Ep #1 Coffee Expeditions: Stephan Kesting - Outdoor Adventurer, Jiu Jitsu Black Belt, & Firefighter

Transcript

Speaker: All right, welcome everyone to the first ever Coffee Expeditions episode on our podcast.

Speaker: I'm very excited to have my good friend and guest today, Stefan Kesting.

Speaker: I'm going to talk a bit about him in a minute, but if you could just say hi, Stefan, and maybe just introduce yourself, that'd be great.

Speaker: Hey, Reid, it's an absolute pleasure to be here.

Speaker: Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker: I love talking about expeditions and outdoor stuff, and it doesn't take much to get me going on this topic.

Speaker: Awesome.

Speaker: Awesome.

Speaker: Yeah, I know it's something I've wanted to chat with you for a very long time.

Speaker: I know just so that people that don't know Stefan, he's done an enormous amount of really cool things throughout his life.

Speaker: I won't give away everything, but a few things that come to mind is he's an expert in Jiu Jitsu, which is he's very well known online for his instructionals and his world class teachings.

Speaker: He's an outdoor enthusiast.

Speaker: He's done a ton of really, really cool adventures, kayaking and all kinds of great outdoor stuff.

Speaker: And he's a firefighter and we work together.

Speaker: We work together for years and years.

Speaker: And that's another exciting side of things as well.

Speaker: Anything else that you want to just quickly add, Stefan, before we get into kind of some questions and seeing what you've been up to lately?

Speaker: I think those are the main highlights.

Speaker: Those are sort of the three areas of my schizophrenic life.

Speaker: Yeah, I think, you know, you and I were chatting the other day and we talked about OCD.

Speaker: I think we both have a little bit of that, possibly.

Speaker: It's a superpower, man.

Speaker: It's a superpower.

Speaker: Being able to

Speaker: The super villain does not shine a light over the entire earth.

Speaker: He beams a laser beam down out of the earth.

Speaker: That's a focused light.

Speaker: OCD is an ability to focus, hyper focus on something.

Speaker: So how could you be a super villain without OCD?

Speaker: How could you be a super villain without hyper focus?

Speaker: Exactly, exactly.

Speaker: Well, this is one of the things that I've always admired about you, and I feel like a lot of times I pale in comparison to the things you've done in your life.

Speaker: You know, I look at your jiu-jitsu.

Speaker: I mean, how long have you been practicing martial arts over the years?

Speaker: Well, I wanted to start martial arts when I was eight or nine, and I really, really wanted to be a ninja.

Speaker: but there weren't that many ninja schools in Toronto at the time.

Speaker: So I tried convincing my mother to let me train in karate or Kung Fu or jujitsu.

Speaker: That would be traditional Japanese jujitsu.

Speaker: And she didn't like that at all.

Speaker: I took a three year campaign of terror, including threats and, uh, promises.

Speaker: And eventually at age 12, I was allowed to study judo.

Speaker: She was okay with judo.

Speaker: So I started judo.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Good Lord.

Speaker: That's a long time ago.

Speaker: 30, 40, 40 years ago, 42 years ago.

Speaker: Man, that, that really, really never stopped.

Speaker: That puts things into perspective.

Speaker: Um, and I, I, you know, you know, I've done a little bit of jujitsu, um, nothing.

Speaker: You're a black belt, buddy.

Speaker: You've done more than a little bit.

Speaker: Thank you.

Speaker: Well, it's, it's, it's an interesting thing because what, you know, what I've done, um, it, again, it pales in comparison.

Speaker: You've done 40 years of martial arts.

Speaker: It's funny, uh, when you talk about becoming a ninja, I went through a spell like that too when I was about 14, 15.

Speaker: And I remember having some ninja books and trying to, uh,

Speaker: trying to emulate some of the things they said in those books.

Speaker: But I also, uh, I fell in love with, um, blood sport and Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Speaker: I wanted to be, I wanted to be him.

Speaker: So that's what got me into karate that and, uh, also the karate kid.

Speaker: So I, um,

Speaker: Started in Gojiro Karate and learned a lot.

Speaker: I got a lot of good things out of that.

Speaker: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker: Yeah, that's right.

Speaker: A lot of horse dance.

Speaker: I remember my legs burning for like, you know, like half an hour straight kind of thing.

Speaker: But then I got away from it and I got into like pursuing, you know, firefighting and was able to get into that.

Speaker: And I didn't get to jujitsu till much, much later on when I was about, you know, 38 years old.

Speaker: And credit to you, you were extremely generous to

Speaker: share your knowledge, train with me.

Speaker: I've learned an enormous amount from your videos online, which like I would constantly refer back to and your instructionals.

Speaker: So I guess just a quick question on that, like what, how do you break things down and build content?

Speaker: Cause this will work into the outdoor adventure stuff, but I know that you've got an enormous amount of history there.

Speaker: I know that for me, when I'm trying to produce something or like make something, it's like arduous.

Speaker: I have to get right down.

Speaker: It's been an enormous amount of hours breaking down.

Speaker: Like when I was trying to break down, for instance, an arm bar in jujitsu, at first it seems pretty elementary.

Speaker: But then when I got into it, it's like, oh, the nuances, the different problems that arise, the different body types, et cetera.

Speaker: it's a big task.

Speaker: So how do you go about learning things?

Speaker: Because I always marvel at your ability to retain information and break it down.

Speaker: Well, it's a little bit of an illusion, right?

Speaker: Because you sequentially move, or at least I sequentially move from an area to an area to an area.

Speaker: For example, the year that I had my kidney replacement, my kidney transplant,

Speaker: I couldn't train much, right?

Speaker: I was very, very, very tired in the year before that, that transplant.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: My kidney function was crashing.

Speaker: And so I had to be very specific.

Speaker: So I had the choice to train a little bit in everything or focus in on one thing and get at least at the end of that year, I'd have trained one thing.

Speaker: I ended up focusing on the single leg X guard and the X guard.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: That was,

Speaker: which is for the people who don't know, that's a specific position in jujitsu out of maybe a hundred or 150 positions.

Speaker: And by laser focusing on that, I think I learned quite a bit and it ended up becoming an instructional and, but it's an illusion.

Speaker: People see that expertise in one area and they assume that it, I must be an expert in every area.

Speaker: But use jujitsu belt terminology, it's perfectly possible to be a purple belt in one area, a brown belt in another, and a black belt in another.

Speaker: I was a black belt at the knee bar long before I was anywhere near a black belt in everything else, but other areas of my game lag behind.

Speaker: So I was good at one specific technique.

Speaker: That was the first technique I was good at.

Speaker: But then I kind of switched that hyper focus.

Speaker: So it is a little bit of an illusion.

Speaker: Because people are going to teach you what they're good at.

Speaker: Hopefully they don't teach you what they're bad at.

Speaker: Hopefully they don't just bullshit and, you know, make up a bunch of impressive sounding sound bites, but they're just speaking out of their ass.

Speaker: So in terms of how to approach the learning,

Speaker: It has changed over the years.

Speaker: There's now so much information available online, but the problem is not really content.

Speaker: It's curation.

Speaker: And I think, uh, if it's, it's important to recognize that just as anybody can put out a video on, I don't know, proving that the earth is flat.

Speaker: Anybody can put out a video showing this cool new arm bar from butterfly guard doesn't mean.

Speaker: that it works or it doesn't mean that it works at a very high level because anybody can catch a beginner in anything.

Speaker: I could, if I wanted to do only Aikido wrist locks, I could tap a brand new beginner with Aikido wrist locks at least a couple of times in a round.

Speaker: It doesn't mean that that's going to be working against somebody of your level, right?

Speaker: Who's more savvy to just, and their alarm bells start going off.

Speaker: So

Speaker: I think initially you just got to get a familiarity with the overall game to kind of a mouth, if you will, from the 50,000 feet from way high up to just get a general view of the landscape.

Speaker: And then you zero in on different parts of the landscape for the outdoor stuff.

Speaker: Sometimes I focused on my whitewater paddling.

Speaker: Sometimes I've focused more on the camping.

Speaker: Sometimes I've done deep dives into, I don't know, bear safety or first aid.

Speaker: So at a high level, you know, I should know all these different things, but then you might spend time focusing on, uh, wildflower identification or edible wild plants.

Speaker: So over a long enough time, you eventually hit all of the major areas.

Speaker: It's interesting the way you say that because jiu-jitsu has taught me an enormous amount of things.

Speaker: I do feel in a lot of ways it does reflect life, but it also teaches some pretty valuable lessons.

Speaker: Yeah, you know, obviously being humble.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: That for me, at least, I know that's not for everyone in the jujitsu world per se, but for me, it humbled me over and over and over.

Speaker: But it also taught me how to learn better because I think I would suggest that for a lot of people, that's a big hurdle is figuring out how to learn.

Speaker: I always say...

Speaker: you got to learn how to learn jujitsu that works for you.

Speaker: And so for me, once I started to figure out how to break things down, I would type it in a computer and I've got like, you know, volumes of like logged, like moves that I would break down and I could recall that, that really allowed me to learn better.

Speaker: And I've been able to now apply that idea to other areas.

Speaker: And I will, I kind of, it seems like that's kind of similar for you with from jujitsu to maybe outdoor wild, wildness to our wildlife adventures.

Speaker: Would you say that something like that is similar?

Speaker: Yeah, I think you and I learn relatively similarly, but that doesn't mean that that's how everybody learns.

Speaker: And it's one of the challenges of being a teacher.

Speaker: I know you've taught, certainly I've taught, and it's trying to figure out how to teach people with different learning styles.

Speaker: Maybe one person needs to feel it.

Speaker: Maybe one person needs to hear it.

Speaker: Maybe one person just needs the highlights and then they figure it out by themselves.

Speaker: Maybe one person needs that detailed breakdown.

Speaker: So how then do you touch on different learning modalities in the same lesson?

Speaker: Or how do you find different ways to explain the same thing?

