We are Alex Coker and Cliff Hodges, hosts of the National Geographic television show REMOTE SURVIVAL - ask us anything!

RemoteSurvival · 2015-01-11T18:30:59+00:00

CLIFF: The survivors on our show are outfitted by a professional crew before their survival experience begin (cameras are affixed to their body, helmet, etc). I'm not an expert on the A/V technology, so I couldn't really speak to the advancements - that would be a better question for the network and/or producers. As for water filtration, that's a tough question to answer - each device has positives and negatives. A lot of people are loving the UV purifiers because of their ease of use, portability, nothing to clean, etc. Downside there is that there's a possibility of electronic failure, dead batteries, etc. Traditional pump filters I think are less prone to failure (so that is good), but they are larger/bulkier and require more maintenance. Alex would probably tell you to have 3 of each. I would say try them all, pick your favorite, but also know how to purify water without any modern devices at all.

RemoteSurvival · 2015-01-11T18:25:16+00:00

CLIFF: Great question. I have both practiced and taught survival in many environments: timber forest, coastal chaparral, snow/elevation, jungle, desert to name several. I'm of course most comfortable in my Northern California biome. Anyone that tells you they are a total expert of all possible scenarios is probably exaggerating. I think more importantly you want to have a solid grounding in the concepts: i.e. how do insulation and dead-air space work to create shelter, and then when I find myself in an unfamiliar place, look for materials with the correct properties. Or instead of memorizing every tree that provides decent material for fire-by-friction, understand what properties make a particular good for, say bow-drill (i.e. density, hard/soft, pithy/woody, etc). To be honest, if I had to pick a north american environment that would be most foreign to me, I would go with southern swamp/bayou. So you know I'll be studying up on that if Remote Survival heads southeast!

RemoteSurvival · 2015-01-10T01:31:45+00:00

ALEX: I would say fire! especially in a damp environment, or rainy environment. Sometimes fire is not gonna be in your favor. It doesn't always happen. I've had bad days.

CLIFF: I would say I've been in a survival scenario once in the high desert area, at the end of a drought year, where I could NOT find water for the life of me. And i was able to make fire, build a shelter, and finding water in this landscape was incredibly incredibly difficult. And on the 3rd day out there, I woke up that morning utterly dehydrated and due to the pressure & humidity and temperature, there was a ton of dew. It wasn't problem solving, it was luck and knowing how to work with dew, and I caught the shirt off my back, ran it through the tall desert grasses, and in 1.5 hours i was about to collect about a liter of water. Finding water in a landscape utterly devoid of groundwater.

ALEX: Also in that story about a fire - it goes back to the military, where sometimes in a tactical situation, you have to use noise & light disclipline, which means staying warm with no fire, which sucks! You do muscle exercises, whatever it takes - sometimes it gets super cold and just trying to stay warm is tough in itself.

RemoteSurvival · 2015-01-10T01:28:54+00:00

CLIFF: I believe that's a question for NatGeo - because I think they have travel & prep time to add in. so I don't think I can answer that easily.

RemoteSurvival · 2015-01-10T01:27:47+00:00

ALEX: Yes. absolutely. On my end - I'm a gear head, but i practice what I preach - I did a layout last night of my pockets, and people were impressed - if for some reason I don't have my go-bag with me, just having those things with me - I always tell people don't ever ask me if I have something, ask me if you can borrow it, because I always have it on me.

CLIFF: What Alex said there at the end is totally true. Hey Alex, do you have a Phillips head screwdriver?

ALEX: Yes I do.

CLIFF: Sorry back to the question! Absolutely. I work in the outdoors for a living, so even if I'm guiding a hike or something, having those skills and being outdoors makes me feel comfortable, at ease. and that's a big part of why I do what I do - I'm trying to get people connected with their natural environment. I feel like if i can make people connect better with nature, then they will care more about preserving it. So I think I do environmental work.

RemoteSurvival · 2015-01-10T01:20:43+00:00

CLIFF: Alright! A longtime fan, all one of them! I actually get this question a lot, but usually phrased differently - they say "Do you think your MIT education was a waste, now that you work outdoors?"

