The Chosen in the Wild with Bear Grylls

I'm Bear Grylls, and the outdoors and adventure

-has been my life. -Let's go!

And a faith in Christ is a light through it all.

My job has led me to take

some of the world's greatest icons on adventures into the wild,

from presidents to Hollywood sensations.

The TV phenomenon The Chosen

is in many ways a story

of the greatest adventure of all time.

Let me tell you a story.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

What better way to get to know the people behind this Bible story

than bring them out here

into this great wilderness for an expedition of their own.

Welcome to The Chosen in the Wild .

I'm on my way to pick up Dallas Jenkins.

He's the creator of the TV phenomenon The Chosen .

He's asked me to take him on an adventure into the wild,

to push him to his limits.

So I've brought him to the Adirondack Forest

for the ultimate test.

Welcome to Chosen in the Wild .

Dallas, you'd better be ready!

I'm Dallas Jenkins. I'm a rugged indoorsman.

I am now out in the wild,

trying to figure out what I did to get myself here.

Dallas Jenkins is the creator,

cowriter, producer and director

of the global smash hit TV series The Chosen .

All right, here we go. Let's go again.

Inspired to create the series after a powerful experience with God,

The Chosen depicts a raw and authentic Jesus

as he navigated the trials of human life.

Thank you for your patience. You guys are awesome!

And Dallas is no stranger to life's challenges himself.

I like to kind of know what I'm getting into,

so even just like a little mouse crawling across a path,

uh, that can be enough to bring me down.

Bear?

Did you hear that?

Bear!

I think I actually woke up real bears.

From pole to pole,

I've been all over the planet in search of adventure.

It's challenging to be away from the comforts of home,

and in the wild, you never know what's gonna happen next.

But what it has taught me is how to let go.

Now I'm taking Dallas, the man in control of The Chosen ,

canyoneering on the Au Sable River

to discover if he can truly let go.

Bear gave me a backpack. I haven't actually seen what's inside,

so I'm gonna check to see what he has for me.

I'm hoping it's, um, you know, creature comforts,

but I'm not optimistic.

Okay.

Well, there's a lot of this.

This is like a… magic trick.

Just a rope. Okay, great.

And a note.

"Hey, Dallas, jump on and meet me at the end of the road."

It's like putting toothpaste back in the tube.

Oh, goodness. Here.

Okay, good. I was hoping there wasn't, like, a… a body.

Oh, gosh, there's more.

This looks jump-on-able.

Oh, my goodness.

I guess…

I'm supposed to jump on.

Key.

- -

I know how to turn it on!

Okay.

All right. Bear left me this quad bike.

End of the road. Here we go.

-Hey, Dallas. -Good to see you.

-Are you okay? -I don't know yet. We'll see.

-You ready? -Yeah. We'll see.

The adventure begins.

Oh, I'm ready.

So if I fall, you'll catch me, yeah?

-Yeah. I've got you. -All right, good.

It's always pretty cool under a chopper like this.

So beautiful.

-Are you okay with heights? -Yeah.

I have a sign on the wall in my house

that says, "You can do hard things."

I wanted to raise my kids to know they can do hard things.

So that's why I had to do this.

Okay, feet down.

Whoo! Okay.

Chopper outta here.

Well done.

Well, we're into it.

So from here, we're going about, uh, three miles.

We've got a river journey.

A whole series of narrow ravines, rivers, wider rivers.

We're gonna be kind of crisscrossing those.

Doesn't sound very far, but it's kind of tricky

getting across them sometimes, but we'll figure it out.

-We'll work it out together. -All right, yeah.

I like indoors, but… all right.

So is most of your life normally indoors?

I feel like, Bear, we've cracked the code historically.

We know how to now temperature control.

-Yeah. -Food control.

And you seem to be not embracing that side.

You seem to be going out into the wild. I'm not sure why.

But I'm gonna join you today. I'll go on this with you.

I love it. Life begins outside of our comfort zone.

-Yes. -You know, we have to kick each other

out of it sometimes, and the outdoors lights us up.

-You ready? -Yeah. Let's go.

We're going this way.

Canyoneering along the Au Sable River

is a perfect place for Dallas to discover life outdoors.

Everything about this landscape is super-sized,

from the thumping white-water rivers

to the sheer drops either side of them.

My team have placed some ropes in advance to speed up our journey,

and this allows us to super-size the challenges.

These forests are amazing. You've got bears, you've got coyotes.

We're heading definitely off the track,

so we'll take our time with this.

Where were you brought up?

I was born and raised in Illinois.

Yeah. What was that like?

My dad is an author,

and so, uh, I was raised in the suburbs.

What's funny is my mom, she was raised on a farm.

So when I was in, uh, sixth grade,

every summer she'd send me to the farm for three weeks with her parents.

And did you like those weeks on the farm every summer?

-Uh, no. Not at all. -That's so funny.

-What were you into when you were a kid? - Sports.

So I was obsessed. I was reading the sports page when I was…

that's how I learned to read, five, six years old.

So for me, I was always obsessed with sports,

and I thought I wanted to be an athlete.

And then raised in a Christian home.

I went to a Christian school.

So kind of the Bible and sports are my two obsessions.

That's amazing you were brought up with a faith.

-You're so lucky. -Yeah.

-What a gift. -Yeah, it really was.

Your parents must've been remarkable.

I mean, I have been very blessed, but what's funny is too,

I think sometimes when you're raised in a foundation of faith,

it is easy also to take things for granted.

And I think that I got into my college years and older,

and I started to get comfortable.

As you know, comfortable is dangerous.

I think personally, you can enjoy things more

when you've pushed yourself,

so as much as I joke around

about how this is uncomfortable for me because it's outdoors,

I'm not a big outdoorsman, the part of it that appeals to me is, I'm gonna…

I think I can be better after doing something like this.

This journey is gonna push Dallas

further from his comfort zone than he's ever imagined.

Oh, my goodness.

-Just watch yourself here. -Yeah.

Yeah, so we're gonna have a bunch of these sort of rivers to cross.

This sort of water's super cold. Your survival time,

you know, after five, six, seven minutes, you're in trouble.

-Yeah. -This is, like, almost freezing.

And then deceptively fast flowing,

and you get eddies and whirlpools down this.

And the other thing is, you don't know how deep that is.

But generally all these things in the wild,

you only get it wrong once.

Err on the side of caution.

You might think, "Oh, it's fine." You jump in, one foot of water,

twist an ankle, and then out here, if you're on your own, you're dead.

-Yeah. -It only takes a small injury.

So, we'll… we'll be cautious,

but at this point, we're just gonna follow upstream for a bit.

Okay, great.

I'm getting the impression that we're not gonna just walk alongside the river,

we're gonna probably go across it as well.

And, uh, unlike Jesus in my show, I can't walk on water.

Okay, so this is our first way we're gonna get across this river.

All right.

Careful on the edge here, but you see real thumping white-water down there.

And this is just a hemp line.

I've added this one because I don't know how old that one is.

But this one's good.

This is definitely gonna be a, uh, little scary

if you've never done this before.

I think this sort of terrain, you've always gotta be mindful of.

If you end up in this water out here, you're in trouble.

It might be sunny, but it's cold.

And that water is only just above freezing.

Might be fine for a few minutes, then you're gonna lose

the feeling in your feet and hands, then your brain goes,

and then you're in trouble.

So we do not want to come off this line, do not want to end up in this water.

So this is gonna be all about core strength.