Extreme sportsman Will Gadd has run the gamut of daredevil stunts, from paragliding off Hawaiian volcanoes to kayaking down Alaskan glaciers. When he decided to go kite-skiing in the Sahara as part of “Fearless Planet,” a new Discovery Channel series that treats the great outdoors as a contact sport, he was in uncharted territory.
“That was one of the weirder things I’ve done in my life,” says Gadd, who ideally hoped that the giant kite would pick up enough wind so that he could race behind it and over the dunes. He found that even mistakes could be learning experiences.
“That adventure in the Sahara turned out to be a good illustration of why that sand is special and different. There was no wind, and the kite-skiing clearly wasn’t going to work,” says Gadd, 34, who lives in Alberta, Canada, and spends his time kayaking, climbing and gliding. “One of the Moroccan guys on the shoot ended up pulling me behind his quad, which is a sort of motorbike. Next thing I know, I’m screaming across the dunes behind this guy. I tried a jump, missed, crashed and gave myself a good bruise. But the sand there is super fine because it’s been blowing around for thousands of years, so when I crashed, it wasn’t nearly as bad as crashing on the beach.”
“Fearless Planet” takes the majesty of the award-winning Discovery series, the high-definition marvel “Planet Earth,” and adds breathtaking action sequences.
“When you look at the reality of a lot of science today, you get people going in on a regular basis and doing extreme and extraordinary things,” says Alan Eyres, one of the show’s executive producers. “It’s difficult to imagine the sheer brutality and violence of the forces that created the world. It’s a mystery you can’t solve in the lab. In order to crack it, you’ve got to live it.”
The lucky (or just plain insane, depending on your thrill-seeking threshold) Gadd tries his hand at every sort of extreme activity in the six-part series. In Alaska, he donned a dry suit to climb an iceberg, which can literally flip — tossing the climber into the freezing ocean — at any moment.
“My iceberg didn’t flip on me but we did go by it again the next day and everything I had been climbing on had literally fallen apart,” he says.
And in Australia, Gadd jumped into shark-infested water with a pail of fish heads, intended to attract the predators. “I wasn’t so happy about that, but the guide assured me it was fine. Where I come from, that’s like strapping raw meat on your thighs and wandering off into the forest,” he says.
The production had a Medivac helicopter on hand at all times in case something serious happened, although Gadd says the worst injuries were sprains and cuts – “normal expedition injuries,” he says. Eyres adds that preparation is the best way he knows to prevent problems.
In each episode, Gadd challenges himself, but he also spends time talking to experts to impart scientific information about each location. While he was climbing a 400-foot Grand Canyon wall, for example, he also was looking at the different layers of rock that define the expansive canyon.
“I hope people will enjoy watching me get stuffed into these environments and come out with some degree of understanding,” he says. “These shows are educational but they are certainly not Al Gore-style education.”
In other words, there’ll be no Power Point presentations here.
FEARLESS PLANET
Sunday, 10 p.m., Discovery