Speaker: Certainly I'm seeing a big improvement in jujitsu over the last, well, 30 years of teaching methodology.

Speaker: Actually, this takes us to hazmat and firefighting.

Speaker: One thing that I heard from one of my hazmat instructors was initially

Speaker: When you get into hazmat, you go and visit another team.

Speaker: You're like, Hey, show me this detector.

Speaker: Show me that detector, which is very similar in jujitsu to going to a school and saying, Hey, show me this technique.

Speaker: Show me that technique.

Speaker: And that's cool.

Speaker: But eventually in hazmat, you end up going, Hey, show me your paperwork.

Speaker: Show me your flow charts.

Speaker: Show me your documentation.

Speaker: How do you train this stuff?

Speaker: And in jujitsu, you end up with the same thing.

Speaker: Yeah, there's a billion techniques.

Speaker: And for sure, you can show me something super cool that I would want to incorporate into my game.

Speaker: But I'm more interested in how do you train this stuff?

Speaker: Cool.

Speaker: There's an arm bar.

Speaker: How much detail do you show?

Speaker: How much is too much detail?

Speaker: What are the drills or what are the games to get good at the arm bar?

Speaker: What are the learning processes?

Speaker: What's the pedagogy for teaching it?

Speaker: And that is an area that's grown in jujitsu, but it's still lacking in many places that instructor will come out and, okay, you do this, you do that, you do this, you do that.

Speaker: Well, you haven't given me any of the context of when you might do this.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: And that's the stuff that I'm more interested in now.

Speaker: And I think probably beginners can get more of that than we give them credit for.

Speaker: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker: I totally see where you're coming from because what I found when I first started Jiu Jitsu and again, I started a lot with your information because back then there wasn't a ton of material online that I wanted to go to.

Speaker: And also, you know, obviously, like you've been doing this forever.

Speaker: You're my friend.

Speaker: I'm able to draw upon your expertise.

Speaker: And then I continued to use yours through all the jujitsu training that I've done, all your instructionals.

Speaker: But I also started to initially look at other things on the internet as they came out.

Speaker: And after a while, I started to really, really narrow that focus to only select instructors that I sort of trusted.

Speaker: the information that they're teaching, but also who I connected with.

Speaker: I think that's just something that I see people, they'll be bouncing from the YouTube clip to YouTube clip, which I'm not saying is bad, but it's hard to get that, utilize those ideas in real time, in a role, you know, when you've seen this one time at this one place.

Speaker: And so eventually I started to get into the idea of, okay, I'm going to narrow my focus on who I study.

Speaker: But I also started to drill more.

Speaker: You know, initially I wanted to just roll and go hard.

Speaker: And of course, I still love that.

Speaker: But I started to drill more, but drilling with focus on really trying to understand the technique, if that makes sense, rather than just reps.

Speaker: Does that something that you see in your travels or like, do you have one preference over another in terms of drilling and learning that way?

Speaker: Well, the problem is that drilling is a very large word.

Speaker: What does drilling mean?

Speaker: To some people, it might mean, hey, I'll get in mount and I'll move into S mount, which is a certain position that sets up the armbar and I'm going to get the armbar and that's rep one.

Speaker: And I'm going to do it again, rep two.

Speaker: And I'm going to do it again, rep three.

Speaker: And I'm going to do it on the other side.

Speaker: I'm going to do it a hundred times.

Speaker: Okay, cool.

Speaker: Some of that's important.

Speaker: Everybody needs to go between, I don't know, one rep and a thousand reps.

Speaker: in a sort of a dead manner like that in order to understand the technique.

Speaker: You might need less than me or for certain techniques, I might need to do it more often because it's awkward and it just doesn't initially suit the way that I naturally move.

Speaker: But that's only one level of drilling.

Speaker: The next level of drilling is drilling against a little bit of resistance or perhaps putting in the context of a game

Speaker: where I have a very limited number of things that I'm going for, and you have a very limited number of things that you can do.

Speaker: So we have a more constrained set of wind conditions.

Speaker: For example, the other day I was drilling the Kimura, which is a bent arm lock, right?

Speaker: It's like a chicken wing or a police hammer lock.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: It's a very powerful arm lock, but

Speaker: My training partner and I were drilling it only as a control position.

Speaker: So I wasn't allowed to finish the actual arm lock.

Speaker: I just had to hold the arm lock and stop the other guy from getting away and to try and transition into the mount, into the back or into the arm bar.

Speaker: Awesome.

Speaker: So drilling the Kimura, but not actually doing the full Kimura technique.

Speaker: So that's an example of a game that you might play.

Speaker: Seeing more of that in the jujitsu space, which is great.

Speaker: I see some people become completely evangelical about this.

Speaker: And this is the only way to learn.

Speaker: And this is the only thing that should be taught.

Speaker: Never actually show the students any details.

Speaker: They will figure it out.

Speaker: They will learn.

Speaker: And I have my extreme concerns about that approach being the best.

Speaker: It might be the best for a very limited number of people.

Speaker: But for the average person, it's probably worth saying, hey, here's how I do the

Speaker: arm bar and here's what works for me.

Speaker: And you should probably start with this before you start experimenting and going crazy.

Speaker: So it's, it's not a very, uh, extreme position, but I think drilling is very, very useful.

Speaker: It should be the majority of your training, especially against resistance in what we call a live manner.

Speaker: But some dead reps and some technical instruction and some put your left hand here with your knuckles going past the guy's ear, put your right hand here is also useful so long as everybody understands.

Speaker: It's not necessarily the truth, the light and the way.

Speaker: It's just a way that's worked fairly well for presumably you and the other people that you've seen do it.

Speaker: Yeah, that makes total sense.

Speaker: And I think one of the nuances that I find is when you come into a class and someone's teaching something, you may or may not be ready for how they're teaching or what they're teaching at that time.

Speaker: But...

Speaker: and there's layers to the onion you know you get into the deeper you get into it the more you understand maybe what the the mission's actually doing and and and the subtleties to the the different body types or just just different ways to create more leverage and but you're not always ready for it like i remember i remember being taught something you know my first year and pretty much just went over my head and then maybe like six years later okay now i now i kind of get it you know and and and whatnot but just takes so much some of that some of that's inevitable right the

Speaker: The teacher doesn't know perfectly what you need.

Speaker: The teacher doesn't know perfectly where you're at.

Speaker: The teacher might have his own preferences or predilections or illusions about what the average person is capable of.

Speaker: I, I, it's no big deal.

Speaker: Uh, move on.

Speaker: Although I, I'm not going to mention any names, but I was once at a seminar that was full of absolute beginners.

Speaker: So nothing but white belts.

Speaker: I think there was one blue belt.

Speaker: And the guy teaching the seminar just went off into outer space with advanced techniques.

Speaker: He was trying to impress the audience with like upside down, inside out triangle chokes from spider guard.

Speaker: And these people would have honestly been happy with like, okay, here is the super basic way to do the triangle choke.

Speaker: Here is the super basic way to do the arm bar.

Speaker: So I have seen huge mismatches between what an instructor was teaching essentially to satisfy or stroke their own ego and what the people actually needed.

Speaker: Yeah, it's well said because we've seen that even in like, you know, firefighting or other elements in life where like,

Speaker: You can have a crowd that's advanced, maybe an advanced group of firefighters that needs a more advanced drill rather than maybe a day one drill.

Speaker: And if you try to throw that day one drill at them, especially if you do it too many times, you're going to lose them pretty fast and vice versa.

Speaker: If you have maybe some new firefighters and you try to teach a really advanced idea or advanced thing, that might be something where, well, they're not maybe quite ready for that.

Speaker: But especially, especially see that in Jiu Jitsu where you can be, you can have a big mismatch in terms of like ability and just readiness to execute.

Speaker: And also depending on their age too, you know, as you get older, maybe you're not inverting quite as much.

Speaker: I don't know, you know, depending on your flexibility and whatnot.

Speaker: I know I find sometimes it's hard for me to really get under people in Jiu Jitsu, but

Speaker: And another note or another sort of idea is how do you apply those same ideas to the outdoors?

Speaker: You know, you've got it blows my mind the amount of things that you do.

Speaker: And when you started to put your videos up on your outdoor knowledge, I was like, wow, that's incredible.

Speaker: And I remember two things, two distinct moments.

Speaker: one jujitsu and one outdoors when when you really uh you know surprised me and kind of opened my eyes to what you're capable of as a as a as a person and the the one related to outdoors one was related to jujitsu one's related outdoors one related outdoors was i remember i was walking by you and you're on the computer and

Speaker: you're looking at a future trip and I'm like, oh, where are you going?

Speaker: And you're like, well, I can't remember the exact details.

Speaker: It was like a thousand kilometer canoe trip, you know, in the north.

Speaker: And then you showed me the map of where you're going and my jaw just about hit the floor because I was just shocked at how, like where you're going, the remoteness, the, like in my mind, the danger that would be involved in something like that.

Speaker: How do you get to the point where you're able to do a trip like that?

Speaker: You must use some of the similar jujitsu, like learning methodologies to get to that point.

Speaker: For me, it seems like such a far away place to be able to go on an expedition like some of the things you've done.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: The answer is semi-gradually, right?

Speaker: I started out going to canoe camp.

Speaker: I grew up in Ontario.

Speaker: One very Ontario thing to do is to send your kids to summer camp, but as part of summer camp, there's usually a three day canoe trip or a four day canoe trip or a five day canoe trip.

Speaker: So I did that for a few years.

Speaker: Um, and that just essentially established a mindset that this isn't inherently a weird thing to do.

Speaker: It's perfectly normal to go on a canoe and go on a trip and paddle around a couple of lakes and then do a portage here and then be picked up by a van.

Speaker: three days later.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: So I think just the idea that something is possible and just the idea that other people have done this before, and it's not that strange is, is a often gives breakthroughs, right?

Speaker: So it sets this, this baseline.

Speaker: It it's really intimidating to walk into a martial arts school for the first time.

