50 Miles On An Inflatable Raft Through The Desert (6 Days ALONE)

I haven't seen a single person in six days. If something happens and I don't make it to the extraction point on time, the crew is going to have a helicopter come looking for me. And the survival situation just got real. I have no food and no clean water. Is anyone there? Hello. What is that? Oh, God, did that just punch a hole in my raft? 50 miles floating on air. Well, I'm currently setting off on one of the greatest adventures of my life so far, six days through the wilderness, through one of the most remote and rugged areas of the United States, on nothing but an inflatable raft. All I've got to survive is basic camping gear. I've got a hammock. I've got a blowgun and some fishing poles. I've got bare minimum food to survive. This is going to be one heck of an adventure. And I'm glad to take you all along with me. I'm constantly going to be dealing with low water and razor sharp rocks. One little mess up, one hole in this raft, and we're going to have to hike 50 miles out of here. There is zero cell phone service, so this could very easily turn into a real survival situation. Oh, that's slick. Oh, boat's full of water. Great. This remote stream should be absolutely full of fish. First fish of the trip. Man, they're fighters. Oh, yeah. Woo hoo. Look at that, boys. Now, you might be thinking this is dinner, but unfortunately, in this river, the large mouth and small mouth bass are catching release only. This is one of the most pristine rivers in Texas. It's been more untouched from pollution or development than any other river in the state. Just a little bit of something to humble you out here. That is like a 17 foot canoe wrapped completely around the tree. From a flash flood. There's a hidden hole of water back here that I'm about to go explore. Looks like there should be some big fish in it. Oh, yeah, that looks good. We should get a big one in here. It's been a pretty long day. I only made it about eight miles. I still got a couple to go. It's getting hot. Start off in the morning, near freezing, and now it's near 100. This is the only bottle of water I brought with me. The rest, I'm going to have to get from the river. Well, I'm thinking that that island looks like a good place to camp. Thinking I'm just going to stretch my hammock across these trees here. The hammock and the tarp. I've certainly had a lot worse camps than this. It's pretty cozy in here. Hopefully out there somewhere we can go find some dinner. Check out this awesome new blowgun I just got. It's a three piece, six foot carbon fiber. This thing weighs nothing. It is so light. I've got to be really careful around this raft with these razor blades. One wrong move and I'm stranded in this place. Now we just got to find some fish for dinner. So I have an idea to get them up where I can shoot them with the blowgun. I found these at Walmart. It's just little bags of fish chum that dissolve in the water. Supposed to attract the fish up. I'm going to pick a good spot here next to deep water, but still kind of isolated. If I can draw them up. This is about 20 yards from my campsite. Straight hog wallers. It's going to be pretty crazy when they're running right under my hammock in the night. Got some perch right here. A little bit too deep. Well, I'm going to call it a bust on the blowgun fishing for tonight. This spot really ain't that great for it, but I'm thinking tomorrow night's campsite should be a lot better. So we're just having jerky tonight. Oh, no. My water filters completely seized up. Yeah, I'm going to be switching brands of water filter because I'm squeezing as hard as I can and nothing's coming out. And survival situation just got real. We have no clean water. Yeah, I tried to clean it out, it did nothing. Oh, thank goodness. I knew I had a spare somewhere, but I didn't know if I brought it. Hopefully this one works and that one's not working either. What the heck? All right, let's try to back blow it out one more time. Well, I got a little bit of backflow there, so that's a close. Thank goodness. Just a little bit of flow coming out. I would have had to boil all of my water and it would have been extremely time consuming with the small pot I have. But it took me close to 20 minutes just to filter this one bottle. Yeah, Sawyer just lost my business. And honestly, I don't even know if this water is safe. It's kind of crazy to think about, but it could rain 100 miles that way and still flood me right here. Well, I'm going to call it an early night. We got a long day tomorrow. That was a rough night, but I got the camp packed up. All right, let's roll. Got to cover about the same distance today as we did yesterday. Today has a pretty eerie feeling about one. We should be entering a full coverage eclipse in