Polar strikes again...a comedy of errors

Am I just too nit picky?  I'm watching this show on the discovery channel where they are recreating the exploration of the grand canyon.  They are trying to recreate the exact conditions, so one of the guys has his arm taped up because the origional explorer only had one arm.  Anyway, they want to somehow record anxiety and excitment of the exploreres as they raft down the river and climb up the cliff.  So how do they do it?  They issue them Polar HRM's.

Now am I the only one that sees no scientific value in this?  They were rafting and commenting how the one guy who is an experienced mountaineer was barely breaking 80 bpm on one rafint section while the historian was "dangerously high" at 120 bpm.  "At that high of a HR, it would be difficult for him to sustain his current level of exertion.  Image how hard it would be for the early explorers...."  They also had this nice little bar graph showing their HR compared to what I can only imagine is their age based max.

Then later when they were climbing the cliff, the guy with "one" arm hit a whopping 228 bpm.  Which was "quite a strenuous activity".  So 228 bpm is strenous, yet 120 bpm is dangerously high?   I'm willing to bet hard money that their 228 bpm was the monitor glitching.

Do these people do any research before airing a show on a major network touting scientific accuracy?  It's almost comedic.