ski technology develop. And I still haven’t found exactly what I want in a ski.

My first pair looked like they’d been excavated from a Scandinavian peat bog—solid wood and nothing close to whatĚýwe now call shape.ĚýIn 1958, when I was four, my parents jammed my little leather boots into immobile metal brackets called “bear trap” bindingsĚýand launched me down the icy Wisconsin cow pasture that served as our local hill. Lacking basic features such as metal edges, these skis were mainly designed to go straight. Back thenĚýthe carved turn was in the experimental phase.

As I sprouted into a proficient skier and then a committed racer, ski design and technique leapt forward at the same time. First came lightweight metals like Howard Head’s revolutionary aluminum and neoprene sandwich, release bindings, and the perfection of the carved turn. As the 21stĚýcentury drew closer, the industry exploded with composites, carbon fiber, computer engineering, and shapedĚýskis. Then came twin tips, fat boys, reverse camber, and many other innovations that allowed the skier to float, spin, fly, and carveĚýin conditions ranging from deep powder to black ice to artificial grass.

Today’s well-armed (and by necessity, well-heeled) skier boasts a quiverĚýof skis—pairs to match every snow condition and type of turn, as if coordinating a hand purse to heels before an evening ball. While comparing my first antediluvian set of boards to modern high-performance versions is like comparing a donkey to a fighter jet, the fundamental problem still remains:ĚýI don’t want to mess with a quiver. I want a single pair of planks that do it all.Ěý

This can be a very tall order nowadays. Our standards and expectations have changed so dramatically in the past 60 years. We want everything more perfect, more ordered, and more controlled, forsaking theĚýpioneering mindset, those days when skiers rigged rope tows powered by old tractors and braved third-degree frostbite to get in a few runs on the local hill. Back then, every ski could do it all—insofar as it could do anything—because only one type of alpine ski existed, and it was long, stiff, and hard to turn. With the myriad refinements since those days, we have myriad expectations of what they can, or should, do for us.

After decades of skiing on hard-carving, hard-snow-only models similar to racing skis—most recently the beefy Nordica Firearrow, with a narrow 84-millimeter waist—I was essentially clueless about today’s all-mountain skis. My first taste of a modernĚýall-mountain ski convinced me that the perfect pair might actually exist.Ěý

It happened serendipitously. While driving to the West Coast for Thanksgiving in 2018 with my 21-year-old son,ĚýSkyler, and my wife, Amy,Ěýwe passed through Idaho and heard thatĚýGrand Targhee had just opened for the season. WeĚýdecided to detour for a quick dive into light snow in the Tetons.Ěý

When I asked the veteran ski tech at the local shop for the highest-performance modelĚýitĚýrented, he set me up on what he calledĚý“a good western all-mountain ski,” the . My pair wasĚý177 centimeters long and had a 96-millimeter waist.

I was skeptical. I’ve long associated all-mountain skis with soft snow. I doubted these could make tight arcs on the hard stuff. From the first turns off the lift, however, I knew I was on something different from anything I’d ever tried. These skis wereĚýfar more versatile, so much so that it puzzled me. I thought theyĚýwere simply responding to the easy-turning snow. But the harder I cranked them, the better they held the turns on both firm and soft surfaces, as well as big groomers. They even kept me alive and turning when I dropped in behind Skyler in an ungroomed gulley with a few inches of new snow atop a tricky breakable crust.

What’s going on?ĚýI wondered. I’d never been on a pair of skis that did all of these things well.

It was this random experience that launched my season-long search to find the perfect ski—an odyssey that took me from the muscular TetonsĚýto the chutes of Telluride, Colorado, to the volcanic cone of Oregon’s Mount Bachelor.

But the bulk of the hunt took place at the spire-like Lone Peak thrusting above Big Sky, Montana. HereĚýmy quest took me to one of the annual ski tests hosted by industry manufacturers for shop buyers, where I was guaranteed to find hundreds of pairs to try.

At a reception on the opening evening of the ski test, I bumped into two of my old Montana racing buddies, Bob Anderson and Glenn Gaertner of in Missoula, where I live. When I told them about my mission, they gave me a list that might represent my holy grail—the Experience 94, the Black Ops 98, the Vantage 97, the Enforcer 100, the Bonified 98.

Significantly, each model name was followed by a number that ranged from the mid-nineties to 100. Unlike the one-size-fits-all era of my youth, skis now come in countless width combinations. The width underfoot—the waist—factors crucially in how it performs in different conditions and turns. Many models of skis now use their waist width as an identifier. All-mountain versions tend to range in waist width from roughly 90 to 100 millimeters, with the lower range more effective in firmer snow and often preferred by East Coast skiers, and the higher range often used by those in the Mountain West.Ěý

I also had to overcome a certain prejudice that, as a former racer, I’ve held against skis made for some other purpose than pure,Ěýhard carving. I’m not alone in this. “I know diehards who won’t ski anything over ninety [millimeters]” said Kurt Sundeen, an instructor at Big Sky and a Blizzard rep. “I used to only ski 88’s, and then I smartened up.”

It felt like I had walked into a medieval fair the next morning, as I tromped in my boots through the rainbow mini village of awnings staked in the snow beside the base lodge. I marched up to the Rossignol tent, handed the manufacturer’s rep my official card, whichĚýrecorded my binding settings and boot size, and asked to take a run on the .

Snow was falling lightly when I got off the lift, and a soft layer of packed powder and light chop blanketed the runs. I’d chosen the Black Ops to start because Skyler had covetously eyed a pair a few weeks earlier on the rack at Gull Ski and thought they might suit his style: high-speed carvingĚýon hardpack, slamming through moguls, seeking powder and crud in the woods,Ěýall punctuated by the occasional flip.

Although I was skiing on a longer-than-usual (for me) 182-centimeter length, they turned easily, held an edge on a tight giant-slalom carve, and felt cushy and maneuverable in the bumps. Yet they had the rockered tips and tailsĚýfor the freeride maneuvers practiced by a younger generation. That may serve Skyler well, it but wasn’t for an old dog like me who wasn’t planning on learning new tricks.Ěý

The former racer in me wanted a pair with an elusive quality I call snap.ĚýBy pressuring and arcing the ski through a hard carve, you “load it up with energy,” as they say in the industry, and it launches you out of the turn.

I returned the Black Ops and stomped over to the Elan tent. The reps fitted me out with the . Like shoes, the Ripstick comes withĚýa right and a left ski, because the inside edge has traditional camber (a ski’s bowed shape, helping it track and hold) and the outside edge features rocker (a more pronounced upturn at the tip and tails, good for maneuverability and playfulness). This asymmetrical configuration lets the Ripstick, as the Elan rep put it, “tip in and out of turns a little easier.”

And these did indeed want to rip. Aiming at a trail’s-edge skirt of light powder, I almost had to rein them in like a young horse eager to run. They traced smooth arcs through swirls of fresh snow and nicely held those long arcs on hardpack, but when I tightened my turning radius, they slightly resisted my efforts to make them carve. The verdict: similar to the Black Ops, certain skiers—especially of a young generation—would love the Ripstick. But for me, the holy grail still lay beyond.

I moved on to Atomic. I’ve been a fan for years and in the early 2000s skied the brand’s Metron, at the time a cutting-edge performance ski. A maker in a country that passionately follows its alpine racers the way Americans follow pro football teams, Austria-based Atomic has serious racing heritage. I clicked into a pair of Vantage Ti 97’s and took a spin. Even skiing them a bit long, they felt both playful and solid, handled the soft snow, and zipped quickly into turns when given tip pressure on hardpack—a classic characteristic of race skis. They could do everything wellĚýbut not in a flashy way. As the no-nonsense Austrians might put it, the Atomic Vantage 97 is an extremely competent ski. I put a check mark beside this one.Ěý

At the Nordica tent, the reps convinced me to bypass the bestselling Enforcer 100 and try something “even better”—theĚýnew Enforcer 104, with rocker added to the tail for easier turning. I put these inĚýleague with the Atomic Vantage: both were playful and steadyĚýand felt at home, even graceful, in mixed conditions and chopped-up powder. Likewise, Völkl’s new model of the Mantra (the ski that caught my attention at Targhee), the Mantra 102 felt capable of doing whatever I asked of it quietly, smoothly, and with agility.

As one retailer, Dave Schmidt of the in Kalispell, Montana, had told me at the reception, “Each brand is going to have something that’s hot and not so hot, but overall, everybody is making such good stuff—you’re not going to buy bad quality anymore.”

The next morning, I again made my wayĚýthrough the village of rainbow awnings. I had a listĚýand checked my way through it: the , the , the , and the .

I’d tried a pair of last year’s Ěýand Ěýearlier in the winter, and they had blown me away with their energy. There was a snap, snap, snapĚýthrough the tight turns on hardpack, a longer snaaapp through the GS turns, then aĚýflickĚýflick through the moguls. These reacted with a liveliness that I immediately loved, seemed to weigh nothing on my feet, and were up for anything. So I got ahold of this year’s model, the Fischer Ranger 99 Ti. On every turn, they rewarded me. I could make them do whatever I wanted on moguls, they floated on powder with the 99-millimeter waist, and on a hard carve in firm snow, they held an edge like an ice skate, launching me out of one turn into the next. I savor that kind of energy.

The Fischer Ranger 99 Ti has a titanium-alloy layer mid-ski, which yields to carbon fiber at the shovel and tip. The lightweight carbon lowers the swing weight, Fischer’s Mike Hattrup told me, which gives it a light feeling on yourĚýfeet. Yet the Ranger 99 also has a classic laminate construction of wood core, fiberglass, and metal-sheet top and bottom, like a “big, fat GS ski,” he said. “That’s probably one of the reasons you like it—it’s supple and damp, with good edge hold.”

Likewise with the Head Kore, which also has a 99-millimeter waist. Deano Uren, a Head rep of 24 years, explained that the Kore has a bit of rocker on the tip and tailĚýand skied as if it had metal in it,Ěýbut that stiffness was due to woven carbon fiber in the layup.Ěý

“You must like Austrian skis,” said Gull’s Bob Anderson when I told him which models had particularly appealed to me. The Fischers and Heads are both made at Austrian factories not far from each other.

My quest could have ended right there, but it didn’t. A few weeks later, while demoing skis on the sprawling sunlit slopes of Mount Bachelor, I also fell in love with theĚýKästle FX95 HPĚýfor all the sameĚýhead-spinning reasons: carving melded with maneuverability and float. On these skis, I could actually keep up with my 25-year-old daughter, Molly, and her boyfriend, Cody, as they swooped between tight trees. If treed out, I could throw them around in an instant to alter course. A tech in the Mount Bachelor shop said it well: “I call it a freeride carving ski because of the rocker tip.”Ěý

Ultimately, my winterlong quest for the perfect pair landed on that triad: theĚýFischer Ranger 99 Ti, theĚýHead Kore 99, and the Kästle FX95 FP.ĚýAll of them have some rocker and special lightweight materials in the tips, camber underfoot, and widths in the mid-to-high nineties. This makes them easy to turn in bumps andĚýable to hold a hard carve on firm snow, and it gives them float in the powder. What more can youĚýask?Ěý

But I had to choose one ski that could do it all. I went with the Fischer Ranger 99, which isĚýbest suited for my style of skiing, my background, and the places and conditions I prefer.Ěý

It’s a great time to be a skier. The technology in the industry has attained a level of sophistication utterly unimaginable when I was growing up. If there’s a perfect ski out there for me, somewhere out there isĚýa perfect ski for you.Ěý

The post To All the Skis I’ve Loved Before appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

End of the dirt road. You brake to a stop, swing your leg over the scooter, and kick the stand into place.

The effort makes your head throb. The scooter wobbles. Your sunglasses slide down the mixture of sweat and sunscreen on your nose. You adjust them, look up tentatively at the fiery orb in the deep blue sky, and flinch. You chide yourself for staying out so late the night before, for not getting an earlier start this morning. The sun already feels too hot. But this is your only chance to surf Emerald Cove. It’s gonna be OK, you tell yourself. You’re in good shape. You’ve got the stamina to hike the five miles over the ridge and down to the beach before the tide comes in.

That glaring sun, of course, is essential for life on this planet. But its thermal energy, which we feel as heat, is a force both benevolent and cruel. The human body employs a spectrum of physiological tricks to maintain the steady internal temperature—98.6 Fahrenheit—at which it thrives. There is about eight degrees of difference between an optimal level of internal heat and the limit the body can endure. This threshold is referred to as the . Exactly when one reaches it depends on individual physiology, exertion, hydration, acclimation, and other factors. Estimates place it at an internal temperature between 105 and 107 degrees. Heat is a giver of life, but when the human body gets this hot—or hotter—­terrible things occur.

How to Prevent and Treat Heat Stroke

Exertional heatstroke can cause devastating damage, but it can also be treated quickly

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Emerald Cove is on an island off the coast of South America. You’d flown over a couple of days ago, after a trek in the mainland’s cool interior highlands. You wanted to take in those thousand-year-old stone statues you’d heard so much about, plus you figured you could cap off your vacation with a couple days of surfing. You’re just a beginner, and already you’re hooked, but it’s hard being a newbie. The locals are reluctant to let you into the lineup. What you need is that perfect undiscovered break, no people, no pressure.

Last night you walked into a popular surf bar and pulled up a stool next to two guys you’d seen in the water that day. If you wanted to find a secret spot along this spectacular wave-battered coast, you figured these guys would be the ones to know. They gave you a cursory nod and continued their conversation.