this area. There's a big fish. Oh, there's a good one. Oh, yeah, that's a real good fish. Golly, that was a giant smallmouth. Oh, my gosh. And there's like four with them right there. There's there's two bigger ones there. Cool. Oh, my gosh. Oh, yeah. Look at that. It's a good smallmouth for Texas. I think it's that this wind has gotten brutal. And these are the reed jungles. They split a million different ways. And if you pick the wrong way, you could be lost in there for days. It looks the same all the way around. The water is just flowing through the reeds. And I'm lost, found a path of flowing water. Well, the eclipse is about to start. And I'm right here around all of these caves. The freaky part about this is there was once about 10,000 years ago, an ancient civilization that lived right here in this region. And they don't know what happened to them. They just completely vanished off the face of the earth. There's a huge snake that just went into that bush right there. Yeah, I'm going to go over here. I think the eclipse is happening. It just got really eerie out here and the birds are singing like it's morning. It's extremely difficult to wade through here because there's deep, deep holes that are over my head just right next to the bank. Now, half of this river actually flows underground. This is one of the largest underground cave systems in this area. They run under this river. So who knows? One wrong step in one of those holes could be a portal into it. The frogs are starting to croak like they think it's nighttime. It's getting spookier by the minute out here. And it's so silent out here. It was loud. The high definition of this camera might make it not seem so dark. But let me tell you, guys, it's super dark out here. And boom, just like that, the sun and the wind are back. Trying to find a campsite. Aha. And here's a good campsite. All right, I'm just I'm just going to hang my hammock from this tree to this tree here. That airplane is not searching for me. All right. There's camp for the night. I got here just in time. The wind has picked up like crazy. First wildlife visitor. I got to get to work. I got to try and catch us some dinner. All right. So my plan is to try to catch a little bluegill and then we're going to bring it back and use it for bait to try to catch a big catfish for dinner tonight. Oh, spiders, big spiders. I'll go around. I have a fish on. It's not the species I'm after. These are off limits on this river. Catch and release only. But still fun to catch. Feels pretty good. Another largemouth bass. Dang it. I think the eclipse turned his eyes red. Dang it. Another little bass. All right. I give up on fishing. Let's go see what we can find at Camp D. All right, let's go try this away from camp. This is Patagonia salmon, fully cooked. Well, that stinks. It's probably going to be disgusting. It's got the skin on as well. Maybe I'm just starving. That tastes pretty good to me. This first real food I've had. On this trip. It's not terrible. I think it's better than tuna. Now, let's just hope that smell doesn't attract bears. The way water is coming through that thing so easily now does concern me that it's not working properly at all. And there's beavers all in here. And one of the worst sicknesses you can get is giardia, which is you get it from drinking water that beavers have pooped in. Well, I think I'm going to call it an early day. We've got a big day tomorrow. A little bit farther distant, but we have to cross over one of the biggest waterfalls in Texas. Yeah, got to make it a little over eight miles tomorrow. So far, we've had great campsites this trip. All right, guys, I will see you all in the morning unless something tries to eat me tonight. Man, do the birds put on a show here. It's like you're in the Amazon jungle. You always want to beat your shoes out around here before you put them on. There are scorpions everywhere. Got turkeys coming right into camp. Look at this. All right, let's hit the road. We got that big obstacle today. Big waterfall. Into the spider empire we go. I think that spider did pretty well last night. Look at all those bugs. I definitely hear a waterfall coming up. So I got to go to that side of the river. But this hole right here is like over my head deep. So I'm going to have to jump on the raft and push it over there without accidentally going down the waterfall. That was sketchy. Well, I literally just dropped my fishing pole, the strap broke. It's gone over the waterfall, sunk straight to the bottom. I'm going to scout out the waterfall first before I try to go down it. This isn't the main waterfall here. This is just a little side, little side one. The big one's over there. I'm just going to try and drag my raft down this. It looks slick. All right, let's hit the road. Paddling and