Top 20 Insane Bear Grylls Moments

After coming across a dead sheep in the icy wilderness, there’s only one thing on Bear’s mind: food. So, he takes out his knife and goes straight in for the most nutritious part of its body, the eyeball. If you can stomach eating an eye, Bear will be the first one to tell you it’s got all sorts of good stuff inside, like protein and vitamins. He cuts the eyeball out and then ties it to a rope, before dipping it in a hot spring to warm it up. It’s more cooking than we’re generally used to seeing him do, though he does still flinch when he bites down.

Out in Alaska, Grylls comes across some droppings from a black bear and is quick to point out the dangers they pose if you underestimate them. Just in case he’s being tracked, he decides he’d better take an alternative route across a noisy river and opts to use a fallen tree trunk for a makeshift bridge. While you’ve seen people do this countless times in the movies, in this instance, it doesn’t go well, thanks largely to how wet the tree is from the river and rain. It’s a miracle he manages to cling to the side of the cliff and get back to safety after it crashes down into the water below.

Deep in the wilderness of Siberia, Bear accompanies the Tuvans as they hunt a yak. Seeing them kill the yak is a little distressing, but as always, Bear takes it to the extreme by leaning down and drinking its warm blood. Then it’s down to him to skin the yak in sub-zero temperatures, trying to get the job done before the body freezes solid. He’s successful and begins cutting through the innards to get at its liver, the most nutritious part. It’s clear by his expression that despite the warmth of the liver, he’s really not enjoying this. But at least he has something familiar for dessert: another raw eyeball.

Layering up might be the best thing to do to stay warm in normal circumstances, but if you’re trapped in freezing water, your best chance of survival relies on shedding as many layers as possible. This enables you to move faster and means you’re not stuck in dangerous, wet clothes. As Bear says, “you’ll survive better naked.” He bravely demonstrates this during a trip to the Arctic Circle, stripping down to his “bear necessities” to take the plunge. The water is so cold that the camera they’re using actually freezes over when it gets wet. It takes all of Bear’s survival knowledge to make it through this alive.

If you thought the yak liver was bad, wait until you get a load of this. Still in the Arctic Circle, he encounters a herd of wild reindeer and decides that they’re his best chance at a balanced meal. While he’s not able to catch a reindeer on his own, he gets help from Lapland’s reindeer hunters to show exactly what you should do if you find yourself in this situation. He kills the animal and drinks straight from the wound he made in its neck, then cuts it open and rips out its heart. Covered in blood, he chows down on the raw organ.

In Canada, Bear takes it upon himself to show viewers the best way to survive if they get caught underneath the ice of a frozen body of water. Unlike his other dip into icy water, this stunt wasn’t on the spur of the moment: it was “premeditated,” which Bear says makes it harder for him. It’s one thing doing something dangerous with your life at risk, and another to engineer a deadly situation, even if it is in the public interest. But true to his reputation, he’s able to swim in a straight line underneath the ice and comes out the other side no worse for wear – if a little chilly.

Deep in the Carpathian Mountains, Bear and the crew are stopped in their tracks when they spot a brown bear nearby. They have to crouch down to hide from the bear so that they don’t draw its attention; if they’re in its territory, it could well attack them. Bear advises the audience that the best thing to do is back away from the animal slowly and, if you have to run, to drop a bag so that the bear will go for that first. While it does spot the crew, it luckily doesn’t seem too interested in coming closer and leaves them alone.

He’s in for a tough ride trying to survive in the Northern Sahara Desert, the largest desert in the world. Bear says the previous night was one of the best nights he’s had in the wild, and that’s in spite of having to eat a raw goat testicle that even he couldn’t stomach. The following evening, he spends the entire day disemboweling a camel to show us how to get water from its body in case of an emergency... and takes a bite of something else he doesn’t like: uncooked camel fat. When it’s finally time for him to get a real meal, he barbecues a strip of meat and uses camel dung for fuel.

Bear has to swing an enormous chain up over his head so that he can climb up onto a bridge in rural Montana, and has to trust that it’ll hold without being able to see where it’s landed. But his problems don’t end there. He decides to follow a train track, but then the worst happens: he and his crew are in a long tunnel when a train comes, and they’re left with no choice but to run as fast as possible to avoid getting hit. They barely make it out alive, but things don’t end there: still trying to escape, Bear keeps running and manages to jump onto the moving train.

This dangerous technique could save your life if you pay close attention to Bear’s instructions, but it could just as easily prove fatal. If you find yourself trapped somewhere and you desperately need to rappel down a cliffside or canyon to reach safety, you can try this “kamikaze knot.” It will do the job and, if you know what you’re doing, you’ll be able to preserve your rope afterward. You have to tie an intricate knot and then cut the middle section of the rope out: if you release it, the rope will come apart, letting you retrieve it, but if you don’t maintain the tension you could fall to your death.

Bear catches an assortment of insects in a water bottle that he decides will make a balanced breakfast brimming with protein. He picks out locusts and moths and pulls them apart to make sure they’re dead, before crushing them all together in a bug burger few people would be desperate enough to try. Insects are eaten around the world, but they’re rarely squashed together and served up raw. Bear definitely struggles to get through the crunchy critters, saying they taste like “sandy goo” and out-of-date mustard. It’s a miracle he can get them down.

He needs to utilize some vines to descend down a sheer cliff-face, but the vines themselves have other ideas. They grow right in the path of a waterfall which is making both the flora and the cliff way too slippery for Bear to hang onto. He’s left with no alternative but to try and swing out of the path of the waterfall and towards a nearby tree branch. And it doesn’t stop there: he has to keep climbing to get to safety, which he does without any equipment. When he gets as low as he can, he jumps into the lake below, finally safe.

Even for an experienced survivalist, building and lighting a fire can be one of the most grueling things you have to do. Even if you have all the right tools, know-how, and conditions, it can still take hours and hours to get even a spark going. This is exactly what happens when Bear is stranded in the deserts of Western Texas. It’s a credit to his patience and dedication that, after rubbing sticks together for what feels like an age, he finally gets an ember he can use to light an old bird’s nest and makes a roaring fire. It’s even more satisfying when he uses the fire to actually cook his food, for once.

Bear’s entrances are always exciting, and none more so than when he parachutes onto a small, desert island in Indonesia. He’s jumping directly into the ocean, but to pull this off he has to detach from his chute at the last possible second. Too early or too late and it could be the end. While he does, of course, pull it off, it’s even more impressive when you learn that when he was much younger, he broke his back in a parachuting accident – it was this incident that forced him to leave the SAS and turn to TV.

Stranded on an island in the South Pacific, Bear teaches us that there are some fluids even he won’t drink – at least, not in the conventional way. He gets his hands on some water, but it’s contaminated with bird poo, meaning he can’t drink it. He embarks on the most extreme course of action: giving himself an enema so that he can consume the fluids through his rectum without risk of vomiting, which would cause him to lose not only the water he’s just drunk but whatever else was in his stomach. This is a last resort, and it’s more than a little uncomfortable to watch.

In search of a tasty treat, Bear gets his hands on a live octopus. Raw octopus may be a delicacy in certain parts of the world, but few will advise biting through its nerves beforehand to kill it – which is exactly what Bear does. While chewing the fresh tentacles he complains about the suckers sticking to the inside of his mouth as he swallows, which he says is down to nerve reflexes and nothing else. Nevertheless, the thought of eating raw, squirming tentacles – no matter how nutritious they are – might be too much for some. Is there such a thing as seafood that’s too fresh?

One of the deadliest creatures in the world, venomous snakes kill thousands of people every year, and the puff adder is no exception. One of the most dangerous snakes in Africa, rather than avoid it like the plague, Bear decides to beat the snake to death with a rock and cut its head off – even when it’s dead, it has more than enough venom to kill someone. But he didn’t kill the snake just to prove how badass he is, he did it to get his hands on a nutritious meal and begins to eat the snake raw, despite also saying it tastes a lot better when it’s cooked.

While he’s made a name for himself by eating anything and everything from across the animal kingdom, he doesn’t shy away from sourcing food from humans, either: specifically, his own urine. While in Australia, he stressed the importance of hydration and peed in his water flask, proceeding to drink it. Despite how much he says he doesn’t like drinking his urine, this incident eventually produced a wide array of memes, and in another episode, he takes this behavior to a new extreme. Stuck in Mexico and apparently without a decent water bottle, he urinates into a snakeskin and drinks directly from it.

On his Sahara journey, Bear is quick to stress just how useful every single part of a dead camel he’s been given by the locals is. He first skins it so that he can later use the skin as a makeshift bedroll, then opens it up to show us all the organs. He begins with the rumen, a part of the camel’s digestive system where lots of clear liquid is stored. This isn’t quite as stomach-churning as his usual activities, but don’t worry, he eventually cuts open its guts and tries to get water from partially digested cud. Finally, he demonstrates that the camel’s carcass can also function as an emergency shelter during a sandstorm, by climbing inside.

One of the most infamous moments of Grylls’ entire career came when he traversed the Savannah and proved just how far he was willing to go to get his hands on some fluids. In desperate need of something to drink, Bear picks up a handful of fresh elephant dung and squeezes it out above his open mouth, letting the liquid drip down. Once again, he stresses that this should only be done as a last resort as the dung can be home to all sorts of dangerous bacteria, but as always this doesn’t prevent him from giving us an enthusiastic demonstration.