Speaker: But once you've been in it and once you've done a couple of classes, you're like, well, I might not know anything, but I came in here and I haven't been, I don't know, branded.

Speaker: They didn't beat the shit out of me.

Speaker: They didn't try to like scout me or all these other, you know,

Speaker: terrible things that we might imagine would happen inside there.

Speaker: No, it's a bunch of crazy people, but they're, they're nice, crazy people.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Now you've got kind of a familiarity of ground, a baseline familiarity with the topic.

Speaker: So, uh, if you wanted to start doing outdoor stuff, start really small, really small, join a hiking group, take a canoeing course.

Speaker: There's probably a, I don't know what,

Speaker: ski touring 101 group that does really easy ski tours or cross country skiing in your, your area.

Speaker: You don't have to figure it all out yourself.

Speaker: Now, that being said, I did figure out most of this stuff by myself.

Speaker: I bought a book.

Speaker: I bought path of the paddle by Bill Mason, which was to some extent still is the canoeing Bible.

Speaker: Really interesting.

Speaker: It's for flat water and for white water.

Speaker: And Bill Mason was an iconic,

Speaker: outdoorsman.

Speaker: He essentially educated an entire generation of Canadians with his movies on how to paddle and with his books and just his infectious love of the outdoors.

Speaker: So I read that book probably a hundred times.

Speaker: I remember taking it on my first canoe trip that I organized with a friend.

Speaker: We did

Speaker: drove out to Quetico, which is at the Ontario-Manitoba border, essentially.

Speaker: And I remember sitting at the top of the rapids, trying to identify rapid features, and we brought the book.

Speaker: It was wrapped in a plastic bag.

Speaker: And like, oh, you know, I don't know, that's a pillow there.

Speaker: That's a south hole.

Speaker: That's an eddy.

Speaker: And then we promptly...

Speaker: blew it and ended up swimming in the rapids, but that's beside the point.

Speaker: So through a lot of trial and error, I did figure it out by myself.

Speaker: And the book was a large part of that.

Speaker: And then when you start talking about the solo trips, that again started small.

Speaker: Uh, my first solo trip was by accident.

Speaker: I went on the river with my brother and he had a lot of problems.

Speaker: He was a severe drug addict.

Speaker: He didn't take any drugs with him.

Speaker: And after, uh,

Speaker: 12 hours on the river, he began tweaking and, and picked a huge imaginary fight with me and stormed off.

Speaker: Oh no.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: And basically it left me there.

Speaker: I was like, well, I'm not going to let that ruin this experience that I've been looking forward to.

Speaker: And I continued on alone.

Speaker: And for the next two days, I continued on alone on the trip that we had supposed to, we were supposed to do together.

Speaker: And that was a magical and transformative.

Speaker: I mean, it was sad, but,

Speaker: I was also pretty mad at him.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: And, uh, it was down the grand river in the middle of winter because there'd been a thought.

Speaker: So you're paddling on this river that you have all to yourself paddling through this monotone landscape, not monotone, but monochromatic where there's white snow and black water and gray skies and not much color.

Speaker: And it was astoundingly beautiful.

Speaker: So the, my first solo trip was,

Speaker: three days long, but that came at the end of doing lots of shorter trips.

Speaker: And then gradually these trips started getting longer and longer.

Speaker: It's like, okay, well, the three days alone didn't kill me.

Speaker: What about, well, I guess the next one is a pretty big jump.

Speaker: What about six weeks alone?

Speaker: But it was also informed by knowing other people had done this.

Speaker: I knew Bill Mason.

Speaker: Part of his mythology was going out into the woods alone

Speaker: So I know that that's possible.

Speaker: And then I ran into a friend of mine.

Speaker: He was French Canadian.

Speaker: Basically, every time he had a relationship breakup, he'd go off on some incredibly arduous solo ski trip or solo canoe trip.

Speaker: You know, like I think he ended up skiing the Hudson Bay coast in the middle of winter.

Speaker: 30 below was a warm day.

Speaker: Does it get much colder than that?

Speaker: No, no, it really doesn't.

Speaker: Uh, and just knowing somebody and having met somebody in the flesh who did this, like, okay, this, this guy knows what he's doing, but he's human.

Speaker: You know, he's, he's not, there's nothing inherently different about him.

Speaker: So it's possible.

Speaker: And same in jujitsu.

Speaker: You're going to meet somebody like, oh, that guy kind of is like me.

Speaker: He, you know, whatever.

Speaker: he's my height and he's my weight, or he started at my age, or he's older than me, or he's older than me and he only has one hand and he's doing jujitsu.

Speaker: Okay.

Speaker: Well, this doesn't seem so unachievable.

Speaker: And so meeting the right people and putting yourself in positions where you can meet the right people, you get this kind of like, well, if that idiot can do it, I can do it.

Speaker: Not that any of these people are idiots, but you kind of get that...

Speaker: It's amazing what someone else can do to spark your interest.

Speaker: And it's also amazing to me when you're passionate about something and enjoy it, how far it can take you.

Speaker: I always kind of wrestle with the idea of things being work or not being work.

Speaker: I always kind of categorize it into two things.

Speaker: Work can be really terrible.

Speaker: or work can be pretty enjoyable.

Speaker: And if you're trying to get better at something, I always feel there's a bit of an equation of work, but it can be so much more enjoyable when you're passionate about it.

Speaker: When you went out on your solo trips, your first few times, I've been out on solo trips a few times, camping, just camping.

Speaker: And I find my, I'm hyper like aware of everything, almost like exhausted, like my, like, you know, you know, sometimes hair standing up on the back of my neck because I'm, you know, worried about maybe a bear or a cougar.

Speaker: And how, how did you, how have you found that to be when you've been out, you know, when you started, but also on your really long trips, did you, did you find that it kind of is always there or did it kind of just taper away over, over your, over your adventures?

Speaker: I think there is that hyper-awareness there and that if there's too much of it, it can be exhausting, right?

Speaker: It's kind of like an immune system that's too powerful is going to end up attacking your own body, right?

Speaker: You're going to end up with, if your immune system was functioning at 200%, it would find something to attack and it would be your body and you'd end up with, I don't know, type 1 diabetes or lupus or one of these other horrific autoimmune diseases.

Speaker: So there's an optimal level of

Speaker: attention and paranoia.

Speaker: Too much of it is bad and not enough of it.

Speaker: And just being blasé is bad as well.

Speaker: So there's certainly an optimal level.

Speaker: And I think you get dialed in with that.

Speaker: The jujitsu equivalent would be for each person.

Speaker: There's an optimal level of arousal for say competing.

Speaker: And I've gone into competitions too amped up.

Speaker: And also I've gone into competitions too relaxed.

Speaker: So yeah,

Speaker: there's an optimal level.

Speaker: And for some people, they might be 10 out of 10.

Speaker: They might be frothing at the mouth and that's going to work for them.

Speaker: And for other people, they should be napping right before they go compete.

Speaker: So your optimal level of arousal for the outdoors varies.

Speaker: And it varies, of course, on the situations.

Speaker: There are times that you should be very concerned about bears.

Speaker: If you have a place you can camp, I remember pulling into a lake,

Speaker: after a long, long day where there'd been no campsites, I'd been going up river, fighting my way up river, and I reached this lake, and finally there was a place to camp.

Speaker: Oh, thank God.

Speaker: And I pulled over at the beach, and okay, first there's a giant bear turd, and then here's a tree that's just torn apart, and now there's bear prints, and I'm stuck.

Speaker: I can't go on.

Speaker: At that point, you know, a certain level of bearanoia

Speaker: is uh justified now you're cooking dinner with you know a shotgun on one side of you and bear spray on the other and you're looking around every 20 seconds oh sorry go ahead yeah yeah and one thing that really helped is actually thanks to you is the pack alarm oh yes you recommended to me

Speaker: I tried to build bear alarms in the past using like a fishing reel and like a little rape alarm where you pull the tab out to make a noise.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: And they, they were never, uh, it never worked very well, but that pack alarm that you recommended and I ended up getting a couple and using them just knowing that you have that trip wire around the tent.

Speaker: And after you tested a bunch of times by getting out of your tent in the morning and stumbling into that line and having this,

Speaker: shrieking siren go off you begin to trust it like the odds of a bear getting to me through this line yeah are pretty low because i managed to set it off every single morning yeah yeah yeah i i've done that many times where i give myself a heart attack uh setting off the trip wire but but then you feel all great this thing's working so you're good to go

Speaker: I'll also say that there's a big shift that happens either by yourself or with other people for me anyway, at about the five or six day mark of a trip, because at that point it starts feeling normal.

Speaker: It starts feeling like, of course I should be waking up in a tent.

Speaker: Of course I should be making my oatmeal over a fire.

Speaker: And of course I should be spending all day hiking or, or canoeing.

Speaker: And then,

Speaker: looking for a place to camp and then setting up and it reduces your life in a wonderful manner.

Speaker: It reduces it to sleeping, eating and traveling.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: And it starts feeling normal.

Speaker: And for me, that always happens at the five, six, seven day mark.

Speaker: And it's wonderful.

Speaker: When that happens, you kind of settle into the rhythm of the trip.

Speaker: And I'm not saying shorter trips aren't good.

Speaker: And maybe some people can get into that rhythm fast.

Speaker: I do lots of shorter trips whenever I can.

Speaker: But there's something different once you start going above the sort of one week mark.

Speaker: So maybe some people start hating it at that point, like they just can't wait to get back to.

Speaker: I get home or.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Oh my God, what's happening on on my TV show?

Speaker: it's always, I've always, uh, been blown away by the length of your trips.

Speaker: Um, I, I found the same thing though, a little bit, I've done a little bit of, you know, camping and hunting and that.

Speaker: And by sometimes the first couple of nights, I'm actually a little bit homesick, but by about the third, fourth night, that really fades.

Speaker: And I feel much more comfortable in the environment that I'm in.

Speaker: Um,

Speaker: But you're going on much longer trips, some of these expeditionary type portages that you're doing.