going in reverse from this wind. Great, I'm high centered. Stopped here right in the middle of these rapids. Look at this fish, guys. Oh, three of them. Oh, there's a whole bunch of them there. Oh, gosh, they are everywhere. We might have to break the blowgun out and have carp for dinner tonight. Look at this, I might not even need the blowgun. That was crazy. And I did get a hole in my dry bag here. It's not good. All my important stuff's in this one. Thinking I'm going to go explore this island, see if there's a flat spot to camp. Well, it's not great, but it's going to have to work. Had to hang my sleeping bag up to dry. Got everything dry and everything got soaked when we capsized. Dinner tonight, I'm going to be cooking some potatoes, but I'm trying to decide which ones. All right, I think it cooled off enough. Potatoes aren't my favorite thing, but they're super easy to cook out here. Pretty high in calories. Look at that guy. All right, guys, I'm about to go to sleep. I will see y'all in the morning. Well, it's the morning of day four. Last night was a tough one. I'm currently wearing every layer of clothes I've got. It is freezing cold. A strong cold front came through. Super windy. I'm not looking forward to wading through the water this morning. Well, we have a problem. A pretty big problem. My raft is going completely flat. I'm hoping that this is just from the temperature going from around 100 all the way down to. I bet it's around 30 right now. It's pretty dang cold out here. So I'm going to put some more air in it and hope that it holds much better if it'll hold it. All right. I think I got everything secured down. Let's roll. Today's going to be the longest paddle yet. I'm not looking forward to getting into this water this morning. And the water is actually warmer than the air. The wind pushing us today, making twice the speed I normally do. I need to cover as many miles as I can with the wind blowing in my favor because it could switch at any moment. Oh, we hit that rock hard. And this is what it leads us to right into the jungle. Looks like a spider kingdom to me. Oh, that was a tunnel. If you look closely, you can see what the peoples from over 10,000 years ago left us to view. Not dead yet, guys. We've got the entire flow of the river narrowed down to this little bitty like 15 foot area. The wind has changed directions and it's now blowing directly in my face. Now that was a gust of wind right there. People are always like, well, what if you die out there? And my answer is everybody's going to die. And I would way rather die out here doing what I loved and in a hospital bed of old age one day somewhere, you know, everybody's going to die, but not everybody's going to live. And that's a fact. So I spent the last six years of my life grinding hard, working almost 24 seven, saving up and investing all of the money I could to be able to go out and do this now. And I essentially accumulated enough wealth to last me the rest of my life. But I'm extremely rich in freedom to be able to go out and do stuff like this every day. You've got zero debt. Really? Nobody can tell you what to do. And just like that, the river vanishes. I would have thought it would have went right through here, but it went around one of these islands somewhere. There's no flow through here. River has just vanished again. This is a third little cove. I went up and looking for the river. Finally found a pathway through. So windy that the wind is trying to flip me over. Are we in the Bahamas? That's a good size bass. Tons of bluegill right here. Hopefully we can get one for dinner. All right. There's good signs of fish here. I'm going to start looking for a campsite close on one of these islands. All right. Let's go explore this place here. Let's see if we can find a tree to hang our hammock on. Golly, look at this. Every tree on this island has had a beaver or a new tree chewing it. Look at this. Fresh, too. I mean, surely that wasn't people, right? Those almost look like knife marks. It's kind of freaky. Every single tree on this whole island. Huh. All right. I'm going to try and make this spot work and keep in mind, I am in the absolute middle of the wilderness. We're in the middle of nowhere. There's not a house around for miles and miles. I'm not even going to put the rainfly over my hammock tonight just so I can keep a lookout with the flashlight. It's definitely going to be another sleepless night. I think on this trip, I probably only average close to two hours sleep a night from all the wildlife breaking sticks around me. And this campsite is probably going to be the worst. And just to be clear, we are on public property right here. This is an island in the middle of the river. No one owns this other than the state of Texas. And to top off the day, I did just