Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [120]
I have been so lucky to lead amazing teams to incredible places: the remote Venezuelan jungles of the ‘Lost World’ in search of Jimmy Angel’s lost gold; or the remote white desert that is Antarctica to climb unclimbed peaks. (I managed to break my shoulder in a fall on that trip, but you can’t win them all!)
Then we returned to the Himalayas, where my buddy Gilo and I flew powered paragliders to above the height of Everest. Once again, we were raising funds for the charity Global Angels, an extraordinary charity that champions the most needy kids around the world. But the flight itself was a mission that so nearly had fatal consequences.
All the aviation and cold weather experts predicted almost certain disaster; from frozen parachutes to uncontrollable hurricane-force winds, from impossible take-offs to bone-breaking landings – and that was before they even contemplated whether a small one-man machine could even be designed to be powerful enough to fly that high.
And if we could, it certainly then would not be possible to lift it on to our backs. But we pulled it off: Gilo designed and built the most powerful, super-charged, fuel-injected, one-man powered paraglider engine in history, and by the grace of God we somehow got airborne with these monsters on our backs.
Some blessed weather and some ball-twitching flying, and we proved the sceptics wrong – even, at the end, landing effortlessly at the foot of the Everest range, nimbly on two feet, like twinkle-toes. Mission complete.
Then, recently, I got to lead the first expedition to travel through the Arctic’s infamous Northwest Passage in a rigid inflatable boat – a mission that showed me, without doubt, some of the most remote landscapes I have ever witnessed, as well as some truly monstrous waves through the Beaufort Sea and beyond. It’s a wild, inaccessible place with little chance of rescue if things turn nasty.
Yet, by chance, on one of the thousands of tiny, unexplored islands, surrounded by fragmenting pack ice, we discovered European-style makeshift graves, a human skull and myriad bones. The finds pointed towards the potential discovery of what happened to the fated members of Captain Franklin’s Victorian expedition, who died in the ice after enduring the worst sort of frozen, starving, lingering death imaginable – all in pursuit of a route through the Northwest Passage.
Adventures, such as these, and many more beyond.
Among these have been an unhealthy number of near-death moments, many of which I look back on now and wince. But I guess our training in life never really ends – and experience is always the best tutor of all.
Then there are the more bizarre: like jet skiing around Britain in aid of the UK lifeboats (RNLI). Day after day, hour after hour, pounding the seas like little ants battling around the wild coast of Scotland and Irish Sea. (I developed a weird bulging muscle in my forearm that popped out and has stayed with me ever since after that one!)
Or hosting the highest open-air dinner party, suspended under a high-altitude hot-air balloon, in support of the Duke of Edinburgh’s kids awards scheme.
That mission also became a little hairy, rappelling down to this tiny metal table suspended fifty feet underneath the basket in minus forty degrees, some twenty-five thousand feet over the UK.
Dressed in full Naval mess kit, as required by the Guinness Book of World Records – along with having to eat three courses and toast the Queen, and breathing from small supplementary oxygen canisters – we almost tipped the table over in the early dawn, stratosphere dark. Everything froze, of course, but finally we achieved the mission and skydived off to earth – followed by plates of potatoes and duck à l’orange falling at terminal velocity.
Or the time Charlie Mackesy and I rowed the Thames naked in a bathtub to raise funds for a friend