Travel & Tourism
Bear Grylls, the acclaimed adventurer and presenter of the popular TV series Man vs Wild, skydived in the Everest region on Thursday.
The 48-year-old Briton, who is currently in Nepal on a family vacation, has been in Lukla and the Everest region for the past couple of days.
Grylls, who previously served on the Special Air Service (SAS) of the British Army, is very famous for his survival skills. He hosted several programmes and series focusing on survival skills, some even with celebrities and politicians like Barak Obama and Narendra Modi.
It might be quite surprising to see him skydiving near Everest, with low atmospheric pressure and a harsh environment. That is especially considering that he broke his back when his parachute failed to inflate properly in a similar skydive in his early twenties.
Grylls, the father to three teenage sons, still has a similar desire for adrenaline.
What is skydiving?
Skydiving, the word is self-explanatory, dive from the sky. Unlike other forms of parachute sports like paragliding and base jumping, skydiving is done from a greater altitude from an aeroplane or a helicopter.
The fun of skydiving lies in the adrenaline boost from the free fall in the first few seconds of diving. The diver experiences acceleration due to gravity (9.8m/s2). That is, until the diver reaches the terminal velocity - the maximum speed one can achieve diving. Yes, it's true one doesn't accelerate forever.
Provided one dive from a sufficient height, the terminal velocity during free fall can reach 200km/h in a belly-down position. That number may vary depending on the mass and surface area of the diver.
That is precisely why it is impossible to kill an ant by throwing it from height; the terminal velocity (6.4 km/h) never reaches the lethal mark to kill the ant.
After enjoying the free fall and push-of-the-air on the body, a diver needs to open the parachute. The height for a parachute deployment depends on the diver's weight and the type of licence.
Then the descent happens, searching for a safe landing spot.
Bear's jump
In a short video he posted on his social media profile, Grylls could be heard saying the team of two is jumping at a height of nearly 4,000 metres. He acknowledged not many people have got a chance to dive in such a high altitude and thanked the team at Elite Exped, the adventure expedition company led by famous Nepali mountaineer Nirmal Purja.
But Grylls is not new to the Khumbu region. He set a paragliding world record by flying 140 metres above Everest peak in 2007. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiv4XJ17_7Q&t=2s
Grylls is also the first Briton to climb Ama Dablam (6,812m) in 1997, a peak Sir Edmund Hillary described as "unclimbable."
Many hope Grylls doing these adventures in Nepal will boost Nepal's tourism sector, which is in its back gear after the Covid lockdown. The Nepal Tourism Board welcomed him in a tweet, wishing him a great experience.
Super cool to jump beside Mount Everest with good friends and great people! Thank you Jesse @mingma_david @nimsdai and Hugo & Arabella MS & family plus of course Shara and the boys! #adventure #stateofmind #nevergiveup #everest pic.twitter.com/V1ELHS9A0F
— Bear Grylls (@BearGrylls) October 20, 2022
