nostalgicOkay, maybe I never fished for baby gators in a muddy pond. Does helping with cleaning a caiman habitat (with a very *nasty* caiman wanting to bite you) count?
It's also educational. They give critiques of everyone's performance, and you know *why* a person was eliminated. Mistook an animal for something else? Failed a challenge? Bad handling of an animal? Misinformation? And then there are the physical challenges.
I want to go DO them! They're similar to the sorts of things I've always done to challenge myself. The first one was climb up a tree to a platform, then traverse a rope on one of those zippy wheeled things, hanging from a knotted rope, grab a cargo net, and climb down. I want the whole course! It looked like such FUN! Like stuff I haven't had a chance to do in years. And I did these things without a safety line. Last night, I thrilled to the second challenge, because I've *DONE IT*! You had to climb a tree, cross a couple logs suspended in the "canopy", including bridging a substantial gap between, observe a raptor nest, then return the way you came. I did something like that (except part of the branch was rotten!) as a kid, to get to a vintage tree house, where you had to leap from this branch waaaay up there to the "porch" of the tree house. And back. Very scary. And then there was how I became acquainted with my college boyfriend, the start of a 5 1/2 year relationship. At the Electronics Club picnic, he issued a challenge: "Can you get across that stream by using the sycamore trees?" "Sure." By the time we had traversed a couple leaning trees, changing trees literally in midstream, we were fast friends. (Lately hasn't been trees, but rather rocks I've climbed, and found I've needed to jump from a ledge to a miniscule rock spire across a substantial gap, etc.) Watching makes me want to go climb some trees, hunt up some wildlife, etc. After all, my degree is actually in Biological Sciences. I just hung/hang out with Tekkies. (Okay, I'm both...)
I'm not a good enough zoologist to be one of the contestants (hey, I'm a botanist, okay?), but I sure would love to play on their challenge course!
