Ky Furneaux and Thomas Coyne set out across the Sierra Nevadas with nothing but a pocketknife, no food, no water, no shelter, no sleeping bags or mats, and no way of making fire that didn’t involve friction and two sticks. Below, an excerpt from Coyne’s journal in which he is figuring out how they will eat.
The Plan(s)
By Thomas Coyne
As with all well-made plans, mine were severely challenged when confronted with the reality of the situation. We had three options: hang out at the starting point processing food for a few days then head out, hiking into a backcountry river and processing there; or power hiking across the whole darn thing. I really wanted the second. Kylie had real faith in my skills, and expected to eat well. She spoke of an Eden-like wilderness where we would camp and fish for days along the river, and do… well, survival stuff I suppose, LOL.
The first option wasn’t too appealing for me. It seemed as though it would make the hike less challenging, and as the starting location trailhead was at a campground, we didn’t want the intrusion of campers and such. The first river was only eight miles away but it soon became the first challenge to my plan. It was straight uphill the entire way. More than 4000 vertical feet uphill actually, and with all the foraging and filming along the way it took two days, so when we hit that river, we were very tired and hungry.
We fished for about 10 minutes that night before setting up our camp. You see, at 8,000 feet + in the Sierra Nevada, with no blankets or sleeping bags, a camp with a good fire is more important than food. It can take more than a week to starve, but sub-freezing temperatures can easily kill you in one night, and my boots were soaked from building a hasty stone fish pen (trap) upon arrival at the river. I hate to say it but Kylie was very demoralized by our fishing attempt. We saw millions of trout, but they weren’t quite attracted to our lures. I tried to reassure her, I told her how we could be up here with nice poles and cans of bait and not score in 10 minutes, and talked about how many fish we would get the next day. I was a little down too, for sure, but I saw nice choke points in the river, and I figured we could hand-fish too.
That night was about our coldest. We built a hasty A-frame with a reflective fire, but we were barely warm enough to sleep… too much nighttime wind… too little shelter. As I said, it was a hasty A-frame. We were exhausted that night, and we had set up charging stations, laid our materials out, hiked all the way up there of course, and the firewood was pretty spread out so it took a while to gather it. So I messed up, and didn’t take my time on the A-frame. It was a rule that I knew better than to break. That next morning was freaking terrible, LOL. It was our third day, and we were beat. No protein yet, and we were down on sleep and up on sore legs. So we talked about the plan. This river was okay, but there were others, and we were only about 12 miles, mostly downhill, from a river 3000 feet lower. We had made only eight miles in two-and-a-half days, and settling down when we were that far behind didn’t seem too smart. So we pressed on.
I felt like I had hit a wall as I packed up camp that morning, but something strange happened; as we began to hike, it all went away. I felt strong as long as I kept moving. And every subsequent wall I hit on the trip seemed to get smaller and smaller. But yeah, that first one was huge and all the worst thoughts in the world ran through my head that morning. I felt like I was in a boat with no paddle heading up a real stinky creek. 
Now, Kylie won’t admit this, but on this day, I, yes I, taught her how to catch a fish by hand. Not just any fish either… freaking trout; dam-jumping (like the kind that hold water back, not the swear word, lol), speedy little upstream-swmmin’ trout—like a hungry damn bear. And if you ever get the chance to do it, you’ll understand why I feel so psyched up about having achieved it.
The two most fulfilling feelings in wilderness survival are successfully making a fire with sticks, and catching game without a manmade weapon (unless you make it yourself out there). So when you reach down and grab that fish out of your trap, and go cook it on a fire you made with sticks, pardon my speech, but you feel like kind of a badass.
We hiked along the South Fork of the Kaweah most of the day, right up by its source. It was getting smaller and smaller, with more tributaries and easier choke points. We went to cross our last tributary and head through the pass, so I gave it a shot. I walked along the stream a ways searching for fish… and yah, score. So I headed downstream from them to find a choke point. Bingo. A 6-inch wide choke point just before it tied in with the main river again. I yelled for Kylie. Now in my defense, Kylie wasn’t quite into it. She saw how small the creek was and didn’t believe me when I said I saw fish… Sorry, Ky… She kept doing what she was doing. So I yelled, Kylie! Work your way over here and scare the fish toward me, beat the water with a stick! She finally meandered along, talking about the invisible trout I was imagining, lol 🙂 that girl… Then bam, she saw the trout, me and the choke point in one view…. and something deep inside awakened in her… and me… the hunter—the primitive hunter.
Now, I love animals. Cute little squirrels, fuzzy little bunnies, happy tweeting songbirds, all that stuff. I still stare at deer, and get a kick out of scarin’ up some quail… but I was ready to kill—and to kill without remorse—anything that crossed my path; and not only that, it would have felt darn good to do so… like I had achieved something… like I should wear some little fetish of it afterwards (a religious carving of an animal believed to be imbued with its power… so no weird stuff ya sickos ;).
We were now focused on the two trout between us like laser beams. All our communication was done without looking at each other. Our peripheral vision was heightened as were the rest of our senses, and we didn’t have to look at things directly to walk through the stream or pick things up. As the fish got to me I closed the choke point in the front, Kylie blocked off the rear, they now had 6–12 inches of water and about 6 square feet to move around in.
One was very little, we forgot about him and he wiggled away. But the 6-incher, he moved under a small rock so we closed the pen around him, or her, sorry. It now had 3 feet, one small circular pool around 12 inches across, and the rock he was under. I used a stick to get him out of the rock crevice and into our smaller pool. Then we closed it off. Game over. He tried to escape between a small gap in the stones and was trapped. I asked Kylie to do the honors, and she reached into the water and grabbed out a live trout—our first protein. Score, baby.
Thomas Coyne teaches survival skills at California Survival Training.
Read about Ky’s personal experience, and more about their adventure.
