Mears’s guide to close encounters of the wild kind and how to survive them

WITH his olive green shirts, matching trousers and Tilley hats, the sight of Ray Mears trekking through some of the most remote, albeit stunning, places on earth has become a familiar one to TV viewers.

Bear Grylls might have the dramatic name and macho image, but if you want to know how to craft a canoe out of birch bark then Mears is your man.

For the past 30 years he’s been running courses at Woodlore, his School of Wilderness Bushcraft, in Sussex, and when he’s not teaching pupils about the art of surviving in the wilderness he’s off globetrotting with a camera crew in tow to some of the world’s harshest and most uninhabitable environments, where he rustles up bush tucker from things that most of us would run a mile from.

Through TV programmes like Ray Mears’ Extreme Survival and Ray Mears’ Adventure Special, in which he took Ewan MacGregor into the Honduran jungle on the trail of the ancient tribes of the Mosquito Coast, Mears has brought the more remote corners of the world into our front rooms.

He’ll be talking about his adventures as well as offering practical tips on how to deal with poisonous animals and endangered species in his new theatre show An Evening with Ray Mears – The Outdoor Life! which comes to the Grand Theatre, in Leeds, later this month, and ties in with his autobiography My Outdoor Life.

Although Mears has made his name from his various TV series he thinks some nature programmes create a false sense of danger to make them more entertaining. He draws a line between what he does in showing off the realities of the natural world, and shows that are more sensationalist.

“I’m a great believer in television as a medium for communication. I think what Bear Grylls does is entertaining and I have no issue with that, but there are lots of documentaries coming up which create a false sense of jeopardy within the programmes for entertainment’s sake,” he says.

“I try to bring people and nature closer together. In the digital age, it’s more important now than ever before.”

Mears grew up in Southern England on the North Downs where he developed a deep fascination with the countryside, learning to track foxes and use the natural tools at his disposal. This interest was further fuelled by his school judo teacher. Kingsley Hopkins was a Second World War veteran who had fought behind enemy lines in Burma and taught him the mantra “You don’t need equipment, you need knowledge to survive in the wild.”

This seemingly simple ethos, along with the principle of “Maximum efficiency from minimum effort”, has since become the bedrock of his Bushcraft philosophy.

“It’s about exploring the differences you find and asking questions like ‘what’s that tree?’ And once you know what it is the next question is ‘what is it used for?’ And ‘does it grow quickly, or slowly?’” he says, explaining his empathy with the natural world.

“There’s always a raft of questions that you want to find the answers to and that’s how you build up your knowledge.”

He gets people of all ages and backgrounds doing his courses. “I had a guy who came on my course and he wrote to me afterwards saying he’d been walking down the street where he lived and looked up at the trees and said he not only knew what they were called but for the first time he appreciated their value,” he says.

“I meet young people whose parents send them on my course and they’re usually well-heeled and well-motivated youngsters who are curious about the world around them. But I’m aware there are a lot of young people who don’t have that kind of advantage, but at the same time you can’t reach everyone.”

Mears counts a knife and a water bottle as two of the essentials you need when you’re going into the wilderness. “It’s about preventing things in the first place and making sure you’re prepared because you need different equipment in the Arctic than you do in the desert.” Too many people, though, go on adventures ill-prepared.

“If you don’t prepare properly then you’re setting yourself up for a fall. Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.”

When things do go wrong he says laughter can be a powerful psychological prop. “Having a sense of humour when things go wrong can be very important because if you can laugh at something and not panic it can help you deal better with a situation.”

He says there tends to be two types of people who end up getting into difficulty.

“You have extreme adventurers who live on the edge and get into trouble and at the other end is the people who think it’s cool to blast off into wild places and get lost and don’t have the tools or ability to deal with the situation. Nature is great but if you don’t prepare you can be traumatised by it, or worse.”

It’s a point he’s keen to emphasise. “Going into the wild isn’t like going to Glastonbury for the weekend. If you go into the desert and you’ve not done your homework it will eat you. I’ve just come back from Arizona where I went to the coroner’s office in Tuscon and they told me they find two corpses a day of people trying to cross the border from Mexico. As we’re speaking now someone will be dying in the desert.”

Mears’s own adventures have put him in extreme places but his nearest brush with death didn’t come from close encounters with a crocodile or a deadly snake, but a helicopter crash in the United States in 2005. He was filming Ray Mears Bushcraft for the BBC, exploring the dramatic landscape of Wyoming when the aircraft ran into problems. “I got into the brace position and just hoped,” he says. Mears managed to escape with just severe bruising while the cameraman broke both legs.

It was a lucky escape but while accidents like this are rare, surely animals are much more unpredictable? “I was talking to someone who had an incident with a grizzly bear and said it was just a bad grizzly. But I’m not sure that’s true, 99.9 per cent of the time when something goes wrong we’ve precipitated an attack.

“We have to respect animals, they can feel threatened or be in pain and people don’t realise. Most of the time it’s our fault but we have this attitude that nature is threatening and I don’t think it is, it’s a lack of knowledge.”

Which is why, he says reiterating the point, preparation is vital whether you’re going to Snowdonia or the Sahara. “You need to be realistic and prepare for the worst and hope for the best.” And if you’re going deep into the wilderness you need a rifle and “to know how to use it.”

Mears has become synonymous with the outdoor life but are there ever times he yearns for a quieter life and a nice, warm office? “I tried it when I left school and I didn’t like it. It just didn’t suit me, but then what I do wouldn’t suit a lot of people either.”

Although he thrives in the natural world and enjoys filming, it isn’t an easy life. “It’s hard work and a lot of the time you’re either wet and cold, or getting burned by the sun and bitten by insects. There are some dangerous creatures on the planet and it’s often the little things that cause the biggest problems.”

There are, of course, some exceptions and having spent time in Australia’s Northern Territories and seen crocodiles up close he has a new found respect for them.

“I didn’t perhaps realise just how dangerous they are. They’ve evolved over millions of years and it’s one of those designs that’s stood the test of time. No-one has ever survived being bitten by a four metre crocodile. If it gets hold of you it’s over.”

But even with crocodiles there are sometimes miraculous escapes. “I heard a story of an aborigine woman who was bitten by a three-metre crocodile. She broke several ribs and her liver was bitten in half, but her husband fought it off and she survived,” he says.

“It just goes to show that you should never give up.”

An Evening with Ray Mears - The Outdoor Life!, Leeds Grand Theatre, October 27. For tickets call 0844 576 2210 or go online at www.leedsgrandtheatre.com

My Outdoor Life by Ray Mears, published by Hodder & Stoughton, is out now priced £20.

Ray Mears: Wild Man

Ray Mears was born in 1964 and grew up in the South of England on the North Downs.

He founded Woodlore, the School of Wilderness Bushcraft in 1983 and has been teaching ever since, as he puts it, “to enable others to drink at the well of Bushcraft”.

His first TV show was Wild Tracks for the BBC in 1994. Since then he’s done a string of programmes including Ray Mears’s Extreme Survival and Survival with Ray Mears and written several books including The Outdoor Survival Handbook and Northern Wilderness.

He survived a helicopter crash while filming in the United States in 2005.

In 2010 he was 
asked by Northumbria Police to help them track down fugitive killer Raoul Moat.