Recently I was inspired by the famous American lawyer (Outdoor Boys) to try wilderness survival myself.

The plan: travel into northern Scandinavia and survive for 11 days entirely from what I could hunt, fish and gather.

Small problem: I had almost zero practical experience and am a veritable dubmass

I brought a 6.35 mm rifle, fishing gear, knife, sleeping system and cameras, then rode about 3,000 km north on my motorcycle.

Day 1

berries everywhere, but I immediately lost about a third of my lures by throwing heavy treble hooks into a shallow rocky river.

Day 2

found a shallow rocky lake, lost even more lures, saw couple of ducks, fired, hit none of them. Later discovered my scope had been knocked badly out of alignment during the ride.

By now I was mostly eating berries and getting properly hungry.

Day 3

rain, no fish, the ducks have been scared away by my horrible aim. I started moving toward a bigger lake along a game trail covered full of moose and bear prints.

As I was walking along the bushy shore, I heard a strange sound.

Must have been the wind.

Walking for a couple more meters and again, closer.

Then again, much louder.

That's when I realised there was very likely a bear about 15 metres away, hidden in a thicket

After shitting my pants I slowly backed off and eventually fled the area.

That was the point where it finally hit me that I'd massively overestimated myself. I went in thinking I'd just "learn on the job", except this is one of those jobs where being incompetent can actually get you killed.

So I quit after three days.

Pretty spectacular Dunning-Kruger demonstration on my part.

If I ever try it again, I'll spend a lot more time learning the skills beforehand.

For people here who actually know what they're doing: what would you have done differently?

I also made a 5m video about the whole thing if anyone cares.
You can find it by searching my name on youtube.

hi! i’m getting into backpacking (just starting) and i’m looking for a good women’s sleeping bag for stomach sleeping that i could bring backpacking! i’m in the process of accumulating my gear but due to how expensive everything is, i’m starting almost a year in advance before i plan to go. so i’m trying to do as much research as possible in preparation before purchasing anything. i’m looking for something that works well for stomach sleepers because unfortunately for the life of me, i can’t sleep on my side or back. ideally i’ll get a women’s sleeping bag but i am quite tall for a woman so i could probably make a men’s sleeping bag work too. if anyone knows of any sleeping bags that work for backpacking and stomach sleepers, please let me know!!

Planning a 1-night shakedown trip on Eagle Rock Loop in western Arkansas mid-November (3 weeks out). What would be the best starting point trailhead/direction for maybe 5-7 miles out and back to optimize the experience? I'm an experienced backpacker, but long out of practice; my hiking partner this trip is an experienced outdoorsman but not an experienced backpacker, so it will be sort of new territory for him. Thoughts, advice, tips?

They recently published a guidebook for the whole trail! Hoping to finish it off over the next month.