LAKE PLACID – Sipping his usual coffee with a friend at McDonald’s on Saranac Avenue on July 9, Nip Rogers saw a black Suburban pull up at the drive-through window.

Rogers, a former 6-foot-7 forward at George Washington University who once played against NBA Hall of Famer Patrick Ewing, looked through the car’s tinted windows and thought he might have caught a glimpse of an even taller retired basketball player. He thought he saw someone 7-foot-1 and 300-plus pounds, famous from his NBA days of scoring more than 28,000 points and shattering a handful of plexiglass backboards.

“I thought, geez,” Rogers recalled, “that looks like Shaquille O’Neal.”

“The guy next to me asked, ‘Did that look like Shaquille O’Neal to you’? What could he be doing here, at a McDonald’s of all places?”

So Rogers and his friend grabbed their coffees and walked outside to the drive-through window “like a bunch of high school kids.” Sheepishly peering into the Suburban, Rogers said O’Neal bent down and waved as if to say, “Yeah, it’s me, guys.”

Rogers and his friend weren’t the only people to spot the famous basketball star in Lake Placid. O’Neal, who boasts on his Twitter profile page that he performs “random acts of Shaqness,” brought those acts to McDonald’s, Price Chopper and the Crowne Plaza, where numerous people said they met him.

O’Neal’s most random act of Shaqness, though, might have been when he filmed a scene on the Adirondack Scenic Railroad for the upcoming episode of “Running Wild with Bear Grylls,” to premiere on NBC Monday at 10 p.m. An NBC Universal preview of the episode says O’Neal joins the famous British adventurer Grylls on “an oversized adventure to the Adirondacks. After O’Neal is plucked from a freight train via helicopter, he and Grylls battle dense forest, blood-sucking leeches and 200-foot sheer rock faces in the remote Adirondacks in search of their extraction point, according to the NBC preview. Mark Piersma of the Adirondack Scenic Railroad said that battle begins on a train departing Lake Placid heading to Saranac Lake.

“The Wild will dole out everything it’s got,” the NBC preview reads, “but it’s never met a force of nature like Shaquille O’Neal.”

“(We) try to go above and beyond to accommodate their needs,” said Bethan Maher, executive director of the Adirondack Scenic Railroad, “something that I think the audience will appreciate once you see what Shaq did involving the (ASR).”

Monday’s show centers around what O’Neal did after the train, though. High Peaks Cyclery Head Guide Royce Van Evera got an up-close and personal experience with the NBA?Hall of Famer and Grylls. The longtime Adirondack rock climbing and wilderness guide helped to ensure the show’s safety in the wild. Van Evera worked as one of three riggers stabilizing the production crews as three cameras were used to shoot the host and his celebrity guest.

“We would belay them up, and when they are shooting over the edge of the cliff, these guys are literally hanging over the edge of the cliff,” Van Evra said.

“Bear was belaying Shaq, and what you can’t see Monday night, we were actually the backup to Bear,” he added. “The one cliff that he went up was about 50 to 60 feet, and after he does journey through the woods with Bear, in order to get to where they are going to camp actually, they have to come down fairly steep rock. It’s a real rock climb, not make believe.”

Van Evra, who has rigged other shows in the past, said the experience with O’Neal was more difficult than the average shoot because he estimated O’Neal outweighed the next heaviest guy by at least 150 pounds.

“I mean, he’s a monster,” Van Evra said.

“Shaq was an incredibly funny guy,” he added, “He doesn’t really swim, and when you watch it on Monday, you’re gonna say, if he doesn’t swim well, how the hell does he know what he’s doing?”

Van Evra also said the basketball legend had never rock climbed or camped overnight before.

“I’ve never dealt with a celebrity as great as he is,” Van Evra said. “The Shaq thing is a totally different animal in one.

“When you watch the TV program, what you don’t see is all of us,” he added. “The only people you are going to see are Bear and Shaq, and then the extraction point of the logging truck riding off into the sunset in the pouring rain.”