“HłÜ±đ±ąĂł˛Ô,” one was saying to his pal (or at least that’s what you think he said). Your Spanish is OK, but you’re not catching all the slang. He was talking about a point break.

“Qué bacán!” Rad! “And there’s nobody there. Nobody. You have to try it.”

“Nobody where?” you asked quietly, leaning in.

“La Cala Esmeralda.” He barely turned his head to look at you.

“Emerald Cove?” you repeated.

It had taken a long time, a lot of patience, and too many piscolas—pisco and Cokes—to pry out where it was, but the effort was worth it. It’d be the perfect end to a perfect trip, something to talk about to your well-traveled friends back home. “Seriously, you’ve never been there?” you’ll say to them, acting surprised. “You should definitely check it out. But it’s kinda hard to get to, and the trail’s a secret.”

You had to ask the surfers to repeat themselves, just to be sure you understood. They’d finally turned and looked at you full on.

“Dude,” one said, “I’m not sure I’d try it if I were you.”

Heat-related illnesses in the U.S. annually than hurricanes, lightning, earthquakes, tornadoes, and floods; there were heat-related deaths between 1979 and 2014. The fatalities tend to peak during heat waves and hotter-than-average years, and they’re expected to rise as climate change affects global temperatures. One of the deadliest heat waves in modern times swept Europe in 2003, killing over 30,000 people as temperatures soared to 100 degrees for days on end.

The human body is much less tolerant of rises in internal temperature than drops. The lowest body temperature a human has been known to survive is 56.7 degrees, nearly 42 degrees below normal. Anna Bagenholm, a 29-year-old Swedish woman, was backcountry skiing when she broke through eight inches of ice into a frozen stream. Her upper body was sucked down, leaving only her feet and skis visible, but she managed to find an air pocket and was able to breathe. After 80 minutes, she was finally rescued. Bagenholm remained in a coma for about ten days and was in intensive care for two months but ultimately suffered . On the other end of the spectrum, the highest body temperature measured was only 17 degrees above normal. Willie Jones, a 52-year-old Atlanta man, was rescued from his apartment during a heat wave in 1980. His internal temperature was 115.7. He spent 24 days in the hospital before being released.

While there is some debate, studies on women in the military have shown that they to heat illness than men due to their higher body-fat content and lower sweat output. Whether the heatstroke victim is male or female, the odds of surviving depend on the duration of overheating and, once their condition is discovered, how quickly they can be cooled down—most effectively by immersion in ice water within 30 minutes. Survival, moreover, doesn’t guarantee full recovery. A powerful heat wave in Chicago in 1995 caused 739 deaths and 3,300 emergency-room visits. A study reviewing 58 of the severe heatstroke victims found that 21 percent died in the hospital soon after admission, , and all the remaining subjects experienced organ dysfunction and neurological impairments.

An average-size male at rest generates about as much heat as a 100-watt light bulb simply through metabolism. During moderate exercise, temperature increases nearly ten degrees every hour unless you cool yourself by sweating or some other means. You risk a variety of illnesses, starting with , which entails swelling of the hands and feet and can begin at body temperatures close to normal. No precise temperature marks the onset of the various other heat illnesses, and the order of symptoms varies between individuals, but they may include heat syncope (dizziness and fainting from the dilation of blood vessels), heat cramps (muscular clenching due to low salt), and heat exhaustion (identified by muscular weakness, rapid heartbeat, nausea, headache, and possible vomiting and diarrhea). Finally, an internal temperature of 105 marks the lower boundary of heatstroke territory, with outward symptoms of extreme irritability, delirium, and convulsion. Because of individual variation in how these symptoms appear, and because some may not appear at all, athletes in particular can be overcome quickly and with little warning.

There are two kinds of heatstroke: . Classic heatstroke hits the very young, the elderly, the overweight, and people suffering from chronic conditions like uncontrolled diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. Alcohol and certain medications (diuretics, tricyclic antidepressants, antipsychotics, and some cold and allergy remedies) can increase susceptibility as well. Classic heatstroke can strike in the quiet of upper-floor apartments with no air-conditioning.

Exertional heatstroke, on the other hand, pounces on the young and fit. Exercise drastically accelerates temperature rise. Marathon runners, cyclists, and other athletes sometimes push into what used to be known as the fever of exercise and is now called exercise-induced hyperthermia, where internal temperatures typically hit 100 to 104 degrees. Usually, there’s no lasting damage. But as body temperature climbs higher, the physiological response becomes more dramatic and the complications more profound. The higher temperature can ultimately trigger a cascading disaster of events as the metabolism, like a runaway nuclear reactor, races so fast and so hot that the body can’t cool itself down. A person careens toward organ failure, brain damage, and death.

It’s February, the height of summer in the Southern Hemisphere. You’d planned to get up early but didn’t hear your alarm after the late night at the bar. Now the sun is well into its arc. The temperature is supposed to hit 93 degrees by midday.

Pulling the keys from your scooter, you sling your rented surfboard onto your back, thread your arms through your chest pack, and hear the reassuring slosh of the water bottle inside. You have a seat on the twice-weekly plane that leaves tomorrow, returning you to the mainland. If you’re going to do this, the moment is now. You launch up the trail, a faint unmarked path on the gentle, grassy slope. You’re not surprised you’re the only one around. The surfers said to follow the volcano’s right flank until you gain the ridge, then drop down a cleft in the rocks to the sea. Good luck finding the cleft, they seemed to say. Maybe they were just trying to deter you. You see the slope steepen as it rises toward the sharp crest, where chunks of volcanic rock protrude like broken dinosaur scales through velvety green nap. No trees, not a wisp of wind. Ancient cultures deforested this island centuries ago and mysteriously disappeared, leaving not a sliver of shade under the tropical sun.

You feel the quick flex of your quads, the push of your glutes, the spring of your calves propelling you up the winding path, and hear the steady mantra of your breathing. You have to make time. The guys at the bar said the shore bristles with stone dientes, teeth—get there at low tide. That gives you just under two hours.

Within only a few steps, your body begins to respond to the sun’s radiation, the moist air pressing against your skin, and the heat generated by your own rising metabolism. Blood coursing through your arteries begins to grow warmer. At less than one degree Fahrenheit above your normal internal temperature, receptors in your brain’s hypothalamus start to fire, signaling the circulatory system to shunt more blood toward your skin’s surface for cooling. Other messages tell peripheral blood vessels to dilate, opening up to allow greater blood flow. Still other signals activate millions of tiny coils and tubes embedded in your skin—your sweat glands. Concentrated within your head, palms, soles, and trunk, the glands pump water from a tiny reservoir at the base, pushing the salty liquid up a long tube through layers of skin to erupt in a miniature gusher at the surface.

Several hundred yards up the grassy slope, sweat is popping onto your face. You feel the slick, dark blue fabric of your shirt sticking to your back, despite its breathability. You wish it was looser, and a lighter color that didn’t so readily absorb the sun’s rays. A trickle of sweat runs down your forehead and into one eye, stinging with dissolved salts, blurring your vision.

The air is smothering, thick with moisture, like a greenhouse. The dripping sweat should bring some relief. Usually, the body’s cooling system operates remarkably efficiently; blood rushes to carry the excess heat from your core out to your sweat glands, which squeeze warm fluids to the surface, where air moving past your skin evaporates the moisture. Your excess heat literally blows away in the wind. But for this to work properly, the sweat must evaporate. When the air lies close and unmoving, heavy with humidity, sweat evaporates more slowly. If the air is saturated enough, or if impermeable fabric—or, in your case, a surfboard and a chest pack—trap the sweat against your skin, the moisture won’t evaporate at all.

High school athletes are often , which ranks as one of the among that demographic. And according to an investigation done by the HBO show Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, since the year 2000, at least 30 college football players have died of heatstroke during practice, when remedies as simple as immersing the overheated player in ice water were available. Minnesota Vikings offensive lineman died of heatstroke during a preseason practice in 2001, and now the University of Connecticut’s , established in 2010, specializes in sudden-death prevention in athletes, soldiers, and laborers.

Runners, cyclists, and hikers routinely succumb to heatstroke. If properly acclimated, trained, and managed carefully, the human body can endure grueling events in high temperatures, like the Badwater—a 135-mile running race in California that begins in Death Valley, traverses three mountain ranges, and ends at Mount Whitney—and the six-day Marathon des Sables in the Sahara. However, experts say that due to the high intensity of the pace on shorter courses, heatstroke is more common in races of 30 to 90 minutes than in longer events. Three years ago at the annual Falmouth Road Race, a 12K running event in Massachusetts in August, 48 out of more than 10,000 finishers suffered from heatstroke and another 55 from heat exhaustion. (All of them survived without incident due to the extensive cooling procedures available at the race’s finish.)

The National Weather Service now issues warnings when excessive temperatures are expected and gives predictions of the heat index, which takes into account both temperature and humidity as experienced by a five-foot-seven, 147-pound person walking at a speed of about three miles per hour in a six-mile-per-hour breeze. Like the windchill index, the heat index conveys what it feels like outside. For instance, at the Hot Trot Half Marathon, which is held in Dallas in August, the day is often 97 degrees but can have a heat index of 116 degrees because of the 60 percent humidity.

You pull your water bottle from your pack—a full liter shimmering inside a translucent blue Nalgene—take a warm swig, and strike upward again toward the broken scales of the ridge. For the next hour you push at a fast walk, pausing only occasionally to drink. You know the importance of hydration. What you don’t know is how remarkably fast the human body can expel water to cool itself—one and a half liters or more per hour. (Highly efficient, heat-acclimated marathoners can lose close to four liters per hour while they run.) The human gut, however, can absorb only a little over one liter of water per hour. That means that during maximum rates of water loss, it’s possible to drink steadily and still become dehydrated.

Your core temperature has now climbed to 101.5—three degrees above normal—but you’re still in the exercise-induced hyperthermia zone. Your head throbs. You wish you hadn’t drunk quite so many piscolas last night. In doing so, you unwittingly tricked your body’s water controls. Alcohol is a small molecule that slides easily through the walls of the gut, into the bloodstream, and up into the brain, where it , or ADH. This is the hormone that inhibits urination, in effect closing your dam’s spillway in order to keep your reservoir full. Typically, when you become dehydrated, the percentage of salt in your blood rises, triggering your pituitary gland to release ADH. But under the sabotaging influence of alcohol, your body may sense that your water stores are being depleted but blithely ignore the warning. Thanks to those piscolas, rather than prehydrating for today’s climb, you started the day in the red.

The incline grows steeper. The grass gives way to a light, loose volcanic rock called tuff. The scrappy path has now completely disappeared, but still you labor toward the ridgetop—two steps up, slide, one step down. You’re panting now. The rocks crunch under your feet. Each footstep produces a gritty dust that crusts your bare legs, which are coated in a paste of sweat and sunscreen. The arteries protruding on your forearms look like grapevines wrapped around a post. Your blood vessels are dilating, trying to move as much overheated blood to the surface as possible. Your heart pumps madly, trying to keep the vessels full, but it can’t keep up. Not enough blood—and the oxygen it carries—reaches your brain. You pause to rest. You feel lightheaded and faint. Your vision dims and narrows. You feel wobbly and strange—the onset of heat syncope (or orthostatic hypotension), a temporary loss of consciousness from falling blood pressure.

Fainting from orthostatic hypotension poses a distinct problem for those whose sworn duty requires standing still for hours in the sun, as it does for Britain’s royal guards. In their bearskin hats and thickly layered uniforms, which are designed to hide sweat, they topple with surprising regularity flat onto their faces, breaking teeth and smashing noses, with their arms and rifles still rigidly glued to their sides.

But you decide to sit on the rocks, and so you do not topple. You finish your water. You feel limp, like a wrung-out rag. You have a single thought: make it to the ridge and descend to the cool of Emerald Cove. Thirty minutes to go.

At one hundred three degrees internally, you’re pushing into the upper limits of exercise-induced hyperthermia and into heat exhaustion. Your brain is no longer able to deal with large numbers.

One hundred four. Get over the ridge, you tell yourself. Get over the ridge.

Above you the jagged lava rocks begin to distort, reshaping into those ancient giant stone statues erected along the island’s shore. They face you, their enormous heads silhouetted against the blue sky, as if to say, Go back!

But you don’t.

Over millennia, people exerting themselves in hot environments, like the nomadic Maasai of Kenya, have , selecting for tall, slender, long-limbed body types that offer the maximum ratio of cooling surface area to heat-generating body mass. You are not Maasai.

When you finally crest the ridge, your core temperature is pushing 105. You are weak, hot, and thirsty, and you are confused but don’t know it. Gazing back down the way you came, you see the dropping sweep of green. It seems surreal, removed and stylized, like an old hand-painted postcard. Just ahead, the cliff’s edge drops away to crashing ocean far below.

The guy at the bar had said that the top of the trail was marked by a divot where the rock is worn like a V. You walk carefully along the broken ridgetop, afraid to peek over the airy drop. Where’s the guardrail? Your body feels unwieldy.

Maybe it was a mistake to come here straight from the interior highlands, with their evening breezes and cool air. You’d heard that the human body needs time to fully adjust to heat. What you didn’t know is that it generally needs about 7 to 14 days. By gradually building your exercise time outdoors in heat and humidity, . It learns to increase the rate of sweat production and to trigger a mechanism to conserve sodium, which, along with potassium, is essential for fluid regulation and transmission of nerve signals. (The evolution of this mechanism was honed by our , who struggled to consume enough sodium in their diets.) Acclimation would have slowed your heartbeat but boosted the volume of blood circulated with each contraction to help maintain your blood pressure as your vessels dilated.

