Latest / Adventure Sports Podcast / Ep. 1195: Pack Rafting and Multi-Sport Adventure with Thor Tingey

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Ep. 1195: Pack Rafting and Multi-Sport Adventure with Thor Tingey · Adventure Sports Podcast

0:06
[SPEAKER_00]: your listening to the Adventure Sports podcast.
0:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for adventuring with us, as we discover what incredible athletes and outdoor enthusiasts are doing all over the world.
0:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, here's your host, Kurt Lindville.
0:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Hey friends, thank you for joining us today.
0:21
[SPEAKER_01]: I interviewed a fellow by the name of Steve Fastbinder.
0:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Boy, it's been about 10 years ago, and he introduced me to the idea of
0:31
[SPEAKER_01]: And today, we're revisiting the whole adventure sport of pack rafting and multi-sport adventures that it allows, but we're doing it with Alpaca Raffs CEO who founded the company a long time ago, but we're gonna talk about adventure pack rafting.
0:48
[SPEAKER_01]: It's gonna be a heck of a lot of fun.
0:50
[SPEAKER_01]: It's such a, it's one of the favorite subjects of mine.
0:53
[SPEAKER_01]: So our guest today is Thortingy.
0:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And he started the idea of pack rafting.
0:59
[SPEAKER_01]: not not pack rafting itself, but modern pack rafting with the modern gear that we have.
1:03
[SPEAKER_01]: And then he went off to law school and he came a corporate lawyer and then he left corporate America and came back to pack rafting at Alpaca rafs.
1:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's going to be a fun story.
1:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Thor, welcome to the program.
1:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks, excited to be here.
1:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I love it when I get to hear how people, you know, kind of built a career and then did a pivot and came back to the outdoor industry in general or to the life they love or to, you know, a more adventurous approach to living.
1:31
[SPEAKER_01]: How did all of that transpire.
1:32
[SPEAKER_01]: That's funny.
1:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I've had.
1:34
[SPEAKER_03]: three careers in my life and I would seem the perfect candidate for somebody to have just started in adventure sports because I grew up in Alaska.
1:43
[SPEAKER_03]: My mom was not a clothing designer who had lived in Jackson Hall in that her own clothing business was contemporaries with Iván Bernard and those people and Patagonia and then my dad was a climbing ranger in the Teton screw up in Salt Lake put up a lot of first-to-sense there in the properties in 60s.
1:59
[SPEAKER_03]: So I grew up in a climbing, back in Trisking, boating, dog-mushing household.
2:05
[SPEAKER_03]: I went to college.
2:05
[SPEAKER_03]: I had no idea that you could have a career in any of these things.
2:09
[SPEAKER_03]: I thought the only careers that were in outdoor sports were like working in a gear shop, which actually did right after college.
2:15
[SPEAKER_03]: So I got a degree in biology and became a fisheries biologist for the federal government.
2:19
[SPEAKER_03]: Most of it, because I love fly fishing and it's like great.
2:21
[SPEAKER_03]: I can go fly fishing while working in these really cool places.
2:24
[SPEAKER_03]: I'll pack it.
2:25
[SPEAKER_03]: We kind of found it.
2:26
[SPEAKER_03]: I'll pack it around the same time and there's a whole story there.
2:29
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I after four years of a fish biologist I was trying to decide do I want to go get a master's or a PhD.
2:35
[SPEAKER_03]: And I decided to go law school because I thought I wanted to do fisheries policy work.
2:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, okay.
2:39
[SPEAKER_03]: I didn't want to I didn't want to do the science anymore.
2:41
[SPEAKER_03]: I wanted to do what are we doing with this fish stock species or whatever.
2:45
[SPEAKER_03]: So I went to law school in Portland, Oregon, at Lewis and Clark.
2:47
[SPEAKER_03]: There, without as a great school for that kind of work, but I'd really well in law school and found that I really enjoyed the idea of practicing law.
2:55
[SPEAKER_03]: So I joined a medium-sized boutique law firm in Portland and did a mix of land use real estate and bankruptcy for the next 10 years.
3:03
[SPEAKER_03]: And then my wife kind of burned out on the city.
3:06
[SPEAKER_03]: I got a bad head injury, which kind of made it harder to practice law at the pace that I needed to make partner that kind of thing.
3:12
[SPEAKER_03]: So at that point, Alpaca, my mom had grown it to the point where it was she was ready to kind of step back a little bit and needed somebody to come in and run it.
3:21
[SPEAKER_03]: And it was a so it was either sell it or us coming run it.
3:23
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's kind of what drove us out of corporate world.
3:26
[SPEAKER_03]: And now here we are in sunny southwest Colorado and running a business.
3:30
[SPEAKER_01]: So, Mankus is the home of Alpaca Raffs, right?
3:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
3:35
[SPEAKER_01]: And let's see here.
3:36
[SPEAKER_01]: I did some quick AI research.
3:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Your mom is Sherry, is that right?
3:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Yep.
3:40
[SPEAKER_01]: That's fantastic.
3:42
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I saw the name and it didn't say what your relationship was to Sherry.
3:46
[SPEAKER_01]: To find out that that's your mom.
3:47
[SPEAKER_01]: That's actually kind of cool.
3:48
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, not a lot of people could say, I started a company with my mom left it in her hands and went off and became a lawyer for 10 years.
3:55
[SPEAKER_01]: But now I'm back and I'm running the company.
3:57
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a nasty story.
3:59
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, what a family.
4:00
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I had a really, I did not draw wealthy or financially privileged, but I grew up extremely privileged in terms of just getting to experience the world.
4:10
[SPEAKER_03]: I would not trade my childhood for anything.
4:13
[SPEAKER_03]: We grew up in rural Alaska, we just adventureed.
4:17
[SPEAKER_03]: And so by the time I got to college, I had no idea that other kids didn't grow up like that.
4:23
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow, things that are just kind of like based knowledge to me about being in the outdoors and doing
4:29
[SPEAKER_03]: a lot of people had to learn in their 20s and 30s.
4:33
[SPEAKER_03]: I was learning that stuff when I was five.
4:35
[SPEAKER_03]: So I really credit to my parents for that.
4:37
[SPEAKER_03]: They were great that way.
4:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I don't know that we had as many big adventures, but my wife and I decided to raise our kids in the woods.
4:45
[SPEAKER_01]: We made sure that, you know, we had a house in the forest.
4:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they grew up doing woodsy things and climbing mountains and skiing and, you know, snow sports and
4:53
[SPEAKER_01]: you know all that kind of stuff and I it blessed our family so much now later in life I think their professionals in their own regard in doing their things and I think that they're realizing well all of those skills actually taught me things about life.
5:06
[SPEAKER_03]: I agree completely I learned a lot just about life and living in the outdoors and I didn't really kind of see it through that lens when I was a kid.
