Ok, so let's just check the backgrounds of our respective TV hosts:
Les:
Stroud graduated from Mimico High School in the Mimico neighborhood of Toronto.
[5] Stroud went on to complete the Music Industry Arts program at
Fanshawe College in
London, Ontario.
[6] Stroud worked for several years at the
Toronto-based music video channel
MuchMusic, and as a songwriter for the band New Regime before a
Temagami canoe trip sparked a career change.
[1] During this time he also worked as garbage collector for the City of Toronto.
[3] In 1990 Stroud became a guide for Black Feather Wilderness Adventures leading
canoe excursions into the Northern Ontario wilds.
[3] It was also during this time while on a survival course he met his future wife, photographer Sue Jamison.
[2] They married in 1994 and together left for a year-long honeymoon in the remote Wabakimi area of Ontario which was to become the basis of the
documentary Snowshoes and Solitude. Afterward, the couple moved to
Yellowknife in the
Northwest Territories where Stroud was employed as an outdoor instructor to special needs individuals of aboriginal descent.
[7] Stroud and Jamison then settled in
Huntsville, Ontario where they had two children and started both the outdoor instructional outfit Wilderness Voice and the media company Wilderness Spirit Productions.
[6] Inspired by the popularity of the television show
Survivor, Stroud pitched a more authentic version of the show to
The Discovery Channel Canada. Stroud produced two programs titled
One Week in the Wilderness and
Winter in the Wilderness for
@discovery.ca in 2001.
[2] The success of these specials led to the development of
Survivorman, a show that followed a similar format of leaving Stroud on his own, with minimal equipment, in the wilderness to videotape his survival experience.
Stroud has extensive experience with survival and
primitive living skills, initially training with expert David Arama.
[8][9] He went on to study with many others including John "Prairie Wolf" McPherson.
[10]
Stroud has been an active participant in
adventure racing and has competed at the Canadian championships.
[8]
Bear:
Grylls grew up in
Donaghadee, Northern Ireland until the age of 4 when his family moved to
Bembridge on the
Isle of Wight.
[6][7] He is the son of the late
Conservative party politician
Sir Michael Grylls and Lady Sarah Grylls.
[8] Lady Grylls was the daughter of
Patricia Ford,
[9] briefly an
Ulster Unionist Party MP, and cricketer and businessman
Neville Ford. Grylls has one sibling, an elder sister, Lara Fawcett, a cardio-tennis coach, who gave him the nickname 'Bear' when he was a week old.
[10]
Grylls was educated at Eaton House,
Ludgrove School,
Eton College, where he helped start its first
mountaineering club,
[11] and
Birkbeck, University of London,
[12] where he graduated with a degree, obtained part-time, in
Hispanic studies in 2002. From an early age, he learned to climb and sail from his father, who was a member of the prestigious
Royal Yacht Squadron. As a teenager, he learned to skydive and earned a
second dan black belt in
Shotokan karate. He practices yoga and ninjutsu. At age eight he became a
Cub Scout.
[13] He speaks English, Spanish, and French.
[14] Grylls is a Christian, describing his faith as the "backbone" in his life.
[15]
Grylls married Shara Grylls (née Cannings Knight) in 2000.
[3][9] They have three sons: Jesse, Marmaduke,
[16] and Huckleberry.
[5]
Military service
After leaving school, Grylls considered joining the
Indian Army and hiked in the Himalayan mountains of
Sikkim.
[17] Grylls joined the
British Army and served in the part-time
United Kingdom Special Forces Reserve, with
21 Regiment Special Air Service, 21 SAS® for 3 years until 1996.
In 1996, he suffered a freefall parachuting accident in
Zambia. His
canopy ripped at 4,900 metres (16,000 ft), partially opening, causing him to fall and land on his parachute pack on his back, which partially crushed three
vertebrae. Grylls later said: "I should have cut the main parachute and gone to the reserve but thought there was time to resolve the problem".
[18] According to his surgeon, Grylls came "within a whisker" of being paralysed for life and at first it was questionable whether he would ever walk again. Grylls spent the next 12 months in and out of military rehabilitation at
Headley Court[18] before being discharged and directing his efforts into trying to get well enough to fulfil his childhood dream of climbing
Mount Everest.
In 2004, Grylls was awarded the honorary rank of
Lieutenant Commander in the
Royal Naval Reserve for services to charity and human endeavour.
