Stranded

In the summer of 2000, Les Stroud started something that would change the way people looked at documentary filmmaking, wilderness, and life. But before all that it changed him. Les knew there was only one true way to film survival experience if he wanted to share it with a large audience.

He had to do it alone. This meant no camera crew, no safety line, taking himself far into remote area and left alone to his own devices, without water, no food, no survival gear, just a backpack full of camera equipment with which to record the survival ordeal.

He's been flying over the remote bush for years but he was always going in very prepared, ready for anything. To go in with nothing - voluntarily - didn't leave him with an easy feeling and the pilots thought he had a death wish. Farther and farther they flew into a remote spot on the map, a spot unknown to him... a place to survive chosen by a simple throw of the dart.

Only the pilots saw where it landed and he was blindfolded so he couldn't pick off any advantages from the aerial view either. Wherever the dart landed so would he, regardless of the terrain. They left him in the Northern Ontario wilderness, in a magical paradise called Wabakimi. He'll be nearly a 100 kilometers from the closest person in the environment known as the boreal forest - possibly one of the toughest places on Earth to survive.

There's very little art and culture that lived there for thousands of years. People were too busy trying to eat to bother with art. He was given no advantages. When the plane left it left him alone and he wouldn't see it again for seven days. It's an ominous feeling. The overwhelming noise of the engines subsided as he was left in the silence of the deep woods.