"Survivorman" Les Stroud spills secrets of keeping your gadgets alive in the wild

On the reality TV show Survivorman, Les Stroud serves as a one-man cast and crew for a full week in a remote location. As such, he says he spends a full 60 percent of his time not looking for food, building fires, and erecting shelters, but rather dealing with the various cameras he invariably has to take with him in order to get it all on film.

Today at CES I spoke to Stroud -- where he categorically says he's not quitting Survivorman (season 3 premieres next week), refuting earlier retirement rumors as a misquote. He's here with Sony, which provides all his gear and with whom he's developed a close relationship. But how does he keep them intact when he's, you know, surviving?

The number one menace to cameras and tech gear when you're out in the elements? "Humidity," says Stroud. "Water in all its forms will quickly render a camera unusable." Once they dry out they usually recover, he says, but that means finding someplace indoors to do the drying... and that's rarely available in Stroud's adventures. 

Number two? Sand, dirt, and dust, anything that can get into the cracks and gaps in most electronics products. Sand won't kill a shoot immediately, says Stroud, but it pretty much spells the end of the life of the camera once that assignment comes to an end.

After that the dangers are cold and heat. Stroud says that they're almost equally bad, but when pressed to pick one, he says cold is the worse of the two, freezing up gadgets, at least those that have moving parts. (Quick trick for dealing with cold gadgets? Says Stroud: Chemical hand warmers which you can wrap around the body of your camera to keep it toasty. Also: Keep your gear out of the wind.)

Things are looking up, though. Stroud says the move to flash-based storage should help considerably as it cuts down (or eliminates) moving parts.

What's next for Stroud? From the sound of it, enough for about a dozen careers, including TV shows galore, promiting his best-selling book Survive!, a full-on music career, a Cartoon Network kids' show, and a new blog. Check it out at lesstroudonline.com, launching (he hopes) in late January.