All language subtitles for man.vs.wild.s01e04.european.alps.dvdrip-momentum

my name is Bear Grills

I've served with the British Special Forces

I've climbed to the summit of Everest

and cross the frozen oceans of the Arctic

now I'm in the French Alps

120 million people visit these mountains every year

and each year

hundreds of skiers climbers and hikers get lost

for injured

dozens are killed

if you're in trouble

I'm going to show the skills needed to survive

I'm flying over the French Alps

it's one of the biggest tourist destinations anywhere

for hikers

climbers and skiers

beautiful but it's a place where even the most

experienced mountain goer

can get into serious trouble

the Alps can be a dangerously hostile world

this year alone

over 80 tourists have lost their lives in avalanches

and every season

dozens of climbers are killed

I'm gonna show how to survive here

if needed

I'll be receiving some help from local experts

and a film crew will follow me

I'm going to show how to get off this mountain

as quickly as possible

I'm keeping my parachute

and you should hold onto any rope or cord you have

as it could be useful

the challenge is this glacier is riddled with crevasses

huge cracks in the ice hidden by snow

these can be up to 200 feet deep

see this wall of ice here this tells me

that I'm on a glacier up here

I guess a height is maybe

maybe anything up to 10,000 feet

and right at the top of glacier

and this whole thing is just slowly moving

causing these sort of crevasses

and all these crevasses are just

ruptures in the glacier

where it splitting and cracking its way

slowly through this valley but

in some ways I was pretty

lucky this is a relatively small one

but as I get lower down this glass here

they're going to get an awful lot bigger

a French

hiker fell into a crevasse near here three years ago

he was roped with two companions

so he dragged them to their deaths as well

I'm gonna show you how to avoid that

what I've got here are my

parachute rigging lines and what I've done is actually

cut these these rigging lines off the chute

and I'm trying to weave a rope here

every like couple of feet

and get a big bunch of it

turn it over

and make a knot like this

okay and the idea of doing this

is this is a technique that

Alpine guides have been using recently a way

of self arresting you

if you take a fall

but the idea with this I've got a long line

of knotted rope

as I walk along it can bubble along behind me

but if I go down a crevasse that fourth will

rip down into the snow and hopefully these knots

will bite

the method is simple

if you have a backpack

fill it with snow and drag it behind you

if you fall

the weight should make the knot bite into the snow

and break your fall

this is dangerous

so I'm also using a backup safety line

and you should only do this

if you have no other option

and those not

have just bitten into the ice

and I can see the first not jamming it

getting out is tough

I'm gonna use a special looper rope called a Prussick

I've just got a

somehow get back over this but there's no way

I'm gonna be able to pull myself up this string

but what I can do

is try and use

what's known as a proset lube and I've got some

some speck cords enough

stash earlier but

if I made what's called a press it

loop I should be able to wrap this round higher up

and if I wrap it around

5 or six times

get the loop and I can put my foot

into this

and this should bite now

okay

and this

rustics just give me enough height

let me

that's allowed me now to reach just not

and I should be able to

pull myself up the last bit here we go

under reach his son

these knots

really help me well

but that is

one of the hardest things visiting

you can do

to avoid the glaciers

aim for a ridge

from there you'll be able to see the best way down

it's late afternoon now the sun has softened the snow

and it's making it much harder to walk

anyone who's not acclimatized

should watch out for sized altitude sickness

breathlessness and a headache

I've been there and I can tell you it's horrible

and wading through snow like this

is physically exhausting

and it literally saps your strength

physically demanding

these mountains are especially at this altitude and

I'm just not as

you know I'm not as fit as I was climbing so much and

sighs

I've really murdered a cup of tea

but always make sure you keep an eye on the weather

I don't know if you can

see over there but

it looks like there's some bad weather coming in

and

one of the best bits of vices ever given by

a weather expert was it

clouds often behave like they look

in other words

yeah if they look menacing they often are menacing

and if they look quite benign it's often

yeah that's what it's gonna be

but that looks pretty

pretty nice it's covering a lot of those upper

upper summit and it's heading this way

