TWO HUNDRED FEET UP, with the waters of the
English Channel lapping below, Bear Grylls wants to know how I am with
heights. We're strapped into harnesses and standing on a chalk cliff at
the Isle of Wight's westernmost tip. In 5 minutes we'll rappel down the
cliff—part of a formation, called the Needles, that juts out like shark
teeth—and now he asks? I allow that heights may possibly rattle my
nerves. "Fear is normal," he says, surely not for the first time. "It's a
tool that sharpens us for what we need to do."
The idea is that I'll descend first, with Grylls following. It's only fitting that a journalist with zero climbing experience would show the Man vs. Wild star (who has twice summited Everest—once on foot and once in a paraglider) how it's done. We'll venture in succession onto a ridge that's perhaps 6 inches across, and from there lower ourselves with ropes to a small ledge halfway down the cliff. There we'll pause to conduct an interview, and through this process the Men's Health reader will learn how he can live more adventurously. Grylls advises me to shuffle onto the ridge, hook my rope into a crack in the cliff, and then rappel. "Just don't look down," he says. And then it's go time.
The tricky thing about chalk is that it crumbles—you don't need climbing experience to know this—and, true to form, once I'm about 10 feet out onto the ridge, a chunk of cliff breaks apart beneath me. Pebbles tumble down. And so, it seems, will I. "Don't worry," Grylls calls out, seeming more concerned with the rock than with me. "It's only an ancient national monument."
Grylls can joke because he knows I'm safe. He trusts our rigging. I may feel as if I'm one false move away from a death dive, but feelings don't necessarily match reality. The truth is that even if I let go, I'd simply dangle in my harness. Eventually this sinks in. I ease myself backward and down, backward and down, backward and then . . . down to the ledge.
Grylls follows, strolling backward with little apparent effort. He lands on the ledge and fishes into his backpack for a stainless-steel thermos engraved with his name—a gift from his patrol sergeant back in the British special forces, where he served 4 years before breaking his back in a skydiving accident. He twists off the thermos cap. "I was always brought up to have a cup of tea at halfway up a rock face."
Edward Michael Bear Grylls has explored the outdoors ever since he was a child here on the island. "We did a load of boating and sailing and kayaking and climbing and horse riding around here," he tells me. "It wasn't a complicated life. It was a great life." But it was only after the accident that he became a celebrated adventurer.
That sense of adventure comes from his father, a Royal Marines commando who later became a wine importer and a member of Parliament. "My dad's not around any longer," Grylls says, "but I'm a dad to three young kids, and there's always a special bond when you climb and you have to trust each other with your lives." In the age of overprotective parenting, it's bracing to hear Grylls describe paragliding with his 2-year-old son, Huckleberry (as in Finn), or kayaking with 8-year-old Jesse. The middle Grylls child, Marmaduke, is named after the World War II flying ace Marmaduke Pattle. Grylls is a man who treats bravery as a sacred heirloom handed down from father to son.
"The problem is, they now watch my TV show, so they love it a bit too much. I am now actually trying to scale it back with them. Their teachers have said to me, 'That's all well and good having Jesse give me a detailed description of how to rappel out of a helicopter, but his mathematics are suffering.' "
Man vs. Wild, now in its sixth season, drops Grylls into dangerous and remote terrain—jungles, deserts, volcanoes, glaciers—and then follows him as he battles the elements. His two most notorious survival tactics involved guzzling his own urine and crawling inside a camel carcass for shelter. Grylls, 37, freely acknowledges that he'd like to move on from the show. But it's become such a juggernaut—1.2 billion viewers in 180 countries, the promo materials boast—that it's hard to just shut down. Plus, he has product lines to maintain: his clothes, his books, his knives. The dude even has his own deodorant.