confirm our water filter is not working. It's there's there is a leak by the housing. How it would have came from the factory like that? I have no idea. So we are going to have to boil all of our water for the rest of the trip. I'm really hoping I don't get sick from drinking the water out of that faulty filter the last few days. It's going to suck boiling the water, but got to do it. So I've been thinking about it a while. And most of those trees that got cut are a species of tree that's foreign. I think they're native to China. But this tree here is not even the same species. This is a native tree. Why did it get cut up, too? And Texas owns the like 18,000 acre ranch that's right there on the other side of the river. So the only thing I can think is some environmentalist came over here and started chopping trees because chopping the bark all the way around like that's probably a good way to kill them. I would assume it would have to be text parks and wildlife or some really unhinged person living on one of these islands. Kind of creepy still. I don't know. All right. I'm going to go out the blowgun. Try to get some dinner. There's a ton of fish right here in this. It's just a little too deep and the wind is not helping. All right. Since it's too windy to blowgun fish. Here's my plan. Since my rods and reels are gone, I've still got a little bit of fishing line and some hooks and weights. I'm going to tie on a little bitty hook here and put on a piece of that bread and go try to catch a little bitty small perch. And then there's a deep hole of water over here. I'm going to try and rig up the bigger handrail and try to catch catfish for dinner. This is actually the deep hole where I'm going to try and get a catfish. But I'm thinking there's some bluegill in here, too. And something's running through the trees. Something really big. Cool. They were just bedded down right beside my camp right there. I'm getting a bite. Oh, I got something. Oh, yeah, looks like a good sized bluegill. Oh, yeah, that's a good eater. Yes. Oh, and he came off. All right. Rebated. I'm going to try and go back in that same area. Yes. Got one finally. Well, it's starting to get too late, so I'm just going to let him go and I'm going to go cook something at camp. Oh, that fishing wore me out. I'm exhausted. I'm starving and I'm thirsty. We're going to boil some water here, so I have something to drink. What sucks about boiling your water to purify it is once it boils, once it gets to a rolling boil, then you've got to wait like 30 minutes on to cool to be even drinkable. Tonight, we're going to eat the last of our food. Smells really good. Finally cooled off a little bit. It's not bad. It's not delicious. Cannot wait to be in town and get some real food. Trying something a little different tonight to help stay warm, because I got a feeling it's going to get cold again. Just put my air mattress under the sleeping bag to give me a little barrier. Oh, that was a pretty good day other than us not being able to catch fish. Sun starting to go down behind the mountain. I'll see you all in the morning. Oh, there's something right there. It's 1am and the forest is alive. Stuff all around me and I cannot sleep. Now that was a brutal night's sleep. I probably only got one hour of sleep last night. I think I'm going to make me a cup of coffee since I got to boil the water anyway. Might as well make coffee. And then I'm going to hit the road. Look at this. I got mosquitoes attacking me right now. Keeping the blowgun out today to hopefully get some shots at fish because we have no food left. Did hear a lot of things in the night. I really did not like this camp spot. I'm pretty sure it's haunted. And there's the catfish we were going to eat for dinner last night. Look at that big old catfish. While I could try to catch those catfish now and save them for dinner tonight. I don't want to. I need to keep them alive till tonight, so I would have to put them on the stringer. And if I hang one off the side of here, there's a really good chance that his that his fin would puncture the side of this raft. One of the best night's sleep I ever got was about 10 years ago. I just camped out on this rock here in the middle of the river. I slept so good. And the cool part about this campsite is the caves up above are all painted with ancient paintings from around 10,000 years ago. And you can just watch the fish right here. It's like I'm floating on air. This water is so clear. I'm now entering the most remote stretch of the river. All those hard miles through the forest become worth it for this stretch right here. Well, this is probably the last time I'll ever get to explore this river as an untouched landscape. If you look right there, Texapox and Wildlife has built a paved road into the area. So