Field Note: 014
The Hammer Wouldn't Fall
What the ice and the jungle actually take from a human body. Then and now.
Image of the Ziegler Polar Expedition taken by Fiala at 82 degrees north latitude, March 1905.
The Hammer Wouldn't Fall
What the ice and the jungle actually take from a human body. Then and now.
The polar bear was now only 75 feet away and closing in on him…hunting him as if he was a seal.
Anthony Fiala had been leading the Ziegler Polar Expedition across Franz Josef Land, a scatter of ice-capped islands above 80 degrees north. It was negative 45 degrees Fahrenheit, and he was lying on the ice for some time. The bear started charging at him
He stood up, shouldered his rifle, and squeezed the trigger. There was a faint click, then nothing.
The hammer was frozen in place.
He remembered back at camp the sailor he put in charge of weapons had been instructed to remove all the oil from the mechanisms of the gun…but they must have missed this one.
He pulled his 5 inch blade out, and with the beast still advancing, he decided the best course of action was to attack back. He stood tall, screamed, and told him to leave. To his relief and joy, the bear stood still in his tracks, hissing and grunting.
This gave the major enough time to warm up the mechanism and reload a new cartridge. This pause in the attack however, encouraged the bear to start walking at him again…and just as they were coming face to face, the gun went off with a huge explosion.
The bear went head over heels backwards and took off sprinting.
George Plimpton's “As Told at the Explorers Club”. At Close Quarters with a Polar Bear pages 95-98
What was the environment actually doing to their bodies, and how much of that has 120 years of gear really fixed?
1903 ice-capped islands above 80 degrees north on the map
Put yourself there.
Your ship, the America, has been crushed by ice in Teplitz Bay. The sun is gone for months. You're wearing wool and fur that will freeze stiff the moment they get wet. Your shelter is canvas. Your transport is dogs, ponies, and your own legs. Your comms plan is nothing. Nobody knows where you are, and nobody's coming until a relief ship can punch through the pack Ice. For Fiala's men that was July 1905, two years after they left Norway.
That's the kit. Here's what the cold does to the body inside it.
The threat | What the research shows | What it means on the ice |
|---|---|---|
Cold shock | In water near 32°F, incapacitation can hit in 2 to 10 minutes. Hypothermia researcher Gordon Giesbrecht got into ice water in a snowmobile suit. He swam 50 feet. Six minutes in, he was done. | Breathing fails first, then movement, then heat. You lose the ability to save yourself while your core is still close to normal. |
The right layer | Subjects floated 6 hours in 1°C water in insulated survival suits. Core temperature dropped 0.8°C total, about 0.13°C an hour. Researchers projected survival past one full day if the person didn't drown. | One purpose-built layer turns minutes into a day. |
The fine print | February 2008, off Newfoundland: two crew on the Check Mate III got into immersion suits and went into 0.8°C water. Both were dead before rescue arrived, less than two hours later. Wind and waves strip insulation that calm lab water doesn't. | The lab number isn’t always the truth. Field Tested is the real science. |
Hands | Ergonomic research shows a direct correlation to decreased dexterity of fingers with decreasing temp, no effect on grip strength. at 14 F, your fingers are at 51 F. | Your core is fine. Your trigger finger isn't. |
Fuel | 2016/17, Spear-17 team: 1,750 km across Antarctica in 67 days, hauling 120 kg sledges, down to −57°C, eating 6,500 kcal/day at 55% fat. They still lost 7% of body weight and 53% of their body fat. Estimated true burn: ~7,400 kcal/day. | You can do the math right and still come up short. |
Appetite | Canadian soldiers in an Arctic-style exercise had ~5,685 kcal/day in their rations. They ate 2,377. They burned 4,917. Researchers called it voluntary anorexia. | The food was in the pack. It never made it into the man. |
Fiala’s men in 1904 were likely burning around 7,000 kcal a day on 4,400 kcal of rations. The Spear-17 team burned an estimated 7,400 in 2017. Just imagine yourself back them…limited supplies, limited food prep. No easy freeze dried meal replacement bars or advanced nutrition packs built by the military…just good ole fashioned food from the earth.
And the hands. Fiala's hammer froze. But even if it hadn't, a man in Arctic air for hours is running his rifle, his stove, his knots and his matches with fingers somewhere around 50°F. The cold doesn't have to make you hypothermic to take you out of the game. It just has to take your hands.
Modern teams landed at roughly 55% of calories from fat for the same reason Amundsen swore by pemmican, the dried-meat-and-fat food he took from Indigenous peoples of the North. Every pound on the sledge has to carry as much energy as possible. We didn't invent that. We measured it.
1913 unmapped river deep in the Amazon basin
Ten years after the bear, Fiala gets another shot.
In late 1913, Theodore Roosevelt heads to Brazil. He's 55, he just lost a run for President, and he wants something hard. The plan he signs up for: paddle an unmapped river deep in the Amazon basin that the Brazilians call the Rio da Dúvida. The River of Doubt. Nobody knows where it goes or how long it is.
His co-leader is Cândido Rondon, a Brazilian Army colonel who has spent 25 years cutting telegraph lines through this wilderness. And the man in charge of the gear and the food is Anthony Fiala. The guy whose rifle froze in front of a polar bear is now the expedition's outfitter.
This time, he does his homework on the boats. He orders lightweight canvas canoes, about 160 pounds each. Two or four men can pick one up and carry it around a rapid.
Then the trip starts going wrong before anyone touches the river.
