In a controversial episode from the first season of Man vs. Wild, Bear Grylls journeys to Mount Kilauea in Hawaii where everything is not as it seems..
“You gotta be really careful crossing these”, Bear tells the audience before blindly leaping and doing the exact opposite. While the above video is pretty hilarious, the guy who made this video, Volcanochaser, also took an entire series of photos exposing the episode as false and deceptive.
This episode was one of 5 from the first season that the Discovery Channel removed entirely and never re-aired again due to the criticism the show received. You can read all about that here. In the YouTube description, he sums up the inaccuracies pretty well:
The phony bear faked it in Kilauea Volcano also. He taped most of the show a few hundred feet from various highways. He didn’t even hike the easy three miles from the landing site to the final destination. Most of the scenes in the show don’t exist in the area he was supposed to be in: avocado trees, lava tube, tropical forest, fissures, and landing site are all in different parts of the island and separated by up to 50 miles. I have hiked this area hundreds of times. I can understand how people who have not been to the area may think it’s legitimate, but I was surprised how easy it was to dupe the Discovery Channel. It would be suicidal to follow the foolish advice given by this show.
In this clip, the phony bear is supposed to be next to the ocean and is trying to cross these fissures to get there. But he is, in fact, at the SW Rift Zone at the 4000 foot summit of Kilauea. This is about 50 highway miles away from his very next scene next to the ocean and his final destination at the end of Highway 130. These fissures are unique to a small area on the summit and are a very popular tourist viewing area. They are only a few hundred feet long and easy to go around. Only the phony bear seems to have trouble crossing them. Throughout the episode, he makes up silly solutions to problems which don’t exist. The fissures are located next to the parking area on the Crater Rim Drive shown on the clip.
If this brief video exposé leaves you wanting more, definitely check out Volcanochaser’s extensive photo gallery detailing all the ways this episode faked it.