Speaker: Do you find throughout that time, do you ever go into low moments and high moments or is it all pretty steady?

Speaker: The other part of the equation is while we're talking about not being too hyper aware or too under aware, you're also having to make a lot of decisions on the fly as you go.

Speaker: And that's another more crucial reason to not be too one way or the other because you've got to make smart decisions.

Speaker: So I guess the question is, how do you find in terms of being fatigued and being out for a long period of time, how do you find you sustain that?

Speaker: that sort of, uh, that, that mental state where you're, you're ready, but you're also functioning well.

Speaker: The highs and lows really depend on how hard you're pushing yourself and, uh, how difficult the trip is on a difficult trip.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: There's, there's definitely dark nights as a soul and like, uh, and recognizing that,

Speaker: that may not be possible to pull this off.

Speaker: And at that point, I always start thinking in terms of mountaineering.

Speaker: If you are on Everest, and you're climbing Everest or some other really dangerous mountain, you have to have the idea that this might not work and that you're going to have to pull the pin, right?

Speaker: If there's 100 mile an hour winds up at the top of the mountain, you're not going up.

Speaker: If the visibility is shit, you're not going up.

Speaker: If it's super crazy cold, you probably won't go up.

Speaker: And on, for example, I talked to a crazy German guy called Joost Kobusch, who spent two winters on Everest, might just summit Everest by himself without oxygen in the middle of winter, up a route that's killed more people than have successfully summited.

Speaker: And by himself too.

Speaker: By himself.

Speaker: Holy, when did he do this?

Speaker: Do you remember?

Speaker: I want to say 2021 and 2022.

Speaker: Wow.

Speaker: Yeah, and it didn't work.

Speaker: The conditions never were good enough.

Speaker: This guy climbed a million mountains.

Speaker: He's a really elite level.

Speaker: Elite level mountain here.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: But if he's trying something that crazy, then there is a chance that it's not going to work.

Speaker: And in his case, it's probably a pretty big chance because you may not get the weather window.

Speaker: Being prepared to turn back if things don't go in your favor is a really important safety thing.

Speaker: Because if you're like, I'm going to do this no matter what.

Speaker: Okay, cool.

Speaker: But that's when you could end up dying.

Speaker: So on some of my longer trips, especially the ones that were very physically hard, there were many times I was like, I give this,

Speaker: maybe a 60% chance of success.

Speaker: You know, like all it takes is one infection that, you know, that you can't get under control with the antibiotics that you have.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: One small cut that turns into an infection or one small injury that you just can't continue.

Speaker: Uh, it's pretty hard to paddle say if, if you,

Speaker: if you can't hold anything with your hand and that's, it's come close.

Speaker: There've been times I've kind of been paddling with an open hand and kind of using all five fingers to like gently pull the paddle.

Speaker: Thankfully the tendonitis went away, but if it hadn't gone away, I would have had to pull the pin and it's, it's hard because you've invested so much time into preparing this.

Speaker: You've invested so much money into doing this and,

Speaker: depending who you tell about it, you've also invested social capital.

Speaker: And so that's a double-edged sword.

Speaker: I think when I'm trying to pull off really hard trips, personally, I kind of use the dark side of the force.

Speaker: I do tell people about it.

Speaker: I tell people what my plans are.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: It kind of puts a gun to my own head.

Speaker: Yes.

Speaker: I will do this because I've publicly announced that I'm doing this.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: But at the same time, it,

Speaker: part of your brain also goes, yeah, I do have to just remember that this may not work and that it may be entirely beyond my control.

Speaker: Yeah, that's, that's, it's fascinating.

Speaker: Like there's so much in just that one, those, that one idea of, you know, pushing hard, but having the cognitive ability to make the correct safety decision that, okay, this is, this is too much, or I'm too tired, or I'm too injured to, to divert course if you need to.

Speaker: And it's hard, like your idea of telling everyone about your,

Speaker: what you're going to do.

Speaker: I've wrestled with that over the years when, you know, even something small like a marathon, it's like, I don't want to tell anyone because I don't, you know, I want to, I almost want to go do it.

Speaker: But then if you tell people, then you have that extra pressure to do it.

Speaker: So it's, it's an interesting take that you, or a way that you take it or execute it in terms of just telling everyone.

Speaker: And then you have that extra pressure to actually hopefully be successful and push through the problems that you're getting, you're into, right?

Speaker: It is a double-edged sword.

Speaker: It could definitely backfire.

Speaker: I mean, how many people have died in the mountains or doing some stupid stunt because they're like, man, Red Bull's going to drop me as a Red Bull athlete.

Speaker: I better do something crazy.

Speaker: I better, hey, do this massive jump on my motorbike.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: with my motorbike on fire, with me wearing a blindfold, and people shooting at me with BB guns, or just some crazy, whatever the crazy thing is, I better secure this contract.

Speaker: Well, maybe you get an amazing footage, or wingsuit guys, dude, I need to go closer to that mountain.

Speaker: Last time...

Speaker: I was three feet away from that cliff.

Speaker: This time I need to like one foot away from that cliff.

Speaker: Oh, well, maybe.

Speaker: Yeah, consequences when you're planting in those worlds, right?

Speaker: And same with what you're doing.

Speaker: You know, when you do go along your long trips, I find that a little bit of camping I do, I get exhausted or even hunting.

Speaker: I go and get exhausted just from poor sleeps.

Speaker: Do you find that that accumulates over time or do you find you actually get some pretty good rest when you're out there?

Speaker: Sleep is a major problem.

Speaker: Sleep is a major problem.

Speaker: Part of

Speaker: I mean, my preferred territory is up here, right?

Speaker: Like northern in the north.

Speaker: And so the further north you go in the summertime, the more light there is.

Speaker: And especially once you're above the Arctic Circle.

Speaker: But even if you're not above the Arctic Circle, you might have 20 hours of light a day.

Speaker: So maybe even more.

Speaker: And so that is not at all conducive to sleeping.

Speaker: You're on high alert.

Speaker: Part of your brain is watching out for bears, mostly.

Speaker: Yeah, 100%.

Speaker: Your brain is also running a whole bunch of subroutines as you're sleeping, because all day long, you're trying to figure out, okay, should I go up the left side of this lake or the right side of the lake?

Speaker: And that might seem like a small decision, but that can be a life and death decision if it's a large lake.

Speaker: If the wind is coming from the west, going along the west side of that lake, could the

Speaker: That could add days or weeks to your trip because now you're getting hammered by the larger waves and you could be pinned on that shore.

Speaker: Makes sense.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Whereas the other shore, there might be islands that you can sneak by.

Speaker: So all day long, you're thinking about this and it doesn't stop once you go to sleep.

Speaker: So you're, the light isn't conducive.

Speaker: The, uh, the, you know, you are worried about animals.

Speaker: You are worried about the route.

Speaker: And you're also physically exhausted.

Speaker: It's the idea of being too tired to sleep.

Speaker: So I do find the sleep thing very difficult.

Speaker: I'm going to try experimenting on this next trip with a sleep mask, which is kind of silly, right?

Speaker: You're trying to pare away everything that you, you know, I should bring, I should bring, you know, one spoon and no fork, right?

Speaker: Because it's lighter.

Speaker: Can I get away with just three tent pegs instead of four tent pegs?

Speaker: But now I'm going to, and I'll bring a sleep mask.

Speaker: We'll see if that helps.

Speaker: I've been playing as well with taking some more magnesium and taking CBN, non-psychoactive cannabis extract that supposedly helps with sleep.

Speaker: Hopefully those help.

Speaker: You got to be careful.

Speaker: Like obviously you could take some prescription sleep medication, but you don't want to be so far out that you can't respond.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Something comes up in the night.

Speaker: So anything that could gently nudge you over that line to get to sleep a little bit earlier, if you sleep a little bit longer would be helpful, but sleep is a major problem.

Speaker: And, uh, it's, um, it's a good thing that your stick is coffee.

Speaker: You can just turn that double espresso into a quadruple espresso.

Speaker: That's right.

Speaker: I have on occasion resorted to caffeine tablets.

Speaker: I know that's...

Speaker: probably going to get me kicked off the podcast here.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Oh, geez.

Speaker: Do you ever take coffee with you at all or anything?

Speaker: Or do you have a drink of choice that you take into that?

Speaker: I know that weight is an issue and you're trying to pack everything tightly.

Speaker: And on that note, I know your Instagram has an enormous amount of great tips and you show how you make your food and you pack it and everything.

Speaker: But do you have a drink of choice that you go for?

Speaker: Honestly, water.

Speaker: Especially on the longer, harder trips.

Speaker: If you're spending, say, 12 hours traveling in a day of canoeing and portaging, and by the time you get to camp, after you've been on the trail for a couple of weeks, by the time you get to camp, things are going to be broken.

Speaker: You're going to spend at least an hour a day

Speaker: fixing things, at least.

Speaker: Sometimes it can be two hours a day.

Speaker: Like, bring a sewing awl because you're going to be fixing clothing.

Speaker: You're going to be fixing a mosquito net.

Speaker: You're going to be fixing your spray deck.

Speaker: You're going to be relashing the seats of your canoe.

Speaker: It's amazing how fast things break when they're being used hard.

Speaker: So now you've been traveling for 12 hours.

Speaker: Now you need to fix something for a couple of hours.

Speaker: Then you set up camp.

Speaker: The idea of sitting around

Speaker: leisurely on those types of trips.

Speaker: That's why most of the time I have a cold breakfast and cold food during the day and maybe one hot meal in the evening.

Speaker: Now, when I'm going with friends and family, that's different.

Speaker: There's, there's, you're not going for 12 hours a day, or at least I haven't yet with somebody.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: You're, you might be traveling.

Speaker: You might be hiking for six hours a day, maybe with a, and then take an hour for lunch.

Speaker: And then I like the teas and I'll bring a little coffee press for the people that I'm with.

Speaker: And that becomes part of the ritual.