the weather is closing in now

and it looks like there's a snowstorm on its way

I'm going to show you how to make a shelter

okay what I'm gonna try and do here

is make a snowcave into this

into the slope

and this is a pretty good place to

try and do this it's on a leash

Lee facing slope which means it's out of the wind

should be a little bit more sheltered

uh but also it's much easier digging into a

slope than trying to dig

uh into the flat

uh my big challenge is

though I obviously haven't got a shovel

uh which would make digging this

much easier but what I can do is try and pull out

from

inside the parachute the back protector

is a little strip of plastic

here we go

it's not great but it's certainly better

than nothing and this should

be much easier

to dig in than using

using my hands

when the sun drops there's a real risk of hyperthermia

and the worst thing you can do

is to keep walking and sweat

when that sweat evaporates

your body will cool to a dangerously low temperature

right now I've dug actually into this bank a bit

I'm now gonna try and create like a bit of a

platform here

and get rid of this snow

and this is gonna be like a bed platform

and the idea of this

is that

the cold

air

will then sink into what I'm sitting in

which is called like a cold well

and I'll be able to create

under here nice sleeping platform

and that's the theory of it

but they always say try and make

a snow cave about three times

the size of your body not too big

otherwise you're gonna be wasting any heat

generate any smaller

and what happens as the

snow compacts it actually shrinks

so you'll end up then

in a much worse situation buried alive

so you want about three times your own

body size and the last thing I'm gonna do is just

try and smooth off

the roof and what happens if you don't do this

as your body creates heat

the little pinnacles will start to drip on you

and the last thing you want when you're just getting

warm is to have a leaking roof

four snowboarders were

trapped on the mountain not far from here

in a snowstorm three years ago

they built a makeshift shelter like this

and survived for four days before being rescued

you need something to lie on

you lose 75 percent of your body heat

through the ground

use anything you have for this

a backpack or any spare clothing you might have

the other vital thing is water

they say with dehydration if you're thirsty

you're already dehydrated

the difficult is this is just no running water up here

and the only way I've ever been able to do this

is just when I'm

walking along

keep just stuffing

snow into my water bottle

like this

and then

just

stuffing up my jacket

where it's nice and warm

and let that

melt and bit by bit

it gives me some fluid

my next challenge

is to try and find food in this barren landscape

and I tell you this

must be one of the

worst and hardest places in the world

to find food there's just

you know there are no animals that are

you know running around

up here really is just barren barren environment

the only chance you'd really have of getting food

is maybe to uh

to catch uh a crow or rook which is some uh

their natural scavengers and they come up this high

but really without any sort of bait

uh that's gonna be nearly impossible

and my best bet is to head down off this glass here

get back down into the valleys where there's lush

of vegetation and much more food

but how do I know which way to go

and a really simple way of working out your direction

when you're lost in the mountains

is just to use your watch

and the sun and all I do if I

take my watch off

I just point the hour hand

at the sun and then I biset the line between

the hour hand and 12 o'clock

and that will give me a north south line

so if I know

that south I want to be heading off the glacier

so the northeast over there

so that's the plan

the tree line is down there and in the forest

there'll be berries and animals to eat

there are also Mountain Lakes

and you might well have to cross one

people die on lakes like these every year

I'm going to show how to survive such a life

threatening fool

first I'm lighting a fire then it's add on to the ice

whenever I'm out walking on a frozen lake like this

I'm always going through the scenario

of what would happen

if the ice gave way underneath me

and if you did go through the ice of a frozen lake

that is a seriously a life threatening hazard out here

and

only recently a 28 year old Boston guy

was swept by an avalanche into freezing water

he was swept by the avalanche

through an 8 inch thick layer of ice

on a lake just like this

and the only real way to show you

the technique for doing this

is to do it myself

for real and if you look behind me here

we've got an area of clear ice

and I suspect this is gonna be much weaker

and if I try and stand on it