"When I'm in Man vs. Wild mode, it's not pleasure," Grylls says. "Every sensor is firing and I'm on reserve power all the time and I'm digging deep—and that's the magic of it as well, and that's raw and it's great. But pleasure for me is good friends coming, picking some adventure—whether it's a weekend thing or a day thing or a weeklong thing—and then planning it and building it and researching it and training for it."
And this, he believes, is something every man can do. Maybe even something every man should do. Adventure builds character and camaraderie. Adventure breaks us out of our daily routines. Adventure reminds us we're alive.
Grylls stashes the tea and we prepare to climb back up. By the time I reach the top, both hands are bleeding and my adrenaline is surging, as Grylls knew it would be. "You feel a complete buzz when you reach the top of that," he tells me before we ascend, "because you did it. And I feel exactly the same, and that's the magic and attraction of adventure."
Your Adventure Checklist
Simple gear to save your life
1 Zip-top bags
You'll need these to waterproof your gear.
"They could save your life," Grylls says. "You know, people go out with a cellphone, put it on top of the rocks; then it rains, and the phone's dead." Throw your wallet in there too.
2 Extra socks and gloves
Socks get wet. Gloves are dropped. "Somebody loses a glove in a cold environment," Grylls says, "and they can die because they'll suffer a frostbitten hand and can't use the hand. I've had a lot more riding on a spare pair of gloves than you might imagine."
3 Tarp
Rain or shine, "the priority is always protection from the weather. So if you're in the desert, you need something for shade."
Three Adventure Sports to Try Now
Bear's favorites, your next challenge
Rock Climbing
"Go with a friend, take a class, find a wall in your city, and learn some skills," Grylls says. "And then push yourself a bit. Research some cool routes nearby, go out and try some easy ones, take someone who's done it before, and just grow. Adventure should be 80 percent 'I think this is manageable,' but it's good to have that last 20 percent where you're right outside your comfort zone. Still safe, but outside your comfort zone."
Paragliding
"I took my kids paragliding yesterday," Grylls says. "Huckleberry is 2. I strapped him in—it was an adult harness. I wrapped it around him a few times, and we jumped off this hill. It wasn't like a vertical hill or anything. It was a gentle hill, and I ran down, just holding the bottom of his feet, and he was going, 'I'm flying! I'm flying!' My 8-year-old loves it and doesn't want me to hold him, and he takes off on his own, goes up 20 feet and comes down." Grylls says he taught himself the sport. But that's not advisable. "Take a class."
Kayaking
"You can do it with your kids, you can do it on your own. You can start off just on a lake. You can learn how to kayak well, how to roll it, and then take it to a river. But again, be careful, research the river, and get some help and some guiding, because rivers are things I've learned to really respect. And I always give myself a 20 percent margin of error."
Ratchet Up Your Nerve
To summon your courage, follow this playbook
Anticipate hazards, and plan around them
You don't need the heart of a lion to face danger like Bear. You do, however, need to resourcefully strategize for safety. "Being brave isn't the absence of fear," Grylls says. "Being brave is having that fear but finding a way through it."
Detach from your anxieties
Objectively examine your situation. Then harness your fear, which Grylls says exists "to fire up your sensors and give you the edge to make sure you hear well, see well, act strongly, and perform well in a big moment."
Trust your gut
Grylls says he has a reliable inner voice, and a rather insistent voice of doubt. "The doubting voice is not the one to listen to. The doubting voice is just that little boy going, 'Have you double-checked everything? Are you sure?' But yes, it's fine. The inner voice is the one that says, 'You're okay to do this,' 'This is the right girl to marry,' or 'This is okay to climb this rock face.' And life's journey is to distinguish between the two voices."
Make risk a habit
Once you've conquered a few dangerous situations, you know you can handle the next one. Previous experience teaches you when to take a calculated risk and when it's time to pull back. It also helps you avoid panic. "When it overwhelms you—and we've all been there—it controls you; people freeze. I've seen it a lot with people on mountains, and it's often the people you don't expect."