Speaker: And honestly, sometimes I wonder if I included a little bit more of that ritual time in the evenings, like a decompress and wind down, maybe I would sleep so much better that I'd be able to go harder the next day and cover more distance.

Speaker: So I don't know what the right answer is there.

Speaker: I'm still looking for the right mixture of

Speaker: pushing as hard as you can.

Speaker: But what does that mean?

Speaker: Does that mean taking an extra hour to wind down so you sleep better so you can go harder the next day?

Speaker: I'm still looking for that answer and I've been tooling around the bush for four decades.

Speaker: Maybe the next decade I'll figure that one out.

Speaker: The, the, I find that when I'm out, like the little bit that I've done, I'm finding that I'm constantly looking for things to get done because I feel like if I don't stay on top of it, I'm going to run into like a snowball effect where I'm going to really miss something big.

Speaker: It's going to be a real problem.

Speaker: Um,

Speaker: Do you find like all day long when you're out there, you're basically trying to find those little things to make sure everything's just shored up and not just equipment maintenance, but maybe, I don't know, building a fire or whatever, like your days get pretty full, like over that 12 hours that you're out there?

Speaker: Or is it, do you find that you do have windows where, oh no, I've got a few hours to just chill out here and relax?

Speaker: It depends.

Speaker: Like, honestly, a lot depends on the weather.

Speaker: The harder the weather, the more challenging the weather, the more challenging decisions you need to make.

Speaker: And it also depends on the terrain.

Speaker: If it's a big oval lake with an even shoreline, there isn't that much decision making.

Speaker: Is it safe?

Speaker: Is it not safe?

Speaker: If it's safe, I'm going to go follow.

Speaker: I'm going to keep the shore on my left-hand side, and I'm just going to go.

Speaker: If we throw in tons of lakes and tons of peninsulas and we start asking questions like, well, should I portage across the base of this peninsula?

Speaker: What are the hints that I can get from the map and then the landscape?

Speaker: And by looking at the water and by looking at the clouds and looking at the wind and studying how the waves are moving across the lake and the big waves are moving left to right, but the little waves are beginning to move right to left and they're beginning to pick up.

Speaker: The mind is going continuously.

Speaker: often, but the moments when you can just relax and be there, they're magical, right?

Speaker: It's not that I, it's not that I love canoeing or I love hiking as an activity.

Speaker: It's the places that it takes you.

Speaker: And it's the mindset that you get into when you're out there.

Speaker: That's, that's the magical part.

Speaker: places that you would never go probably otherwise, like without kind of a purpose.

Speaker: And that's what I find, you know, even with this coffee expeditions, you know, ideas that I've been doing is taking me to new places that I, you know, wouldn't go otherwise.

Speaker: And that's what I'm looking forward to, you know, doing more and more in the future.

Speaker: On that note, it may or may not go well with you.

Speaker: There's a lot of really good small versions of equipment now for espresso and coffee making.

Speaker: I've got one in particular coming from a company called Outin, which I think is in England.

Speaker: And it's maybe, I don't know, it's maybe like that big, kind of like that way around.

Speaker: But they have ones that are even smaller and from another company that I'm going to try to play around with.

Speaker: So maybe in the future, we'll get you some espresso in your adventures.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Well, there's amazing technology.

Speaker: People are always trying to figure out how to do things smaller and lighter and it's, or more durable.

Speaker: I'm a big fan of more durable.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: That's crucial.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: For, for anything you're, when you're playing hard, where, where like we've been talking about your adventures.

Speaker: And one thing that I don't, I don't want, I want to make sure we don't forget is you do have a book coming out.

Speaker: You've been working on for a good couple of years or longer.

Speaker: Where are some of your adventures that you've been on or even like describe what the adventure is like and how long they would be?

Speaker: Because I think people watching this podcast are going to be interested to know the style of like, you know, adventure slash expedition that you do.

Speaker: And I know I find it fascinating.

Speaker: It blows my mind.

Speaker: Like I said, when you first showed me where you're going on the map, I was just shocked.

Speaker: And I tell people this.

Speaker: I'm like, you see where my friend Stefan's going.

Speaker: It's like a maze.

Speaker: When I first saw it, it looked like a thousand miles of just pure maze to me with water and islands.

Speaker: That's what it looked like.

Speaker: And I thought, man, we're going to have to get a group of us to go out there and maybe potentially try to rescue you if something goes wrong here.

Speaker: But yeah.

Speaker: I'm glad it's gone so successfully well for you.

Speaker: But yeah, so where do you generally, what type of adventure do you do, generally speaking?

Speaker: Sure.

Speaker: Well, there are many, many kinds of adventure in the world, and there's many kinds of adventure I would like to do, but you can't be a master of all trades.

Speaker: I would love to do, I don't know, mountaineering, but mountaineering is an entire set of skills.

Speaker: So you don't want to be a shitty mountaineer

Speaker: and a shitty paddler, and a shitty hiker, and a shitty dirt biker, or I don't know, a shitty sailor.

Speaker: And unfortunately, there isn't time enough in the world to become a world-class sailor, and a world-class hiker, and a world-class whatever you want.

Speaker: So that lesson was driven home to me when my kids were very young.

Speaker: So I used to paddle quite hard whitewater in both canoes and kayaks.

Speaker: So grade four and grade five.

Speaker: So if things go wrong, they can really go wrong.

Speaker: And I really enjoyed it.

Speaker: And I was pretty good at it.

Speaker: And I was, you know, I think, for example, I think I was the first canoe ever to run Lynn Creek in North Vancouver.

Speaker: Now, that's not that hard a river, but it was at the time.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: And so...

Speaker: And I don't know if there were first descents that I did, but they seemed like first descents because I didn't have any information about them and we couldn't find any information about these creeks at the time.

Speaker: So to pump my own tires a little bit, that was really quite difficult and quite demanding whitewater with high consequences.

Speaker: But then I started working in the fire department.

Speaker: But then I had kids.

Speaker: But then I got a second job.

Speaker: And the times that I would go out and paddle would be less and less frequent.

Speaker: And soon I was paddling maybe once a month.

Speaker: But I was still enjoying the difficult stuff.

Speaker: Because that's what gave me my buzz.

Speaker: And then I remember paddling the Sioux River north of Whistler.

Speaker: And there's kind of a waterfall thing.

Speaker: And I flipped going into the area above the waterfall.

Speaker: It's a waterfall that goes down into a head wall.

Speaker: And I flipped.

Speaker: I should never have flipped.

Speaker: There's no reason at all that I should have tipped over.

Speaker: I should have been on top of my game and not bumbled into something that knocked me over.

Speaker: And then I tried to roll up and I should have been able to roll, but I hadn't been practicing it.

Speaker: I'd been, it'd been a four or five weeks since I'd been out last and I blew my roll.

Speaker: And I remember resetting underwater going, okay, I really have to make this roll.

Speaker: And I tried a second roll and it didn't work because I did it wrong.

Speaker: And then I tried a third roll and I just looked, I was going over the edge of the waterfall.

Speaker: I was like, screw this.

Speaker: And I bailed out of the boat.

Speaker: And so I ran the waterfall upside down while coming out of my boat, boat hits the cliff wall and we washed down river and I was rescued by my friends.

Speaker: So I didn't break my neck.

Speaker: That's a good thing.

Speaker: I didn't drown.

Speaker: That's a good thing.

Speaker: But I came out of that so deeply shaken.

Speaker: Like if I'm not going to be doing this, but I'm not going to be doing the requisite training for this.

Speaker: I shouldn't be doing,

Speaker: I shouldn't be screwing around in this.

Speaker: It's like there are MMA fighters who are like, ah, you know what?

Speaker: I've got a fight coming up in four weeks.

Speaker: I should probably begin training.

Speaker: So what?

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Like you're about to take risk taking severe brain damage here.

Speaker: And life changing injuries.

Speaker: And you haven't been training like that is that's, that's time to pull the pin.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: So I pulled the pin on the hard stuff at that point.

Speaker: And I'm now beginning to ramp up my,

Speaker: training like 20 years later, I now have a little bit more time to start paddling a little bit more often in that whitewater vein.

Speaker: So I think you really have to pick and choose your poison.

Speaker: There's a long way of saying, if you're going to do the hard stuff, you have to specialize.

Speaker: If you just want to go for a little paddle on the lake and then go for like a little rock scramble here and then go sailing with friends.

Speaker: Okay, cool.

Speaker: If you want to sail around the world, you better focus on making your sailing skills rock solid.

Speaker: You want to do, I don't know, the longest trip I ever did was a 2,800 kilometer trip from Jasper in the Rocky Mountains to Churchill on Hudson Bay.

Speaker: It took, I had a plan for a hundred days.

Speaker: It ended up taking 82.

Speaker: Before that trip, that's all I was focusing on for a year.

Speaker: I was doing the paddling.

Speaker: I was doing the research.

Speaker: I was doing the strength and conditioning.

Speaker: I remember putting my girlfriend into a giant backpack, a giant Duluth pack, and carrying her over Mount Royal, the mountain in Montreal.

Speaker: Because I was going to have to be doing long portages and carrying tons of weight.

Speaker: So if you're going to be doing dangerous things, you have to specialize.

Speaker: So what I've specialized in, for now anyway, is...

Speaker: Northern Canada, Northern U.S., I guess, as well.

Speaker: Specifically, and the area that I love the most is the Canadian Shield.

Speaker: So when you talk about that confusion of lakes and islands, that's very terrain specific.

Speaker: That's because the Canadian Shield is this undulating, rocky plain, which was just 8,000 to 12,000 years ago under ice.

Speaker: It was glaciated, and that scraped away all the soil.

Speaker: So it hasn't had the time to build up the topsoil, which would then allow the rivers to sort themselves out.

Speaker: I mean, if you're down in the Great Plains, more or less the rivers go in the same direction, and there aren't going to be two major rivers coming too close together, because over time, in that deep soil, they would figure out how to merge, or they'd figure themselves out.

Speaker: Up in the Shield, you've got lakes.

