'I followed the sun': Mushroom picker recounts 5 days lost in Yukon bush

Alone,exhausted and thirsty, blackened by ash,and withhis boots in tatters,DarrelRussell obeyed a simple strategy to find his way back to civilization "I followed the sun".

Russell spent five days last week desperately wandering through the charredYukon backwoods. He had been picking morel mushrooms in the Barney Lake burn area, east of Watson Lake,and had become separatedfrom his group.

• Lost mushroom picker 'emerged from the bush' 5 days after going missing

Today, he's back home inGitanyow, B.C., still resting and recovering fromhis grueling ordeal.

"Feeling a lot better than the first day Iwalked out. More rest now and [I'm] able to stomach my food," he told Leonard Linklater on CBC'sMidday Cafe.

Russell does not seem prone to embellishmentorexaggerationwhen relating his story. He says he survived simply by walkingand climbing ridge after ridge, and believing that if he headed west, he'd eventually find his way out.

Bootless with a twisted ankle

Russell had onlyarrived attheBarney Lake burn not long before, so he wasn't very familiar with the area.

It had recently seen an intense storm, so there were fallen dead trees everywhere like a game of "pick-up sticks"is how RCMPlaterdescribed it.

Russell says he was picking mushrooms when he"wandered offin the windfall"and quickly lost track of his companions.

"I was whistling and whistling and whistling, and no answer from them."

He had two bottles of water, a can of pop and an orange. They lasted into his second day of wandering.

The next few days were spent walking, or staggering, through the blackened bush. He tried to stick to the high ridges.

At one point, he walked into a stick jutting from the ground.

"It speared me in my right side of body ... that kind of made it difficult for me to breath for a while. Plus, I twisted my ankle at the same time."

His boots were also in rough shape in fact, they fellapart.

"I used my shoelaces first to keep it togetherand then I lost those somewhere along the line. Then I realized my feet were out of my boots, so I stopped and tied everything together again."

He cut up his t-shirt and used the pieces to tie his boots.

Then he kept walking.

At night, he'd make a fire and bed down, taking care to markwhere the sun set so he could keep his westward course the following day"I followed the sun right out," he said.

He wasn't sure if anybody was searching for him, but they were.

'So relieved'

On the fifth day, he attempted toscalea large ridge. It was "like climbing an exercise machine," he said. He was so weak and tiredthathe decided to bed down.

Then he heard what he thought was a bear walking above, but theywerepeople. He heard their voices before he saw them.

"I was more excited than anything, so relieved to find people," he said.

Russell was helped out to meet the search crews that had been looking for him for several days. He was taken to Watson Lake to be checked out, then went back home to Gitanyowwith his family.

There was one thing that kept him going through his ordeal, he said his 18-month-old grandson.

"I just kept him in my mind."