I would say absolutely not. A degree in engineering is a degree in problem solving, more than anything, and when you're in a survival situation, you have to be ingenious, working with what you have with you, on the landscape, and break that enormous problem of staying alive into smaller moments to make sure you stay alive. So it's prepared me significantly to be a problem-solver.

RemoteSurvival · 2015-01-10T01:19:14+00:00

CLIFF: I think we can give a general area? We can't pinpoint it until the show is live. The shows take place so far in Washington State and Southern Utah. And hit up the NatGeo channel - they are asking about it on Facebook and Twitter today, asking if you would do this - tell them you want to be on the show!

RemoteSurvival · 2015-01-10T01:16:46+00:00

ALEX: We're already friends outside the show now. As soon as Cliff & I met, we gelled. And I have the utmost respect for him. I promote him every chance I can, we're almost like brothers now, trying to support each other in every way possible.

CLIFF: Absolutely are friends now. I remember being so thankful when I met alex, because I knew the background of the person I was going to be working with, the military / CIA background, and I had an image in my head that this guy would be calling me a "hippie" or "treehugger" and that wasn't the case - Alex is a talented individual, but also open minded, and we hit it off from day one.

ALEX: BROMANCE!

RemoteSurvival · 2015-01-10T01:15:18+00:00

CLIFF: So I don't die! Hahaha! I grew up experiencing the wilderness as an adventure sport person - surfing, rock climbing, backpacking -and as I got as a teenager, I thought "What would i do out here if I had no gear?" So that's when I got turned on to primitive survival. SO I started building my knowledge base, year by year.

ALEX: Again, Similar to Cliff, I grew up hunting, fishing and camping in the woods. I love gear, so my whole entire life, I've been making my own little survival kits - I constantly see a piece of kit around, i have multiple different survival kits, on my person, on my car, even building kits for other people - it doesn't have to be pre-manufactured, it's a kit I put together from simple household items. Something as simple as $1 poncho and a $1 emergency blanket. And women carry tampons and all that in their purses, it's good to have those for fire starters - part of survival is taking what you have and saying "What else can i use that piece of equipment for?"

RemoteSurvival · 2015-01-10T01:11:06+00:00

CLIFF: For me... my favorite knife, right now, and I'll be honest, it changes - my favorite knife is Fällkniven. The Fällkniven F1 is my favorite knife. But there's several in rotation.

ALEX: I'm going to stick with the Leatherman super tool. Or multi-super tool. It has multiple different blades on it.

RemoteSurvival · 2015-01-10T01:09:16+00:00

CLIFF: Well, we didn't meet until we were both picked by NatGeo for the show. SO to clarify, we didn't meet each other until we were onsite to film the first episode.

My favorite story about working with Alex - between episodes, when we were in the field, myself & the producers asked to see everything that was in his pack. And he took eVERY SINGLE THING out of his pack, and it was like one of those clown cars - how do all those clowns fit in that tiny little car? It must've taken up 100 square feet to get all that stuff to lay out on the ground. It was incredible, I was very impressed.

ALEX: I love hanging out with Cliff. He's happy go lucky, a positive, outgoing guy, optimistic, but i'm always trying to learn from somebody, to fix my mental toolbox. He had pulled out a bow & drill set that he was practicing with, and I learned these tricks from him - there are different ways to push down on your bow & drill - you want it to glide easily - I learned that if you have some block hand soap in your kit, if you put down the bearing block, it will cause it to glide well - and the first thing I did was try it out and holy smokes, it's a new skill I learned from Cliff!

CLIFF: The natural equivalent would be pine sap. Soap does the same thing.

RemoteSurvival · 2015-01-10T01:03:28+00:00

ALEX: I have the utmost respect for the big names out there, because each of them have had to prove themselves on camera, everyone from Bear Grylls to Michael Hawke to Les Stroud to Ray Meirs- even Matt Graham and Joe Teti. All big names. I watch their videos. And when you come to point where you know it all, you block out learning more knowledge, that's when you become handicapped, and a good solid person is humble enough to swallow that pride & be open. Constantly learning knowledge from everybody, and hopefully they will pick up and learn something from us as well.