5:14
[SPEAKER_03]: I've got a funny story here on the big pack crafting trips through the Brooks Rangers led to the founding of Alpaca.
5:20
[SPEAKER_03]: We were about a third of the way through and we crossed the Dalton Highway, which is the highway that runs from Fairbanks up to the oil fields in northern Alaska.
5:27
[SPEAKER_03]: And our group had split up because somebody had a kill East tenonitis, and I'd gone with him, and we had to hitchhike back to the space.
5:33
[SPEAKER_03]: But we ended up hitchhiking, and we get picked up by this German family driving, you know, one of those big, unimog style, our land.
5:40
[SPEAKER_03]: And this isn't like in 2000.
5:42
[SPEAKER_03]: they're more common now, but this was like a rare thing to see on the road.
5:45
[SPEAKER_03]: They picked us up and it's this young couple, I don't know, probably early 30s and they have two kids with them.
5:51
[SPEAKER_03]: And they're in a five or seven year adventure.
5:54
[SPEAKER_03]: They've been in Africa for two years and now they're in North America and they're working in their way to South America over the next two years, just driving around.
6:01
[SPEAKER_03]: And these kids are sitting in the back of this vehicle wall.
6:04
[SPEAKER_03]: They're driving down the road and they're playing a game boy and just
6:06
[SPEAKER_03]: completely bored out of their mind with the adventure that they're on.
6:10
[SPEAKER_03]: The parents are just like this is the greatest thing.
6:12
[SPEAKER_03]: The world and the kids are like, you know, I just want to watch TV and see my friends and I'd love to know what those kids are doing now because I kind of wanted to tell them because I was about 22 at the time.
6:22
[SPEAKER_03]: I know how boring this seems now and I went through this when I was a kid because I felt the same thing at times like why do we live in this house with no power
6:29
[SPEAKER_03]: you know, I want to go from watch TV or what have you, but I'm like, I think when you get to be 25, you're going to thank your parents for those five years that you got to explore the world in such a cool way.
6:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
6:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
6:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I agree.
6:43
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, the co-host that founded the Adventure Sports podcast with me decided to do that with his family for a year, not forever, but they did that for a year.
6:52
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was because of this show.
6:53
[SPEAKER_01]: They Travis and his family were just so enchanted by all the guests that
6:59
[SPEAKER_01]: who are doing things like that, and he just said, you know what, this is the time while my kids are at the right age to do it.
7:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's just go and they did.
7:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was life impacting.
7:09
[SPEAKER_01]: He says he would never want to exchange that time for anything.
7:13
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, we didn't have kids at the time, but when we left Oregon and the corporate world, my wife and I took a year sabbatical before coming back to Alpaca.
7:21
[SPEAKER_03]: And we're kind of like doing a little bit of work for Alpaca at the time, but we're mostly traveling.
7:25
[SPEAKER_03]: We bought a printer van.
7:26
[SPEAKER_03]: This is 2015.
7:27
[SPEAKER_03]: They weren't like every other vehicle on the road.
7:29
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
7:30
[SPEAKER_03]: And we drove around North America.
7:31
[SPEAKER_03]: And then we spent three months in New Zealand.
7:33
[SPEAKER_03]: They kind of reset and reinvigorated our marriage.
7:36
[SPEAKER_03]: And I don't think either of us would trade that for anything.
7:39
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, part of it is like I wish I could go back to that at times, but that's hard.
7:44
[SPEAKER_01]: it was worth every day and every dollar.
7:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow, that's great.
7:47
[SPEAKER_01]: So you said head injury, kind of pulled you out of law and back into the outdoor industry.
7:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Are you thankful for that?
7:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Was it huge?
7:55
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, the head injury.
7:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
7:57
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm thankful for getting pulled out.
7:59
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know what would have happened if I had never had it.
8:03
[SPEAKER_03]: But I was working in my garage on a bike, slipped with a wrench and took handlebars.
8:08
[SPEAKER_03]: I was not being careful and took handlebars.
8:11
[SPEAKER_03]: The
8:14
[SPEAKER_03]: And double black guys didn't really think much of it and it just lingered and never went away and I had about a year where I had a lot of trouble with sleep disturbance and brain fog and just mood disturbance and all you know all the all the grim stuff that comes out of post concussions and room.
8:31
[SPEAKER_03]: It's been 12 years now, kind of on 13 actually.
8:34
[SPEAKER_03]: And I've never been the same.
8:36
[SPEAKER_03]: I've got 90% of it back for the last 10% have never come back.
8:39
[SPEAKER_03]: Some people tell me that's just getting older, but I'm still hypersensitive to any kind of headbub.
8:43
[SPEAKER_03]: So I've been careful as a adventure sports athlete since that injury.
8:49
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't take as many risks on a bike anymore.
8:51
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't take as many risks skiing.
8:53
[SPEAKER_03]: Just because I don't want to crash.
8:55
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't want to spend a week kind of like zoned out because my brains are a little foggy Yeah, well, it's no fun.
9:01
[SPEAKER_03]: No, no, no, when I've met a lot of you know, there they're there way more common people think before my head injury I had no idea about it and now I'm like just hypersensitive about them So I've actually one good thing is growing up the way I did.
9:13
[SPEAKER_03]: I grew up with a lot of different activities It wasn't like we were really my dad is an obsessive climber.
9:18
[SPEAKER_03]: My mom was a skewer guy We grew up doing everything
9:21
[SPEAKER_03]: I loved fishing, I loved hunting, I loved backpacking, I loved water sports, I loved mountains, sports, I loved all of that stuff.
9:28
[SPEAKER_03]: And so, as I've had to kind of deal with the fallout of it, it's like, oh, I don't ride this technical of bike trails anymore and as fast.
9:36
[SPEAKER_03]: It's okay, I go fishing more because I don't have this nearly as high over the risk with it.
9:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
9:41
[SPEAKER_03]: And pack wrapped things a great one because I do white water pack wrapped a lot, you know, I wish I got into white water earlier in life.
9:47
[SPEAKER_03]: living in Alaska.
9:48
[SPEAKER_03]: My parents did not get us made my sister into white water.
9:52
[SPEAKER_03]: It's cold up there.
9:53
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
9:54
[SPEAKER_03]: More dangerous.
9:54
[SPEAKER_03]: That's different now.
9:55
[SPEAKER_03]: But modern dry seats weren't around in the 80s.
9:58
[SPEAKER_03]: Coked out was around.
9:58
[SPEAKER_03]: But that was a lot of money, especially to put it like a kid in a cook or a whole family.
10:03
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, family, yeah, I think I think it would have been very different if we had lived Colorado or the southeast or even Oregon where you have warmer water in the summer.
10:11
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like, oh, we're going to go kayaking now because we're going to wear t-shirts and a PFD and we're going to paddle class tunes.
10:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Could be really fun.
10:18
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, well, it works.
10:20
[SPEAKER_01]: you can get away with that with class two.
10:21
[SPEAKER_01]: I still I still reach for a paddle jack and if I'm going to get splashed.
10:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it just doesn't get warm enough, you know.
10:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of the bigger rivers might be warmer.
10:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, they're down.
10:31
[SPEAKER_01]: But I'm all later on the summer.
10:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm in the snow melt.
10:34
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, we're in the same thing here.
10:36
[SPEAKER_03]: One of the things I noticed about Colorado is what makes it I think challenging is a whitewater powder is Colorado kind of starts off of the bang like there's no warm up.
10:44
[SPEAKER_03]: It suddenly last week there was no water in this week's
10:48
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's so cold because it's no melt.
10:52
[SPEAKER_03]: You need to jump in it class.
10:53
[SPEAKER_03]: If you want to run class four or five this year, you've got to do it this week because next week the run-up's going to fall.
10:58
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not like it slowly comes up.
11:00
[SPEAKER_03]: And we're going to start out with some easy runs.
11:02
[SPEAKER_03]: You're like jumping right into it.
11:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, we don't have much in the way of damn release, which moderates the flows.
11:08
[SPEAKER_01]: There's some, but it's not like back east where that's what's going on.
11:12
[SPEAKER_03]: It's going on.
11:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, here it's when the snow melts, it melts.
11:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And you've got to be ready for it.
11:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, let's talk about pack rafting a little bit.
11:19
[SPEAKER_01]: They're probably listeners that have never considered what that means, what the value of it is.
11:24
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it started when you're crossing the Brooks range, and your rafts were just too heavy.
11:29
[SPEAKER_03]: I know they were, they were too fragile.
11:31
[SPEAKER_01]: So, okay.
11:33
[SPEAKER_03]: So the very brief cliff notes version is I went to Colorado College for college over in the Colorado Springs.
11:39
[SPEAKER_03]: And they have a grant program called the Rick Kellogg Memorial Fund, really great program that essentially provides grant funding for college students to go on 14-day adventures.
11:50
[SPEAKER_03]: And one of the only requirements is you have to give a presentation back then it was a slideshow.
11:54
[SPEAKER_03]: Now most kids have never seen a slide.
11:58
[SPEAKER_03]: But that's what we did.
11:59
[SPEAKER_03]: And here again, I'm this kid grew up in Alaska to do all these different sports and I know I did what to pick.
12:04
[SPEAKER_03]: Like what
12:07
[SPEAKER_03]: And my parents introduced me to kind of the one of the founding fathers of modern pack rafting, which is his name is Roman Dile.
12:14
[SPEAKER_03]: And my dad was a friends with him and I met him in a coffee shop in Anchorage in 1997 and he said, you got to try pack rafting.
12:22
[SPEAKER_03]: And so he had been published in National Geographic for a pack raft by traverse across the Alaska range that year.
12:30
[SPEAKER_03]: And so he gave us a portion of that trip about 180 miles worth of it and we got a grant to go repeat that section.
12:39
[SPEAKER_03]: And one of the cruxes there was we needed a pack raft.
12:42
[SPEAKER_03]: The only pack rafts that existed at the time were very few handful of these boats called
12:52
[SPEAKER_03]: And then they made pack rafts in the 80s, but very few of them, and they were reasonably durable.
12:57
[SPEAKER_03]: If you looked out in the day, you'd be like, that's pretty basic.
12:59
[SPEAKER_03]: But then they were reasonably durable.
13:01
[SPEAKER_03]: They were actually made with murethane code in nylon, and they could kind of handle Alaska back-country mellow water.
13:08
[SPEAKER_03]: But we couldn't get our hands on them.
13:10
[SPEAKER_03]: They didn't.
13:10
[SPEAKER_03]: They were only fuel-askin town.
13:12
[SPEAKER_03]: So we ended up going down to either cabellas or Kmart, and we bought this thing
13:20
[SPEAKER_03]: with three and a half pounds.
13:21
[SPEAKER_03]: It was vinyl and just a pool toy.
13:25
[SPEAKER_03]: That's what we took on these backcountry rivers in Alaska.
13:28
[SPEAKER_03]: So if you hit a rock or a stick, you put a hole in this boat, guaranteed.
13:32
[SPEAKER_03]: So those days were spent in the damage we had done through the day.
13:37
[SPEAKER_03]: So there was a lot of periods where we were doing these trips.
13:39
[SPEAKER_03]: And so this goes back to the original concept of pack
13:44
[SPEAKER_03]: Walk, float, walk, float, float.
13:47
[SPEAKER_03]: But on those trips, we would actually walk more than we would float.
13:51
[SPEAKER_03]: So we'd get to a river and be like, is the walking good?
13:54
[SPEAKER_03]: If it was good, we'd continue walking because we didn't want to risk the boats.
13:59
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's flipped 180 degrees today.
14:02
[SPEAKER_03]: Where people are like, the boats are so tough and so performance oriented that people are dragging them down.
14:08
[SPEAKER_03]: The shallow is gnarly of stuff, because it's more fun to float than it is to walk.
14:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
14:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
14:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's the part that is, uh, I don't know.
14:16
[SPEAKER_01]: It's amazing to me is that we could make a boat that's light enough to throw in a backpack and durable enough to do white water.
14:26
[SPEAKER_01]: And then also have enough for him to carry your other gear that was also in the backpack.
14:31
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you can actually take advantage of all the waterways and you can do your portages without having to carry a heavy something, right?
14:39
[SPEAKER_01]: You can hike into places to raft that you wouldn't even dream of with a bigger boat.
14:44
[SPEAKER_01]: So how do you get something tough enough that's light enough and compact enough?
14:48
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the part that I don't understand.
14:50
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's all about the fabrics.
14:52
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know if this is for two of us or what, but my mom and I stumbled on the correct fabric combination the very first time.
14:59
[SPEAKER_03]: This is really funny.
14:59
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow.
15:00
[SPEAKER_03]: Before Alpaca, the only pack grass were you go all the way back to the 1850s with this, you know, rubber coated canvas and then.
15:08
[SPEAKER_03]: There were the World of War II survival rafts and that's what a guy named Dick Griffith who just recently passed away is kind of the grandfather of fact grafting.
15:16
[SPEAKER_03]: It really invented the modern sport.
15:18
[SPEAKER_03]: He was taking World War II survival rafts down into Copper Canyon and Mexico and the Grand Canyon and places like that to do adventures and he introduced Roman downhill to pack grafting in the kind of the Alaska guys.
15:30
[SPEAKER_03]: That's when, you know, kind of the Sherpa era, and then there were these several 12 boats, and then there was a little boat up in May by a Boeing engineer in Washington.
15:39
[SPEAKER_03]: There was very delicate made out of like 70 down near an island like Tent Fabric.
15:44
[SPEAKER_03]: And so that boat, the Curtis design boat was built for, you know, mountain-like took, you hike into the high gas gates, getting these mountain lakes.
15:51
[SPEAKER_03]: But we were like, we want to do a lasking rivers, and so we need a durable boat.
15:55
[SPEAKER_03]: So my mom was like, I want to make this boat.
15:57
[SPEAKER_03]: So she's the designer, because she's got this long history and outer clothing design and experience kayaking and rafting in my apnea.
16:05
[SPEAKER_03]: So we come up this design together.
16:07
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm like, I want bigger tubes.
16:08
[SPEAKER_03]: So the water doesn't splash over the edge, but she sourced the fabric.
16:12
[SPEAKER_03]: And at the time, it wasn't like we knew all these fabric suppliers.
16:16
[SPEAKER_03]: We went to like Seattle fabrics, which is just one of these DIY kind of places.
16:21
[SPEAKER_03]: And we found some military surplus, like a military contract surplus of a 200-10-in-year nylon, that year thing coding on it.
16:30
[SPEAKER_03]: And then we got some similar stuff, which was an eight-40-in-year nylon.
16:34
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's what we made the floor out of.
16:35
[SPEAKER_03]: And so some of the original boats are the first gear we made them, are that combination.
16:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
16:41
[SPEAKER_03]: And most of our paragraphs today are still a 2 10 nylon with a year thing coding and an 840 nylon with year thing coding for the floor.
16:50
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's the industry standard that most of our competitors use as well.
16:54
[SPEAKER_03]: There's some we're using some heavier weight materials now for some more durable boats as the sports evolved, but the standard is still 2 108040.
17:02
[SPEAKER_03]: And we stumbled on that.
17:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow.
17:04
[SPEAKER_01]: That's okay.
17:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, your mom had some good intuition based on experience I would think.
17:08
[SPEAKER_01]: That's impressive, though, because most people are, they're testing dozens of different things to figure out what works.
17:14
[SPEAKER_01]: But you guys just bang, you got it.
17:16
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, what's evolved over the years is not the basic recipe, the basic material, but we've changed the thread count in it through our main supplier.
17:27
[SPEAKER_03]: We've changed the thickness of the earth thing on it to add durability or take away weight.
17:32
[SPEAKER_03]: So we've finessed around there, but the basic combo is still the same.
17:36
[SPEAKER_01]: last cool.
17:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, describe your average pack rafting trip or one that you've done recently that you could just take us there.
17:43
[SPEAKER_01]: So tell us the story.
17:44
[SPEAKER_01]: What is it like?
17:45
[SPEAKER_01]: What are the advantages?
17:46
[SPEAKER_03]: So, like I say, the historical purpose is the idea of going and where you can put a boat in your backpack and then hike, float, hike, float.
17:55
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the original purpose of pack rafting.
17:57
[SPEAKER_03]: It's evolved a lot since then.
17:59
[SPEAKER_03]: I still love traditional pack draft trips and Alaska's kind of ground zero for that.
18:04
[SPEAKER_03]: That's still our largest market because you have so such big landscapes with such big dangerous rivers that if you don't have a pack graph, you can't get anywhere.
18:15
[SPEAKER_03]: You can walk but then you're going to come to River and your stuck there.
18:18
[SPEAKER_03]: And if you bring a regular raft, you're stuck on the river that you're on and you can only go where the plank and land you where's when you have a pack graph, you can go
18:27
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I love those kinds of trips.
18:30
[SPEAKER_03]: Once I've done more recently, have been in Western Alaska, just getting into rivers that don't have as much access.
18:39
[SPEAKER_03]: for fishing purposes.
18:40
[SPEAKER_03]: So there's wonderful fishing out there.
18:42
[SPEAKER_03]: We're looking at the Oscar Pencil of this year.
18:45
[SPEAKER_03]: And there, you can get dropped off at a lake and then hike into a river that doesn't have a lake system and then float that river.
18:52
[SPEAKER_03]: And the thing that I just love about those kinds of trips is most of those are rivers that we may be, I'm not going to say the first descent.
18:59
[SPEAKER_03]: I have no idea.
19:01
[SPEAKER_03]: But we might be the first person in 20 years to be on some of these rivers.
19:05
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow.
19:05
[SPEAKER_03]: that experience for me of like being in a place with no human presence is really really cool.
19:12
[SPEAKER_03]: I just love that.
19:17
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's the advantage of making your own access.
19:20
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't have to do the route that other people can get to.
19:23
[SPEAKER_01]: You can do the route that you can walk to, essentially.
19:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
19:26
[SPEAKER_01]: That's cool.
19:27
[SPEAKER_01]: And it opens up so many doors.
19:28
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
19:29
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, in Alaska and Canada, that's exponential numbers of doors.
19:33
[SPEAKER_03]: If less so in the lower 48, because there's just fewer rivers that are remote, you know, walk in, centric.
19:40
[SPEAKER_03]: But there's still quite a few.
19:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
19:42
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, in Colorado, when they started building roads, the valleys where the places to build the roads, because it's too hard to make the road up on the cliff, right?
19:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, the valley is where the river is.
19:52
[SPEAKER_01]: And so quite often, if you're kayaking or boating, you're close to a road in Colorado.
19:57
[SPEAKER_01]: That's, it's not always, but it's quite often that way.
20:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you like to see how Alaska, the waterways were the roads for so long?
20:04
[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
20:05
[SPEAKER_03]: Suddenly the blue lines on the map, those are your highways.
20:07
[SPEAKER_03]: In Colorado, the advantage you have with Pat Crafts, there's two.
20:11
[SPEAKER_03]: One is you can go more places.
20:13
[SPEAKER_03]: So, for example, on just take the Gunnison River, you've got with a kayak or a larger raft, you're stuck with two choices.
20:23
[SPEAKER_03]: You can either pay mules to go down the checker trail to run going to go up for a great run.
20:28
[SPEAKER_03]: It's very popular.
20:28
[SPEAKER_03]: Or if you're good enough kayaker, you can start at the top and run the whole black canyon, which is an hourly class 5.
20:34
[SPEAKER_03]: And with a pack raft, there's a lot of other hiking trails in the black canyon zone that are steep and rough.
20:42
[SPEAKER_03]: So they're not easy, but you can access other points in the river.
20:46
[SPEAKER_03]: And you have the ultimate portaging craft.
20:48
[SPEAKER_03]: So if you
20:52
[SPEAKER_03]: And so that suddenly opens up a lot more miles of river to a skilled, but not classified that.
20:58
[SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of funny you mentioned the gunnison because our house is two blocks from the gunnison.
21:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's the river that I started river snorkeling this summer.
21:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Because it's nice and clean up here.
21:08
[SPEAKER_01]: You can see the fish and just class two, three.
21:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Mostly class two, a couple of class three drops, but it's really fun.
21:14
[SPEAKER_03]: Rivers snorkeling is something that I'm surprised hasn't ever really like taken off.
21:19
[SPEAKER_03]: Because a few times have done, it's really cool.
21:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's crazy.
21:22
[SPEAKER_01]: And you're right.
21:23
[SPEAKER_01]: When I tell people that that's something that I do, I get a lot of strange looks.
21:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
21:28
[SPEAKER_01]: And the people that we met on the river were also giving us strange looks.
21:33
[SPEAKER_01]: They're in rafts.
21:34
[SPEAKER_01]: You know?
21:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
21:36
[SPEAKER_01]: What are you seeing down there?
21:37
[SPEAKER_01]: What?
21:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Are you guys just swimming this?
21:40
[SPEAKER_01]: You know?
21:40
[SPEAKER_03]: No, I've done it back in my biologist days.
21:43
[SPEAKER_03]: We used to do surveys with it and it was like,
21:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh man, snorkeling in Alaska, salmon stream is as cool as it gets.
21:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, yeah, man, the number of fish that you could see.
21:53
[SPEAKER_01]: I, I think we were in copper center.
21:55
[SPEAKER_01]: I saw so many salmon going up a stream there, a river.
21:59
[SPEAKER_01]: It looked like you could walk across the river without getting your feet wet.
22:02
[SPEAKER_01]: It was just unbelievable.
22:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah.
22:05
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd never seen anything like that.
22:06
[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.
22:07
[SPEAKER_03]: And then the other real advantage of pack crafting is it's a very beginner friendly way to get on water.
22:17
[SPEAKER_03]: So they're incredibly stable.
22:19
[SPEAKER_03]: They're easy maneuver with limited skills.
22:22
[SPEAKER_03]: So the learning curve is much shorter.
22:29
[SPEAKER_03]: and not everybody takes to it.
22:31
[SPEAKER_03]: Not my wife.
22:32
[SPEAKER_03]: She has a beautiful role, but she has a mental block about being upside down in a river.
22:38
[SPEAKER_03]: And so she doesn't like, she likes being in the kayak, but she doesn't like kayaking, because she's afraid of getting flipped.
22:44
[SPEAKER_03]: even though she had a great role, yet she loves pack grafting.
22:47
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's just kind of how that goes.
22:49
[SPEAKER_03]: So pack wrap is this nice, easy way to get started, easy way to carry your gear, and then people really like to do things themselves.
22:57
[SPEAKER_03]: I like rafting too, but the price point on a full set up on a raft is pretty high, and then you've got to have a trailer and you've got to get it to the thing, and then you've got to win a magical unicorn
23:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Drawing to get a good river permit.
23:10
[SPEAKER_03]: So you know, I think there's a lot of barriers to rafting that are unfortunate that don't necessarily exist in background, because you can buy a paragraph to get right in and take a swift water course, you know, have the basics for safety to get out and have a really really great time and have access to a lot of sections of river where you get out of yourself right off the bat.
23:30
[SPEAKER_01]: So, Thor, I've got a question, a legitimate question.
23:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know the answer to the wilderness series in the U.S. You're not allowed to have mechanized travel.
23:38
[SPEAKER_01]: You can't have a mountain bike.
23:39
[SPEAKER_01]: You can't, you can't do anything like that.
23:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you have a boat?
23:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Could you pack raft?
23:44
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, boats do not apply.
23:46
[SPEAKER_03]: They're not considered mechanized.
23:48
[SPEAKER_03]: So I get a boat, but you can absolutely have any kind of powercraft.
23:53
[SPEAKER_01]: So the beauty of that then is that there's so many waterways that are in wilderness areas where you could back back in and float out.
24:01
[SPEAKER_01]: It would be so fun.
24:02
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, the very most popular ones is that I know that PackRafting is matured as a sport.
24:07
[SPEAKER_03]: Some of the earliest PackRafting trips when we started selling Alpaca back in 2002, 2003, where people were taken into the ball marshal wilderness in Montana.
24:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, and the South Florida flathead there was one of the earliest ones that people were like, this is what we've always wanted to do, because it's this beautiful,
24:24
[SPEAKER_03]: beautiful crystal clear 60 mile long river that's a minimum 12 mile hike in there.
24:30
[SPEAKER_03]: And so the only people that we're doing trips on the south for pre-Alpaca were horse-packing groups and then occasionally you people would pay horse-packers to pack in like iK's for them to do a float trip.
24:44
[SPEAKER_03]: But even then the thing about that trip is you don't float to the road necessarily you still have Ports around it.
24:50
[SPEAKER_03]: So even that's hard to bring an IK in there because you're like I still have to carry it the last Couple miles out of there and with pack grafting that area has gotten more and more and more popular to the point where it's now a trade route
25:03
[SPEAKER_03]: and the Forest Service is building new management's plans directly around pack rafting in that zone because it's got in that popular.
25:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, man.
25:13
[SPEAKER_01]: So you've really seen the industry develop.
25:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you're kind of the father of the modern pack rafting industry.
25:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And you've watched it for what you just said like 24 years, 23 years, something like that.
25:25
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's been, it'll be 26 years this summer since I did the second big traverse with the several boats that led to creating a pack.
25:34
[SPEAKER_03]: So we're not sure when the anniversary date is.
25:37
[SPEAKER_03]: I finished that trip in August of 2000.
25:39
[SPEAKER_03]: My mom and I were making
25:40
[SPEAKER_03]: prototypes in our basement in Che Guevac, Alaska in October of 2000 over that winter.
25:46
[SPEAKER_03]: I took one of those prototypes to Katmai National Park for the summer of 2001 and was using it there and Roman dial was using it other prototypes in the Anchorage area that summer summer of 2001.
26:01
[SPEAKER_03]: And then I believe that we incorporated the business in January of 2002.
26:08
[SPEAKER_03]: we were trying to figure out how we're going to make these and we were selling them by the summer of 2002.
26:13
[SPEAKER_03]: So Pacco is founded somewhere between October of 2000 and June of 2002, depending on what date you want to fit.
26:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow, that's kind of fun.
26:23
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's a young industry and we're honored to have
26:26
[SPEAKER_01]: the innovator right here.
26:28
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's been 25 years and it's every innovation that we've done.
26:32
[SPEAKER_03]: I've kind of sworn that I didn't think there was much more to innovate and then we come up with a new idea.
26:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so I've heard that some of these have a sleeve inside of the tube so you can put gear inside of the tubes to have more space.
26:47
[SPEAKER_01]: How does that work?
26:48
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and this is probably a good time.
26:50
[SPEAKER_03]: I've never actually
26:53
[SPEAKER_03]: I've always wanted to in writing, but I'll just go through it kind of all the iterations of innovation that have happened over the last 25 years and really my mom is responsible for 90% of those and that's one of the unfortunate things about the industry.
27:07
[SPEAKER_03]: It's it's great to be the leader, but there's been it's been a large amount of like outhack at continuing to lead the charge and everybody else just kind of like glomming on to what.
27:15
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah.
27:16
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't want to complain about that.
27:18
[SPEAKER_03]: It's just the way it is.
27:19
[SPEAKER_03]: There's not been an industry where there's been like a bunch of players where everybody's pushing a new direction.
27:24
[SPEAKER_03]: Everybody's kind of following each other.
27:27
[SPEAKER_03]: It's kind of an us and everybody behind us.
27:29
[SPEAKER_03]: So first votes were these what we call the stubbies.
27:32
[SPEAKER_03]: They were round and short.
27:33
[SPEAKER_03]: If you went through any kind of steep hole or something, they tend to flip over backwards.
27:38
[SPEAKER_03]: They're really compact and small.
27:39
[SPEAKER_03]: They filled with water so you got wet and cold.
27:42
[SPEAKER_03]: So around 2004, my mom started making the first deck style things in the original spray decks.
27:49
[SPEAKER_03]: We're actually they stretched out like a skirt that went over the entire boat.
27:52
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
27:54
[SPEAKER_03]: So they're going to water out.
27:55
[SPEAKER_03]: Those they did a great job at that, but they were incredibly dangerous because if you flipped and swam, the whole skirt came off and now it was like trying to swim or wrap it with a tent around you're wearing them.
28:05
[SPEAKER_03]: thing right yeah it's a noise you know because it goes over the whole boat so that was like that's not gonna work somebody's gonna die doing that and then she figured out how to put a spray deck actually affixed to the boat and the way she did it then is the way we still do it today and so those first but those first decks were just they had this little inflatable chamber that went around you we call them the eventually call them the cruiser deck
28:25
[SPEAKER_03]: So they would keep water out, but they weren't like a traditional skirt like you would have of the kayak.
28:31
[SPEAKER_03]: And then we moved forward in around 2008, there were a bunch of guys in Alaska that were just trying to push the white water boundary, like ready to run class 4 and 5 in really sketchy boats, not built for it.
28:43
[SPEAKER_03]: So they came up with the idea of putting thigh straps in to give you more control over the bite, boat, and we kind of fought those for years.
28:50
[SPEAKER_03]: Around 2010, a mom came up with the white water spray deck.
28:54
[SPEAKER_03]: So this is the first deck where you not only have a deck to keep the water out, but now we use a flexible rim pole with a sleeve so you can put a spray skirt on it.
29:05
[SPEAKER_03]: So now you're wearing a
29:07
[SPEAKER_03]: just like a kayak, but it's foldable.
29:09
[SPEAKER_03]: And then the dead one is good.
29:11
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, and now suddenly you're dry and warm, and now you can run real white water the boat stays dry.
29:17
[SPEAKER_03]: improvement.
29:18
[SPEAKER_03]: And then the second huge improvement happened is she started to extend the stern out.
29:22
[SPEAKER_03]: So rather than this square back in like a raft that would flip you over backwards, extend it to stern out.
29:27
[SPEAKER_03]: Now the boat starts to track straighter.
29:29
[SPEAKER_03]: It starts to have a little bit more performance.
29:32
[SPEAKER_03]: So that added in there.
29:33
[SPEAKER_03]: There is one we call it the big butt design.
29:35
[SPEAKER_03]: And then eventually the extended stern.
29:38
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, when that happened, a guy named Force McCarthy came and said, wow, we have, there's all this space inside the tubes.
29:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Can we figure out a way to put your gear in there?
29:48
[SPEAKER_03]: Because up to this point, you put your backpack on the bow, which is really awkward and top heavy.
29:54
[SPEAKER_03]: So, which is fine for flat water, but not good in white water.
29:58
[SPEAKER_03]: So, she sees this thing called a teaser, you know, an airtight zipper, and she figures out how to put that in the stern of the boat.
30:05
[SPEAKER_03]: So forest came up with the concept and then cherry figured out the implement that.
30:10
[SPEAKER_03]: So that zipper, airtight waterproof zipper, which goes in the stern of the boat, suddenly now you can take this zipper open it and now you can put all your gear on the inside of the tubes.
30:21
[SPEAKER_03]: And that is the single most important innovation in backwrapping in terms of allowing you to do real trips, especially with white water, because now your gear goes inside.
30:32
[SPEAKER_03]: If you have to limit yourself to having a pack on the front of the boat, you can still do incredible
30:40
[SPEAKER_03]: But when you can put your gear inside, now your gear is evenly weighted, it's a lower set of gravity that boat gets more stable, it has some weight behind it so it can punch your waves better, and that really pushed forward the white water kind of level in pack graphs.
30:57
[SPEAKER_03]: And then after that,
30:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I've got to ask, can you access your gear and keep the air in the tubes?
31:05
[SPEAKER_01]: No, no, no, you unzip it all the air falls out.
31:07
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's okay.
31:08
[SPEAKER_01]: So all your stuff you're going to do your river run.
31:11
[SPEAKER_01]: You take your gear out, you're going to do it.
31:13
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a reset.
31:14
[SPEAKER_03]: Yep, exactly.
31:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
31:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, great.
31:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
31:18
[SPEAKER_03]: And then around the same time, she came up with this thing called the bow bag, which now everybody has won, but it was it would attach to the front of your boat and it was a little bag that would go up there so you could put your lunch and your water bottle on your repair kit and reach and stuff like that up there.
31:33
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, the boat start to get more streamlined and during this time, the boats are going from these little round rafts to these
31:42
[SPEAKER_03]: And then in 2014, we came out with a boat called the Alpacleus, which is our first white water boat and it had, I mean, it had wild stuff in it.
31:52
[SPEAKER_03]: It looks very plain and simple today kind of how like a 1990s mountain bike looks like to a modern one.
31:58
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
31:58
[SPEAKER_03]: But you know, you have to go through those iterations.
32:01
[SPEAKER_03]: And it was a
32:01
[SPEAKER_03]: poor seller it was very expensive to make the way the back band was designed was it was like the least profitable but we've ever had but if we don't make that vote none of what happens today happens and for that project that project created the whitewater deck it created the zipper the tease that cargo fly that allows your gear storage and then the other things she created and that she created four point thigh straps are rather than just
32:25
[SPEAKER_03]: like a ducky thigh strap and a ducky thigh strap just goes from your hip to your ankle and they're nice but when you bend your knee on the inside you have a ton of flex before the boat engages so it gives you control but it doesn't really do a lot so she came up with these really elaborate four point thigh straps that wrapped that a fabric cup that wrapped around your knee and a bar that held it to the top of the boat and they're really uncomfortable and really hard to get fit right but if you got them fit right they gave you a lot of control over the boat and so
32:55
[SPEAKER_03]: Elite level powders are something able to roll their pack craft nice like a guy style and two years after that She figured out how to take that four point concept and make it out of just a very simple piece of fabric and webbing So the weight went way down the complexity went that way down and they started to fit Really really well, and we have a pattern on those thigh straps and There's still there's nothing else like them.
33:21
[SPEAKER_03]: They work so well
33:23
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's really what drove the white water performance way up.
33:26
[SPEAKER_03]: Suddenly people are like, I can run class four in this stuff.
33:29
[SPEAKER_03]: And then over the next 10 years, we've really pushed a ton of the white water with more and more radical shaping tighter curves, a lot of manufacturing improvements to get higher and higher performance votes.
33:41
[SPEAKER_03]: So now the Valtteri, which is kind of the top level, people are running, you know,
33:52
[SPEAKER_03]: and then we have a boat called the mage which is more of the everyday white water boat that's selling super well because it's just straight up a fun boat to go on any kind of white water trip.
34:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so how light is light and how tough is tough?
34:09
[SPEAKER_03]: So going back to the original, the weight is slowly ramped up over the earth.
34:14
[SPEAKER_03]: Very similar to bikes.
34:15
[SPEAKER_03]: 20 years ago, your lightweight XC bike was like 1920 pounds.
34:20
[SPEAKER_03]: People thought any bike over 25 pounds is heavy.
34:22
[SPEAKER_03]: Today your modern kind of heavy duty trail bikes around 32 pounds.
34:26
[SPEAKER_03]: But the performance has gone up so much that nobody worries about that.
34:29
[SPEAKER_03]: We're the same thing.
34:31
[SPEAKER_03]: Our boats were three to five pounds in the early years.
34:35
[SPEAKER_03]: Whoa.
34:36
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
34:36
[SPEAKER_03]: But they were, you know, that's back to their again flipped over.
34:39
[SPEAKER_03]: Again flipped, getting wet.
34:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
34:41
[SPEAKER_03]: Our modern ones are really in the eight to 10 pound range through the high performance boats.
34:47
[SPEAKER_03]: So they've doubled in weight, but the performance in comfort has gone up so much that nobody worries about that.
34:52
[SPEAKER_03]: and we do sell a few models that are back to the original kind of idea that are more in the fort of seven pound range for if you really want to be old school pack after and go on a multi-hunter mile traversing Alaska where you're putting a lot of time in the backpack you take one of those.
35:09
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, on my last, I guess it wasn't my last, well, maybe it was.
35:13
[SPEAKER_01]: My last backpacking trip.
35:14
[SPEAKER_01]: We, we backpacked way into the wilderness and it's getting cold, you know, and, and it's evening, and we have a little fire going, and my son reaches in his backpack and pulls out a gallon of apple cider.
35:28
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, we just thought he was a nut for carrying that much weight, but actually, well, you're the weights that you're citing are very comparable to that kind of an idea.
35:37
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, that's not that much weight to add to a pack.
35:40
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're based way down your pack is 20 pounds, which is not that terrible or 25 pounds, it's not hard to do that.
35:46
[SPEAKER_01]: You had a one of your apps to it.
35:47
[SPEAKER_01]: You still have a light pack.
35:49
[SPEAKER_03]: You still have a light pack.
35:50
[SPEAKER_03]: The real weight impact drafting is how much of the extra gear you're being.
35:54
[SPEAKER_03]: There's been a big push towards safety impact crafting, which is great to see.
35:59
[SPEAKER_03]: That's good.
36:00
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, people have died pack crafting, but in general, the injury and death rate is very low.
36:06
[SPEAKER_03]: because a lot of people are getting adequate instruction, taking adequate precautions, and carrying the right safety equipment.
36:14
[SPEAKER_03]: I laugh because the trips that led to the founding of Alpaca, if we didn't bring anything, I didn't bring a PFD, I didn't bring a helmet, I didn't bring a dry suit, I didn't bring anything, and we were 22 year old tough guys.
36:25
[SPEAKER_03]: I was going to muscle through.
36:26
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh yeah, so the boat would fill with water like a bathtub.
36:30
[SPEAKER_03]: be paddling in this bathtub of ice water and our rule of thumb we had five of us is we would paddle until somebody started slurring their speech and that was like oh somebody in the group has hypothermia to a point where they're not able to physically control themselves and so we would then pile out of the boats and usually by that point at least another person if not three of the five of us
36:57
[SPEAKER_03]: and hard to do fine motor skills.
36:59
[SPEAKER_03]: But the other time you figure out how to make a fire, make a big fire on the beach, strip naked, stand next to fire, warm up.
37:05
[SPEAKER_03]: It warm up for two hours and get back at the boat.
37:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, you know, Thor, that sounds miserable, but also hilariously fun.
37:14
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, yeah, it was, you know, it's just like, and now it's like so luxurious.
37:19
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like, oh, no, I've got this ultra light cocatat dry suit and my, my lightweight astral comfortable PFD and I've got poggies and I'm sitting in my warm boat with my skirt and I've got a thermos of cough.
37:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And my gear is high and dry in the tubes and it's in the way all that stuff.
37:39
[SPEAKER_03]: So you can today, it's a little lot less stuff for voting.
37:43
[SPEAKER_01]: That's fun.
37:43
[SPEAKER_01]: It just opens up so many doors.
37:45
[SPEAKER_01]: I did interview someone about bike, pack or acting.
37:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and they were combining mountain biking, but the idea was that somehow they were strapping their bike to the boat and doing the river to connect trails and rivers and they were able to go from trail to trail to trail and river to river to river this way and do some epic trips.
38:04
[SPEAKER_01]: How do you make that work?
38:05
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so that's the terrain of Steve Fassbinder.
38:08
[SPEAKER_03]: He's one of the original bike packers.
38:11
[SPEAKER_03]: Now what's funny is Roman who introduced me to pack rafting the trip they had done in 1996 was a bike rafting trip they wrote about bikes client titanium.
38:22
[SPEAKER_03]: No, Merlin, titanium mountain bikes across the Alaska range, you know, with what they thought were fat tires at the time of the price, two point ones, you know, and just hardcore stuff, and so they would strap the bike to the front of the boat.
38:33
[SPEAKER_03]: So when we started bike rafting was already a thing because people had seen it was in the National Geographic and stuff like that.
38:40
[SPEAKER_03]: So bike rafting is kind of one of the earliest multi sports for pack rafting and it remains popular because you can do so many cool things.
38:48
[SPEAKER_03]: That bikes have really made that a thing because now you can do adventure biking especially in Alaska.
38:55
[SPEAKER_03]: High on my list I don't know if I'll ever get it down to my life but there's a trip called the Lascoast and it's from Yacatat to Gustave
39:07
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the outer coast facing the Gulf of Alaska and there.
39:10
[SPEAKER_03]: There's amazing beach riding all along there.
39:12
[SPEAKER_03]: There's almost no habitation.
39:14
[SPEAKER_03]: You got to go by glaciers and cross big, big open stretches of water.
39:18
[SPEAKER_03]: So it spat bikes and pack graphs.