take one last look at this pristine wilderness before it turns into a park and a tourist attraction. We're getting within a few miles of camp. So I'm going to go ahead and load the blowgun up just in case we see something on the way. It's a huge guard. The entire river funnels down right here into this funnel point. And I'm about to run it. Cool. And look at the size of that bass right there. There's two. That's a good fish. That's a big one. He's following me. It's like she knows that I lost my fishing pole. All right. I got to start looking for us a place to camp. And then we're going to worry about getting dinner. This will have to do. Might stretch the hammock in between those two big trees. Is anyone there? Hello. Something running through there. And even the grass here will cut you. I just sliced my finger wide open. Got to get some water boiling. I'm extremely dehydrated. Well, I got a lot of work to do to ensure we're not going hungry tonight. Look at that bass right there. Just swimming along, right? Swimming right to my camp. All right. I'm going to try and find the worm or a grasshopper or something to use for bait to try to catch a perch. And then hopefully we can turn the perch into a channel catfish. All right. Let's try to get a bait fish. Got a long way to deep water. This is a big hole of water here. Carp are just teasing me. I can't shoot them with the blowgun here since I don't have the reel because they're just going to run for deep water and I can't chase them down before they get to the deep water. There's an enormous bass swimming right at me. That's even bigger than the one I saw earlier. Golly, look at the size of that thing. That thing's over seven pounds. That is a monster bass. Holy cow. Might be an eight pounder. I got my bobber dangling in front of it. And it did show a little interest. Oh, it just turned back on it. I think it's going to try and eat the whole bobber. Oh, my gosh. I think it's about to eat it. It's like a shark. Oh, he's swimming away. That got crazy for a second. You know, hearing jets like that, when you've been out in the wilderness this long with no contact, always has an eerie feeling because it's in the back of your mind. You're thinking, is the world still going to be the same when I get out of here? There's always that chance that it's not. You know, we're having a pretty rough day, but I'm still doing a heck of a lot better than this guy. Look at that. Guys, I've got a little gar right here coming right at me. Just over him. Look at all these minnows. How the heck did I miss that? And now that I'm heading back to camp, the wind decides to just completely stop. I'm just going to boil me a cup of water for dinner. All right. I just about got everything packed up. I got to head out from this campsite at about 4 a.m. in the morning so I can make it to the extraction point on time. If something happens and I don't make it to the extraction point on time, the crew is going to have a helicopter come looking for me. So I got to be there on time. Look at this view. I got. It's pretty incredible here. What is that? Well, it's 4 a.m. and I am feeling the tiredness today. Got a 14 mile paddle to the extraction point. We got to get a move on. The sun is beginning to rise. Thank goodness. Running those rapids in the dark was so sketchy. Most likely, whatever that is, rolled off this huge cliff to its death. And this part of the river is extra dangerous because in between these flutes, it's filled in with silt. And I just stepped in there and went up to my neck almost in mud. It's like quicksand. We just about lost everything. Dry bag busted open. You can't let your guard down for one second out here. I can only think of a few reasons of why the famous Texas Ranger and Indian fighter Captain Jack Hayes would have named this river of such beauty after the devil. Maybe he witnessed some of the evil things that took place here, or maybe he could feel the eeriness of the ancient peoples. Well, now, while it is an extremely beautiful place, it can be extremely dangerous. I was hoping that bottom of the raft hold together a little bit longer. I haven't seen a single person in six days. The last few miles of the river are filled in with silt. It's making it extremely challenging. This beautiful crystal clear stream has turned into a muddy mess. Well, I'm completely stuck in silt all the way. It's just flat all the way around and I'm silted in here. I can't get out and walk because the silt is over my head. It's the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. I can see a boat ahead in the distance. That's my ticket out of here. Well, that was one heck of an adventure. I'm glad you could join me. Don't forget to like and subscribe. And I'll see you all next time with another adventure. Oh, take me to Chili's.