The 3 toughest journeys in survival history

Every journey that comes as part of a survival situation can be tough, but for the majority of people who have to experience it, they usually make it out alive. Every now and then a story comes along like the tale of Aron Ralston who had a movie made about his experience called “127 Hours”. Even though he had to cut off his own arm to escape being trapped, it’s still a long way off from the extreme stories of impossible travels that were somehow survived by the people involved. Here are the 3 toughest journeys in survival history.

Hugh Glass

Crawled 200 miles in a state close to death

In 1823, an advert was sent out for people to join a fur trapping expedition on the upper Mississippi River, and Hugh Glass decided to answer the call. An experienced frontiersman and fur trader, Glass had previously been involved in an ambush by the Arikara tribe shortly before he was supposed to start the expedition and was apparently shot in the leg, though this didn’t stop him from reaching the meeting point of Fort Kiowa to wait for the rest of the party.

It was going to be a few days before everyone was ready to leave, so Glass and a few others went on a hunting trip deep in the woods to gather meat for the journey. While sneaking through the trees, Glass came across a mother grizzly bear and startled her, causing her to charge and attack. After a very nasty fight, Glass managed to kill the bear with his knife but was in a state that caused the rest of the party to think he was already dead when they finally made it to him. They skinned the bear and draped the hide over Glass’s body before taking all his things and heading back. When Glass woke up, he found himself alone and with festering wounds and broken bones. He made a splint out of wood, reset his leg back into place, and was able to find some maggots to put into his wounds to eat the dead flesh and stop gangrene from setting in. He then proceeded to crawl and limp for almost 200 miles back to safety, where he met his very surprised party members.

Ernest Shackleton

Over 1000 miles in frozen waters and sliding down a mountain

On September 8, 1914, a ship called the Endurance left England and headed south towards Buenos Aires in Argentina to begin a crossing of the continent of Antarctica. The plan was to sail to the coast below Argentina, walk across the mainland, and get picked up by another ship on the opposite side. Due to bad weather and large amounts of sea ice, the voyage from Argentina to the Antarctic coastline was very slow, with increasingly larger ice sheets causing them to wait for days at a time until they could sail through. On 19 January 1915, the Endurance because frozen in the middle of a huge ice sheet and was forced to move along with its flow. On the 24th of the next month, Shackleton ordered the conversion of the ship into a winter station after realizing they were going to be trapped until the following spring.

(The Endurance stuck in the ice a few days before it went under)

In late October, the pressure on the hull caused it to split open, and Shackleton ordered it to be abandoned and a camp set up on the ice. The ship took over a month until it finally went beneath the waves, which gave them enough time to retrieve enough supplies, but they were now stranded without any means of transportation on a slowly melting ice sheet. After camping on the ice for just over 2 months, Shackleton realized they were within reach of Paulet Island and ordered his men into the small wooden lifeboats they had. After traveling over 300 miles and getting blown off course during the voyage, they ended up on another speck of land called Elephant Island. Shackleton took the five strongest men and the best lifeboat and decided their best chance of survival was to make it to the south Georgia whaling stations 720 miles away, which could send a boat back to Elephant Island for the rest of his men. They made the journey but landed on the wrong side of the island to the whaling station in a boat too badly damaged to use. They had to walk the 36-mile trip across impossible terrain, during which they were forced to slide down the side of a mountain to avoid freezing to death in a blizzard. They made it to the whaling station and a ship eventually found his men, every single one of which was still alive.

Sławomir Rawicz

4000-mile walk through hostile terrain

Rawicz was an officer in the Polish army during the Second World War, and shortly after the joint German and Soviet invasion of Poland, he found himself in a Russian Gulag, a type of prison camp where the inmates were often worked to death. In April 1941, Rawicz realized he was going to die if he stayed there, so he came up with a plan to escape and was joined by six others. The Gulag was located in Siberia and there was no way he’d make it through Soviet territory back to Poland, so they decided to head south and try to reach India, where there was a strong British presence.

(Sławomir Rawicz – 1915 – 2004)

The group of seven was later joined by another Polish woman, and they headed south through the frozen lands of Siberia and across the Gobi Desert. During the crossing two of the group died but Rawicz didn’t mention how in the book he later wrote about the experience. After the desert crossing, they came to the Himalayas, the crossing took over a month and another two members of the group died. The remaining four eventually made it to India where they received help from the British presence there and all went their separate ways. Rawicz made it back to Poland and rejoined the army, later writing the book about his journey called “the long walk”.