But you didn’t acclimate. You relied on the fact that you exercise five days a week at home—also a hot, humid place in the summer. Your heat-addled mind drifts back to those summer days. Instead of this blazing light, you see the tinted windows of your SUV. Instead of this heat smothering your skin, you remember the hair-tingling chill of your car’s air-conditioning, the dim, dank spaces of a parking garage, the cold blasts washing over the treadmill in the climate-controlled gym. It begins to dawn on you that all your life you have relied on artificial sources to keep you cool. You’ve never had to change your behavior or alter your ambitious schedule to accommodate the natural diurnal cycle. You’ve always carried your bubble with you. You’ve never had to truly confront the punishing heat of the midday sun.

And then: you’ve found it! You see a scuffed notch on the ridgetop and, far below, the glint of water. This is why you came! Delirious, you begin to scramble down. You slip, skid on your side, dragging and scraping your hands. You regain your feet and steady yourself against smooth boulders, leaving a bloody handprint. The blood stain looks like a bird, you think, in acrylic paint, textured and thick—another effect of dehydration. Suddenly you notice that a bird (does it have four wings or six?) is swooping toward you, its talons reaching for your face. You try to swat the heat-induced hallucination away, first with your hands, then with your board, but it keeps coming back. You toss aside your board and stumble downward to get out of range.

You come to a ledge. Beyond it is pure drop and yes, there’s the beach, several hundred feet below. You just need to fly, you think foggily, but sense that you have no choice but to climb back up. Your chest pack feels impossibly heavy, as if you’re hauling the 13-ton head of one of those ancient statues. Irritated, you shimmy clumsily out of the straps and watch, mesmerized, as your pack tumbles over the edge and drops into the ocean.

Free at last, you begin to crawl back up. But you feel yourself sliding down the loose tuff. It’s so much easier than climbing. You give into the sensation of increasing speed, like a plane accelerating down a runway. You always loved that. You spread your wings and topple backward down the slope. As your head hits the tuff, you feel the coarse lava grit stick to the drying saliva of your lips and mouth. The ledge stops your descent. And then you feel no more.

It could be a small measure of good fortune that confusion, semiconsciousness, or coma overcome victims as they succumb to severe heatstroke. The damage about to ensue wreaks so much havoc that almost no major organ escapes untouched. At 105, your metabolism accelerates, so your cells generate heat at a rate that is 50 percent faster than normal. In other words, as your internal temperature rises, rather than cranking your air conditioner, you fire up your furnace. The only effective remedy is to douse the fires with immediate and extensive cooling.

Each heatstroke victim responds differently to these extreme internal temperatures, but a sequence of events might go like this: at 105 to 106 degrees, your limbs and core are convulsed by seizures. From 107 to 109, you begin vomiting and your sphincter releases. At 110 to 111, your cells begin to break down. Proteins distort. Liver cells die; the tiny tubes in your kidneys are grilled. The large Purkinje neurons in your cerebellum vanish. Your muscle tissues disintegrate. The sheaths of your blood vessels begin to leak, causing hemorrhaging throughout your body, including your lungs and heart. There is now blood in your vomit. You develop holes in your intestines, and toxins from your digestive tract enter your bloodstream. In a last-ditch effort, your circulatory system responds to all the damage by clotting your blood, thinking your vessels have been severed. This triggers what physicians call a clotting cascade.

As your insides melt and disintegrate, purple hemorrhagic spots appear on your skin. Those, the bloody vomit, and your convulsions are the only external hints of total internal annihilation.

“Is that a person down there?” the surfer from the bar asks his friend, skidding to a halt in their quick descent through the rocks.

Following the line of a pointing finger, the friend peers at a dark splotch on a ledge far below and a bit to the left, off the winding path and down through the steep rocks.

“Looks like that dude from the bar last night,” he continues.

They continue scrambling down toward the cove, their wide-brimmed hats flapping, surfboards strapped to their backs. As they get closer, they see it is you. They drop their boards and clamber across the rocky slope. When they reach you, you look dead—limbs askew, eyes staring. One of them touches your bare arm. The skin is clammy. He feels for a pulse. It’s faint and quick, like the heartbeat of a bird.

“He’s still alive,” he says. “But he’s way too hot,” he adds, shaking his head. “Let’s get him to the agua dulce.”

Lifting you carefully, they drape you over the stouter surfer’s back and shoulders. You’re several pounds lighter than your normal weight due to dehydration. They scramble down the precipitous path, kicking free tuff that bounces ahead. Ignoring the shimmering water and the sculpted waves curling off the point, they haul you across the beach to a grove of palms against the foot of a cliff. A spring spills from a crevice in the rocks into a clear, quiet pool. Agua dulce. Sweet water.

It’s much cooler than the tepid ocean—­almost cold. They slide your body in and hold you there, immersed, cradling your head above the surface. Two minutes pass, five minutes, ten.

“Está muerto,” says the stouter one.

“No,” says the other, carefully scooping handfuls of cooling water over your head.

Your eyes show a flicker of movement.

You hear splashing, faint at first, from somewhere far away. It comes closer, growing louder, until you realize that it’s right around your ears. You feel the sensation of cold all over your body. When you open your eyes, you can’t make sense of what you see—two faces framed by drooping palm fronds and deep blue sky.

â€Ćŕ±đ˛őł¦˛ą˛Ô˛ő˛ą,” one says. Rest.

You close your eyes again. A hand brings water to your lips. You drink. You are lucky. With an internal temperature of 106, you peaked within your critical thermal maximum. It’s not yet clear what lasting damage you may have sustained, but you are alive.

Right now, however, all you know is that you’re so very tired. You’ll have to be carried out of here, by stretcher or helicopter or boat. Your thirst feels like a cavernous hollow at your core. You don’t know where you are or where you have been. You remember leaving the scooter and starting up a long grassy slope toward a volcanic ridge. After that there was only the relentless weight of the sun overhead, the heat-blasted lava rock underfoot, and the sense that you were being crushed between them with nowhere to run or hide, a fragile creature of flesh and bone, blood and water, trying to escape the enormity of this force that gives life but, you now understand, can so easily destroy it.

Amy RagsdaleĚýand longtime şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř correspondent Peter Stark () live in Missoula, Montana. Ragsdale is the author of . In 1997, Stark wrote an article about what it feels like to freeze to death, which led to his book, (Ballantine), in which he first wrote about heatstroke.

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“The key thing for people’s outcome is the number of minutes their temperature is over 105 degrees,” says Douglas Casa, CEO of the University of Connecticut’s , named after the Minnesota Vikings offensive lineman who during an August 2001 training camp. Survival is highly likely if the core temperature is brought below 104 degrees within 30 minutes. Here are Casa’s tips on prevention and treatment.

What It Feels Like to Die From Heat Stroke

Your head is pounding, your muscles are cramping, and your heart is racing. Then you get dizzy and the vomiting starts. This is what it feels like to die from heatstroke—and how to know when you’re in danger.

Read More

1. Avoid exercising in high temperatures, or choose cooler parts of the day and stay in the shade. If you do exercise in the heat, wear pale-colored, loose-fitting, lightweight clothing, and acclimate to the conditions by gradually increasing your output over 7 to 14 days.
2. How much water to drink is the subject of some debate. For recreational athletes, Casa suggests hydrating based on thirst. High-level endurance athletes should account for other factors, such as sweat rate. Avoid drinking alcohol before and during strenuous outings.
3. Heatstroke symptoms vary. Many victims are still conscious, and some have seizures or vomit while others do not. Suspect heatstroke if the person can no longer support their body weight, speaks irrationally, or is hyper-irritable or confused. (Casa knows of heatstroke victims who punched a police officer at the finish line of a race.) To get a true reading of core temperature, use a rectal thermometer.
4. “Cool first, transport second” is the oper­able concept when it comes to heatstroke. With mere minutes to act, a victim should be cooled down before being taken to an emergency room. Immersing the body in a cold bath lowers temperature the fastest, dropping it one degree every three minutes if the water is circulating.
5. Exertional heatstroke in the backcountry presents additional challenges. Anything that cools the victim is helpful, but the best options are to immerse them in a lake, river, or stream, or wrap them in fabric drenched with ice water from a cooler. It’s important to cool as much of the body’s surface area as possible. In the absence of cold water, seek shade, wet the person’s clothing with your water bottle, and fan them.Ěý(For heatstroke prevention tips aimed specifically at desert hikers, go toĚý.)

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One day, during your struggles, you look down at your thigh. You should see a familiar scar from an old childhood wound. But now that scar has begun to pull apart, skin separating, as if the stitched seam in a pair of jeans has started to unravel.

Scurvy Leg

From aboard Her Majesty’s Convict Ship Barrosa

Meanwhile, your teeth have grown so loose in your skull that, if you had the strength in your hands, you could pluck them out with your own fingers. The hair follicules on your legs have turned purplish. You bruise at the slightest touch.

As one description puts it, if this malady continues on its course, “the body will degenerate into a bleeding pulp for which death is a blessing.”

This is not some rare and frightening disease recently emerged from primate populations in Central African jungles. Rather, it is one of the oldest human maladies known. For four hundred years, it had a profound effect in shaping world history, and yet is .

This “bleeding pulp” of the human body represents the end stages of scurvy.

A Disease as Old as Us

Scurvy has probably been around as long as humans existed—Hippocrates in Classical times—but it wasn’t until about 500 years ago that it threatened the balance of emerging world powers. Basically, scurvy is caused by the lack of what we now call Vitamin C (or ascorbic acid). Most animals need Vitamin C to survive, but most of them can manufacture it in their own bodies, with the exception of certain primates, bats, and guinea pigs.

To describe its role in the human body, I think of it as a kind of atomic welder in the body’s foundries that make proteins. One of the most important proteins the body manufactures is collagen, which helps form the tough, connective tissues—ligaments, tendons, skin, blood vessel walls. Scurvy sets in when there is no vitamin C to weld together the collagen protein in these tissues.

“The Explorers’ Disease”

This became glaringly obvious starting in the late 1400s when sea-going European explorers made epic voyages in search of new lands. They sailed for months without fresh food that contains Vitamin C. Scurvy typically appeared among the crew after ten or twelve weeks at sea, but sometimes sooner. around Africa to India in 1497 suffered mightily from it, saved by an Arabian trader who happened by with a boatland of oranges. A French expedition led by Jacques Cartier, his ship in the frozen St. Lawrence River in the 1530s while looking for a Northwest Passage, lost 25 out of 110 men.ĚýĚý

Cartier ordered an autopsy on one 22-year-old victim to try to understand what this curious malady was.

“It was discovered,” according to the expedition’s journal, “that his heart was completely white and shriveled up, with more than a jugful of red date-coloured water about it.”

(One of my favorite scientific books of all time, which describes some of these events, is Kenneth J. Carpenter’s “”)

Once European nations developed navies to colonize and defend distant lands far across the seas, the death toll from scurvy skyrocketed. By one calculation based on nautical records, between 1500 and 1800, scurvy appears to have .

What’s bizarre is that it took so long, literally centuries, for European powers to such as the famous British Navy lemon juice, which was instituted around 1800. Countless cures were lying under the noses of every expedition and were long known to native peoples. Cartier’s expedition was saved from utter decimation through the knowledge of the local Indians, who, in the depths of frozen winter, showed the clueless Frenchmen how to brew tea from the needles and bark of a tree called the anneda, much later identified as the white cedar, or arborvitae. This happened to be very high in Vitamin C.

Other native peoples in cold regions throughout the world—where there are no fresh fruits or vegetables available in winter—had figured out over the millenia what herbs or barks or animals to consume that happened to be high in Vitamin C and would keep them healthy during the long frozen months. The Inuit of the Arctic, for example, chewed on whaleskin, extraoridnarily high in vitamin C, while the Yukon Indians knew that the adrenal glands of field mice would keep them healthy in the winter.

Collapse of the Overland Expedition

In my book, Astoria, I’ve written about the possible effects of scurvy on Wilson Price Hunt’s Overland Party in the winter of 1811-12. They were trapped in a huge canyon (unmapped then but known today as Hell’s Canyon of the Snake River) with little or no food. I suspect at least some members, such as the collapsing Scottish fur trader Ramsay Crooks and American hunter John Day, were succumbing both to hunger while also severely weakened by scurvy.

The Shoshone Indians saved Hunt’s Overland Party from this fate. When a group of Hunt’s party finally escaped Hell’s Canyon and reached some Shoshone villages, the Shoshone fed them, among other things, dried, pounded “wild cherries.” It’s not clear just what type of cherries these were, but some cherries (or cherry-like fruits) are extraordinarily high in Vitamin C. The acerola, or , contains about 1700 mg of Vitamin C per handful, or 170 times what the human body needs daily to recover from scurvy. Experiments on conscientious objectors during World War II showed that 10 mg per day of Vitamin C cleared up the symptoms of scurvy within a few weeks.

Whatever kinds of cherries, it is almost certain that the Shoshone Indians ate rosehips, either dried and infused in teas or mixed with other foods. Rosehips are (each cup of fresh rosehips contains close to 1,000 percent of the human daily requirement for Vitamin C). With pounded wild cherries, and rosehip tea or rosehips mixed in stews or in pounded meat, Hunt and his Overland Party were restored from their possible scurvy and debilitating nutritional weakness. With these mega-doses of Vitamin C from ancient, traditional sources, the Overland Party continued on its way to the Pacific to start the first American colony on the West Coast.

