5 Insane Survival Stories

5. Antarctic Hell

Douglas Mawson was an Australian scientist who, at the beginning of the 20th century, set out on a mission to explore Antarctica, an idea that has never worked out well for anybody.

On December 14, 1912, Mawson and his two colleagues, Belgrave Ninnis and Xavier Mertz, were returning to base after successfully not dying for a few days. It was apparently one day more than the Antarctic will allow: Tragedy quickly remedied that oversight when Ninnis fell into a crevasse, dragging their sledge, their supplies, and most of their dogs down with him. They were around 310 miles from home.

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Then, unbelievably (or perhaps totally believably), Mawson’s sledge got wedged in the snow and he also fell into a crevasse, where he was left “dangling helplessly above the abyss, with his sledge behind him edging towards the lip.” After pulling himself up from a frozen grave and surviving 32 days in the harshest environment on the planet, Mawson finally reached his hut … where he was told that he would have to wait 10 more months in Antarctica because the ship that was meant to take him back home had sailed off only a few hours earlier, believing him dead.

 

Still, before settling down to the most well-deserved nap in the history of mankind, Mawson thought to send his fiancee back home a telegram consisting of the most bad ass understatement ever uttered: “Deeply regret delay only just managed to reach hut.”

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4. Lost in the Sahara

The Marathon des Sables is considered by many to be the toughest foot race on the planet. It’s a six-day, 156-mile marathon held in the Sahara Desert in southern Morocco, where only the most insane runners compete.

Enter Mauro Prosperi, a Sicilian policeman and Olympic pentathlete who decided to wager his life on this race, because what else was he going to do in Italy?

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Four days into the race, Prosperi had worked his way up to seventh place when a sandstorm arose. The rules of the race state that whenever a storm hits, runners are supposed to stop and wait for assistance. He’d been to the beach before; a little sand never hurt anybody. He wrapped a scarf around his head and kept on running.

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Miraculously, Prosperi was so dehydrated that his blood had actually thickened to the point where his cut wrists were unable to bleed out. When he awoke with nothing but a couple of bitchin’ scars and a headache, he felt a renewed confidence and decided to fight for life — although it seems like death had pretty clearly rejected his advances, so what were his options, really? For the next five days, Prosperi continued to push through the Sahara, eating lizards and scorpions and drinking the dew off leaves until he stumbled upon a group of nomads, who informed him that he was now in Algeria, 130 miles from where he was supposed to be.

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Prosperi went ahead and applied for the same marathon two years later. He was turned down. So he applied again. This time, having already secured the blessing of Dio, which grants a +2 to Acts of Courageous Insanity, Prosperi made it through unscathed.

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