[19]
Everest
On 16 May 1998, Grylls achieved his childhood dream (an ambition since his father gave him a picture of Everest when he was eight) and entered the
Guinness Book of Records, as the youngest Briton, at 23, to summit Mount Everest, just eighteen months after injuring his back. James Allen, an Australian climber who ascended Everest in 1995 with an Australian team, but who has dual Australian/British citizenship, reached the summit at age 22.
[20][21] Grylls' record has since been surpassed by
Jake Meyer and, at age 19, by
Rob Gauntlett.)
Other expeditions
Circumnavigation of the UK
In 2000, Grylls, led the first team to circumnavigate the UK on a personal watercraft or jet ski, taking about 30 days, to raise money for the
Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI). He also rowed naked for 22 miles in a homemade bathtub along the
Thames to raise funds for a friend who lost his legs in a climbing accident.
[22]
Crossing the North Atlantic
Three years later, he led a team of five, including his childhood friend, SAS colleague, and Mount Everest climbing partner Mick Crosthwaite, on the first unassisted crossing of the north
Atlantic Arctic Ocean, in an open
rigid inflatable boat. Suffering weeks of frozen spray and icebergs, battling
force 8 gale winds, hypothermia, and storms in an eleven-metre-long boat through some of the most treacherous stretches of water in the world including the
Labrador Sea, the
Denmark Strait, and the stretch made famous by
The Perfect Storm, Grylls and his team were just barely able to finish the journey from
Halifax, Nova Scotia to
John o' Groats, Scotland.
Paramotoring over Angel Falls
In 2005, Grylls led the first team ever to attempt to
paramotor over the remote jungle plateau of the
Angel Falls in Venezuela, the world's highest waterfall. The team was attempting to reach the highest, most remote
tepuis.
Dinner party at altitude
In 2005, alongside the
balloonist and
mountaineer David Hempleman-Adams and Lieutenant Commander Alan Veal, leader of the Royal Navy Freefall Parachute Display Team, Grylls created a world record for the highest open-air formal dinner party, which they did under a hot-air balloon at 7,600 metres (25,000 ft), dressed in full
mess dress and
oxygen masks. To train for the event, he made over 200 parachute jumps. This was in aid of
The Duke of Edinburgh's Award and
The Prince's Trust.
Paramotoring over the Himalayas
In 2007, Grylls claimed to have broken a new world record by flying a Parajet paramotor over the Himalayas, higher than Mount Everest.
[23] Grylls took off from 4,400 metres (14,500 ft), 8 miles south of the mountain. Grylls reported looking down on the summit during his ascent and coping with temperatures of −60 °C (−76 °F). He endured dangerously low oxygen levels and eventually reached 9,000 metres (29,500 ft), almost 3,000 metres (10,000 ft) higher than the previous record of 6,102 metres (20,019 ft). The feat was filmed for
Discovery Channel worldwide as well as
Channel 4 in the UK.
[24]
While Grylls initially planned to cross over Everest itself, the permit was only to fly to the south of Everest, and he did not traverse Everest out of risk of violating Chinese airspace.
[25]
Journey Antarctica 2008
In 2008, Grylls lead a team of four to climb one of the most remote unclimbed peaks in the world in Antarctica. This was raising funds for
Global Angels kids charity and awareness for the potential of alternative energies. During this mission the team also aimed to explore the coast of Antarctica by inflatable boat and jetski, part powered by
bioethanol, and then to travel across some of the vast ice desert by wind-powered kite-ski and electric powered paramotor. However, the expedition was cut short after Grylls suffered a broken shoulder while kite skiing across a stretch of ice. Travelling at speeds up to 50 km/h (30 mph), a ski caught on the ice, launching him in the air and breaking his shoulder when he came down. He had to be medically evacuated.
[26]
Longest indoor freefall
Grylls, along with the double amputee Al Hodgson and the Scotsman Freddy MacDonald, set a Guinness world record in 2008 for the longest continuous
indoor freefall.
[27] The previous record was 1 hour 36 minutes by a US team. Grylls, Hodgson, and MacDonald, using a vertical wind tunnel in
Milton Keynes, broke the record by a few seconds. The attempt was in support of the charity
Global Angels.
Northwest Passage expedition
In August 2010, Grylls lead a team of five to take an ice-breaking rigid-inflatable boat (RIB) through 2,500 miles (4,000 km) of the ice strewn
Northwest Passage. The expedition intended to raise awareness of the effects of
global warming and to raise money for children's charity
Global Angels.
[28]
You guys
*SNIP* call him a real expert but he has not real back ground in it.
Edited by Lilly, 04 October 2012 - 10:33 PM.
removed personal insult
1
keninsc, on 30 September 2012 - 01:34 AM, said:
