Can Bear Grylls Teach This City Boy to Live in the Wild?

I did not survive my pretend broken leg. (All photos are courtesy of Bear Grylls Survival Academy unless otherwise noted.)

My first crisis arose two minutes into the Bear Grylls Survival Academy. The coffee machine in the meeting room wasn’t working. I can’t survive without coffee.

I got some help with my drink from survival experts who were a little overqualified for fixing a coffee dispenser, and over the next 24 hours of the camp they put me through some considerably more challenging tests, including eating live bugs and sleeping unprotected in the wild. I did manage to survive — well, kind of. At one point, I actually died. I’ll explain later.

The survival academy was launched two years ago in the U.K., then in  Africa, with the backing of Bear Grylls, the famous British survivalist who stars in TV’s “Man vs. Wild.” It more recently launched in the U.S., with a handful of courses so far in New York, Colorado, and a campsite just outside Yosemite National Park. I was invited to attend the latter venue for a 24-hour crash course on how to stay alive when the worst-case scenario becomes real.

Bear Grylls makes a rare cameo appearance at our course for a helpful pep talk.

The 24-hour adult course costs $399, and for an adult-child combo, it’s $598. For the hardcore learner, there’s also a five-day course you can take, in which you’re trained for three days and then dropped from a helicopter to survive for two days on your own. That costs $2,199. (Grylls, for the record, doesn’t make a dime off these courses; the proceeds go to children’s charities.)

I took a combination of the adult and parent-child course, with seven students (two children) and three instructors. It was designed for someone with little survival experience, which was perfect for a lifelong city slicker like me — if the zombie apocalypse ever breaks out, my brain would be in big trouble.

We traveled up, around, and through the woods just outside Yosemite.

We had very little idle time over the next 24 hours, with activities including foraging for food, building shelter, climbing and rappelling rocks, crossing bodies of water in full gear, crawling through a narrow muddy culvert, skinning and barbecuing two rabbits that were caught in traps, and much more.

I came away both exhausted and pleased with the experience. There’s no way you’ll become a survival expert in 24 hours, but that’s not the point of the camp — it’s more of a gateway to get the average person a little more attuned to an environment, and possibly a lot more down the line.

Here are some survival lessons I picked up that might serve you well if you’re in the wild and things start to break down.

It’s not as gross as it looks — OK, maybe it is.

Live worms taste bad, but live grubs taste good!

Things escalated pretty fast for us. Within the camp’s first five minutes we’d covered ourselves in mud. (Aside from helping you snap out of urban living, it’s also a primitive sunscreen). Within an hour, we were learning how to find bugs for food.

As gross as this might sound to some, there isn’t a better way to find protein in the wild — your average earthworm has up to three times the protein of beef. One of our instructors, Matt Randall, showed us how easy it is to find these critters: Just lift any log, dig a few inches underground, and voila — a wriggling happy meal awaits.

Related: A Terrifying Trek Into the Heart of Darkness. America’s 8 Scariest Hikes 

I started by eating a live grub, and to my surprise it was tasty, with a crunchy, nutty finish. The bitter chaser was an 8-inch earthworm, which I would definitely send back to the chef were it not so nutritious. It was gummy and gritty. Maybe it would have been better with Sriracha.

Finding nontoxic food is an inexact science

Grylls told us about this himself when he made a cameo appearance near the start of our camp. We were told this was only the third Bear sighting of 60 camps so far, but he happened to be in the neighborhood shooting an upcoming feature with Channing Tatum.

Even Grylls, who is known to eat scorpions for breakfast, has had his misfortune with wild food. He told us a very intimate story about getting diarrhea on camera while climbing after he’d eaten a snake — while his cameraman laughed. But in his eyes, moments like that are just part of the fun.

Instructors played a big part in helping us climb up and down rocks.

“Adventure begins when things start to go just a little bit wrong,” he told us.

If you know your greens, you can confidently eat the right ones, and we found a veritable salad bar in the forest, with the likes of miner’s lettuce, shield leaves (I like its mustardy taste), fir, clover, and clinger plant. We also found succulents, which can offer some nice liquid refreshment in a pinch.

A demonstration in healthful-leaf eating.

If you’re a fan of mushrooms, however, you’re going to need another pizza topping. They’re a notorious crapshoot in their toxicity, and we were told about a professional forager who died eating a lethal strain.

Then you’ve got your berries, which are generally predicable by color. We learned this piece of poison poetry: “Green, yellow, or white: dead in the night.” On the other hand, there’s “Purple, black and blue: Good for you.”

As for red? “Good for the head, but may leave you dead.” So be careful with those berries. Rubbing them against your skin might give you a hint of whether they’re dangerous.

You can filter stream water with a sock

Our lead instructor, James Turner, warned us not to drink unfiltered water, no matter how clean it looked. After all, there could be a dead deer upstream contaminating it: “I once had perfectly clear water coming out of the ground, and I got giardia,” he told us, referring to the nasty parasitic infection of the intestines.