Speaker: Wollaston Lake is a giant lake.

Speaker: It's got two outlets.

Speaker: It's strange for a lake to have two outlets.

Speaker: One outlet goes up to the Mackenzie River.

Speaker: The other outlet goes down to the Churchill River and empties into Hudson Bay.

Speaker: Those rivers empty out 5,000 kilometers apart.

Speaker: Holy smokes.

Speaker: 5,000, 4,000.

Speaker: That doesn't make any sense.

Speaker: Right, yeah.

Speaker: Rivers shouldn't do that.

Speaker: Lakes shouldn't do that.

Speaker: But the Canadian Shield is this crazy, irregular country, and it's got a certain rhythm to it after a while.

Speaker: And you learn how to interpret the maps and you learn how to, I don't know, find outlets in a lake when there's a thousand bays and they all look the same.

Speaker: And which one do I go into to leave this lake?

Speaker: I don't know.

Speaker: There are tricks that are specific to the terrain.

Speaker: Just like I'm assuming that there are people who specialize in

Speaker: climbing in the Alps and that climbing in the Alps is different from climbing in the Himalayas.

Speaker: And if you just take your Alp climbing skills, there's some transfer, but you've got to learn the rhythm of the land and the rhythm of the weather and the cultural aspects and the increased elevation.

Speaker: It all changes it a little bit.

Speaker: Yeah, that's fascinating.

Speaker: I find it very interesting, especially if you're watching this episode, definitely try to check out that area that Stefan's talking about.

Speaker: And obviously check out his book and his Instagram, because when you showed that to me, I was stunned.

Speaker: It wasn't like a straightforward river that, okay, I'm just going to go down this river and it's easy to navigate.

Speaker: It's like, oh no, this is a maze.

Speaker: It's like

Speaker: I don't know how you navigate your way through that.

Speaker: On that note, do you use like compass or do you use electronics?

Speaker: I would think probably compass and maps would be probably the most reliable, but on the same token, having digital tools would be very good too.

Speaker: So the answer is yes, I use all those tools.

Speaker: I carry a Garmin GPS.

Speaker: I don't typically pair it with my smartphone.

Speaker: because it takes up too much power and over on a longer trip, keeping all your devices charged is problematic.

Speaker: Yes.

Speaker: So you've got a little tiny screen.

Speaker: I don't know.

Speaker: That's one and a half inches by one and a half inches at best.

Speaker: And that's difficult to navigate from because especially as you zoom out to get the big picture, all the little islands that you're landmarking off of disappear.

Speaker: So, but I, but I carry it.

Speaker: I've also got a backup map on this watch.

Speaker: So if I lost everything and I still had the watch, I could probably, hopefully figure out how to walk to safety, but mostly it's maps here and compass.

Speaker: That's still the central thing because it's, it gives you the big picture and I've learned something, right?

Speaker: These maps are now, they're printed out on a polyethylene material.

Speaker: So they're care resistant.

Speaker: They're water resistant.

Speaker: They're not going to shred if they get wet.

Speaker: Nice.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: And it costs a few extra dollars, but it's so worth it.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: So just for your own peace of mind for a long, long time being out there.

Speaker: But it's the idea that two is one and one is none.

Speaker: If you need, if you absolutely need something, if it's mission critical to your expedition,

Speaker: it's probably going to break or tear or get lost.

Speaker: So if the maps, if I lose this one to 50,000 scale map, I've got a one to 250,000 scale map.

Speaker: It would be hard to navigate off of that, but at least it's a start.

Speaker: And if I lose that, I've got my Garmin.

Speaker: And if I lose that, I've got this.

Speaker: So there I've got actually quadruple redundancy because navigating is so important.

Speaker: For lighting fires, you know, you carry lighters and then you carry matches.

Speaker: And then somewhere in your pack, you've got a, like a magnesium, uh, fire starter rod.

Speaker: Yep.

Speaker: That's right.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Because it's really important to be able to do it.

Speaker: Uh, what's another super important paddles, right?

Speaker: If you carry one, it's guaranteed that if you carry two paddles, you're going to break one and lose the other.

Speaker: So I actually carry three paddles, which is overkill.

Speaker: When you're that exposed and when calling a float plane to come rescue you might take a week if the weather's shitty and it's going to cost you $10,000, it's worth the extra weight of the extra paddle to have redundancy.

Speaker: So you don't have to carry always multiple paddles.

Speaker: copies of the same thing you don't need to carry 10 lighters you need to have multiple ways to accomplish the same goal which is light a fire so you you or multiple ways to navigate so maps at different scales plus your garmin plus your watch so it you're never hopefully never going to be left without an option

Speaker: Yeah, that's that's exactly the way I try to or at least very similar to the way I try to think.

Speaker: I try to have redundancy built in.

Speaker: The one thing that I find found fascinating when you're talking about those items like, you know, your garment, your watch, the map, each one of those is a skill set and it's in its own that you have to practice on before you get into the into the outdoors, like deeper into the outdoors.

Speaker: You know, same thing with building fires.

Speaker: It's

Speaker: It looks easy.

Speaker: I was just watching a video last night on YouTube with an incredible guy out of Ontario that when he goes in the back door, out back country, and he'll build a fire in the pouring rain and he'll make an incredible dinner and he'll camp overnight.

Speaker: And having done a little bit of that, it's like,

Speaker: And that guy made that look easy, you know, and that's because he's got an enormous amount of time invested into developing those skills.

Speaker: And I think for people that don't maybe get out as much, those are some things to like maybe some takeaways is to like really like

Speaker: Know your limits, like know where you're at, practice with your tools, whatever you're going to be using before you get into those environments.

Speaker: Do you find that you do a little bit of that?

Speaker: I'm sure you do.

Speaker: You must go out and try a smaller level, like maybe overnight and just play with different equipment and see what works, what doesn't work.

Speaker: If I can, I do.

Speaker: And the times that I haven't done it, I've often regretted it.

Speaker: Most notably, so in a canoe,

Speaker: You've got something often called a spray deck, which is a fabric material that goes over the top of the canoe.

Speaker: And it keeps the waves out.

Speaker: If it's raining, it keeps the rain out of the boat.

Speaker: But in whitewater or in heavy, windy conditions, it really increases your margin of safety.

Speaker: So it's a pretty important piece of kit.

Speaker: Not everybody takes them, and I don't take it on every trip.

Speaker: But for expeditions, I almost always take some kind of spray deck.

Speaker: Now, I remember pulling up at the starting point of a trip and realizing that my spray deck couldn't fit over the amount of stuff that I had in it.

Speaker: Like, okay, so I'm going to have to eat through quite a bit of this food.

Speaker: I'm going to have to eat through 20 days of food until the level of the bags sticking up above the gunnels is level with the gunnels so that I can get the spray deck on.

Speaker: Okay, so I'm just going to have to be very careful for the first 20 days.

Speaker: After 20 days, finally everything fit below the gunnels and I put the spray deck on and I realized that the design of it in had these suspenders.

Speaker: And I'm very particular about spray deck design because if you flip, the last thing you want to be doing is fumbling in my mind for these plastic buckles to release these suspenders upside down while you're getting dragged down rapids.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: And not confuse those buckles with all the other buckles that are on your life jacket and all the other things that you've got attached to your life jacket.

Speaker: And I was like, I can't actually use this fucking spray deck.

Speaker: I've carried this now for 20 days.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: So I managed to find a way to attach it to half the boat.

Speaker: So I got half protection.

Speaker: It was better than nothing.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: But it was really my own damn fault for not going out and setting it up.

Speaker: I trained with a boat.

Speaker: And I got the spray deck, I ordered it and it arrived a couple of days before the trip.

Speaker: Oh yeah, cool.

Speaker: I'll just throw that in the packing.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Idiot.

Speaker: I was stupid.

Speaker: Like there's something that important.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: You have to set it up.

Speaker: Like there's lots of times that people have gone camping and left their poles for their tent at home.

Speaker: That sucks.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: I mean, it's not as, you know, I pulled up on a hiking trip and, you know, realized I don't have any toilet paper or any matches.

Speaker: So I'm trying to get much better at that and have checklists, set everything up and, uh, and test it and then test it again before going out.

Speaker: But it's a lot, right?

Speaker: You need a spreadsheet.

Speaker: Honestly, I've got a, for this summer's trip, I've got a spreadsheet with about 10 or 12 different tabs on it and all the items, you know, everything related to food here, everything related to logistics here, everything related to

Speaker: satellite communications here everything related to uh trip you know repair equipment medical equipment and and without checklists and in my case spreadsheets you're gonna forget stuff

Speaker: Yeah, that makes absolute sense.

Speaker: I've got the same thing.

Speaker: I actually use notes on my phone and I have checklists.

Speaker: And the same thing, I categorize them into like, you know, I don't know, like food, you know, dishwashing equipment or like cleaning equipment, you know, navigational or electronics, clothing, et cetera.

Speaker: And it's absolutely critical.

Speaker: And I'll use that and double check it as I'm packing things.

Speaker: And it just gives you that reassurance.

Speaker: And there's been quite a few times where I've been out and I'm like,

Speaker: oh, thank goodness I packed that that one item, you know, like, you know, they just came into use at this one point.

Speaker: And I know that packing it at the time when I was packing it, I was thinking, I'm probably never going to use this.

Speaker: But sometimes it does go really well where it goes good and vice versa.

Speaker: I've had it where I've gone out to use something in the outdoors and I don't understand actually how to use it.

Speaker: I'm fumbling.

Speaker: I'm getting frustrated.

Speaker: And again, that wears down your brain a little bit.

Speaker: You know, you get a little more stress from that.

Speaker: If that makes sense.

Speaker: It makes it more amazing when you read accounts of the early explorers or the early people traveling through.

Speaker: All right.

Speaker: I had my bag of beans, my side of bacon, my rifle, a blanket, my paddle and a tarp.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Really?

Speaker: Like maybe they left out a few things on their packing list.

Speaker: That's what I like to think.