The Hardest Way West

In this exclusive excerpt from the new book, Astoria, the legendary Overland Party attempts to establish America’s first commercial colony on the wild and unclaimed Northwest coast—provided, of course, they survive the journey.

Peter Stark is a full-time freelance writer of non-fiction books and articles specializing in adventure and exploration history. His most recent book,Ěý, tells the harrowing tale of the quest to settle a Jamestown-like colony on the Pacific Coast and will be published in March 2014 by Ecco/HarperCollins.

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When an explorer is dying of starvation in the wild, his voice takes on a peculiar deep tone.

. “The alteration in our appearance was equally distressing to them… we were little more than skin and bone. The Doctor particularly remarked the sepulchral tone of our voices, which he requested us to make more cheerful if possible, unconscious that his own partook of the same key.”

Other strange physiological phenomena occur when the body is totally deprived of food, some that might be considered desirable, others not. The eyesight of one subject in a 1915 study improved dramatically on day 14 during a carefully monitored 31-day fast and was twice as acute at fast’s end as at the beginning. Others reported a peculiar lightness in their bearing. Heart rates can drop to 35 beats per minute. And there’s the nasty breath—breath that smells like a solvent such as acetone.Ěý

These observations came from controlled studies of fasting. , the Overland Party of John Jacob Astor attempt to found the first American colony on the West Coast, a kind of Pacific version of Jamestown, were not fasting. Rather, they were starving—they simply couldn’t find food—while traveling hard in winter’s cold, like Franklin’s party quoted above. Their caloric needs were enormous—as I wrote in my last blog posting, the energy demands of traveling hard on foot in winter can amount to an extraordinary 6,000 calories—orĚýnine square meals—per day.

After abandoning their canoes, which had smashed among the waterfalls and rapids of a canyon, the 50-person Overland Party, led by Wilson Price Hunt, a young New Jersey businessman with no experience in the wilderness, split into two main groups in November, 1811. Trekking on foot, they followed the unknown river downstream toward what they hoped was the Pacific. Barren lava plains spread on both sides of the river gorge. With no game, and no fish appearing in their nets, they managed to trade with scattered bands of Shoshone Indians for a few dogs and horses. Consuming these—a group of 50 people trekking in winter could demolish the caloric equivalent of a large animal every few days, thus they traveled in two smaller groups—they chewed on bits of beaverskin and spare moccasins. Hunt stayed with the slower group, which included the family of the Indian interpreter, his pregnant wife, and their two toddler boys.Ěý

For a month, Hunt’s group struggled onward along the river. Then the river poured into a massive canyon—now known as Hell’s Canyon of the Snake River, the deepest canyon in North America. One snowy December day, as Hunt’s slow party struggled downstream over rocky outcrops, they spotted the other main party staggering back upstream on the opposite bank! This was the worst kind of news. Led by Scottish fur trader Ramsay Crooks, it had been stopped by the extreme depth and ruggedness of the canyon and the onset of winter’s deepening snows. Still worse, Crooks and his party verged on collapse from starvation and exhaustion due to the tremendous exertion and caloric needs.

Hunt had a small boat crafted from a horsehide and brought Crooks and a voyageur, Le Clerc, across the river from the starving party on the opposite bank. Crooks told him there was no way forward down the canyon on foot or boat. Hunt knew he now had to retreat upstream in hopes of finding Shoshone villages and food. They were at least ten days or two weeks away. Even after Hunt fed Crooks and Le Clerc the last of his horsemeat, however, they were still too weak to walk and became feebler with every moment. Hunt, loyal to a fault, trying to lead by consensus, wanted to stay with the dying men. Crooks was his friend and partner. But the 20 other members of his party, the voyageurs especially, harangued him to abandon Crooks and Le Clerc and retreat as hastily as possibly to the Shoshone villages and the hope of distant food.

“They said that we would all die from starvation,” wrote Hunt in his journal, “and urged me by all means to go on.”

The process had now begun for everyone.Ěý

The human body has a special mechanism to deal with starvation in these dangerous circumstances. A fascinating account on the physiology of human fasting can be found on the website .ĚýDrawing on the classic 1970 study “Starvation in Man” by George F. Cahill, the website tells us that the human body, even when starving, wants to continue to feed nutrients to the brain, despite all else. The starving human body also tries to hold onto a certain reserve of ready energy for “fight or flight” or other emergencies.

Normally, the fuel driving our bodies is glucose (a simple sugar) and glycogen (glucose transformed and stored in the muscles). We constantly drain this fuel supply to power our muscle movements and metabolism. We refill this fuel supply through eating.

But under fasting conditions—starvation—the body makes a peculiar switch. The muscles and heart stop using up all the ready fuel—glucose and glycogen—saving some of it for emergencies, and start to draw on fuel made from the breakdown of the body’s fat reserves and what’s called “ketone metabolism.”

“The glycogen reserves in humans never get completely depleted,” according to the website. “There is at all times a hepatic [liver] reserve, waiting to mobilize and rescue the organism from some sort of horrible situation.”

But the brain has to function, too, in order to save the starving human from “some horrible situation.” The human body is remarkable among animals in that the human brain can function with alternative energy supplies to glucose. Some of the body’s fats are converted to what’s known as “ketone bodies,” which, only in humans, have the ability to enter the brain and power it. (The human brain of a 150-pound male requires about 325 calories a day, or the equivalent of about one-and-a-half energy bars, to keep the lights on.) Thus by switching over to alternative energy supplies like ketone bodies, the brain, too, helps save the body’s glucose reserves (as well as the body’s muscle mass) for emergency “fight or flight” situations like a kind of human rocket fuel.

The “acetone breath” of starvation or fasting comes from the metabolism of these ketone bodies into byproducts like acetone, which is then dissipated through urine and through exhalation from the lungs.

Eventually, however, as the fats are used up, the body will begin to break down its own proteins—its muscles and tissues—and convert them to fuel. (None of the physiology of starvation or fasting that I’ve read explains the deep voices such as Franklin’s, but I wonder if it has something to do with the proteins of the vocal cords breaking down. Maybe a reader will know the answer.)

“An organism which is consuming its own protein is truly struggling,” according to derangedphysiology.com. “That said, if your [human] organism is struggling it has some 6kg or so of protein to get through before it dies.”

Ramsay Crooks and the voyageur Le Clerc had clearly entered this protein-consuming phase of starvation, and had finally used up whatever rocket-fuel reserves they had possessed.

Hunt, deeply conflicted, profoundly troubled—were his loyalties to his good but dying men, or to his leadership of the group as a whole?—finally abandoned the starving pair in the canyon depths. But he didn’t forsake them entirely. He left them two beaverskins to chew on, and promised that as soon as he found food, he would send it back to feed them.

Peter Stark is a full-time freelance writer of non-fiction books and articles specializing in adventure and exploration history. His most recent book,Ěý, tells the harrowing tale of the quest to settle a Jamestown-like colony on the Pacific Coast and will be published in March 2014 by Ecco/HarperCollins.

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One of the most delicious breakfasts I ever ate consisted of a foot-long length of the boiled intestines of a large fur seal, split open length-wise like a hot dog bun, with slivers of baby seal blubber wrapped inside—kind of like a foot-long, with blubber relish.

Peter Stark Mocassin

Calories: approximately 416 per pair. Also contains brains from tanning process

How to Survive a Scalping

On a forgotten day in 1811, a scalped head would not only shape the American West but refashion the geopolitical future of the entire North American continent.

We were spending several days on the sea ice off Northern Greenland with tradtional Inuit subsistence hunters, traveling by dogsled and sometimes foot. In this pure-white, frozen landscape of sea ice, glacier headlands, and frigid wind, accompanied by a great deal of physical exertion, the notion of a bowl of granola and skim milk for breakfast lay beyond laughable. First, you couldn’t grow grain here anyway. Second, you didn’t want it. No, what the body craved was fat—pure, unadulterated calories in their most compact and high-energy form.

I’ve always advised weight-conscious friends that if you want to shed pounds REALLY QUICKLY go winter camping and cover some serious mileage on foot. I’ve staggered home from five days of winter camping and backcountry skiing, and, after the first hot shower, see a very noticeably leaner self standing in the bathroom mirror. Scientific studies done on adventurers moving on foot in the polar regions show that the male body consumes around 6,000 calories daily (compared to about 2,200 normally) under these extreme and arduous conditions, or about nine square meals per day.Ěý

If you don’t get those nine square meals or their equivalent (I’ve known winter mountaineers to carry bottles of olive oil inside their parkas, to drink as fuel) and you keep moving hard under these cold conditions, first you lose a whole lot of weight. Then you start to deteriorate.

These hungry memories came to mind during the research and writing of my book, , about the enormous scheme launched by John Jacob Astor to found the first American colony on the West Coast, and a trans-Pacific, trans-global trade empire. If you read my last posting (or the book excerpt), you’ll remember that the huge Overland Party that Astor sent from New York was to cross the wilderness of the western continent on the route that Lewis and Clark had blazed five years earlier. But, hearing stories about the ferocity of the Blackfeet Indians at the Missouri headwaters, the Overland Party diverted south into a thousand miles or more of unexplored terrain.

Carrying somewhere between 10-15 tons of gear on 115 horses and traveling partly on foot, the huge party of 60 crossed today’s Dakotas and Wyoming, and over the Big Horn Range, and the Wind Rivers.Ěý They stopped to hunt buffalo, laying in two tons of dried bison jerky and trading with Shoshone Indians for another ton—or roughly 25,000 packets in today’s convenience-store terms. Immediately after crossing the Tetons, they reached a small river that they believed was a headwaters stream of the Columbia. The forty French-Canadian voyageurs, happy to be off horses and foot, crafted fifteen giant canoes out of cottonwood logs, the Hunt party climbed aboard, shoved off, whisking toward what they believed was the Pacific not far beyond.

By now it was late in the season, the end of October, due to Hunt’s earlier dallying. The first day, with voyageurs singing, they flew along on swift but calm water making good mileage. The second day they hit a few riffles. The third day, two canoes swamped. Each day the river grew worse. On the ninth day, they struck major rapids and waterfalls. The first voyageur drowned. They were now stuck in a canyon, winter coming on, and surrounded by a desolate lava plain. But the worst of it was, with so large a party to feed, and despite the 25,000 packets worth of jerky they had laid in several weeks earlier, they were almost out of food.

Their calaroic expenditure was enormous. To sustain a party this large—now fifty people, now in cold weather, and now on foot—would mean killing and consuming a bison or large elk every three of four days. This is partly because most game is so lean, each pound offering only about 500-600 calories. The U.S. Army recommends for winter hiking a bare minimum of 4,500 calories daily—what would be the equivalent six to eight pounds lean game meat.

For Native Americans and early explorers, “fat meat”—the fatty meat and scraps we discard—was understandably the meat most prized by hunters. It was the meat that sustained you, like the seal blubber consumed by Inuit hunters.

But there was no fat meat to be found for Hunt’s party. No meat at all. The barren lava plain had no water. They split into smaller groups and staggered along, parched, drinking their own urine at times.Ěý Finally it happened, totally out of food, they were forced to eat the only edible item left: their extra moccasins.

They probably soaked them in water overnight to soften, boiled them, and cut them into pieces, as do peoples in Nigeria when they eat cow-hide called “pomo,” which they make into a soup with okra and cassava-paste as a substitute for expensive beef. Even then, however, the explorers’ moccasins didn’t offer much in the way of caloric value. With an ounce of hide providing only about 26 calories (this based on the nutritional content of “pomo”), and a pair of moccasins out of deerskin or elk weighing roughly 16 ounces, an explorer’s footwear would only provide him a mere 416 calories, or barely one of his nine square meals a day.

Peter Stark is a full-time freelance writer of non-fiction books and articles specializing in adventure and exploration history. His most recent book,Ěý, tells the harrowing tale of the quest to settle a Jamestown-like colony on the Pacific Coast and will be published in March 2014 by Ecco/HarperCollins.

The post When 25,000 Packets of Jerky Is Simply Not Enough appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

“So maybe you two can tell me,” I shouted over the holiday din. “How can you survive a scalping?”

Ěý

“Whoa!” someone said. “Now that’s a real conversation stopper!”

My two subjects were standing in a circle of people holding drinks and chatting, presumably about holidays plans or the good work in river restoration, in the middle of a party tent festooned with cheery Christmas lights.

The two of them, doctors Doug Webber M.D. and Gary Muskett M.D., both avid outdoorsmen themselves, have seen all sorts of cases involving wilderness injuries in decades of experience in the emergency room of St. Patrick’s Hospital in our mountain town of Missoula, Montana.

“You’re exactly the two guys I need to talk to!” I had called out when I had spotted them across the tent.

Amid the holiday cheer, they briefly consulted with each other about scalping.

“Under the right conditions,” came back the answer, “you probably could survive a scalping. The issue is how to constrict the blood loss. If it were really cold outside, that would help constrict the arteries. Also, if the cut were jagged and torn rather than clean and sharp, the arteries constrict faster.”

Their answer matched what clues I’d picked up from historical accounts.

“That makes perfect sense,” I replied. “The duller the knife—like a stone knife—the better your chances of survival. And if a partial incision was made around your skull, and then the rest of the scalp torn off in a single jerk—that was the usual technique—that would increase your chances of survival even further!”