there's every chance I'll go straight through that

but this is always a really horrible bit

getting into a frozen lake

consciously

and I know that

as soon as I get in that water

your whole world just gets

turned upside down

so here goes

go

okay first thing I've got to do is try and get

some semblance of

control back again and fight this sense of shock

and

the way I do this is to try and control my breathing

and keep calm but that's easier

easier said than done

but the three main dangers in this water

and first of all what they call the gas reflex

which is when you initially go in

you just gas because of the shock

you breathe in water into your lungs and you drown

the second danger

is cardiac arrest just from the shock of the water

and the third main danger is

the most dangerous is what kills most people

and it's just a numbing sensation to call

slows your movement

saps all of strength

your coordination and you just don't have a strength

to cool out again

the final thing I've got to

remember

is to go out this way the way I went in

because sure as hell the only

place I know the ice is strong enough

is the way I've come from

here goes

regal like a seal

keep a low sense of gravity not to break the ice

and when I

say fish disses away

get up now you have to get dry as quickly as possible

what I can do

is use some of the snow

and even that looks completely crazy

it's a really good way just to absorb some

of the moisture

off my body

and then just

try

get some black again

come on

I'm gonna get this fire going now

ah

can't believe this thing's gone out

come on

fire

okay now this fires gang

I've just got to get this closed drive

and

then get back

on the move again

for every thousand feet that I descend

the temperature will

rise by three and a half degrees Fahrenheit

I'm at the tree line now for some food

and here's an ant's nest

once you can't actually heat these

ants when they're alive

cause the amount of formic acid

and if you can get the lava soften inside

those eggs are really nutritious and a great for bait

it just I think it might be a bit early on

in the season Drak Sheik

get it the egg but there's a really good little trick

for separating the ants from the larvae

and what you do

is

you get like a top pool

and I've got that but I can use my jacket

create a bit of a bowl

make a bit of shadow on it

and when I break open

break this open

and have a look inside

I can see if there's some eggs

and

oh god

that's just a billion billion

4 make acid field ants

no eggs but what I could have done is just

throw them all into here

and then the ants try and protect the larvae and they

pick up the eggs

throw them into the shade

and you can literally then

scoop out the larvae separated from the ants and

eat them but not this time and that is the essence

of survival is it you win some castings you lose some

but you just gotta keep keep trying

you must take every opportunity to eat

these tender pine roots

don't look much

but they have a texture like celery

and contain vital calories

I've also found some spring buds on another pine tree

there's not much energy in these either

a handful

give me fewer calories in just a corner of chocolate

but if nothing else

they'll give me something to nibble on as I walk

now a real an enormous gorge with 100 foot drop

mountain rescue teams

use rope bridges for training exercises

we've got one here

so I can show you how to make use of it

you'll have to decide whether the bridge is safe

and I'm using a safety line because one slip up here

can be fatal

they look a bit old and tatty but these things probably

are probably pretty strong

and with some of my paracord

looped over this and

then just using some parachute stuff too

take that friction on my hands

there's no reason why I shouldn't try and shimmy my way

across this

and it should hold me

okay

I'm gonna use what climbers call eterilian traverse

where you pull yourself along

staying on top of the ropes

but it's not that easy

at last my feet are back on solid ground

these mountains are also notorious for their avalanches

which wreak havoc on an all to regular basis

moving through the forest and suddenly

I'm out into daylight and this is the reason why

this whole area of forest is just being

smashed by an avalanche

and this has to be

one of the most awesome things I've ever seen

just the power of nature

hitting and just stripping

all of this bark off the trees

and just splintering it all

and the power of this avalanche

would just kill everything

in its car this avalanche probably

hit the forest just a couple of weeks ago

it would have moved to up to 150 miles an hour

100,000 tons of snow

breaking tree trunks as if they were twigs

people skiing a snowboarding off piste

have set off

record number of avalanches in the Alps this year

