Crawling 11 Hours to Survive- Jake Schmitt and the Dog Who Led Him Home | E 269

In November 1934, 20-year-old artist and adventurer Everett Ruess disappeared into the remote canyons of southern Utah with two burros and a desire to explore some of the wildest country in the American West. He was never seen again.When searchers eventually retraced his route, what they discovered raised more questions than answers. And as the years passed, the mystery surrounding his disappearance only deepened. Did Everett fall victim to the unforgiving desert landscape? Did he encounter someone dangerous? Or was there something else behind his disappearance? In this episode of The Crux True Survival Stories: Disaster Strikes, Kaycee and Julie investigate one of the American West's most enduring mysteries—a disappearance that has puzzled investigators, historians, and adventurers for more than 90 years.

In the vast, frozen wilderness of Nunavut, Canada, even the most experienced hunters know that a routine trip can become dangerous in an instant.When Inuit hunter Ernie Etak headed out onto the Arctic tundra in December 2021, he couldn't have imagined the ordeal that lay ahead—or just how far he would be pushed to survive.In this episode of The Crux, Kaycee and Julie share Ernie's extraordinary true story and explore the traditional Inuit knowledge, survival instincts, and remarkable physiology that can mean the difference between life and death in one of the harshest environments on Earth.What happens when the human body reaches its limits? And what allows some people to survive when the odds seem impossible?Join us for a gripping story of survival in the Canadian Arctic.

On May 24, 1998, a Canadian climber lost his footing on Denali's West Buttress and disappeared down the north face toward the Peters Glacier. Two National Park Service volunteer rangers were a hundred feet ahead of him. One of them radioed for permission to go down and look, got it, and started descending — and somewhere on that slope a decision was made that two separate federal investigations would spend the following year trying to explain. What happened next left one man clipped to a single ice screw in a storm, with no radio, waiting to find out whether anyone knew where he was. Thirteen days later, on the same stretch of ridge, it happened again.

A day hike in Glacier National Park turns into a fight for survival when 19-year-old Matthew Read encounters deep spring snow near Huckleberry Lookout.What begins as an ordinary hike quickly goes wrong, leaving Matthew stranded in steep, heavily forested terrain as changing weather and cold exposure raise the stakes.In this episode of The Crux: True Survival Stories, we follow Matthew’s three-night ordeal and the massive search effort unfolding around him. Along the way, we break down postholing in deep snow, wilderness survival strategy, hypothermia versus frostbite, and the challenges search-and-rescue teams face trying to locate one person in Glacier’s vast backcountry.How do you survive when a simple step into the snow changes everything?

Doug Scott broke both his legs 23,900 feet above sea level on one of the world's most technically demanding mountains. No rescue team was waiting. No helicopter stood by. For eight days, Scott and his climbing partner Chris Bonington faced a descent that should have killed them—navigating crevasses, rappelling with broken legs, surviving a five-day storm with no food and wet sleeping bags in the death zone. But the real question isn't how they survived the mountain. It's what each person on that team did at every moment when survival seemed impossible. This is the story of how humans respond when everything goes catastrophically wrong.