I’d been writing about a pivotal, if little known, figure in the exploration of the American West in my book, , Edward Robinson, who happened to have been a scalping survivor. The shocking image of the scarred and ridged flesh atop his hairless pate may have, in some way, changed the course of America’s Western empire.

In 1810, as I recount in Astoria, fur merchant John Jacob Astor, with the enthusiastic backing of Thomas Jefferson, sent two huge expeditions from New York City to the Pacific Coast. Their mission was to found America’s first colony on the West Coast and a trans-Pacific, global trade empire. One expedition sailed around Cape Horn by sea. The other, led by a young New Jersey businessman named Wilson Price Hunt, traveled overland, following the recent Lewis and Clark route up the Missouri River. Ěý

One problem was that Hunt, a nice, serious-minded, consensus-seeking sort, had no previous wilderness experience. Another was that the farther they rowed their riverboats up the Missouri, the worse the stories they heard about the ferocity of the Blackfeet Indians at the river’s headwaters.

One day in May, as Hunt’s 60-person party breakfasted on the riverbank, two canoes drifted down carrying three white men.Ěý The three had survived a major massacre by the Blackfeet with a party trying to establish a fur post at the Missouri headwaters. One of the trappers, the 66-year-old Kentuckian Robinson, wore a scarf around his head. Under it were the scars of a scalping.

He had this advice for the wilderness neophyte Wilson Price Hunt: Avoid the Blackfeet at all costs.

The Blackfeet were implacable and still furious that Meriwether Lewis’s party had killed two of their young men, left a Jefferson Peace Medal hanging around one’s neck, and fled.

Robinson and company said they knew a better way to the Pacific than the Lewis and Clark route, one that left the Missouri, skirted to the south around Blackfeet territory, across several mountain ranges, to a headwaters branch of the Columbia. Here the voyageurs could build canoes and easily paddle to the Pacific to start Mr. Astor’s trans-global empire. In fact, the three trappers wanted a piece of the action, too.

Hunt spent an anxious night agonizing over the decision about route. Surely, in his tossing, the puckered ridges of Robinson’s hairless pate played with his imagination. (Robinson had actually received the scalping some years earlier in Ohio Valley Indian wars.) Finally, Wilson Price Hunt chose. He would take the party away from the Missouri and the known Lewis and Clark route into a thousand miles or more of uncharted terrain.

Hunt’s choice, informed by Edward Robinson’s scalped head, would prove a fateful decision for the American West and the geopolitical shape of the North American continent.

Peter Stark is a full-time freelance writer of non-fiction books and articles specializing in adventure and exploration history. His most recent book,Ěý, tells the harrowing tale of the quest to settle a Jamestown-like colony on the Pacific Coast and will be published in March 2014 by Ecco/HarperCollins.

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It was glorious to be on the water, at first. The little river wound smoothly through a broad, high mountain valley dotted with grassy meadows and groves of old cottonwood trees. The voyageurs paddled rhythmically to chansons sung out by the fifteen steersmen who swung the big canoes agilely around the river’s tight bends and along its willow banks, heading generally southwest. Autumn-yellow leaves fluttered down and settled on the gentle swirls of current. A few miles to their left, or eastward, rose the great barrier of the Tetons they had just crossed in this October of 1811, the gray rock spires of its upper- most peaks veined with white from the first hints of winter’s snowfall.

“[T]he mountain,” reported the party’s leader, Wilson Price Hunt, “we believed was our last.”

Only five years had passed since Lewis and Clark had returned from their epic journey to the Pacific. The fifteen-canoe flotilla was one of two advance parties, one overland and one by sea, sent from New York by John Jacob Astor, with the enthusiastic support of Thomas Jefferson, to establish America’s first colony on the wild and unclaimed Northwest Coast—the Pacific equivalent of the Jamestown or Plymouth colonies. For Astor, a youngish German immigrant to America who had grown wealthy in the fur trade, the colony at the mouth of the Columbia would serve as the epicenter of a global commercial empire that leveraged nearly all the wealth of western North America into one vast trade network that passed through his own hands. For Thomas Jefferson it would provide the beginnings of a separate country on the West Coast—a sister democracy to the United States that looked out to the Pacific.

While the Sea-Going Party rounded Cape Horn en route to the West Coast and Columbia’s mouth, the Overland Party, led by young New Jersey businessman Wilson Price Hunt, had followed the route up the Missouri that Lewis and Clark had blazed a few years before. But the farther Hunt’s party traveled upriver, the worse the stories they heard about the ferocity of the Blackfeet Indians. Finally, Hunt, a neophyte in the wilderness who was universally referred to as a nice person, decided to avoid a head-on conflict with the Blackfeet and explore a possibly easier route to the Pacific. He would veer away from the Missouri, skirt south around the Blackfeet, and strike across an enormous stretch of uncharted terrain in hopes of finding a headwaters branch of the Columbia.

[quote]The new colony at the mouth of the Columbia would provide the beginnings of a separate country on the West Coast—a sister democracy to the United States that looked out to the Pacific.[/quote]

Hunt’s large party of sixty—French Canadian voyageurs, Scottish fur traders, American hunters, a Native American interpreter with his pregnant wife and their two toddlers—had left the Missouri in July. They spent four months trekking on foot and with horses purchased from the Plains Indians, the great caravan carrying tons of trade goods and supplies to start Astor’s West Coast empire. After traversing today’s Dakotas and Wyoming, crossing the Bighorn Mountains, the Wind River Range, and the Tetons, they had arrived at this small river. Here they built their fifteen large canoes from cottonwood trees, abandoned their hundred and fifteen horses, and, leaving a few trappers behind, shoved off into the unknown.

No European had paddled this river. No European knew where it ran. It was a guess, as if they had taken up a random piece in a vast geographic puzzle that measured a thousand or more miles across and now tried to click that piece into its proper place. Likely from Indian information and its westward flow, the partners to whom Astor had given shares in the great Pacific enterprise, Hunt and Crooks, Mackenzie and McClellan, believed this small river eventually joined a branch of the Columbia and would lead them to the “great salt lake”—the Pacific Ocean.

Despite the gentle current and beautiful scenery, the weather was brisk that first day. Flocks of ducks and geese bobbed in the riverbank eddies, driven down from the north by the first wave of cold. The paddlers pointed out to one another encouraging signs of beaver in the form of gnawed trees and stick-built lodges. Periodic snow flurries swept across the little river in white veils, casting the flotilla in shades of gray, with the voyageurs in their capotes, or hooded cloaks, like a procession of singing monks gliding down the smooth water. They were happy. These “Men of the North” well knew this weather and this paddling. Winter was coming. But they believed they had crossed the final range of the Rockies. The Pacific felt near.

They paddled the small river’s twisting course nearly thirty miles that first day. The smaller river then joined a larger flow. This was the watercourse they called the Mad River, which they had encountered on the far side of the Tetons some days earlier. But here it was smoother—another encouraging sign.

Hunt noted that it could easily float a canoe of any size—good information to have when establishing Mr. Astor’s network of fur posts in these unknown regions. The Mad River—or the Canoe River, as Hunt dubbed it, putting the best possible spin on its name—danced along in a clear, beautiful green. The river left the mountains and cut through the broad lava plain, straightening and gaining speed, as if to whisk them, and future loads of Mr. Astor’s furs, straight to the Pacific, thence across to China, to complete the great, golden triangle trade. Circling the globe, his ships would carry trade goods from New York to his “emporium” at the mouth of the Columbia, exchange them for lustrous sea otter and other furs with the Coastal Indians, transport them to Canton, sell them at immense profit, and bring teas, silks, and other luxury Chinese goods back to London and New York.

On the second day, they had paddled nearly forty miles on the unknown river when, late in the day, they heard rapids. Two canoes swamped. Although they saved the men, they lost one canoe and all its trade goods. Astor, however, had hired the best in the business in a canoe—the French Canadian voyageurs. They were not daunted. On the third day they had to portage a low waterfall, where the river ran in a kind of crack in the lava plain. They made only made six miles, and likewise only six on the fourth. But then their pace picked up on the swift but mostly smooth river, making a good 70 miles on the fifth day, and again on the seventh day.

On the ninth day, October 28, 1811, however, the routine changed. The river channel tightened. On each bank, lava walls rose sharply in gray-black columns of basalt, clumps of minty sagebrush and tufts of tawny autumn grasses sprouting from cliff ledges. The current swiftened, the green water bunching up against the black walls and shoreline boulders. The lead canoe picked its way, bowman scanning for the best route, steersman prying his steering paddle to swing the stern around, calling out to the voyageurs the strokes he needed, while the other canoes followed.

They whisked through several rapids without mishap. They approached the entrance to a canyon, the lead canoe didn’t stop. The second canoe followed, carrying partner Ramsay Crooks in the bow and voyageur Clappine in the stern with three voyageurs to paddle. Weaving down a swift channel between rocks, scouting ahead from the bow, Crooks spotted a midstream rock in their path. He called out a warning to Clappine, but the steersman didn’t hear him, or Clappine didn’t have time to pry the steering paddle, or call out to the other voyageurs and swing the heavy cottonwood canoe.

With a hollow thunk it slammed head-on into the basalt boulder. Like the cleaving blow of a giant axe, the impact instantly split the fragile hull along its length. Frigid, swirling water engulfed the hull and it rolled easily, spilling out its load of food and gear and voyageurs.

Crooks and one voyageur, both strong swimmers, struck for the safety of the riverbank. Stroking hard across rushing tongues of current, they managed to drag themselves to the rocky shore. The other two voyageurs and the steersman Clappine had far less confidence as swimmers. The threesome clung to the hull of the swamped canoe as it washed downstream like a half-sunken log, with Clappine clinging to its stern.

Clunk!

It slammed its bow end into another boulder. The two voyageurs clinging to the hull released their grip from the canoe and seized the big rock, scrambling onto it.

But Clappine, either from fright or lack of confidence in his ability to swim to the rock, held tight to the canoe’s upstream end, its stern, his customary spot as a steersman. The current shoved against the hull and swung the canoe broadside. The canoe spun off the rock, propelling Clappine out into the middle of the powerful current.

His horrified companions watched the turbulent river sweep Clappine and the swamped hull toward the canyon’s mouth. The lone head and the swamped canoe bobbed along helplessly. Then they tumbled over the lip of cascading rapids and disappeared from sight.

It was the emotional impact of losing Clappine that struck them first. A friend of all, a steersman with years of experience, he had a fine, powerful singing voice—a prerequisite for taking the stern of a voyageur’s canoe. It would have been Clappine who started the rounds of singing, Clappine who prompted the voyageurs’ response, Clappine who kept spirits high and kept them paddling and pushing onward.

Ěý

At the clear running fountain sauntering by one day, I found it so compelling I bathed without delay/ (Chorus from paddlers): Your love long since overcame me/ Ever in my heart you’ll stay

But they would hear his powerful voice no more. The canoes—now only thirteen of them—beached on the rocky shore. The voyageurs and partners and hunters combed the riverbanks up and down. There was no sign of Clappine, or of the split canoe or the trade goods it carried.

It was the Overland Party’s first death. It stunned the group— “struck a chill into every bosom,” as Washington Irving, who was commissioned by Astor decades later to write the Astoria story, phrased it.

The loss of Clappine now only underscored the deepening predicament of the entire party. At the main encampment, beside a thundering thirty-foot drop, Hunt and the partners conferred. The Scottish partners dubbed it “Caldron Linn,” after a famous waterfall in the Scottish Highlands. Just below it was a narrow gorge. Hunt led a small scouting party along the canyon’s north rim and found the river choked with one cascade after another, which they called the “Devil’s Scuttle Hole.” Another scouting party on the south rim discovered a notch in the gorge’s steep side about six miles downstream beyond what looked like the worst of the rapids. This had possibilities. They laid out a plan.

“Sixteen men, with four of our best canoes, went to attempt the passage,” wrote Hunt.

Six miles was not an unusual distance for the voyageurs to portage. They easily carried canoes and baggage on their powerful shoulders over sagebrush plains and lava rock and negotiated the steep descent to the river. Here, they tried to “line” or lower the canoes through the rapids with ropes. Almost immediately they lost one canoe and all its trade goods. The other three canoes wedged fast Ěýamong exposed rocks, pinned by the thousands of pounds of pressure exerted by the current. Even the strong-armed voyageurs, were unable to budge them. Abandoning the three canoes, they trekked, disheartened, back to the main camp at Caldron Linn.

“We saw no way to continue our journey by water,” reported Hunt.

The Overland Party was now stuck. They couldn’t go forward by canoe. They’d left their horses what they estimated was 340 miles upstream. They had no idea where this river might run, only that it eventually reached the Pacific. But their most immediate problem was this: food. Specifically, food to feed a party of fifty.

“Our situation became critical,” reported Hunt. “We had enough food for about five days.”

Hunt now had to make his second big decision. As the situation grew dire, Hunt, consulting with the Scottish partners, mapped a new strategy. As he noted tersely in his journal on November 1, “we changed our plans.”

In essence, several small reconnaissance parties led by different partners would split off from the main group and fan out looking for an avenue of escape or a source of food. One reconnaissance party, led by Ramsay Crooks, would head on foot back upstream to try to recover the horses, while others would go forward on foot. If a reconnaissance party couldn’t find an easy way out and if it couldn’t report back to the main group, these small parties would simply keep going until reaching safety of the Columbia’s mouth, where the Sea-Going Party presumably had already arrived by ship to lay the colony’s foundation.