and you can see while I'm actually walking on here

this is all the pine

and the earth is actually on top of the snow

and this stuff hitting would just be like concrete

splintering all these trees look at this

just ripping them apart

and you know basically this is all that's left

of an entire Pine Forest

amazing

but an avalanche may give you the chance

to find something to eat

if you do come across a dead animal like a shamoir

a mountain goat

make sure you take a close look

you can just see all the

gats of this here

and this is all rotting away but

look yeah you go look under

under this stuff

there's some maggots feeding off this

and even though

I don't want to be going near the flesh of this

these maggots are living and these are good protein

and really good energy massive calories

and the way to eat these is you bite

off the head because that's a really disgusting bit

in fact the whole maker is pretty disgusting

but then you just eat the body

but I want to be taking a bit of these now

a few for bait

and a few for food

now I'm going to use my maggots as bait

to find something more substantial to eat

the only question is what to do with them

so now a chance

to use those frozen lakes to your advantage

for where there's a lake there's often fish

I am definitely on a frozen lake and you can just tell

it's just wet

really slushy

and you can see just a few digs down

and I'm just into

into water here

and this is probably ice's only probably

3 or 4 inches thick

and I've got to be really careful on this stuff

but

with a little bit of effort I should be able to dig

a decent enough hole here

get through to the slush and then through

a few inches of ice

and the idea what I want to do is put out a nightline

with some hooks and with a bit of my paracord

and try and catch

a

couple of fish

that's the plan

alright I've

got a nice size hole here

all the way through the water

and that should do and what I'm gonna do now

is that

I've got a little bit of a weight from just a rock

and then I've made some

a little bit of thread out of the paracord as a line

and then just put some makeshift hooks along here

so I've made just from

bit of the wire from my parachute harness

and I'm putting these maggots

on these hooks

and

I'm hoping that these

trout in here are gonna be pretty inquisitive

at the end of a long winter

and

the idea also putting hooks all the way along this line

is to try and get to

get to fish at all different levels of lake

but like all things

it's a bit makeshift

but the essence of survival is just keep trying

keep trying anything you can think of that's gonna

help you and give you food

right and the last thing I need to do now

is use some of these spruce branches

and stuff these right down

into the hole

and the idea of this

is that this hopefully stops the hole freezing over

this is where most people get this wrong

is that they get all the effort

to make their lines their hooks

get through the ice

they might even catch some fish

but when they come to get it

their holes frozen over

don't wait around to see if the fish bite

in survival situations

you shouldn't just rely on one source of food

I've just been watching

a pair of gold eagles circling above me

and it's such a beautiful beautiful sight

but I tell you what they're not just circling for fun

they're looking for

looking for food

and I'm pretty certain

what they're after is the owner of these prints

and I've just come across these and these are

these are probably I think fox prints

and you can see the whole pool

and actually the claw marks in there

I follow the fox's tracks

then I see him

I'm hoping that he's hunting rabbits

if he gets one

my plan is to chase him off the kill

and take the meat myself

but he's heard me

there'll be no rabbit for dinner tonight

and I didn't catch any trout either

but if you're luckier than me

my advice is just get stuck in

there's no way I can make a fire on this and cook it

but these these trouts are just fine to eat raw

and if I get my fingerness

gills here and bite into this

and as soon as I bite into it

it's gonna break its spine accord and we'll kill it

MMM

I'm heading back to the tree line

so I can show you the best spot to build a shelter

and get a fire going

this is all old man's beard

a climbing plant which attaches itself to trees

and this makes great tinder for a fire and I want to be

collecting some of this

and what it does is so dry and brittle

it catches a spark really easy

so take some of that

keep that for later dried off my pocket

and yeah look there you go

this stuff is cool then

it's cool spagnum spagnum moss is what this is

and it's like

it connects as an antisept

if you get a cut you wipe the womb with it

and it will clean it

now you'd want to find the right place

to build your shelter

what makes a real difference

