A man found dead in a remote mountain hut was an adventurer who had planned a year-long Bear Grylls-style survival challenge in the Scottish wilderness. David Austin, 29, from Derby, was found dead in a 'bothy' by a track worker near Corrour, a remote railway station in Highland Perthshire, on December 31 at 9.50am. His body is believed to have been lying there for several weeks when it was discovered. A post-mortem found there were no suspicious circumstances behind his death, which is understood to have been as a result of hypothermia.
Remember that scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Han Solo and Luke Skywalker are trapped on Hoth, so Han uses Luke's lightsaber to cut open a dead Tauntaun and hollow out the body cavity to use as an overnight shelter from the freezing temperatures? If not, see below...and since it's kind of a sin to have never seen Empire, you get the dubbed version.
In recent news, a pair of Canadian moose hunters trapped overnight in the freezing wilderness didn't follow the script to the letter, but they came pretty darn close.
From this story on cbcnews.com: A western Newfoundland couple used the hide of a freshly killed moose overnight Tuesday to keep warm after getting lost in the woods during a hunting trip near Gros Morne National Park. Stephen and Sheila Joyce said they lost their way after wounding a young moose and began following the trail of its blood. Shivering and soaking wet, they eventually caught up with the wounded animal.
Charging wildlife isn’t the first thing on a mountain biker’s mind in the heat of a race, but the animals don’t know that.
Evan van der Spuy was racing in the 38 km Time Freight MTB Express mountain bike race at Albert Falls Dam, 20km outside the city of Pietermaritzburg in Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa for Team Jeep South Africa over the weekend.
His teammate, Travis Walker, was in third place with a GoPro camera mounted on his bike, and captured this amazing footage below of Evan, who was in second place until this red hartebeest (a member of the antelope family) had something to say about it.
Yes, the hit was as hard as it looks. Evan was stabilized with a neck brace and taken to the hospital for overnight observation. He sustained a minor concussion, whiplash and some bruising on his head where his helmet imploded on impact.
F&S spoke to Evan today to get his take on the events behind this video, which is rapidly going viral.
Evan said he is recovering well, and feels extremely lucky.
“Luckily I walked away with just a bit of whiplash and a concussion, considering what happened,” he says. “I saw the animal moving to cross the road in front of me, but when I saw how close it really was, I was shocked. Then, from the moment it hit me I was unconscious. I actually don’t know what happened from then.”
I’ll spare you the usual litany of reasons why the world as we know it is coming unglued. Needless to say, you should be shopping for the occasion, and if you’re looking for a good fixed-blade knife, here are two that are so similar in purpose and construction that I decided to review them together.
The Ranger Puuko is made in Finland, where it was designed as a survival knife by a Finnish officer named J.P. Peltonen. The original Ranger has a 6-inch blade, but people noticed that if you lopped an inch off that, it would make a dandy hunting knife. And so the Ranger Puuko you see here has a 5-inch drop-point blade made of forged tool steel hardened to Rc 58 and coated with Teflon, a 5-inch handle of hardened rubber, and a totally cool leather sheath with a safety liner and an internal rubber keeper that snaps down on the handle and holds it firmly in place.
It’s not a pretty knife, or a finely finished one. It’s meant to be used very hard. The blade is thick and strong, sharpens very easily to a blood-curdling edge, and holds that edge reasonably well. The price for the either the 5-inch-blade Ranger or the 6-inch is $169.50 from kellamknives.com.
The second knife is a brand new one from Cold Steel, and can best be described as a Ka-Bar on steroids (pictured below). It’s called the Leatherneck SF (for “Semper Fi”) and follows the general lines of the Ka-Bar, but with improvements. The 6 ¾-inch blade is made of a steel called SK-5, which is the Japanese equivalent of American 1080, a high-carbon tool steel. It’s hardened to Rc57-58 and came to me with an appallingly sharp edge and kept it extremely well. As with the Ranger, this blade will rust, and so it, too, is coated.
A Kenora area hunter is lucky to be alive after fighting off a bear attack, Sept. 26. The 48-year-old man was treated for puncture wounds to his arm, shoulder and neck at Lake of the Woods district hospital and released later the same afternoon. The bear was mortally wounded during the encounter and did not survive. A Ministry of Natural Resources official credits the man for taking action to save his life.
"It was a dangerous situation," affirmed MNR Lake of the Woods supervisor Leo Heyens. "He did all the right things. If he hadn't fired an arrow or fought back, yelling and making himself look big, it could have been more serious."
A tragic update from Montana: the Lincoln County Sherriff’s office says a hunter attacked by a bear last Friday after shooting it on the north Idaho-Montana border died of a gunshot wound, not from injuries inflicted by the 400-pound grizzly.
According to this story on IdahoStatesman.com, when Steve Stevenson of Nevada was attacked by the grizzly in the Buckhorn Mountain area, his hunting partner, Ty Bell, shot the bear several times in an effort to save Stevenson.
It is likely one of those shots passed through the bear and hit Stevenson in the chest, killing him, according to the Lincoln County Coroner, Steve Schnackenberg.
Steve Stevenson, 39, of Winnemucca, Nev., was attacked by the bear in the Buckhorn Mountain area of the North Idaho-Montana border last Friday.
Results from a Montana State Crime Lab autopsy released Friday showed Stevenson suffered one gunshot to his chest, officials from the Lincoln County Sheriff's Office said. Lincoln County Coroner Steve Schnackenberg, who viewed Stevenson's body before it was autopsied, told The Idaho Statesman he saw clear signs of the hunter having been attacked by the bear, including bites and scratch marks.
"We're pretty sure the bullet passed through the bear before it got to him," Schnackenberg said, declining to say why. "We're pretty sure of that."
A hunter determined to track down a deer got separated from his friends on Saturday morning in Trinity County, CA. He finally found his way back to his truck…after 86 hours.
From this AP story via mercurynews.com: Twenty-five-year-old Evan Cutting was hunting with a group of friends when he got separated from them while pursuing a deer around 11 a.m. Saturday.
Trinity County sheriff's deputies unsuccessfully searched for Cutting for two days, then suspended the search Monday night.
Sheriff's officials say Cutting somehow managed to return to his truck Tuesday night and called family and friends.
This week on The Gun Nuts, Eddie Nickens talks about trail guns, using my two .22 handguns as examples. As Eddie points out, .22's are fun and inexpensive to shoot and can be loaded with a wide range of ammo. Nevertheless, they may not fit the bill as everyone’s trail gun.
Early one chilly fall morning some 16 years ago, on the scout day for a weekend bonus deer archery hunt I had been drawn out on, I was stumbling my way along a game trail in far eastern Oklahoma when I stepped over--literally stepped over, with my family jewels open to immediate and easily-accessible fanged attack--a cold, curled-up timber rattler trying to warm itself up right in the middle of the trail. This brings up an interesting twist on an age-old philosophical question: If a grown man screams like a wee girl in the middle of the forest, and there's no one around to hear him, does he make a sound?
I'll let you be the judge of that, but when I saw this cool video of a large timber rattler swimming across a Kentucky lake, those nightsweats I thought I'd finally gotten over suddenly started up again...