The overland march to the headwaters takes weeks. Pack animals die. Loads get cut. The canvas canoes get left behind. Food runs short, so the leaders split the party in two. Fiala and a few others are sent down a different river that's already been mapped. They take canvas canoes with them.
Now put yourself with the group that stays.
It's February 27, 1914. You're standing on the bank of the River of Doubt with Roosevelt, his son Kermit, Rondon, and about 20 other men. You have hundreds of pounds of supplies. You do not have a boat.
So Rondon buys seven dugouts from local people. They're whole tree trunks, hollowed out, weighing up to 2,500 pounds each. Roosevelt sizes up the fleet in his journal: one small, one cranky, two old and leaking. Three good.
Every time the river turns to whitewater, you can't carry these. You have to cut a road through the jungle, lay logs down as rollers, and drag a ton of wet wood uphill.
Meanwhile, the boats that could have been carried are floating safely down another river with Fiala in them.
The right gear existed. It just wasn't where the people who needed it were.
The threat | Roosevelt, 1914 | What modern data shows |
|---|---|---|
The boats | Seven dugouts up to 2,500 lb. Every lost canoe meant stopping to fell a tree and carve a new one, which took days. 30+ portages, dragging boats through jungle on log rollers. | A later descent in inflatable rafts needed 6 portages. |
Food | Tins of olive oil, mustard, stuffed olives, applesauce. The plan to supplement by hunting failed. Down to Brazil nuts and palm hearts. | Special Operations troops training in jungle burned 4,664 kcal/day vs. 4,549 on a glacier. However, intake of calories dropped lower than polar expeditions |
Skin | Roosevelt gashed his shin on a rock while saving a canoe. Wet, hot, no antibiotics. It went septic. | 9,221 French commandos in jungle training, rainy season: 39% of medical visits were skin, mostly irritation and maceration. 34% trauma. Tropical disease: 3%. |
Fever | Quinine was the only malaria drug. Roosevelt hit 105°F. The expedition doctor was injecting quinine into his abdomen. | Modern prophylaxis and repellents. In that 9,221-person cohort: three cases of malaria. |
Cost of one small failure | Roosevelt told the others to leave him behind. Kermit refused. He came out 50 to 60 lb lighter (accounts vary). Three men never came out. | Each medical problem cost an average of 5 operational days. |
Everyone pictures the jungle killing you with a jaguar, a pit viper, a piranha.
In researching 9,221 modern commandos, the jungle's number one problem was wet skin leading to further issues.
Appetite is also an interesting one. The jungle didn't make those operators burn more. It made them eat less. Roosevelt's men couldn't find food. Modern operators carry it and still don't eat it. Different century, same end result of undereating.
The gaps
So here's what I think the Explorers Club stories are actually about.
The environment doesn't attack your equipment. It attacks your systems.
The ice goes after breathing, then hands, then heat, then fuel. In that order.
The jungle goes after skin, appetite, heat dumping and logistics. Slowly, and all at once.
Technology has gotten spectacular at plugging single holes. A survival suit buys you a day in 1°C water. A 6,500-calorie ration can be engineered to the gram. Modern antimalarials turned Roosevelt's killer into a rounding error.
But a suit can't make you put it on before you fall in. A ration can't make you eat it at −40. Nothing in your pack stops five days of wet feet from quietly becoming the thing that ends your trip.
Gear protects failure points. The human still has to run the system. That's the part no one's figured out.
That's resilience, the way I mean it. Not toughness for the camera. The capacity to keep the whole system running when the environment starts finding the gaps. Story after story in Plimpton's book comes back to exactly that.
Before your next trip
Three questions I'd ask of any kit list, cold or hot:
Can you run your one critical tool with 50°F fingers? Stove, bindings, buckle, inReach. Actually test it.
What's your plan for eating half your food? Because the data says you will.
What fails first if you're wet for five days? It's probably your feet, not your jacket.
Fiala's store
When Fiala came home from the ice, he opened an outfitting company under his own name. He spent the rest of his life designing field equipment for people headed into specific hostile places.
The man whose gun froze spent the next forty years trying to make sure yours wouldn't.
That's the move. Take the failure. Turn it into preparation for somebody else.
Then go test your hands!!!
Most Measured Driver Project
Rally Racing in Texas
Dr. Dave is going to be volunteering at texas’s only rally racing ranch just outside of Austin on October 17th. Want to volunteer with me???
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Saturday, October 17 · 11:00 AM
11 Stages.
Racing into the night
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Mind of Dave
Gratitude
The Guild of the Wild is taking off and I’m filled with gratitude. Literally today as I’m writing this, 2 different amazing people and organizations stepped up to help with creating this world.
1. I was expressing to a high-performance coach who specializes in the mental game for pro baseball players that I needed a program for measuring cognitive decline in a person as they do extreme things. Over the weekend he coded technology for me and tomorrow I literally get to play around with it. I’m so excited to share with you when the time comes…
2. My second was a long shot, but there is a project that not only fills the needs for the most measured driver project, but has also been a bucket list item of mine for 30 years. I can’t tell you yet, but it’s going to be epic. There will be pro’s, advanced machines, and a full media team involved in making me scream.
I’LL SOON BE POSTING MORE ON HOW YOU, OR PEOPLE YOU KNOW, MIGHT BE ABLE TO GET INVOLVED! STAY TUNED…
Go find your edge. That's where resilience lives.
— Dr. Dave
Guild of the Wild — The frontier of human possibility. Field tested. Truth told.
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