when you're making shelters in these valleys

is to try and pick these south facing slopes

and because they see more of the sun

it means the trees and the rocks

retain more of their warmth

okay look I can

I can easy make a shelter

tucked under this little spruce tree here

really with a minimum of effort

and all I gotta do is take this rock sack

parachute off a lot

all I've got to do

is clear a bit of a platform clear the snow away

break off some of these branches

and insulate the bottom with a load of pine

and

put some more spruce branches above again

to insulate me from above

and this will make a perfectly good shelter

it's easy to cut and thread the supple pine branches

to make a shelter

to protect you from the worse of the weather

now it's time to make a fire

but don't leave it too late

out here you should allow plenty of time to do this

the most important thing about making a fire

especially when you're cold and you're

tired at the end of the day

is preparation

it's no

good spending a lot of effort to get a little bit of

tinder going and then realize you got no killing

uh to feel that fire so what I've got here

is a really good bass rock of quite damp wood

that's gonna uh support it also let some air get to it

I've got a bank of snow around here

this gonna

act as a reflector and reflect the heat back to me

I've got my tinder

some kindling and some bigger wood

and the first thing I need to do

is try and get

some of this

tender going and the way I'm gonna do that I've got

how it's cool just a strike and a Flint

and I always carry this with me

obviously not when I'm at

home because that just be weird

but whenever I'm outside

this is one thing

I always just have it hanging around my neck

and that means whatever the situation

I should be able to get a fire going

also the theory guys

and this is a critical time

they always say

if you invest the effort early on in a fire

that's the time that really really matters

now to make some drinking water

but what I can do now is a little trick

of what they call finish marshmallows

and if I just get a bit of wood like this

and then just grab a bit of snow

jam that onto the end of a bit of stick

stick it into this

get on that stay on your brute

and put this underneath it

and the heat of the fire

will slowly melt that or drip in the cap

and while I'm relaxing I should have a glass of water

in the not too distant future

I can now boil some water for a cup of spruce tea

it tastes good and will give you valuable vitamin C

up to 8 times more than orange juice

amongst the trees on the lower slopes and here

the dangers are more hidden

first few across the valley for a while

just being buried in this dense dense wood

I'm just praying it's going to stop raining

because it's making it

bloody horrible

there is though one thing I can do

to try and get a view above the trees

psssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

but the further you descend

the warmer it gets and the snow becomes softer

and it makes walking almost impossible

but there's a survival trick that makes

travelling a lot easier

I'm going to show how to make a pair of snowshoes

I've got these young saplings here that I've cut

and

if I take one of these

I should be able to

hopefully bend this all the way around

try and do it without it snapping

and

that will effectively

be the chute

I take these ones off

and that's my frame now here

and what I need to do is put a couple of crossbeams in

and then just interweave it

with my parachute rigging lines

and then attach my boot to it

and that will be ready to go

it's gonna make a huge difference

it's not the prettiest job

in this cabin now blood

but

it's gonna do

snowshoes will spread the weight to your body

across a larger area of snow

giving you a much better

chance of staying on top of the crust

and not sinking in right

this snowshoe is almost finished now and I finished

at the cross bracing

I reinforced it with another

a bit of sapling all around the outside

and what I need now is just to measure up

where my feet

are gonna go

one there

and that one back here

okay Mark that one

these are threaded on

time I boot in

and then

rob us your father's brother

or bobs your uncle

and this is going to make

snow travel a load easier for me

now to try them out

and the snowshoes are working

even though it's still tiring isn't

definitely less tiring than

the

thigh deep snow I was trying to deal with before and

it just means I stay on the surface of the snow and

I know as soon as I've taken it off because I've tried

a couple of times

I just sink straight back down again

it's been a grueling

cold often wet

but if I've Learned one thing then it's

these mountains may look beautiful

and be the perfect place for a holiday

but they can be treacherous

and they demand the utmost respect