Hunt’s main group, numbering thirty-four, paddled back upriver a short distance from Caldron Linn, scouting for an obvious escape or some source of food. They set nets but caught only a single fish. The hunters brought in only a few beaver, whose meat Hunt ordered dried. A few days after leaving, Crooks and his small party returned to the main group, also empty-handed. It was already early November. They realized they had no chance of traveling far enough upstream to retrieve the horses before winter descended. Meanwhile, a messenger from a downstream reconnaissance party returned, reporting that, as far as they could see, the river persisted tumultuously through a gorge.

[quote]“I bought two dogs,” he recorded with satisfaction at one stop, “and we ate one for breakfast.”[/quote]

It was growing colder by the day. Their food supply was dwindling. Delayed by his own logistics, his lack of urgency months earlier, and the fruitless sojourn he had made upstream, Hunt thrashed around for an escape from their predicament. The frustration erupted even in his own minimal journal, when he reported that, on November 7, his main party returned downstream to Caldron Linn

“We had wasted nine days in futile explorations.”

They decided to split up even further, as smaller parties had a better chance of obtaining enough food. Leaving Caldron Linn, the two parties of twenty, plus the family of Pierre Dorion, the interpreter. started down opposite riverbanks on the morning of November 9, 1811, Hunt on the north rim of the gorge, Crooks on the south rim. Each member of Hunt’s party carried a ration of five and a quarter pounds of dried jerky. Cliffs, rapids, and massive chunks of shoreline basalt made it virtually impossible to walk along the riverbank itself. Unencumbered by two small children, Crooks’s party quickly pulled ahead on the south rim and was soon lost from sight. Neither party had any idea where they were headed, or any notion of how many days that meager ration of food would need to last.

The buffalo jerky was soon gone. At times the Hunt party’s rations were reduced to nothing but bouillon. They passed an occasional small Shoshone encampment along the river, its dwellings of reeds and grasses piled like haystacks.

“The women fled in such haste,” wrote Hunt, “that they did not have time to take their children who could not walk, but simply covered them with straw. The poor little creatures were terrified when I lifted the straw to look at them. Even the men trembled, as though I were some ferocious animal.”

Most Shoshone camps had little food to spare from the meager supplies they had gathered for the oncoming winter, but some willingly traded small amounts with Hunt.Ěý

“I bought two dogs,” he recorded with satisfaction at one stop, “and we ate one for breakfast.”

While taking a shortcut across a tributary valley, they came to a few prosperous-looking Shoshone villages. They traded for what they could, and kept going along the Mad River, presumably toward the Columbia and the Pacific Ocean.

But then the Mad River suddenly left the lava plain. The terrain around it buckled. The river twisted its way into barren foothills, then steep mountains that squeezed the river, forcing Hunt’s party to clamber up the slopes above its cliffy banks.

December 4 strained them to the utmost. Dragging themselves up steep mountainsides above the river’s cliffs, they laboriously broke a trail through new-fallen snow up to their knees. Winds blew across the snowy slopes, broken here and there by pine groves. The temperature plummeted. There were twenty of them, almost everyone on foot, with the Dorion toddlers carried on a horse or pregnant Marie Dorion’s back. One can picture Hunt’s party trudging along, heads down in a hunched file, breathing hard, occasionally looking up—the cold skies scouring the mountaintops, the steep fields of endless white skirting down. As daylight dims, the cold sharpens. The whiteness deepens to shades of purples and grays. They need to sleep. A profound chill takes hold inside one’s core the moment one stops climbing and the sweat from panting uphill exertion begins to freeze.

“We were nearly exhausted by the harshness of the weather,” recorded Hunt, “when we had the good luck of reaching a patch of pine trees at sunset.”

The grove offered shelter from frigid winds and deep snow. They heaped up a bonfire from dead pine boughs and pressed around it, gratefully warming themselves and ripping into the last of their roasted horse meat.

“Although we had struggled ahead all day,” wrote Hunt, “we were, because of the twisting course of the river, only four miles from our camp of the day before.”

The next day a whiteout blizzard caught them on the mountainside. Guided only by the sound of the rapids rushing somewhere in the whiteness far below, they slipped and skittered on their moccasins down the precipitous snowy slopes. One of the horses suddenly slipped, tumbling down for several hundred feet. Amazingly, it wasn’t hurt. That night, camped in slushy snow along the Mad River’s banks, Hunt ordered one of their last two horses slaughtered—no longer squeamish, as he had been just ten days earlier, about eating the meat of animals he had befriended.

The following day brought a deeply unpleasant surprise.

“On the 6th,” reported Hunt, “to my astonishment and distress I saw Mr. Crooks and his people on the other side of the river.”

So hungry and exhausted they could barely stay upright, Crooks and his party of nineteen were struggling along the opposite riverbank the wrong way—upstream. As soon as they saw Hunt’s party they yelled at the top of their voices for food. Hunt quickly ordered his men to construct a bullboat, using the hide of a slaughtered horse wrapped around a bowl-shaped wooden frame. He sent across one of the voyageurs, Sardepie, to deliver fresh horse meat to the starving men and brought back the group’s leader, Ramsay Crooks, and another voyageur, Le Clerc. As the bullboat neared the bank with the passengers, Hunt and company were startled to see how wasted and dejected his counterpart leader and partner had become since they parted a month earlier.

Crooks ate ravenously. Then he talked. He and his group had traveled down the left-hand bank of the river. The land was especially arid and barren. For the first eighteen days, Crooks reported, they ate only half a meal each day; then for three days they ate a beaver they’d killed, wild cherries, and old moccasin soles. For the last six days all twenty of them had been living off the flesh and entrails of a single dog that had accompanied them.

From where he met Hunt, Crooks and his party had already traveled three days farther down the Mad River. Progress had proved excruciatingly difficult. Cliffs dropped straight into the water, he reported. The river roared through a narrow gorge in an almost continuous stretch of rapids. They had tried to skirt above the cliffs that dropped to the water. The only way past was to climb a mountain that rose steeply from the river. For half a day Crooks and his men trudged upward through snow. They reached a knob that offered a view. They saw they had not yet climbed even halfway up the mountain that flanked the riverbank. From the heights, they had hoped to see the broad Columbia River plain lying ahead, leading gently to the Pacific. Instead they spotted snowy mountain after snowy mountain stretching as far as they could see. Far, far below them, the river ran through a monstrous unknown gorge. Today we call it Hell’s Canyon of the Snake River—the deepest canyon in North America.

Wilson Hunt Price, Ramsay Crooks and their parties were now trapped in it, without food, as winter came on.

After tossing restlessly through the night of December 6, Hunt now had to choose among several bleak options: go farther downstream into the mile-and-a-half-deep mountain gorge; abandon the river and attempt to climb westward over steep, snowy mountains toward the Pacific; or retreat upriver to the broad lava plain where they’d encountered the more prosperous Shoshone camps in fertile valleys, and hope the Shoshone hadn’t moved in the meantime.

Hunt’s carefully cultivated unity now unraveled under the pressure of profound hunger. Finally, only Hunt and five men remained with the failing Crooks and Le Clerc, the rest having pushed ahead in ones and twos and threes. Crooks’ starving party, without Crooks’, struggled upstream on the opposite bank. Hunt and the stragglers camped together that night of December 8. During the night, Crooks fell very ill. Only three beaver skins remained for food. The sheer instinctive necessity of survival was stripping away whatever authority Hunt possessed. Yet he felt weighted by a deep sense of personal responsibility. What had started out as a series of business decisions for this “very respectable gentleman from Trenton, New Jersey,” had now evolved into naked choices over life and death. Reading between the spare lines of his journal, one can hear his tortured thoughts.

Where was he needed more? By the side of a good but failing man along the trail? Or with his party leading them and negotiating for food when—and if—they reached the Shoshone camp? Loyalty to a partner? Or loyalty to the success of the mission? How could he abandon one of Mr. Astor’s primary partners to die of starvation in a river gorge a thousand miles or more from the nearest white settlement?

Hunt finally chose again: He would go ahead. But he didn’t abandon his weaker men entirely—not yet. He left two of the three beaver skins for them to eat, and two men to help Crooks and Le Clerc along the trail.

For ten days they retraced their steps upriver, hoping to find the prosperous tipi village of the Shoshone Indians in the fertile tributary valley. After pausing with Crooks and Le Clerc, Hunt hurried to catch up with his group. He found that some of them hadn’t eaten a single thing in four days of hard, cold trekking over boulders and skirting cliffs.

Then they had a stroke of luck, spotting a new collection of Shoshone tipis along the riverbank, surrounded by a herd of twenty horses. The band apparently had emerged from a tributary mountain valley since Hunt and company had passed the spot downriver. Fearing the Shoshone would flee or hide their horses at the bizarre sight of white men, Hunt approached gingerly and managed to buy (Hunt’s account) or grab (Irving’s account), or some combination thereof, five of the horses before the Shoshone and horses could scatter. He ordered one horse slaughtered on the spot, and meat delivered on the back of another horse downriver to the ailing Crooks and Le Clerc. The starving group devoured the remainder.

Slightly fortified, Crooks and Le Clerc managed to catch up briefly with the Hunt group. Crooks’s men, however, were still on the opposite riverbank. “[H]overing like spectres of famine,” as Irving, who inter- viewed eyewitnesses to the incident, put it. Crooks ordered a bullboat constructed immediately and sent a supply of horse meat across the river to his men. Everyone in the starving party received the meat eagerly, but one of the voyageurs in the Crooks group, Jean Baptiste Prevost, had become frantic with hunger. He demanded to be ferried across the river immediately to the Hunt group, saying death was certain on his side. Prevost forced his way aboard the returning bullboat. As it approached the shore where Hunt’s party roasted hunks of horse meat over fires, Prevost leapt up in the bullboat, clapped his hands in delight, and according to Irving’s account, which possibly came from Crooks himself, capsized the fragile craft. The boat’s steersman, Pierre Delaunay, barely saved himself. Prevost did not.

“The poor wretch,” wrote Irving, “was swept away by the current and drowned. . . .”

It was the Overland Party’s second death.

For the next four days, the two parties continued to struggle upriver on opposite banks. It snowed. The temperature plummeted. Hissing rafts of ice congealed on the surface of the Mad River. Exhausted, hungry, chilled, they finally stumbled out of the mountain gorge and onto the broad lava plain on December 16. They camped that night at a tributary stream they had forded on November 26.

“Thus for twenty days,” lamented Hunt in his journal, “we had worn ourselves out futilely trying to find a passage along the lower part of this river.”

They had reached the Shoshone villages, which offered them some temporary safety.Ěý Hunt asked the Shoshone many times, communicating with difficulty through Dorion, who was part Sioux, and various language barriers, how to get to the Columbia, or “Big River,” as it was known to Native Americans.

They told him that it was seventeen to twenty-one nights along the trail to reach a village of the Sciatoga tribe near the Big River. By now Hunt had learned that without a Shoshone guide he probably would never reach the Sciatoga village. White explorers in North America both before and after him would learn the same basic lesson.Ěý

“I offered a gun, some pistols, a horse, etc., to whoever would serve me as a guide.”

No one accepted the post.

“They all replied that we would freeze to death and pleaded with me to remain with them during the winter.”

Hunt grew desperate. He combed the Shoshone camp searching for a willing guide.

“I went to every tepee along the river banks, but without success. I could not get along without one, for that meant running the risk that we would all die. But to remain in this place would be still worse, after having come so far and at such great cost.”

Yet for all his strengths and failings, Hunt remained an astute reader of human character. Though he’d always been well mannered and unfailingly polite—“a gentleman of the mildest disposition” was how Bradbury, the botanist, had described him—Hunt now deliberately and forcefully changed his diplomatic tone. In order to hire a guide, rather than appealing to their desire for possessions, he played to their sense of pride.Ěý

“I ended by telling the Indians that they spoke with forked tongues, that they were lying to me. I accused them of being women; in short, I challenged them with whatever expressions would goad them most.”

And it worked.

“At last,” he wrote, “one of them found courage enough to volunteer to be our guide as far as the village of the Sciatogas.”

From the book by Peter Stark, to be published in March 2014 by Ecco. Copyright © 2014 by Peter Stark.

The post ASTORIA: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

Risk is a large part of what attracts us to adventure—but it’s worth taking a look at how it can all go wrong. We bring you the science behind 10 of the most terrifying, laughable, and painful ways to die this summer.

Peter Stark’s book Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival will be published in March 2014 by Ecco.

Ways to Die in the Wild: Falling

There is no time to feel fearĚýreally. Within a few hundredths of a second of buttering off the hold, your “startle reflex” kicks in. Your arms fly outward as if to grab something, but there is nothing to grab. You’ve been free-soloing—climbing without a rope or a partner to catch your fall. What were you thinking? You might ask yourself that, but it’s too late. Gravity accelerates your body. You plummet 30 feet—the equivalent of a three-story building—in 1.4 seconds, the time it takes to say, “How are you this morning?”Ěý

Crack!ĚýYour right leg strikes a projection from the wall and you tumble another 20 feet before landing on a granite ledge. The valley is still a hundred feet below.

You try to breathe,Ěýbut the force of the fall has compressed your diaphragm, pushing the air out of your lungs. You manage a short spasmodic gasp, then another. A wave of nausea wells up from your gut and you vomit your breakfast in a long arc over the ledge. Your body instinctively knows that it must rally its defenses after such a severe blow. Digesting food would sap too much energy.