Talk to yourself
In difficult moments, Grylls allows himself to pause. "I just go, 'Okay, I'll stop for a second. I'm just going to breathe and look at it. I'll check my safety—I have confidence in that—and then I'm going to remind myself that I'm way more likely to be hit by a bus. I don't have a problem here.' And then I get on with it."
The idea is that I'll descend first, with Grylls following. It's only fitting that a journalist with zero climbing experience would show the Man vs. Wild star (who has twice summited Everest—once on foot and once in a paraglider) how it's done. We'll venture in succession onto a ridge that's perhaps 6 inches across, and from there lower ourselves with ropes to a small ledge halfway down the cliff. There we'll pause to conduct an interview, and through this process the Men's Health reader will learn how he can live more adventurously. Grylls advises me to shuffle onto the ridge, hook my rope into a crack in the cliff, and then rappel. "Just don't look down," he says. And then it's go time.
The tricky thing about chalk is that it crumbles—you don't need climbing experience to know this—and, true to form, once I'm about 10 feet out onto the ridge, a chunk of cliff breaks apart beneath me. Pebbles tumble down. And so, it seems, will I. "Don't worry," Grylls calls out, seeming more concerned with the rock than with me. "It's only an ancient national monument."
Grylls can joke because he knows I'm safe. He trusts our rigging. I may feel as if I'm one false move away from a death dive, but feelings don't necessarily match reality. The truth is that even if I let go, I'd simply dangle in my harness. Eventually this sinks in. I ease myself backward and down, backward and down, backward and then . . . down to the ledge.
Grylls follows, strolling backward with little apparent effort. He lands on the ledge and fishes into his backpack for a stainless-steel thermos engraved with his name—a gift from his patrol sergeant back in the British special forces, where he served 4 years before breaking his back in a skydiving accident. He twists off the thermos cap. "I was always brought up to have a cup of tea at halfway up a rock face."
Edward Michael Bear Grylls has explored the outdoors ever since he was a child here on the island. "We did a load of boating and sailing and kayaking and climbing and horse riding around here," he tells me. "It wasn't a complicated life. It was a great life." But it was only after the accident that he became a celebrated adventurer.
That sense of adventure comes from his father, a Royal Marines commando who later became a wine importer and a member of Parliament. "My dad's not around any longer," Grylls says, "but I'm a dad to three young kids, and there's always a special bond when you climb and you have to trust each other with your lives." In the age of overprotective parenting, it's bracing to hear Grylls describe paragliding with his 2-year-old son, Huckleberry (as in Finn), or kayaking with 8-year-old Jesse. The middle Grylls child, Marmaduke, is named after the World War II flying ace Marmaduke Pattle. Grylls is a man who treats bravery as a sacred heirloom handed down from father to son.
"The problem is, they now watch my TV show, so they love it a bit too much. I am now actually trying to scale it back with them. Their teachers have said to me, 'That's all well and good having Jesse give me a detailed description of how to rappel out of a helicopter, but his mathematics are suffering.' "
Man vs. Wild, now in its sixth season, drops Grylls into dangerous and remote terrain—jungles, deserts, volcanoes, glaciers—and then follows him as he battles the elements. His two most notorious survival tactics involved guzzling his own urine and crawling inside a camel carcass for shelter. Grylls, 37, freely acknowledges that he'd like to move on from the show. But it's become such a juggernaut—1.2 billion viewers in 180 countries, the promo materials boast—that it's hard to just shut down. Plus, he has product lines to maintain: his clothes, his books, his knives. The dude even has his own deodorant.
"When I'm in Man vs. Wild mode, it's not pleasure," Grylls says. "Every sensor is firing and I'm on reserve power all the time and I'm digging deep—and that's the magic of it as well, and that's raw and it's great. But pleasure for me is good friends coming, picking some adventure—whether it's a weekend thing or a day thing or a weeklong thing—and then planning it and building it and researching it and training for it."