Speaker: But ultimately, you know, they,

Speaker: They didn't have their little custom espresso maker.

Speaker: They didn't have their Leatherman.

Speaker: Yeah, they didn't have the nice warm clothing that we have, the nice thermal regulated clothing and whatnot.

Speaker: But yeah, it's amazing to me what the old expeditioners did.

Speaker: And all across the world, it's incredible.

Speaker: When you think of the adventures they went on, it absolutely blows me away.

Speaker: I think it's amazing how often the answer is gear by which I mean, yes, you definitely need skills and you definitely need knowledge.

Speaker: And maybe I just take that for granted, but the difference between being absolutely miserable in the woods and being relatively comfortable in the woods is often a good set of rain gear or a waterproof tent, right?

Speaker: Not the crappy tent that you get at Walmart.

Speaker: where the fly comes halfway down the body of the tent and you better hope that it doesn't rain.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Uh, it, you can suffer and there are definitely, you know, suffering is character building and, you know, there, there, I've, I've had lots of trips that I've suffered on, but the trips where you have the right equipment really, you can go further.

Speaker: You can go faster.

Speaker: And you can go with a greater margin of safety as well.

Speaker: Like hypothermia is people, everybody freaks out about bears in the wild.

Speaker: Oh, what about bears?

Speaker: Are you going to up north?

Speaker: You better take a gun.

Speaker: You better take two guns.

Speaker: Well, okay, great.

Speaker: But statistically speaking, I think it's about five people a year get killed by bears in North America.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: something like, Oh God, what is it?

Speaker: Thousands of people drown a year.

Speaker: And that's mostly due to hypothermia.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: So actually when you're lakes and cold water kill infinitely more people than bears do.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: You got to watch out for bears.

Speaker: Sure.

Speaker: Okay.

Speaker: We're in agreement there, but what I'm going to carry two guns.

Speaker: It's not piss off.

Speaker: Like, you know, the weight of that is just ridiculous.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Uh,

Speaker: And, and like you said, you're surrounded by water the entire time when you're out, you know, in your, in your boat and, and it's a constant, it's actually constant threat.

Speaker: Um, you know, if you do flip or you do, you know, get soaking wet and, uh, and have you had any major bear encounters, um, when you've been on your trips?

Speaker: Yeah, uh, definitely, uh, the, on the north, uh,

Speaker: The Seal River is a remote river that runs along the Nunavut-Manitoba border.

Speaker: It's in Manitoba, but it's this very different terrain from the rest of Manitoba.

Speaker: It's Canadian Shield, the terrain that I like.

Speaker: And so I went overland to the Seal River coming out of the Cochrane River system.

Speaker: And it's amazing, right?

Speaker: The connection between these two rivers is a...

Speaker: a hundred foot portage over an ester, which is a big sand ridge.

Speaker: And all of a sudden you're in a different river, but you're in a very, very, very small river.

Speaker: And so there's a lot of waiting and dragging because it takes a while for all the water to drain into and, and make this river large enough to paddle in.

Speaker: So I was coming down the, uh, the North seal river when it was just a Creek.

Speaker: It w as a long series of whitewater, but it was way too shallow to paddle.

Speaker: So I'm wading knee deep, thigh deep, dragging the boat or basically walking the boat like a naughty dog, right?

Speaker: Trying to stop it from running away from me.

Speaker: And it's, it's dense forest on both sides.

Speaker: It's, it's would be really difficult to walk through it.

Speaker: It's nothing but pecker pole spruce, just spruce tree, spruce tree, spruce tree, spruce tree.

Speaker: You'd almost have to do some lumberjacking to walk through.

Speaker: And then about a hundred feet downriver from me, I saw a bear.

Speaker: Oh, cool.

Speaker: So I pulled the boat over onto a rock.

Speaker: So it kind of would be bobbing there.

Speaker: And I pulled out my camera and I got one of those fuzzy bear pictures.

Speaker: It was not a very good camera.

Speaker: It's like, no, no, really, there's a bear here.

Speaker: If you look at this little black dot, that's a bear.

Speaker: We all have those.

Speaker: A few of those for sure.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: And then I saw something that made my heart stop, which was an even smaller black dot.

Speaker: This bear had a cub the size of a large cat.

Speaker: I'm like, oh, fuck.

Speaker: Because bear mothers are very protective of their young.

Speaker: So at that point, I pulled out my shotgun.

Speaker: And what do I do?

Speaker: They're both downriver.

Speaker: I can't go through the forest.

Speaker: I'm standing there in the river waiting for these bears to leave.

Speaker: And they finally go up.

Speaker: And they go out of sight.

Speaker: So how far are they?

Speaker: Are they just by the riverside?

Speaker: Are they gone cross country?

Speaker: I don't know.

Speaker: So I got to continue because I can't camp here.

Speaker: And so I start going down river, just yelling as loudly as I can.

Speaker: And it turns out they hadn't gone that far.

Speaker: And the black bear mother came down to the river's edge, charged up.

Speaker: And now she's standing about 20 feet away from me.

Speaker: I'm knee deep in water.

Speaker: I've got the boat pulled up on another rock.

Speaker: It's slippery and I've got the shotgun leveled at her.

Speaker: I mean, it's not an ideal environment for combat shooting.

Speaker: You're standing in side deep white water.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: And she's like growling and pawing the ground.

Speaker: And I fire a shot into the air to warn her and she doesn't flinch, not even a tiny bit.

Speaker: So this is not good.

Speaker: So then I tell myself, if she steps one paw into that water, I've got to shoot her.

Speaker: And then in my mind, I go, and if I shoot her, then I got to find the cub and kill it too, because it's just going to starve to death.

Speaker: So now I'm like, oh, do I really have to kill two bears today, including a cub?

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: And eventually she just slowly, and I'm yelling and I'm screaming.

Speaker: I'm just hurling profanities at her in part to discourage her and in part to hype myself up to fight to the death.

Speaker: And eventually she just turned around and like walked back downstream and went up and disappeared.

Speaker: And I waited another half hour and then continued on very quietly with the shotgun in one hand and the boat in the other and snuck past the area that she was.

Speaker: And so I'd say that was a fairly close call.

Speaker: Wow, that's an incredible story.

Speaker: And that was a black bear or was that a grizzly?

Speaker: That was a black bear.

Speaker: It's amazing.

Speaker: I love bears.

Speaker: I love wildlife in general.

Speaker: And to see them in their own habitat is just something special.

Speaker: But to have one, like how close was that bear when it was, you know, kind of charging and growing?

Speaker: Yeah, that's such a scary position to be in.

Speaker: And just I can imagine your adrenaline must have just been through the roof when you were going through that.

Speaker: It was, but there was also like regret at having to shoot this bear.

Speaker: That's really, I've come into its territory.

Speaker: It thinks I'm trying to kill its cub.

Speaker: I mean, I will defend myself, right?

Speaker: I will put it down if I have to, but it's also, there's not a large margin for error there at 20 feet.

Speaker: They can cover that distance in a blink of an eye.

Speaker: They are really very fast.

Speaker: You see some bear shambling along the river, the water's edge at the river bank.

Speaker: Oh, look at this cute thing going for a stroll.

Speaker: And then it looks up and boom, it jumps like in one bound.

Speaker: It goes 10 feet over the edge of the bank.

Speaker: It's got some serious plyometric power.

Speaker: that it can, that those things can harness.

Speaker: So I always say it's the wildlife, you know, British Columbia, you know, whether it's a deer, bear, elk, moose, they're like elite athletes and, and, and it's hard for us sometimes, you know, in our day-to-day lives to understand that.

Speaker: But like you said,

Speaker: Their ability to cover ground, their strength and power ratio is just incredible.

Speaker: And that's what they do.

Speaker: They're in the wild all day, every day, hunting, surviving.

Speaker: And it is pretty incredible to see them in their own element and definitely something to be healthily respected.

Speaker: For sure.

Speaker: We're at an hour 15.

Speaker: I want to make sure you're okay for time.

Speaker: Are you still good for a bit or do you got to get running here?

Speaker: I've got another 15 minutes if you want to bring it home.

Speaker: I got a fun question for you.

Speaker: If you were to have coffee with any historical figure or expeditionary person alive or, you know, gone or passed away, who might it be and where would you do it?

Speaker: Wow.

Speaker: Well, I guess given the theme of this, I'd have to say Bill Mason.

Speaker: And I would have to say at the, uh, at the seal river because he died of cancer and his last, the seal river was the next river that he was going to do.

Speaker: And he, he didn't go because he was going through chemo.

Speaker: And then just before he died, he said, well, if I'd known I was going to die, I would have gone anyway.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: So I think, I think that would close a loop.

Speaker: in his mind.

Speaker: I have paddled with his son.

Speaker: Uh, I've had his son on my podcast.

Speaker: His son gave me a very nice review for my book, but I never did meet the man.

Speaker: Now, if we open that up to all historical figures, good God.

Speaker: Uh, I think maybe, maybe Winston Churchill in part for the historical significance and in part for the, uh, the amazing wit that that man had.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: He was, uh, very, very quick on his feet.

Speaker: And, uh, and was incredibly important historically and, and a flawed individual like all of us.

Speaker: Yep.

Speaker: Yep.

Speaker: But, but it, uh, off the top of my head, I think that would, those would be the two people.

Speaker: Both of those are the amazing conversation staff, uh, Churchill probably be drinking tea while you drink your coffee.

Speaker: I would imagine.

Speaker: Good Lord, man.

Speaker: That guy was an alcoholic.

Speaker: He started out his day with a stiff drink and didn't stop drinking until he went to bed.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: That's a good point, yeah.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: By today's standards, definitely a functional, functioning alcoholic, but 1,000% an alcoholic.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Dan Carlin, the podcaster, did an interesting episode on this topic very early in 2020.

Speaker: hardcore history in the hardcore history series, talking about the effects of drugs on World War II, because basically Stalin was an alcoholic, Churchill was an alcoholic, and Hitler was a meth addict.