You notice something—a stick, it looks like—protruding from the stretchy nylon of your climbing pants. You look more closely. It’s your right femur, shattered in an open fracture, blood oozing from the torn flesh of your thigh. Oddly, it doesn’t hurt—not much, or rather, not yet. Your body blocks the pain by plugging the nerve endings with endorphins. Meanwhile, you are also experiencing what emergency-room doctors call “the golden hour,” the immediate aftermath of a trauma, when the human body can more or less hold itself together and maintain blood pressure despite bleeding. You feel a dull ache in your trunk. When you hit the ledge, you not only broke the ninth through twelfth ribs on your left side, but you split open your spleen, the fist-size organ to the left of the abdomen that filters blood. Your blood supply is now slowly leaking into your abdominal cavity.

You punch 911 into your cell phone, but the signal is blocked by the canyon wall. When a hunter spots your body several years later, the bones of your fingers will still be wrapped around the phone’s weathered plastic casing.

Ways to Die in the Wild: Cassowary Bird

Twilight falls on northeastern Australia. Beer in hand and with the warm glow of the campfire illuminating the surrounding foliage, you spot a dart of blue through the green and hear a low-pitched boom—too deep to be a bird, too high to be thunder.

Curious and a bit tipsy, you venture forth to explore. Meeting you eye-to-eye is a 6-foot-tall, 129-pound bird. Your eyes quickly scan the beast but miss the 5-inch dagger-like claw on its middle toe. The bird looks tame, but it has repeatedly been fed by people and is now expecting the same from you.

You know not to feed the wildlife, but you toss a beer can its way. When the bird doesn’t move, you move forward and make a fake charge for the (drunken) hell of it. The creature cocks its head and you think it’s finally going for the brew. But instead it lunges toward you. Suddenly, you’re one of the 221 recorded victims of a cassowary attack. You laugh and turn to run, thinking the modern-day velociraptor will be easily distanced. You’re wrong. The cassowary tops out at 31 mph and easily keeps pace with your drunken amble.Ěý

The bird kicks and you stumble across a log. In a flash, it leaps nearly five feet into the air, landing beside your neck. You cover your face in fear as the cassowary nears. With one powerful kick, it opens a half-inch gash, nicking your carotid artery.

Hearing your screams, a nearby camper comes to your aid, shooing off the bird. Within seconds of his arrival and eight minutes after the gash was formed, you slip into unconsciousness. The camper tries to staunch the flow of blood, but it’s no use. You’re the second person since 1926 to die by cassowary.

Ways to Die in the Wild: Heat Stroke

BODY TEMPERATURE: 101 DEGREESĚýFahrenheit. Never mind that the air temperature is way too hot for hill climbing (92 degrees and rising). If you reach the top of the pass, you’ve won!

102 DEGREES.ĚýWith each powerful downstroke of your pedals, your core temperature climbs a tiny fraction of a degree. You’ve entered the “fever of exercise” zone between 100 and 105 degrees—temperatures that trained athletes endure without harm.

103 DEGREES.ĚýEvery nine seconds, each of your two million sweat glands squirts a drop of moisture through a pore, then recharges. Without the cooling mechanism of sweat, at the fierce pace you’re riding, your body temperature would rise 0.9 degrees every minute and you’d reach heatstroke range within 12 minutes.

104 DEGREES.ĚýThe road steepens. You stand on your pedals. Painful knots form in your biceps, calves, and abdominal muscles—heat cramps, believed to be the result of sweating out so much sodium. Though your heart pounds, it can’t keep your veins and arteries filled to capacity; they’ve dilated to their maximum to bring hot blood from your overheated core to your sweat-cooled exterior. Lacking pressure, blood flow to your brain slackens. Your vision turns fuzzy.

105 DEGREES.ĚýYou begin to hallucinate. The searing pain in your thighs suddenly eases. The finish line is just ahead. You know victory is yours but for some reason no one is there waiting. You veer off the road and tumble down an embankment. Everything goes black.

106 DEGREES.ĚýLying unconscious, you suffer a heatstroke. Your cellular metabolic rate—how fast your cells turn fuels into energy—accelerates. Metabolism is now occurring more than 50 percent faster than at normal temperatures. Your body is literally cooking itself from within.

107 DEGREES.ĚýYou vomit repeatedly, and your sphincter releases.

109 DEGREES.ĚýSeizures ripple through your muscles.

110 TO 113 DEGREES.ĚýMitochondria and cellular proteins dissolve. Your heart and lungs start to hemorrhage. Blood coagulates in your veins. Heat damages your liver, kidneys, and brain and perforates your intestinal wall. Toxins emitted by spent digestive bacteria now escape into your bloodstream, perhaps triggering septic shock. Your heart stops.

THEY FIND YOU THAT EVENING,Ěýlong after the race has ended. They can’t locate a pulse, but your lifeless body is still warm to the touch.

Ways to Die in the Wild: Bears

It’s another serene evening in the Sierra Nevada as you watch the sun set into the granite realms surrounding your cabin’s porch. The distant rumble of thunder seems out of place until you look to your left and see a massive black bear charging toward you with a thread of drool hanging from its mouth.

You know fatal black bear attacks are extremely rare—they kill an average of two people per year—so you hesitate. But this is a lone male, hungry, and suffering from food stress*. He smells the trash outside your cabin, and now he’s hunting you.

You leap up and run inside to what you assume is the safety of the log cabin. A minute later the animal smashes through the window, a determined scowl on its ugly mug. Banging pots and pans together to no avail, you retreat to the back room. Ordinarily, the bear would flee. But today, he follows.Ěý

It hits you in the shoulder with a powerful shot, sending you to the floor. Holding you down with its paws, the bruin begins scalping you with its front teeth. You hear it chipping away at your skull as pain sets your nerves on fire. In a desperate attempt to fight the animal off, you roll over on to your back—exposing your throat. The bear bites down. Ěý

The next day wildlife authorities shoot the animal as it attempts to break into another house. They find human remains in its stomach.Ěý

*Fatal black bear attacks are incredibly rare, but they do happen. A that male bears commit 92 percent of the attacks and are often influenced by a lack of food and the availability of human food or garbage.

Ways to Die in the Wild: Drowning

0 MINUTES, 3 SECONDS.ĚýOh, shit! That’s your only thought as your kayak wheels upside down through the air over the huge boulder that sits midstream in the river, creating an enormous hole. You manage to suck in one big breath—five liters of air before going under. Since air is made up of four-fifths nitrogen and one-fifth oxygen, this gives you one precious liter of oxygen trapped in your lungs. Plunging headfirst into the hole, you’re instantly ripped out of the kayak. The cold water slapping your face triggers your mammalian “diving response”: Your heart rate drops and your veins and arteries constrict to channel the oxygenated blood to your brain and organs instead of to your limbs.Ěý

0 MINUTES, 12 SECONDS, 825 MILLILITERS OF OXYGEN REMAINING. The average human can hold his or her breath for about 90 seconds before blacking out. Already, you can feel the strain in your lungs. Sensors in your brain are “tasting” the buildup of carbon dioxide in your blood and signaling your lungs to exhale.

0 MINUTES, 37 SECONDS. Your blood, normally a rich, oxygenated red, is turning blue. Dimly, you feel your arms and legs burn from the buildup of lactic acid caused by oxygen deprivation. Your head breaks the surface of the water and you let out a great sigh of carbon dioxide. Just as you start to take a breath, the hole pulls you back under. You gag, your larynx in spasms as it reflexively closes to keep water out of your lungs.

1 MINUTE, 23 SECONDS, 220 MILLILITERS OF OXYGEN REMAINING. You lose consciousness. The water you inhaled has washed out the surfactant—a protein coating—that keeps your lungs’ air sacs from collapsing. If rescued now, you could die a few hours later of “secondary drowning” as your damaged lungs fill with fluid.

4 MINUTES, 21 SECONDS.ĚýYour feeble heartbeat pushes some residual oxygen to your brain. On dry land, brain damage begins roughly four minutes after breathing has stopped; after ten minutes there is almost zero chance of recovery. These times can decrease when the victim is underwater, particularly in cold water.

19 MINUTES, 36 SECONDS.ĚýExcept for the faintest electrical impulses, your brain has stopped functioning. Your body normally would sink, then rise to the surface as it filled with gases during decomposition. With the life jacket still on, it gently spins into an eddy a half a mile downstream.

Ways to Die in the Wild: Blue Ringed Octopus

Within a few seconds of pulling the octopus from the water, it changes color, displaying a set of blue rings. And when you go to drop it back into the ocean, you notice a dot of blood on your hand. You hadn’t even felt the bite.

There are no fangs, no sting. But you’ve been bitten by a blue ringed octopus, and the neurotoxin tetrodotoxin—10,000 times more toxic than cyanide—was injected 5mm deep into the skin, and is making its way through your body. Within minutes, your mouth goes dry. Soon after, your face and tongue go numb. It reminds you of the time you tasted fugu until you loose the ability to speak and walking becomes impossible.

Your girlfriend calls for an ambulance after you collapse, but you remain conscious as the toxin causes total body paralysis. Paramedics place you on your side to prevent you from choking on your own vomit, but they’re at a loss of what else to do—and you’re unable to tell them your suspicions about the octopus.

Fifteen minutes after being bitten, the muscles responsible for breathing are paralyzed. As you slip into unconsciousness, your heart continues beating—until asphyxia sets in.Ěý

Ways to Die in the Wild: Sea Snail

The beach is littered with shells, but your eye alights on a cone-shaped snail with alternatingĚý beige and rust tiles. You scoop down to pick it up, placing it in your pocket. Almost immediately, you suffer an intense pain in your right leg and an immediate shortness of breath.

You figure one of the shells must have rubbed your leg the wrong way, so you dump them out and continue walking back to camp. As you head back to your tent, your walking becomes labored. Your right leg has gone numb. Concerned, you pull up your shorts and notice a tiny mark that looks something like a bee sting.Ěý

Fifteen minutes after the snail harpooned a lethal mixture of more than six peptides into your body, you develop a severe headache. Your right leg continues to swell, so you pop an aspirin for the pain and waddle over to the communal fire. Soon, you begin vomiting. With your appetite gone, you limp back to your own tent.

Your speech slurs—not that there’s anyone to hear you—as paralysis sets in. The snail’s venom blocks calcium and sodium channels in your central nervous system, leading to paralysis.Ěý

When a concerned friend comes to check in on you in the morning, he finds your face covered in vomit. There is no pulse.Ěý

Ways to Die in the Wild: Bees

It starts as an indistinct hum. You reach for the next hold, ignoring the buzzing in your ears when you feel a pinprick on your right thumb. Confused and alarmed, you look up to see a beehive.Ěý

The first few pinpricks don’t really endanger you—you’re not allergic, you think. But they’ve sealed your fate. Each sting is accompanied by an alarm pheromone that smells vaguely like bananas and sends the hive of bees into a defensive frenzy.

The bees begin to pour out of the hive. They sting every inch of your body, but seem particularly drawn to your head and neck—areas of high vasculature. Fighting to swat them away, you swallow a fistful of the bees, which proceed to sting the inside of your throat.

Your friend belays you down safely, but you’re covered in over a thousand stings. The human lethal dose for honey bee stings is estimated to be between 500 to 1200 stings, if you receive medical care. Off the cliff, you begin to vomit and suffer from diarrhea and incontinence, but your friends help you to the trailhead where paramedics take you to the hospital.

A day later, you’re released from the hospital in good spirits. Unbeknownst to you or your inexperienced doctors, you’ll be dead by the end of the week. Proteins in the venom are dissolving blood cells and muscle tissue, releasing debris. As the debris accumulates, your kidneys become clogged, your begin to experience renal failure. Two days later, you’re back in the hospital and die before doctors can begin dialysis.

Ways to Die in the Wild: Pinecones

You don’t know it, but something peculiarly sinister waits in the branches above. A 22-pound cannon ball breaks from its branch and and hurtles toward your head as your stroll underneath the ancient bunya pine.

The giant pinecone, falling from a limb 90 feet off the ground and accelerating at a speed of 32 feet per second, will land with the force of a bowling ball dropped from a nine-story building.

You hear a crash above you and look up just in time to see the spiny, green aerodynamic object plummeting toward your face. If you’re not wearing a hard hat, it’s lights out.Ěý

Ways to Die in the Wild: Beaver

The beaver pond looks so inviting. With temperatures hovering around 90 degrees, you decide to go for a quick dip after a long hike.Ěý

You’re swimming back to shore when searing pain courses up from your ankle to your thigh. Your right leg dangles uselessly as you flail helplessly in the shallow water.Ěý Clawing your way through a slimly growth of algae, you manage to limp on to the beach.

As you drag yourself from the water, you see a thick ribbon of red trailing back into the pond. Blood streams from your lower leg as you dial 911 with shaky fingers on the cell phone left among your belongings.Ěý

You never see the aquatic culprit, a fiercely territorial rodent with powerful jaws capable of felling a 3-foot-wide tree. By the time the medics arrive on scene, you’ve bled to death from a severed artery and a torn Achilles tendon.

The post The 10 Worst Ways to Die in the Wild appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

Risk is a large part of what attracts us to adventure—but it’s worth taking a look at how it can all go wrong. We bring you the science behind 10 of the most terrifying, laughable, painful, and worst ways to die outside.

Falling to Your Death

There is no time to feel fearĚýreally. Within a few hundredths of a second of buttering off the hold, your “startle reflex” kicks in. Your arms fly outward as if to grab something, but there is nothing to grab. You’ve been free-soloing—climbing without a rope or a partner to catch your fall.ĚýWhat were you thinking?ĚýYou might ask yourself that, but it’s too late. Gravity accelerates your body. You plummet 30 feet—the equivalent of a three-story building—in 1.4 seconds, the time it takes to say, “How are you this morning?”