And this, he believes, is something every man can do. Maybe even something every man should do. Adventure builds character and camaraderie. Adventure breaks us out of our daily routines. Adventure reminds us we're alive.
Grylls stashes the tea and we prepare to climb back up. By the time I reach the top, both hands are bleeding and my adrenaline is surging, as Grylls knew it would be. "You feel a complete buzz when you reach the top of that," he tells me before we ascend, "because you did it. And I feel exactly the same, and that's the magic and attraction of adventure."
Your Adventure Checklist
Simple gear to save your life
1 Zip-top bags
You'll need these to waterproof your gear.
"They could save your life," Grylls says. "You know, people go out with a cellphone, put it on top of the rocks; then it rains, and the phone's dead." Throw your wallet in there too.
2 Extra socks and gloves
Socks get wet. Gloves are dropped. "Somebody loses a glove in a cold environment," Grylls says, "and they can die because they'll suffer a frostbitten hand and can't use the hand. I've had a lot more riding on a spare pair of gloves than you might imagine."
3 Tarp
Rain or shine, "the priority is always protection from the weather. So if you're in the desert, you need something for shade."
Three Adventure Sports to Try Now
Bear's favorites, your next challenge
Rock Climbing
"Go with a friend, take a class, find a wall in your city, and learn some skills," Grylls says. "And then push yourself a bit. Research some cool routes nearby, go out and try some easy ones, take someone who's done it before, and just grow. Adventure should be 80 percent 'I think this is manageable,' but it's good to have that last 20 percent where you're right outside your comfort zone. Still safe, but outside your comfort zone."
Paragliding
"I took my kids paragliding yesterday," Grylls says. "Huckleberry is 2. I strapped him in—it was an adult harness. I wrapped it around him a few times, and we jumped off this hill. It wasn't like a vertical hill or anything. It was a gentle hill, and I ran down, just holding the bottom of his feet, and he was going, 'I'm flying! I'm flying!' My 8-year-old loves it and doesn't want me to hold him, and he takes off on his own, goes up 20 feet and comes down." Grylls says he taught himself the sport. But that's not advisable. "Take a class."
Kayaking
"You can do it with your kids, you can do it on your own. You can start off just on a lake. You can learn how to kayak well, how to roll it, and then take it to a river. But again, be careful, research the river, and get some help and some guiding, because rivers are things I've learned to really respect. And I always give myself a 20 percent margin of error."
Ratchet Up Your Nerve
To summon your courage, follow this playbook
Anticipate hazards, and plan around them
You don't need the heart of a lion to face danger like Bear. You do, however, need to resourcefully strategize for safety. "Being brave isn't the absence of fear," Grylls says. "Being brave is having that fear but finding a way through it."
Detach from your anxieties
Objectively examine your situation. Then harness your fear, which Grylls says exists "to fire up your sensors and give you the edge to make sure you hear well, see well, act strongly, and perform well in a big moment."
Trust your gut
Grylls says he has a reliable inner voice, and a rather insistent voice of doubt. "The doubting voice is not the one to listen to. The doubting voice is just that little boy going, 'Have you double-checked everything? Are you sure?' But yes, it's fine. The inner voice is the one that says, 'You're okay to do this,' 'This is the right girl to marry,' or 'This is okay to climb this rock face.' And life's journey is to distinguish between the two voices."
Make risk a habit
Once you've conquered a few dangerous situations, you know you can handle the next one. Previous experience teaches you when to take a calculated risk and when it's time to pull back. It also helps you avoid panic. "When it overwhelms you—and we've all been there—it controls you; people freeze. I've seen it a lot with people on mountains, and it's often the people you don't expect."
Talk to yourself
In difficult moments, Grylls allows himself to pause. "I just go, 'Okay, I'll stop for a second. I'm just going to breathe and look at it. I'll check my safety—I have confidence in that—and then I'm going to remind myself that I'm way more likely to be hit by a bus. I don't have a problem here.' And then I get on with it."
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