A seaplane dropped Melanie Sawyer onto a spit of land along northern Saskatchewan’s Reindeer Lake. Sawyer’s challenge, like that of nine other competitors deposited across the Arctic, was to survive the longest. Alone.
She built an A-frame shelter with spruce and pine boughs, chinked with clay. For sustenance she foraged for mushrooms, berries and mosses, and ate squirrels, voles, mice and a goose she took down with a bow and arrow. Temperatures dipped below zero, 50-mile-per-hour winds blasted through, and snow blanketed the landscape.
The History Channel’s reality series is, according to its promo, “the ultimate test of human will.” Contestants, handpicked by the show’s producers, are permitted 10 essentials to aid in their survival—for Sawyer, that included an ax, sleeping bag and cooking pot. They’re required to self-document their actions for at least seven hours a day, and when they’ve had enough of trying to stay alive—usually because of starvation, illness or loneliness—there’s a button they can push that