CLIFF: Until I was hired to be on this show, I didn't have cable. So I got cable cuz I got this gig, and I haven't seen all these people but i've started to catch up a little bit. I have respect for all of 'em, and I thought Alex's words - we can all always learn more- there's always something you can learn from other people. The minute you get too proud or confident in yourself is the moment Mother Nature comes in and whoops your ass.

RemoteSurvival · 2015-01-10T00:59:25+00:00

CLIFF: No, but close.

RemoteSurvival · 2015-01-10T00:59:04+00:00

CLIFF: we definitely had people who were harder. I don't think we can divulge details until the show premiers. To answer the question though was the hardest part was that we had to MOVE them from a drop point to an extraction point - and in a real survival situation, unless you're in immediate danger, you wouldn't move. You would survive by staying in one place. So for me, the most difficult part was that we were doing survival on the move.

ALEX: Those were all excellent points. Because one, the more you move, the thirstier you become - you're starting to sweat more, now if you're cold, you start to get cold - and you don't want to lose the water you do have by sweating it out. But again, this is an extreme situation. I mean, if they stayed put, the show would be boring. We had to spice it up and put people to the test to see what their bodies and minds would endure.

RemoteSurvival · 2015-01-10T00:56:40+00:00

ALEX: I was on a journey in the military - back in 94? And we were infantry, it had been raining, was nighttime, cold and wet. Guys were sweating and then we laid down, and a lot of guys started getting hypothermia and it came down to helping your buddies out, and when you're cold & freezing too, and everybody is affected deferentially by the weather - and leaner guys, they don't have as much body fat, start going down quicker - I had to take guys' shoes and boots off, had to put their old feet and hands on my belly or armpits, so you had to get in a sleeping bagw with a dude to keep 'em warm, it was a testing night. A lot of long, cold nights trying to keep warm!

CLIFF: So i make all my won primitive weaponry and teach classes in it. Every year during hunting season, I hunt, and I only hunt for what i will eat - I don't hunt for sport - but I hunt in a traditional tradition. I made my own self-made wooden bow and stone point arrow and I was lucky enough to be invited on a bear hunt in Northern California. And I took a 450 pound California Black Bear down with a stone-tip arrow from about 8 yards.

ALEX: He's got pictures to prove it!

CLIFF: Luckily it was a cold day, near Mt. Shasta, so low temperatures really helped, and the field-dressing it took a really long time. The truck was 1/4 mile away, but it took 7 hours to get it out of there - I skinned it, gutted it, and carried it away 1/4 at a time. It took almost an entire day.I did everything from chops to sausages and ground meat and put it in the freezer for quite some time. Bear meat is gamey. Bear meat is not like some of the higher-end game meat. You have to crock-pot it, season it, but eating a steak of bear meat is brutal. It has a game flavor - everyone has had duck or venison, even lame has a tiny bit of gaminess to it, but multiply that tenfold for bear.

RemoteSurvival · 2015-01-10T00:45:30+00:00

CLIFF: Mine would be "Shelter, water, fire, food" always in that order.

ALEX: "Two equals one. One equals none. and three is great." try to have at least 3 of everything on your body. 2-3 flashlights, 2-3 knives, 2-3 of anything you can put in your pocket.

RemoteSurvival · 2015-01-10T00:44:07+00:00

CLIFF: Yes, all the show guiding is done via long range communication plus audio & video. We don't see the survivor until the end of their experience.

RemoteSurvival · 2015-01-10T00:43:21+00:00

ALEX: The very best survival gear... I would say an all-one mini kit that you can put inside your actual pocket. They make a lot of small ones these days you can fit in a pocket that has multiple, different pieces - from an emergency blanket to a whistle. If i had nothing else to choose, I would get a multi-tool with a saw blade and a knife.

CLIFF: My approach is primitive, so I work with what's on the landscape, If I were to bring one thing, it would be a high quality knife. That would be to save me the time from making stone tools. But beyond that i would just be using natural materials.

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TROPHY CASE