Taking a hike with Discovery's Bear

The 'Man vs. Wild' host grabs all sorts of life by the horns

Bear Grylls has served in the British military and climbed Mount Everest. He now hosts a survival series on the Discovery Channel. (Gary friedman/los angeles times)

Bear Grylls threw a lizard at me.

We were climbing in Franklin Canyon Park in the Santa Monica Mountains in Los Angeles on a cool, hazy afternoon recently when Grylls, host of Discovery Channel's popular survival series "Man vs. Wild," spotted a small dark reptile, no longer than a pencil, scurrying up the trail.

Our group quieted. Grylls stopped, squared his lean body, pounced. Too late. The reptile darted away. "That's one lucky lizard," Grylls said with a smile.

A few moments later, our guide plunged headfirst into a thicket of scrub and, to my astonishment, emerged holding his prey by the tail.

"See, if I were doing this on the show," he said in his British accent, "I'd do like this and" - he mimed biting off the lizard's head.

"Oh, please don't!" someone in our party pleaded.

Grylls chuckled and gave the wriggling lizard an appraising stare. He gazed down the path toward me. "Here, catch," he said, suddenly lofting the critter in my direction with an underhand pass. I stepped aside and watched it disappear in a pile of brush.

If you're unacquainted with Grylls, any culturally aware grade-school student probably can tell you all you need to know. That he travels to the most dangerous wildernesses in the world. That he brims with survival tips and camping lore. And yes, that he literally sinks his teeth into all sorts of disgusting things, from a blood-engorged grub to a still-flopping salmon to a rotting carcass not quite finished by maggots and hyenas. The poor man has demonstrated how to hydrate oneself by squeezing water out of elephant dung.

In the wake of the 2006 death of Australian wildlife guide Steve Irwin ("The Crocodile Hunter"), Grylls has become Discovery Channel's premier ambassador of outdoor danger. The son of a politician, he trained in the British military, where he seriously injured his back in a parachuting accident.

Nevertheless, he climbed Mount Everest at 23 and parlayed his minor celebrity into a book. His TV career started humbly enough with a deodorant commercial. Grylls now spends the few work-free weeks he has each year with his wife and two young children on a houseboat on the Thames in England.

Yet whether Grylls's exploits can be trusted as dependably "real" has made him the subject of controversy. A fuss erupted last year when Britain's Sunday Times reported that he and his producers exaggerated dangers he encountered during filming, stayed in hotels during supposedly overnight camping trips, and contrived certain scenes for dramatic effect, including adding fake smoke to a volcano sequence. (Who among TV producers would do such things?) The network since has added a disclaimer; viewers are told that Grylls and his crew receive support in "potentially life-threatening" predicaments.

Although Discovery executives consider "Man vs. Wild" - which starts its third season this summer - more of a how-to than a reality show, the series is caught up in the debate over whether reality TV is a contradiction in terms. Partisans of "Survivorman," another lost-in-the-wilderness show on Discovery, have compared Grylls unfavorably with that program's host, Les Stroud, who travels into the bush alone, no crew in tow.

I hoped to get a sense of what Grylls is really like in his more customary habitat during our trip to Franklin Canyon, a dense, 605-acre preserve tucked amid the stately mansions of Beverly Hills. Naturally, I also wondered what backwoods delicacies I might sample during an encounter with a man known for devouring creepy-crawlies most people wouldn't dare touch, let alone eat.

I arrived a few minutes early. In the back seat sat my daughter Gabby, an inquisitive third-grader and devoted "Man vs. Wild" fan. (It might be less humiliating to have a close family member rather than Grylls run for help if something dreadful happened on the trail.)

A black limousine glided past on the main paved road through the park and out tumbled Grylls, a tall, wiry, boyish-looking man of 34 dressed in a plaid earth-tone shirt and loose trousers from his own line of branded clothing (to be released this year). A photographer and a Discovery publicity executive rounded out our party.

After pleasantries, I suggested that we pretend that we were stranded in the wilderness and had to battle for survival so that Grylls could show us some basic tips. This was a plan that required a healthy imagination - we were standing a few miles north of the fancy boutiques of Rodeo Drive.

Grylls immediately shot down the proposal. If we pursued the survival scenario, he explained, we'd have to go in search of a stream and follow it downhill - among the first steps for any unfortunate truly lost in the wilderness. Climbing was what he wanted to do. The chauffeur popped the trunk of the limousine and Grylls reached inside. "Rule 1: Take plenty of water," he announced, launching plastic bottles at us.

Once on the trail he seemed to relax. He asked if we could figure out which way we were headed based on the angle of the sun. I craned my neck toward the sky and hazarded a guess, whereupon Grylls gently corrected me.

We kept ascending, and at one spot where the hillside leveled off we came upon a piece of black excrement about the size of a shotgun cartridge. Grylls knelt down and asked Gabby, "What do you think left this? I'd say a coyote." He pointed and added, "The tapered end means it's a carnivore." We moved on.

Days before our excursion, in another exploit that will win him no friends among members of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, he had wrestled a 7-foot alligator in Louisiana. The pas de deux ended with Grylls's knife sticking out of a soft spot in the back of the gator's head. Then, he said, he smeared the animal's fat on his face to ward off mosquitoes ("an old Indian trick") and ate the tail.

"It was lovely!" he said.

Whatever Grylls does in the name of showmanship - and it's abundantly clear he'll do just about anything - the wild mountain man image doesn't entirely fit. For all the exotic raw animal flesh he pops into his maw for the cameras, he said, at home he's actually semi-vegetarian. And it became apparent that he regards nature in a way that's more Sierra Club than Outward Bound.

We neared the summit. Perched on a ridge to the west was a long row of gigantic estate homes, any of which could have made an inviting cover photo for Architectural Digest.

Someone happened to mention Southern California's wildfires. Grylls pointed out that the phenomenon is as nature intended, although the effects probably are worsened by reckless land use and misguided fire-control efforts. "It's all to protect . . . those things," he said, jabbing a thumb at the distant mansions.

"We live in an amazing world, and we're charged with living boldly," he had said earlier. "It's a shame to lose these skills that allow us to live in nature. So much of our brain is absorbed with moneymaking and computers. The most fulfilled people I know are absorbed with nature."