Suffering from exposure and malnutrition, McGee lived off of a diet of leeches, insects, snakes, frogs and lizards for 71 days. He drank water from a dam and constructed a makeshift shelter. Luckily, McGee's ordeal took place during the wet season, and he was able to obtain enough water to drink. He weighed 230 pounds (105 kilograms) before he got lost and weighed 105 pounds (48 kilograms) when he was finally rescued.

Aron Ralston will forever be known as the guy who cut his hand off to escape a climbing accident that left him trapped between two boulders. Ralston was climbing in Blue John Canyon in Utah alone. As he shimmied down a canyon, a boulder came loose and trapped his hand.

No one knew he was there, and he only had a little bit of water and some food. He was the only own who could rescue himself. He struggled for three days before deciding to self-amputate in order to extricate himself. But after two days of trying various methods, he nearly gave up. At this point, he was out of water and surviving on his own urine.

That is until an idea came to him on day six: he could amputate a portion of his own arm much more easily if he could only break his radius and ulna. After an hour of work with a cheap multitool, he had amputated his hand successfully, and had to still get back to his vehicle, descending a 65-foot wall with one hand.

He was eventually discovered by a European family on a camp out, and six hours after his self-amputation, he was rescued by authorities. He was found just in time: Ralston was on the brink of death from blood loss. He survives today, still taking outdoor expeditions and climbing adventures when not giving speeches or having movies made about his life.

In May 2013, off the coast of Nigeria, ship’s cook Harrison Okene was in the bathroom when winds blew the sea into massive rollers, capsizing the small tugboat in which he worked. As it sank in almost 100 feet of water, upside down, 11 of the crew members drowned. However, Okene managed to swim into an air pocket measuring about four square feet, clothed only in his underwear. He was alive, but utterly trapped at a lethal depth.

After more than two days in freezing water and with a decreasing supply of oxygen, Okene heard a pounding noise coming from the deck. A group of South African search-and-rescue divers had arrived—and were shocked to hear Okene’s faint hammering in response. 

Finally, they found him and managed to extract Okene from the sunken boat. Once he was free, Okene was put into a decompression chamber and safely returned to the surface. Experts said his 60-hour ordeal could have been fatal even for experienced divers.

Amelie M.