The 3 toughest survivalists of all time

Trying to stay alive in a life or death situation is never easy, because if it were, it wouldn’t really be survival, and during these times we become capable of doing things we didn’t realize we could ever do. When your life is genuinely under threat, your brain starts to work differently and your body creates large amounts of certain hormones like adrenaline that allows you to power through the situation. This instinctual reaction to staying alive is shared between all humans, but it takes something special to go one step further and survive against impossible odds using nothing but your strength of will. Here are three of the most determined survivors of situations that 99.9% of everyone else would have died in.

1) Hugh Glass

This man achieved something that not only took an unreal level of determination, but also a massive amount of luck. His experience was made into a film called the Revenant in 2015, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Hugh Glass, the man who survived a bear attacked and managed to travel 200 miles afterwards, even though he couldn’t walk.

Glass worked as a frontiersman during the early 1800s, and took interest in an advert looking for 100 men to go on an expedition to “ascend the river Missouri” which involved walking hundreds of miles and passing through Native American territory. Glass and a few others were waiting for the rest of the party to arrive at its starting point when he decided to go into the woods to look for game to hunt for the trip. While walking through the trees he surprised a large grizzly bear and her two cubs, which caused the bear to attack and badly maul Glass before he could kill it. Some of the other men found Glass shortly after the attack but already thought he was dead, and skinned the bear and draped it over him like a funeral shroud before leaving him there in the woods alone, but not before taking his gun and other belongings.

(Hugh Glass 1783 – 1833)

When Glass regained consciousness, he found himself alone with no equipment or weapons, but he did have a broken leg to go with the many deep cuts on his back, some of which exposed his ribs. He set the bone in his leg and made a split out of wood, and used the bear skin to keep warm while he crawled and hopped over 200 miles towards the nearest fort. He prevented infection by letting maggots eat the dead flesh in his wounds, and managed to find enough berries and roots to eat before making it to the Cheyenne river where he made a raft and floated the rest of the way back to fort Kiowa. He made a full recovery from his injuries and soon got back into the wild to carry on as a frontiersman.

2) Earnest Shackleton

This Arctic explorer officially had a rather poor record in terms of the success of his expeditions, but is credited with being one of the best leaders ever to command an expedition and is one of the very few people who could have made sure every one in his party survived such an extreme situation.

(The Endurance trapped in an ice sheet)

In 1914, Shackleton led the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition with the goal of crossing the entire continent by passing the South Pole. The ship left south Georgia on 5 December 1914, but it didn’t take long for the problems to start, and on the 19 January their ship called the Endurance became firmly frozen into a large sheet of sea ice. The ice held them until October when on the 24th, the pressure from the ice cracked the hull and water began to pour in. Shackleton ordered everyone to abandon ship and they set up camp on the ice sheet.

They floated on the ice until February of 1916, when they came within 60 miles of a small island, and after the ice sheet became lodged with others and stopped floating closer, Shackleton ordered everyone into the lifeboats to row the remaining distance. They made it to Elephant island, but it was barren and had no man-made structures on it, so Shackleton chose five men and tried to row the 720-mile trip to a whaling station he knew about.

The ship sank slowly because the ice held it in place, which allowed the crew to retrieve almost all the supplies)

Due to damages to their boat, they were forced to land on the opposite side of the island to the whaling station and had to cross 32 miles of frozen mountains, a route that have never been done before. Somehow they made the 32 miles in 36 hours and found themselves at the whaling station, and ultimately safety. Shackleton immediately sent rescue ships to the stranded men but it would take three attempts to reach the rest of his party on Elephant island, but when the rescue ship did arrive it found every single one of them alive.

3) Aron Ralston

There are many people who went through situations much worse than Aron, but the reason he makes the list is because what he had to do was straight out of a horror movie. While hiking in the Blue john Canyon in southeastern Utah, he found himself trying to jump across a small slot canyon, only to misjudge the jump which caused him to dislodge a boulder, falling to the bottom with it. The fall was only about 20 feet and didn’t cause him any injury, but the boulder had fallen directly on his arm and was pinning him in place.

(Aron Ralston in spot where he was trapped for five days)

He didn’t tell anyone where he was going and only brought a small amount of food and water, which quickly ran out in the hot Utah weather. After four days he was certain he would never make it out alive, and scratched a message into the walls where he thought he was going to die, then he fell asleep expecting not to wake up again.

When he regained consciousness, he saw his arm had started to decompose and decided to try to break his bones before hacking of the remaining flesh with a cheap multi tool he had. Because he was severely dehydrated, barely any blood ran out of the wounds and the tourniquet he made seemed to help a lot. After successfully removing his arm, he climbed out of the canyon, rappelled down a 60-foot cliff face and then walked 6 miles before running into a family who were on holiday. They took a one armed and almost dead Ralston to the hospital where he made a full recovery.