If you don’t have more high-tech filtration options such as chlorine or iodine tablets or a UV purifier, you can go low tech and put a thick sock over your canteen as you dip it in the water. We did this and got some much-needed drinking water on a 90-degree day.

Related: Into the Wild: African Safaris that Offer Close Encounters of a Whole New Kind

This boy started a fire with his knife and ferro rod before any of the adults did.

Dandelions and tampons can help you start a fire

Turner showed us all kinds of ways to start a fire in the wild — I got a large spark just by putting a small wad of steel wool against a 9-volt battery. There are also waterproof and windproof matches you can buy. And if you want to go the Full MacGyver, you can use a tampon, belly lint, or nearby dandelions in your tinder pile.

We were challenged to start a fire by rubbing the back of a hunting knife against a ferro rod — a stick of grooved steel. To make this work, we had to create a tinder pile by grinding any wood or flammable substances we could find on top of a flat piece of bark.

Let’s just say that using the Tinder app is much easier for me than making tinder — I finished dead last, and several of the other students had to help me, including a young boy who was first among all of us to start a fire. So yeah, I think I’ll just carry a lighter from now on.

Don’t worry; he made it across just fine.

Starting a fire is much tougher to do when your friend is dying

Right after I had drenched myself by crossing a cold pond in full gear in chest-deep water with a large stick to keep my balance, Turner pulled me about 50 yards ahead of the group for a different challenge. I was to play the role of a camper who had broken his leg and was going into shock. The campers had to diagnose the injury, stabilize it, and start a fire to call for help — all in 15 minutes before I died.

I put on my best “Saving Private Ryan” face and screamed in agony as the others found me on the ground. To their credit, my mates did a great job of quickly creating a splint with rope, sticks, and some sleeping-bag lining. Starting the fire, on the other hand, was another matter.

My team creates an excellent splint for my fake broken leg.

The evening before, people had struck flames within a few minutes. This time, the optimal tinder materials weren’t lying around, but something else was there: pressure. Even in a pretend crisis, they could feel it.

It took well over 20 minutes to get a fire started while I lay under the hot sun, and by that time I’d died and passed on into my next life as a Thai fisherman. The lesson? Carry good tinder with you, just in case, and keep more than you think you need.

Related: Get a Boot Camp Workout Right in Your Hotel Room

Where I slept (or at least tried to) without a bag. (Greg Keraghosian)

Vaulted ceilings are nice in a house, but not a shelter

Our gang was given 40 minutes to create a suitable shelter to spend the night. Some factors we had to consider: which way the prevailing winds were blowing, whether we were in the path of running water if it rained, and whether we were right on top of an ant hill (which happened to another group).

My two teammates and I built a decent shelter with some large wood beams and a roof of pine needles, with dead leaves composing our bed. But our roof was way too high, which I paid for that night when I made a very egotistical decision: to be the only one of us to sleep uncovered, without a sleeping bag. I shivered much of the night in nothing more than a light midlayer and got two hours of sleep tops. Turner did tell me that I was the first student in four camps he’d taught to bypass the sleeping bag. So I had that going for me.

Some very tasty, freshly caught rabbit on the open fire. (Greg Keraghosian)

Trapping animals for food may not be worth the effort

Our instructors showed us a couple of ways to build animal traps — a “figure 4” composed of a heavy piece of wood held by three smaller ones with bait, and a snare trap composed of a wiry noose held above the ground by a stick. And sure enough, we caught two rabbits after 10 traps had been laid.

But there’s a cost to expending the energy to build such traps or hunt food — energy that, in survival mode, could be better used on finding water or shelter. You can live three weeks without food but just three days without water. As instructor Anthony Handel told us, “Is what I’m trying to do helping me, or is it killing me?”

We ran some wind sprints to help us wake up in the morning. 

A little birdie might tell you if there’s danger around the corner

The better you know the birds in your environment, the better you’ll know what they’re saying. Try walking along your trail, then running wildly. Those raised chirps you hear might be birds sending out an alarm about you, which a nearby deer will pick up as a warning. In other situations, you might be the deer if there’s a predatory animal or human stalking about. Listen well and it might save your life someday.

Fact: You can be swept away by a river even in knee-high water.

A dry bag can be a great flotation device if you’re drowning

After about five hours of completing one physical challenge after another on the second day, which included a three-inch gash on my elbow while abseiling down a steep rock, we had one last task: swim across a small lake fully clothed and with our packs, with a line of rope to help us stay up.

My boots alone weighed me down considerably, but what got us across was our dry bags: Filling them up with our belongings both kept them dry and us afloat as we paddled across. If you’re doing anything near water, such as kayaking, you’d be well advised to keep a full dry bag around, just in case.

Crawling out of a culvert to safety, Shawshank Redemption style.

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