True Stories #384 - The Axe Man

A stranded man in a winter storm attempted to chop his way out of the woods.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm Set Andrews, and what you're about to hear is
a true story. The man whose name has still never
been published all these years later. He was an outdoorsman
and he had been enjoying a multi day outdoor trip

(00:23):
in the woods near Wallaston Lake, about five hundred miles
north of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in Western Canada. This was back
in twenty ten. So there he was on the lake
enjoying the sights and sounds of nature when a storm
blew in a winter storm. The weather turned really bad,

(00:44):
really fast, and he ended up stranded in the bush.
He dragged his boat up onto the land, snow and
ice accumulating all around him. He had brought very few supplies.
He had thought this might be a one day excursion.
Oh there wasn't much food, very little water, and more critically,
he had no way of reaching the outside world. So

(01:08):
as conditions worsened, he shielded himself by rolling his boat
over him like a tent. And he saw no other
choice but just to sit there or lie there and
wait it out. But the storm continued. Hours became all night,
became the next day, than two days, three days. He

(01:31):
was really starting to suffer. His body was white with
the cold. He was starving. It had no food. He
had to melt ice for just a little bit of water.
He had no idea when the storm would pass, or
even how he would get back through the accumulations of ice.
Something had to be done, and then he got an idea.

(01:56):
Among his few supplies was an axe, and so this
stranded man grabbed that axe and he started chopping down
a tree. And from the very start he realized this
was going to be a job. This was back breaking work.
But his strategy was to draw attention from overhead aircraft,

(02:18):
and so he kept at it, strike after strike after
strike at the stump of maybe an eighty foot tree.
His bones rattled, his muscles burned, and yet he continued
one swing following another, and then another, until the tree
finally fell. And then this man walked a few steps

(02:40):
to the next tree, and he started the process all
over again. If only he had had a chainsaw, how
much faster this would have gone. Instead, it was just
him and his hands and the axe head and the
brutal repetitions, and who knows how many swing until the

(03:00):
second tree fell, clearing the skies and leaving a stump.
Then he walked further to tree number three. I mean,
the body aches just thinking about this, and yet this
man set his feet and chopped that wood until the
third whush of the falling timber cleared away. And then

(03:21):
he still wasn't done. He would take on a fourth
giant stalk, chopping away like Paul Bunyan until he watched
in exhaustion as number four would also finally fall. This
stranded man was sheltering, withering under the shelter of his
inverted boat on day four when he finally heard the

(03:44):
sound of something overhead. He heard the rotors of a helicopter.
This was a crew in the skies that had come
to investigate the felled trees. And so he jumped out
from under the boat, and he he threw his hands
into the open air, and he waved his arms and shouted,
and to his great relief, he was seen. He was retrieved,

(04:08):
and he was whisked off to safety, and his rescue
story made the news first locally, but then word began
to spread and he got coverage all around the planet,
partially because there was a lot of debate about his strategy.
Was it logical, was it legal, and was it safe?

(04:29):
Those trees could have killed him, and the cost of
repairing the damage that he had caused with his axe
was estimated to be around one hundred thousand dollars. Wait
a minute, why would four trees cost one hundred grand.
He was never charged or penalized. People understood he did

(04:52):
what he had to do despite the risks, and there
were great risks beyond the falling trees, and despite the
the fact that his rescue strategy had knocked out electricity
to twelve hundred people who lived in the region, because
those four trees he had chopped down by hand were

(05:14):
not just trees, of course, they were power lines. And
the helicopter that arrived was not searching for a lost person,
but was trying to figure out why sask Power customers
weren't able to turn on their lights. And that is

(05:38):
a true story. True Stories podcast dot Com