Speaker: So how would this war have turned out if these people hadn't been all hopped up on drugs and hopped up on booze?

Speaker: They think that some of the Russian, there's theories that some of the amazing

Speaker: German advances early in when they invaded Russia and Operation Barbarossa were because Stalin basically disappeared for a week and he might've been off on a massive bender for like, I can't believe that we're being invaded.

Speaker: Let me self-medicate with vodka.

Speaker: And maybe that made the initial German invasion

Speaker: as successful as it was for them and as disastrous as it was for the Russians.

Speaker: It's interesting you bring up, Dan Carlin, because I think about 15 years ago, you were the one that got me started on listening to podcasts.

Speaker: And we're here full circle now, my first podcast.

Speaker: And you've got obviously multiple episodes on your podcast, Strenuous Life.

Speaker: And it's interesting because you said to me back then, you're like, hey, have you ever listened to a podcast?

Speaker: And I had no idea.

Speaker: I don't know what it was.

Speaker: And it was actually Dan Carlin's Hardcore History that you recommended.

Speaker: And so I went into the, you listened to his Genghis Khan and a bunch of other ones, which are absolutely amazing.

Speaker: I really, really enjoy them.

Speaker: And I think on a personal note, because at this point I'm right into Napoleon, I think it'd be great to have, sit down and have a nice espresso with Napoleon and just hear what he has to say.

Speaker: Maybe on the battlefield somewhere too, it would be pretty interesting to see before the battle started or whatever.

Speaker: But what a fascinating individual.

Speaker: Well, I hope it's the historical Napoleon, not the travesty of a Napoleon that was portrayed in the Ridley Scott movie.

Speaker: I really wanted to like that movie.

Speaker: And oh man, I think they shot that.

Speaker: Yeah, I went on opening night to watch that one.

Speaker: In costume?

Speaker: I hope you were in costume.

Speaker: Yeah, I know.

Speaker: Although that would have been actually a lot better, but yeah.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: No, it's good.

Speaker: Do you have any future big expedition adventures or trips planned or sort of bucket list things you want to do?

Speaker: Well, bucket list is one of the things on bucket list would be a crossing of Greenland, which would require on skis.

Speaker: which would require the accumulation of a whole new set of skills, everything from crevasse rescue to, you know, I, I ski, I winter camp, but that's at a white belt, blue belt level.

Speaker: And you need to be at a black belt level for that.

Speaker: So that's maybe eventually down the road.

Speaker: Actually, I was talking to a coworker of ours, Jeff Pappas and I were chatting about this and daydreaming about Greenland.

Speaker: So who knows?

Speaker: Uh, that's definitely not on the table for this year, but I'm not, I'm not ruling it out.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: It would be just the vast expanse of white for, for weeks.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Uh, in terms of this summer, yes, I have a plan, but it's heavily constrained because at the one end,

Speaker: The big lakes up north.

Speaker: So I want to go back up north and I want to go explore a river called the Ta'ane about which very, very little is written.

Speaker: There's an account by Reverend Lofthouse in the late 1800s who went up the river looking for Inuit and Dene natives to convert to Christianity and he didn't find any.

Speaker: And his account is basically, oh, stupid river.

Speaker: It didn't bring me any people.

Speaker: So I've looked at it on the maps and it looks amazing.

Speaker: It's really quite remote.

Speaker: It's total lost in the Barons country.

Speaker: The problem is twofold at the early end of the year, the big lakes don't become ice free until sometimes early June, late June, but often it's July and often ice persists into August.

Speaker: Okay.

Speaker: Other end of things.

Speaker: It's a really dry year.

Speaker: The combination of global warming and El Nino have really contributed to a hugely deficient snowpack all across North America.

Speaker: I know British Columbia is going to be having some amazing wildfires.

Speaker: Wildfire season is already off to a crazy start.

Speaker: They just almost lost Fort McMurray.

Speaker: We almost lost Fort Nelson.

Speaker: And this is true all across the prairie provinces.

Speaker: And it's also true in the Arctic.

Speaker: tail end of the paddling season is going to be heavily constrained by water levels potentially being too low.

Speaker: So I'm trying to currently find the sweet spot between basically going right at breakup the second the ice is off the lakes to try and follow the spring fresh down to the ocean.

Speaker: We'll see if that works.

Speaker: It's possible that the rivers would be

Speaker: ice free but the lakes wouldn't be and it's that that presents some pretty big navigational challenges trying to paddle it amongst ice flows i mean even if there's a way to thread your way through the ice if a wind comes up and carries that ice out into the middle of the lake now you're

Speaker: 30 kilometers from shore in the middle of ice flows that are going up and down in a little canoe.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: That's really not a good position to be in.

Speaker: Well, and it's not like it's been very well explored.

Speaker: So you're probably going on some new, new ground, almost like new areas to like, I guess it's always kind of new out there, but on the same token, maybe a little bit more.

Speaker: So if it, if you don't have accounts from other people to go by.

Speaker: It's, it's always new.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Even if there's a river that you've paddled 10 times.

Speaker: They had a big, let's say there was a big spring flood and it was rearranged it.

Speaker: And the rapid that was totally easy to paddle two years ago when you were last on it is now a death trap because the boulders have been rearranged by the force of the spring flood coming down.

Speaker: Or there's more simply, there's a log or a log jam right in the middle of a stretch.

Speaker: That's, that's no big deal.

Speaker: A log jam or a log.

Speaker: That's a, that's a big deal.

Speaker: That's a potential killer.

Speaker: So you have to kind of approach every rapid with, or every river with fresh eyes every time.

Speaker: It's a little bit like saying, oh man, I do this drive to work all the time.

Speaker: I can just sleep the entire time.

Speaker: Well, you probably shouldn't because that idiot driver who wasn't there yesterday is on it today.

Speaker: Or the sheet of plywood that stayed on the pickup truck ahead of you yesterday is

Speaker: is going to decide today to break a strap and come flying off through the air at your head like a giant frisbee of death.

Speaker: So I'm not too concerned about it being undescribed or underexplored, but the ice and the water situation, we'll see.

Speaker: So at this point, I figure there's an 80% chance I'll head up.

Speaker: That's exciting.

Speaker: The, when you equate the, the way I kind of sort of thinking about it is like, I've done a little bit of mountain biking, just like very tame cross country, kind of like fast for cardio and whatnot.

Speaker: I find with mountain biking, I, I have to live in the moment at all times.

Speaker: I can't be worried about what just happened and I can't be worried too far down the road.

Speaker: down like you know 20 30 feet i got to kind of be focused on you know like what's in front of me and yes i'm looking further but on the same token it has to be kind of like you know almost second per second because i found the times where my mind has drifted to some other topic or what i just did or what's down the road that's when i've like you know had a bit of a crash or bailed or slipped on a log or or whatnot so it sounds kind of similar there a little bit anyway but

Speaker: It is a, all this, everything we've talked about today, really jujitsu, firefighting to some extent, and certainly many outdoor activities are a way of forcing you to live in the moment.

Speaker: And that's one of the big draws and one of the big attractions of it, because you're not worried about, you know, that email that you got from work saying, Hey,

Speaker: could you please send us a list of the 12 things as per memo?

Speaker: One, two, three, four.

Speaker: Could you please send us an itemized list of items?

Speaker: One, two, three, four, five.

Speaker: Uh, no, there's a log ahead of me and I need to deal with it.

Speaker: There's a tree coming at me at 30 kilometers an hour.

Speaker: I have a, I have a black bear and her baby, uh, in my way here.

Speaker: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker: Carging up.

Speaker: Exactly.

Speaker: Well, that's awesome.

Speaker: Thank you so much, Stefan.

Speaker: I really appreciate you coming on.

Speaker: We're getting close to an hour and a half and I know your time is, you've got lots going on.

Speaker: Is there anything that you want to maybe like, you know, you know, talk about in terms like your book or your social media presence?

Speaker: It's a good idea to throw it out there so people can find you and, you know, tap into your expertise and your knowledge because I know it's been great for me over the years.

Speaker: I love looking at your stuff.

Speaker: I guess it depends what you want.

Speaker: The book tentatively titled Perseverance, Life and Death in the Subarctic is coming out hopefully in January of next year.

Speaker: So that's still a ways out.

Speaker: Keep an eye open for it.

Speaker: I think it's really good.

Speaker: It only took four years and 12 revisions to finally be in a condition that I'm pretty happy with.

Speaker: If you're interested in the jujitsu end of things, or you just think it sounds interesting,

Speaker: I've got a free book that you can download at grapplearts.com forward slash book.

Speaker: It's called a roadmap for BJJ.

Speaker: It kind of takes you through the basic picture, the view from 30,000 feet.

Speaker: So you can know where to slot in the individual techniques and the individual moves in a bigger sort of tactical, in a bigger strategic scheme.

Speaker: And if you're interested in the outdoors, I've been building out the essential wilderness channel.

Speaker: If you go to essential wilderness.com that links to the, uh, to the social media properties.

Speaker: I'm trying to build that out and, and put some of the things that have been bouncing around in my head for decades.

Speaker: onto video and into photos and into articles.

Speaker: So it depends what you're into, but if you search for my name with an interest, you know, Stefan Kesting Canoeing, that should get you somewhere.

Speaker: Stefan Kesting Jiu-Jitsu, that should get you something.

Speaker: Just don't type in Stefan Kesting Only Fans because we don't talk about that.

Speaker: You also have your strenuous life podcast too, which is great.

Speaker: This is also true.

Speaker: We've got a ton of different guests on there.

Speaker: And well, thank you so much for coming on and doing this with me.

Speaker: I really appreciate it.

Speaker: I'm thrilled actually to finally get a conversation.

Speaker: I hope we can have you on in the future again, because I've got about another 150 or 200 questions that I wanted to ask you.

Speaker: But we've put a good amount of time in here.

Speaker: So thanks, Stefan.

Speaker: Anytime, my friend.

Speaker: Awesome.

Speaker: Appreciate it.