Crack!ĚýYour right leg strikes a projection from the wall and you tumble another 20 feet before landing on a granite ledge. The valley is still a hundred feet below.

You try to breathe,Ěýbut the force of the fall has compressed your diaphragm, pushing the air out of your lungs. You manage a short spasmodic gasp, then another. A wave of nausea wells up from your gut and you vomit your breakfast in a long arc over the ledge. Your body instinctively knows that it must rally its defenses after such a severe blow. Digesting food would sap too much energy.

You notice something—a stick, it looks like—protruding from the stretchy nylon of your climbing pants. You look more closely. It’s your right femur, shattered in an open fracture, blood oozing from the torn flesh of your thigh. Oddly, it doesn’t hurt—not much, or rather, not yet. Your body blocks the pain by plugging the nerve endings with endorphins. Meanwhile, you are also experiencing what emergency-room doctors call “the golden hour,” the immediate aftermath of a trauma, when the human body can more or less hold itself together and maintain blood pressure despite bleeding. You feel a dull ache in your trunk. When you hit the ledge, you not only broke the ninth through twelfth ribs on your left side, but you split open your spleen, the fist-size organ to the left of the abdomen that filters blood. Your blood supply is now slowly leaking into your abdominal cavity.

You punch 911 into your cell phone, but the signal is blocked by the canyon wall. When a hunter spots your body several years later, the bones of your fingers will still be wrapped around the phone’s weathered plastic casing.

Death by Cassowary Bird

Twilight falls on northeastern Australia. Beer in hand and with the warm glow of the campfire illuminating the surrounding foliage, you spot a dart of blue through the green and hear a low-pitched boom—too deep to be a bird, too high to be thunder.

Curious and a bit tipsy, you venture forth to explore. Meeting you eye-to-eye is a 6-foot-tall, 129-pound bird. Your eyes quickly scan the beast but miss the 5-inch dagger-like claw on its middle toe. The bird looks tame, but it has repeatedly been fed by people and is now expecting the same from you.

You know not to feed the wildlife, but you toss a beer can its way. When the bird doesn’t move, you move forward and make a fake charge for the (drunken) hell of it. The creature cocks its head and you think it’s finally going for the brew. But instead it lunges toward you. Suddenly, you’re one of the 221 recorded victims of a cassowary attack. You laugh and turn to run, thinking the modern-dayĚývelociraptorĚýwill be easily distanced. You’re wrong. The cassowary tops out at 31 mph and easily keeps pace with your drunken amble.

The bird kicks and you stumble across a log. In a flash, it leaps nearly five feet into the air, landing beside your neck. You cover your face in fear as the cassowary nears. With one powerful kick, it opens a half-inch gash, nicking your carotid artery.

Hearing your screams, a nearby camper comes to your aid, shooing off the bird. Within seconds of his arrival and eight minutes after the gash was formed, you slip into unconsciousness. The camper tries to staunch the flow of blood, but it’s no use. You’re the second person since 1926 to die by cassowary.

Heat Stroke

Body Temperature: 101 Degrees Fahrenheit:ĚýNever mind that the air temperature is way too hot for hill climbing (92 degrees and rising). If you reach the top of the pass, you’ve won!

102 Degrees:ĚýWith each powerfulĚýdownstrokeĚýof your pedals, your core temperature climbs a tiny fraction of a degree. You’ve entered the “fever of exercise” zone between 100 and 105 degrees—temperatures that trained athletes endure without harm.

103 Degrees:ĚýEvery nine seconds, each of your two million sweat glands squirts a drop of moisture through a pore, then recharges. Without the cooling mechanism of sweat, at the fierce pace you’re riding, your body temperature would rise 0.9 degrees every minute and you’d reach heatstroke range within 12 minutes.

104 Degrees:ĚýThe road steepens. You stand on your pedals. Painful knots form in your biceps, calves, and abdominal muscles—heat cramps, believed to be the result of sweating out so much sodium. Though your heart pounds, it can’t keep your veins and arteries filled to capacity; they’ve dilated to their maximum to bring hot blood from your overheated core to your sweat-cooled exterior. Lacking pressure, blood flow to your brain slackens. Your vision turns fuzzy.

105 Degrees:ĚýYou begin to hallucinate. The searing pain in your thighs suddenly eases. The finish line is just ahead. You know victory is yours but for some reason no one is there waiting. You veer off the road and tumble down an embankment. Everything goes black.

106 Degrees:ĚýLying unconscious, you suffer a heatstroke. Your cellular metabolic rate—how fast your cells turn fuels into energy—accelerates. Metabolism is now occurring more than 50 percent faster than at normal temperatures. Your body is literally cooking itself from within.

107 Degrees:ĚýYou vomit repeatedly, and your sphincter releases.

109 Degrees:ĚýSeizures ripple through your muscles.

110 to 113 Degrees:ĚýMitochondria and cellular proteins dissolve. Your heart and lungs start to hemorrhage. Blood coagulates in your veins. Heat damages your liver, kidneys, and brain and perforates your intestinal wall. Toxins emitted by spent digestive bacteria now escape into your bloodstream, perhaps triggering septic shock. Your heart stops.

They find you that evening,Ěýlong after the race has ended. They can’t locate a pulse, but your lifeless body is still warm to the touch.

Mauled by Bears

It’s another serene evening in the Sierra Nevada as you watch the sun set into the granite realms surrounding your cabin’s porch. The distant rumble of thunder seems out of place until you look to your left and see a massive black bear charging toward you with a thread of drool hanging from its mouth.

You know fatal black bear attacks are extremely rare—they kill an average of two people per year—so you hesitate. But this is a lone male, hungry, and suffering from food stress*. He smells the trash outside your cabin, and now he’s hunting you.

You leap up and run inside to what you assume is the safety of the log cabin. A minute later the animal smashes through the window, a determined scowl on its ugly mug. Banging pots and pans together to no avail, you retreat to the back room. Ordinarily, the bear would flee. But today, he follows.

It hits you in the shoulder with a powerful shot, sending you to the floor. Holding you down with its paws, the bruin begins scalping you with its front teeth. You hear it chipping away at your skull as pain sets your nerves on fire. In a desperate attempt to fight the animal off, you roll over on to your back—exposing your throat. The bear bites down.

The next day wildlife authorities shoot the animal as it attempts to break into another house. They find human remains in its stomach.

*ĚýFatal black bear attacks are incredibly rare, but they do happen. AĚýĚýthat male bears commit 92 percent of the attacks and are often influenced by a lack of food and the availability of human food or garbage.

Drowning

0 Minutes, 3 Seconds

Oh, shit! That’s your only thought as your kayak wheels upside down through the air over the huge boulder that sits midstream in the river, creating an enormous hole. You manage to suck in one big breath—five liters of air before going under. Since air is made up of four-fifths nitrogen and one-fifth oxygen, this gives you one precious liter of oxygen trapped in your lungs. Plunging headfirst into the hole, you’re instantly ripped out of the kayak. The cold water slapping your face triggers your mammalian “diving response”: Your heart rate drops and your veins and arteries constrict to channel the oxygenated blood to your brain and organs instead of to your limbs.

0 Minutes, 12 Seconds, 825 Milliliters of Oxygen Remaining

The average human can hold his or her breath for about 90 seconds before blacking out. Already, you can feel the strain in your lungs. Sensors in your brain are “tasting” the buildup of carbon dioxide in your blood and signaling your lungs to exhale.

0 Minute, 37 Seconds

Your blood, normally a rich, oxygenated red, is turning blue. Dimly, you feel your arms and legs burn from the buildup of lactic acid caused by oxygen deprivation. Your head breaks the surface of the water and you let out a great sigh of carbon dioxide. Just as you start to take a breath, the hole pulls you back under. You gag, your larynx in spasms as it reflexively closes to keep water out of your lungs.

1 Minute, 23 Seconds, 220 Milliliters of Oxygen Remaining

You lose consciousness. The water you inhaled has washed out the surfactant—a protein coating—that keeps your lungs’ air sacs from collapsing. If rescued now, you could die a few hours later of “secondary drowning” as your damaged lungs fill with fluid.

4 Minutes, 21 Seconds

Your feeble heartbeat pushes some residual oxygen to your brain. On dry land, brain damage begins roughly four minutes after breathing has stopped; after ten minutes there is almost zero chance of recovery. These times can decrease when the victim is underwater, particularly in cold water.

19 Minutes, 36 Seconds

Except for the faintest electrical impulses, your brain has stopped functioning. Your body normally would sink, then rise to the surface as it filled with gases during decomposition. With the life jacket still on, it gently spins into an eddy a half a mile downstream.

Poisoned by a Blue-Ringed Octopus

Within a few seconds of pulling the octopus from the water, it changes color, displaying a set of blue rings. And when you go to drop it back into the ocean, you notice a dot of blood on your hand. You hadn’t even felt the bite.

There are no fangs, no sting. But you’ve been bitten by a blue ringed octopus, and theĚýneurotoxinĚýtetrodotoxin—10,000 times more toxic than cyanide—was injected 5mm deep into the skin, and is making its way through your body. Within minutes, your mouth goes dry. Soon after, your face and tongue go numb. It reminds you of the time you tastedĚýfuguĚýuntil you lose the ability to speak and walking becomes impossible.

Your girlfriend calls for an ambulance after you collapse, but you remain conscious as the toxin causes total body paralysis. Paramedics place you on your side to prevent you from choking on your own vomit, but they’re at a loss of what else to do—and you’re unable to tell them your suspicions about the octopus.

Fifteen minutes after being bitten, the muscles responsible for breathing are paralyzed. As you slip into unconsciousness, your heart continues beating—until asphyxia sets in.

Poisoned by a Sea Snail

The beach is littered with shells, but your eye alights on a cone-shaped snail with alternatingĚý beige and rust tiles. You scoop down to pick it up, placing it in your pocket. Almost immediately, you suffer an intense pain in your right leg and an immediate shortness of breath.

You figure one of the shells must have rubbed your leg the wrong way, so you dump them out and continue walking back to camp. As you head back to your tent, your walking becomes labored. Your right leg has gone numb. Concerned, you pull up your shorts and notice a tiny mark that looks something like a bee sting.

Fifteen minutes after the snail harpooned a lethal mixture of more than six peptides into your body, you develop a severe headache. Your right leg continues to swell, so you pop an aspirin for the pain and waddle over to the communal fire. Soon, you begin vomiting. With your appetite gone, you limp back to your own tent.

Your speech slurs—not that there’s anyone to hear you—as paralysis sets in. The snail’s venom blocks calcium and sodium channels in your central nervous system, leading to paralysis.

When a concerned friend comes to check in on you in the morning, he finds your face covered in vomit. There is no pulse.

Stung to Death by Bees

It starts as an indistinct hum. You reach for the next hold, ignoring the buzzing in your ears when you feel a pinprick on your right thumb. Confused and alarmed, you look up to see a beehive.

The first few pinpricks don’t really endanger you—you’re not allergic, you think. But they’ve sealed your fate. Each sting is accompanied by an alarm pheromone that smells vaguely like bananas and sends the hive of bees into a defensive frenzy.

The bees begin to pour out of the hive. They sting every inch of your body, but seem particularly drawn to your head and neck—areas of highĚývasculature. Fighting to swat them away, you swallow a fistful of the bees, which proceed to sting the inside of your throat.

Your friend belays you down safely, but you’re covered in over a thousand stings. The human lethal dose for honey bee stings is estimated to be between 500 to 1200 stings, if you receive medical care. Off the cliff, you begin to vomit and suffer from diarrhea and incontinence, but your friends help you to the trailhead where paramedics take you to the hospital.

A day later, you’re released from the hospital in good spirits. Unbeknownst to you or your inexperienced doctors, you’ll be dead by the end of the week. Proteins in the venom are dissolving blood cells and muscle tissue, releasing debris. As the debris accumulates, your kidneys become clogged, your begin to experience renal failure. Two days later, you’re back in the hospital and die before doctors can begin dialysis.

Death by Pinecones

You don’t know it, but something peculiarly sinister waits in the branches above. A 22-pound cannon ball breaks from its branch and and hurtles toward your head as your stroll underneath the ancientĚýbunyaĚýpine.

The giant pinecone, falling from a limb 90 feet off the ground and accelerating at a speed of 32 feet per second, will land with the force of a bowling ball dropped from a nine-story building.

You hear a crash above you and look up just in time to see the spiny, green aerodynamic object plummeting toward your face. If you’re not wearing a hard hat, it’s lights out.

Killed by a Beaver

The beaver pond looks so inviting. With temperatures hovering around 90 degrees, you decide to go for a quick dip after a long hike.

You’re swimming back to shore when searing pain courses up from your ankle to your thigh. Your right leg dangles uselessly as you flail helplessly in the shallow water.Ěý Clawing your way through a slimly growth of algae, you manage to limp on to the beach.

As you drag yourself from the water, you see a thick ribbon of red trailing back into the pond. Blood streams from your lower leg as you dial 911 with shaky fingers on the cell phone left among your belongings.

You never see the aquatic culprit, a fiercely territorial rodent with powerful jaws capable of felling a 3-foot-wide tree. By the time the medics arrive on scene, you’ve bled to death from a severed artery and a torn Achilles tendon.

The post The 10 Worst Ways to Die in the Wild appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.