Joe Fazer walked into one of the largest forests in the UK carrying an axe, a saw, a knife, a sleeping bag, a metal pot, some spare clothes, and a mystery item he was not allowed to open until the final day. No food. No water. No tent. His plan was simple: head in as deep as possible and not leave for five days. What he did not account for was how fast the English sun drops, how cold the nights get, and how long it actually takes to coax fire from two dry pieces of wood and a shoelace.
The first night almost ended everything
Fazer spent his first afternoon scouting a clearing, dragging dead timber back to camp, and attempting to build a curved branch frame sturdy enough to sleep under. The shelter was nowhere near finished by sunset. The bigger problem was fire. Without it, there was no way to boil water, no way to kill the parasites in anything he might eat, and no surviving the cold that sets into English woodland after dark. He had used the bow drill method once before in his life, and that had taken him days. This time he worked through the night, close to an ember several times but never quite there, until exhaustion and hunger and cold combined into something close to breaking. He had not eaten or drunk anything since walking in.
The next morning he sharpened his dry wood, tightened the bow, and tried again. A ribbon of continuous smoke curled up after he stopped spinning. He had his ember. He transferred it carefully to dry grass and wood shavings, gave it oxygen, and then came the shout that carried through the trees. Fire from a few pieces of wood and a bit of shoelace, earned after nearly 24 hours without water.
Days of moss, worms, and a surprisingly sturdy roof
With fire came boiled water and, eventually, a roof. Fazer spent most of the next two days collecting moss from across the forest floor to tile the shelter frame, carrying load after load back to camp and pressing it into every gap. The process, he admitted plainly, ‘takes it out of you, bro, no food for two and a half days and I’ve just been non-stop.’
Food sourcing in the English woodlands proved trickier than shelter. Hazelnuts were out of season. Berries were out of season. That left wood lice, which sit in the shrimp family and taste accordingly fine, worms, which he described as ‘not awful, it’s just the thought of eating it,’ bull rush roots dug from the wetter parts of the forest, and stinging nettles boiled for their nutrients. Everything went into the metal pot together. He ate the entire bowl.
By day four the shelter had a roaring fire inside it, a bed packed with gathered material, and coat hangers fashioned from branches. The mystery item turned out to be ingredients for s’mores, cooked over the campfire on the final evening.
Dustin, who taught him the basics a week before
At the edge of the forest on day five, a man named Dustin was waiting. A week before the challenge, Dustin had taught Fazer enough of the fundamentals to make the whole thing survivable. Fazer called him out by name when he emerged from the trees.
The metal pot sitting over the fire on that second morning, full of water that was far from the clearest he had ever seen but was boiling and safe, was the moment the five days shifted from an open question into something he was actually going to finish.
