Man Vs. Wild (Iowa Style)

After a couple of hours on the lake and not being able to find any fish after my hopeful crappie spot was invaded by some fellow fisherman Spencer and I went to our “backup” pond. This pond is on the north side of Pleasant Creek lake, and is near the old cemetery. Luckily, there is only a few that know where this pond is, as it requires nearly a mile hike through some eighteen inches of snow and the trail back to it is unmarked, and looks like nothing more than a deer trail.

Spencer and I decided we would try our luck fishing on this pond, and that we would bring the hatchet and matches that I almost have with me in my truck. However this soon became far more than just a casual fishing trip we decided to do our own spin on the Discovery Channel shows Man Vs. wild and Survivorman in this small Iowa woods. This show usually involves several “steps” first he gets lost, he finds shelter and food, makes a fire, and then he gets rescued. We were obviously going to ignore the first and last steps as our truck somewhere to the south of where we were.

We found the pond quickly enough and I soon had put a couple of holes in the ice near the deepest parts of the pond where I had hoped the fish we were lying. Spencer searched for a spot near the pond that we could make into a shelter. He soon found a spot on the north bank of the pond to where we could build a shelter. There were three trees and we used those as the supports to hold up the roof. We used extremely small green saplings to tie some larger willow saplings to these support trees and from this we layered several more willow roof saplings to make the main skeleton of the shelter’s roof. We then cut some pine tree branches to cover the willow trees. At this point we had made an impressive shelter, I thought, and was similar looking to several of the shelters we had seen on these shows. Spencer then made a fire from some dry kindling that I had gathered while he was completing laying down the pine branches. He focused on starting the fire and I focused on catching us some fresh fish. However the fishing was also horrible on this lake and I only caught one little bluegill. Spencer and I wanting to be like the heroes of our favorite television show figured that we should try cooking our fish over the fire. We did so and the fish tasted quite interesting to say the least after some more fishing without luck we made our way back to the truck and headed home both agreeing that we would leave the winter surviving to the experts.