If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that a global panic disrupts supply chains and creates scarcity. Many grocery stores issued buying limits on certain food items, prices skyrocketed, and store shelves thinned out. Realizations of just how dependent ...
Survive
6 Crazy Facts About the Man-Eating Lions of Tsavo
The sounds of drilling and blasting amid the big rock cliffs over the Tsavo River for the Kenya-Uganda Railroad didn’t scare off the big cats of Africa — it did just the opposite. At night when the bridge construction stopped, and the laborers ...
Survival Garden 102: Starting Seeds Indoors
Assume an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, was to hit. Would you be able to provide food for your loved ones? Do you know how to take one seed and turn it into hundreds to ensure a food supply for years to come? Harvesting seeds and starting seeds ...
Know Every Plant: A Cool and Useful Flora Identification Smartphone App
Sometimes the Instagram ads really nail you. No, I’m not talking about the cheap Made-in-China adult onesie it tried to sell me or the arthritis pain gel that got Paula Abdul dancing again. (How old do you think I am, IG?) But in my case, the ’Borg ...
Survival Garden 101: Why You Need To Plan Before Planting
Free Range American celebrates self-reliance and self-sufficiency, and a survival garden is one essential part of that lifestyle. This growing season, we’re rolling out step-by-step directions taking you through the planting process while removing ...
The critical importance of being uncomfortable
For three days I averaged only a few miserable hours of sleep a night while camped out on the prairie. I alternated time between trying to get comfortable on my thin and far-too-narrow sleeping mat, scratching dozens of fresh mosquito bites, and ...
Superfoods: How to Make Bone Broth
Endurance athletes have long known the power of salty, high-protein, high-fat bone broth for in-event energy and post-exercise recovery. Health food companies have caught on, too, with a litany of frozen broths and powder concentrates available now ...
How To Stay Safe in Bear Country
Like most wild animals, bears have an innate and healthy fear of humans. If you’ve ever hiked through the Appalachian Mountains, the Northern Rockies, or the Alaskan bush, odds are you crossed paths with wild bears but never knew it. Bear attacks are ...
5 Winter Survival Tips You Need to Know, According to the Boy Scouts
When the days grow cold and short, a lot of people use that as an excuse to stay indoors. But with a little bit of preparation and forethought, you can hike and backpack all through the winter without an issue. The Boy Scouts of America keep a ...
6 Ways to Beat Cabin Fever This Winter
This can be a hard time of year. The holidays are over, and we’re ready for spring — but it’s still winter. For many people that means not leaving the house, or the couch, until the middle of March. But let's face it, there are only so many shows you ...
Mountaineering Hacks: Popping Viagra and Teetotaling on Top of the World
High-altitude mountaineering is a miserable endeavor. In the rarefied air of the world’s highest peaks, there’s simply not enough oxygen for the body to function normally. At great height, however, our genes kickstart a whole host of corporeal ...
Survival Knife: Understanding Blades
There is no such thing as a survival knife. Knives have been called that and have been marketed that way — as some kind of magical tool that will save your ass in some unlikely situation. But that idea is inherently flawed. Sure, some ...
Climbing Movies: The Best and Worst of All Time
Ascending mountains and battling the forces of nature just to say “I did it” is the stuff of high drama, of big suspense. Thing is, a lot of climbing movies about real and fictional events are plain awful. Most of them aren’t great. But there are a ...
6 Reasons America’s First Daredevil Is a Dude Worth Remembering
Long before Evel Knievel, Travis Pastrana, or Smagical, Sam Patch was launching off Niagara Falls for money, wowing crowds, and, notably, not dying in the process. America’s first daredevil was the original extreme sports badass — and here are six ...
Hellespont: I Swam from Europe to Asia and Earned My Survival
I stopped swimming to poke my head above the waves and figure out where I was. While treading water, I met a chilling sight — nothing. Through the spray of the 30-knot winds coming off the water, I could barely make out a cell phone tower on the ...
The Real Hugh Glass Versus What We Saw in ‘The Revenant’
When The Revenant came out in 2015, it made a big splash for a few reasons. The film’s star Leonardo DiCaprio earned a best actor Oscar for his depiction of a legendary mountain man: the real Hugh Glass. The bear-attack scene made headlines, too. But ...
A Conversation with ‘Professional Caveman’ Donny Dust
This story originally ran on Oct. 15, 2020 on The Ultimate Predator. Even the most experienced, seasoned hunters get a chill when imagining themselves stripped of their gear, alone in the wilderness. It’s a pretty extraordinary thing, then, to ...
The 10 Best Holiday Adventure Movies We All Need to Learn From
There’s just something about holiday movies. They’re like holiday music. After about 10 minutes, you’ve had enough for the whole year already and you have a weird urge to shove that candy cane you’ve licked into a sharp point right into your ear. ...
Survival Movies: 10 of the Best Ever Made
Throughout history, humankind has chronicled gut-wrenching tales of heroic survival. We humans understandably have a fascination and obsession with staying alive. For these reasons and more, there is something wholesomely satisfying about survival ...
Wilderness Movies: 10 of the Best Ever Made
The wilderness can be one of man’s greatest allies or his biggest enemy. It can be a refuge for those seeking a greater purpose in life or a hellacious landscape that proves to be unconquerable for those unprepared for the rigors of the great beyond. ...
10 of the Best Adventure Movies Ever Made
Good adventure movies have a few necessary ingredients. You need a protagonist, or a group of them. There also has to be a mission — a goal, a reason for setting out. Then there’s the journey. It can be a literal journey — into space, up a river, or ...
Outdoor Movies: The 10 Films NOT to Watch Before an Outdoor Adventure
When preparing for an adventure outdoors, it’s important to have your gear squared away — and your head squared away, too. To that point, here are the top 10 outdoor movies you want to avoid at all costs before a big trip into the wild. These films ...
5 Classic Books You Should Read While Sheltering in Place
For many people, their exposure to classic literature has been limited to what was shoved in front of them during high school or college. Some of you may have soaked up these novels at the time, but a lot of us breezed through them without taking the ...
Coronapocalypse: 10 Ways to Survive Working From Home
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread, more and more U.S. employees are being volun-told to stay home. For some, that means no work — and no paycheck. For others, that means clocking their hours at the homestead. But “social distancing” from ...
4 Off-Grid Water Sterilization Methods for the Backcountry
When it comes to going off the grid, whether it’s backpacking, hunting, or fishing, water is a basic need. One can survive for weeks without food but only days without water. Unfortunately, humans are not equipped to drink water from natural sources ...
3 of the Best Winter Snowshoe Adventures
Floating across the frozen backcountry on snowshoes is a unique way to see the wilderness. But finding a place to go out and enjoy the snow can be hard. A good summer hiking trail may not be a good snowshoe hike, but areas that are hard to access in ...
Surviving Pastranaland: A Day in the Life of America’s Premier Daredevil
It’s not that the backyard pool was remarkable in and of itself. Rather, it was the people swimming in it. Most of them had visible scars, some of them had fresh wounds that would eventually turn into scars, and one was even ...
I Survived a Mexican Ambush in a Van Named Falcor
Have you ever fucked up so bad that time stops, giving some great ethereal fist the opportunity to slip past your teeth, punch down your throat, and choke stop the conversion of oxygen in your lungs’ alveoli? That’s how bad I messed up on my first ...