39:21
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it was first done in the early 2000s.
39:23
[SPEAKER_03]: Today it has never become a trade route because it is a hard trip.
39:27
[SPEAKER_03]: There's those kind of trips out there.
39:29
[SPEAKER_03]: There's really cool desert pack graph bike graph trips because there's so many old roads and routes through the Colorado Plateau and the sandstone desert as long as you stay out on the national parks because you can have a bike there.
39:44
[SPEAKER_03]: to get in to the Colorado, to get into the green, to get into some of the smaller rivers, a lot of bike backing trips there.
39:51
[SPEAKER_03]: I see people doing bike raft trips on more gravel like trips where they're riding on roads and then connecting them with rivers and stuff like that.
40:00
[SPEAKER_03]: We have a pack raft called the care of, but most of our pack rafts, you can still strap a bike to the front.
40:05
[SPEAKER_03]: The hard thing is if the boat fits you for paddling size, it's hard with a bike because now
40:13
[SPEAKER_03]: a lot of people for specific or bike rafting will get one of our longer boats so the bike sits further out in front.
40:21
[SPEAKER_01]: So do you take the tires off, strap it all together so it's more compact and just throw it on top?
40:26
[SPEAKER_03]: Yep, usually you take both wheels off the frame straps and the handlebars rotate so they're 90 degrees and you take a ski strap and you strap the fork down which locks the handlebars.
40:38
[SPEAKER_03]: You scrap the top tube down with two straps and then you strap the chains they down with the four strap and so now the bike's locked down pretty good and then you stack the two wheels on top of the whole setup in the middle and strap them to the frame itself.
40:53
[SPEAKER_01]: So it sounds like a lot, but the reality is that's less in 10 minutes.
40:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Less than 10 minutes.
40:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you just re-crease shape your bike so that it fits conveniently.
41:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow.
41:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you keep up with Roman?
41:05
[SPEAKER_01]: I we did have him on the podcast years and years ago.
41:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, this is a funny story.
41:11
[SPEAKER_03]: He introduced me to pack rafting.
41:13
[SPEAKER_03]: I've known him for 30 years now.
41:16
[SPEAKER_03]: And what's funny is I've known him all this time.
41:20
[SPEAKER_03]: I've spent exactly one day in the field with him.
41:23
[SPEAKER_03]: We went and paddled six mile creek, which is a whitewater run outside of Anchorage like six years ago.
41:28
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's it.
41:29
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow.
41:29
[SPEAKER_03]: That's all I've ever done with Rome in the field.
41:31
[SPEAKER_03]: But every time I go to Alaska, now I stay in his spare bedroom and we tell stories early in the morning to late night.
41:40
[SPEAKER_03]: And so we're super close friends.
41:43
[SPEAKER_03]: But
41:44
[SPEAKER_03]: We've never done anything in the backcountry together.
41:46
[SPEAKER_03]: It's just quite funny.
41:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that is.
41:48
[SPEAKER_01]: He's done some epic trips.
41:50
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm sure you have done some epic trips as well.
41:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Tell us about an epic trip.
41:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Something that was big.
41:56
[SPEAKER_03]: So one of the most fun ones that happened was tell the story.
42:02
[SPEAKER_03]: So this is 2018.
42:05
[SPEAKER_03]: And my wife and I are running the company doing whatever we're traveling around.
42:10
[SPEAKER_03]: We don't have kids yet.
42:12
[SPEAKER_03]: We have a guy that keeps contacting us as a marketing person.
42:16
[SPEAKER_03]: He's like, I love this pack rafting thing.
42:18
[SPEAKER_03]: He's an altar runner.
42:19
[SPEAKER_03]: We got to go do this trip out in Western Alaska, Bethel.
42:24
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm like, kind of put him off, put him off, put him off, put him off.
42:27
[SPEAKER_03]: In 2017, I went out and did a trip with one of my best friends out there, and it was a really, really cool trip.
42:35
[SPEAKER_03]: We did a river that I had never been on, fishing with fantastic scenery was incredible, and I was like, wow, this is really cool.
42:42
[SPEAKER_03]: I started looking at other rivers around there, not paying attention, so this guy sends me this route.
42:47
[SPEAKER_03]: And he's like, well, just look at the route and I look at it and I'm just like, well, this is a really cool line.
42:52
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, that's one of my favorite things is like, there's just take old school topo maps now.
42:56
[SPEAKER_03]: You do on the computer and you just start drawing the line connecting riverways.
43:01
[SPEAKER_03]: And I love this.
43:03
[SPEAKER_03]: This connects the key cerolic river to the Keith luck river to the connect up river to the erolic river.
43:09
[SPEAKER_03]: which is five big rivers and they kind of spread out in a fan in Western Alaska.
43:14
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm like, I don't know, okay, maybe I'll think about doing this.
43:18
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't really think long and hard about just doing a trip to the random person.
43:22
[SPEAKER_03]: I've kind of met over the internet.
43:23
[SPEAKER_03]: That can go.
43:24
[SPEAKER_03]: That's not my thing.
43:26
[SPEAKER_03]: So he's like, yeah, we got to do it.
43:28
[SPEAKER_03]: So he's working marketing with a flight service up there and he sets up the trip.
43:33
[SPEAKER_03]: So we're supposed to show up
43:36
[SPEAKER_03]: where we're going to do the trip with him, and these convince a photographer and a videographer from Salt Lake to come along, and then it's going to be me and my wife, so that's five, and the guy that owns the flight service is supposed to come along.
43:50
[SPEAKER_03]: And my wife is just like, who is this person?
43:52
[SPEAKER_03]: Why are we doing this?
43:53
[SPEAKER_03]: This is a, and I'm like, I'm like, don't worry about it, because all that matters is we're going on the trip.
43:58
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't care who they are.
43:59
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm, I'm fine.
44:00
[SPEAKER_03]: We're going to have a great time.
44:01
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah.
44:02
[SPEAKER_03]: We're sitting in at the gate to fly from Anchorage to Bethel, and I'm like, where is this guy?
44:09
[SPEAKER_03]: What has happened to him?
44:10
[SPEAKER_03]: And I get a call.
44:11
[SPEAKER_03]: I can't make it.
44:12
[SPEAKER_03]: What?
44:14
[SPEAKER_03]: My wife was just like, ah, and I'm like, don't worry about it.
44:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Like I said, it's fine.
44:18
[SPEAKER_03]: We don't need him for the trip.
44:20
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, it's a bummer that he can't make it.
44:22
[SPEAKER_03]: And he had a good, I feel really bad for him.
44:24
[SPEAKER_03]: He had a good reason he couldn't make it.
44:25
[SPEAKER_03]: So we meet these two kids from Salt Lake who've never been to Alaska, never been back rafting.
44:30
[SPEAKER_03]: And then we show up in Bethel, which is a, you know, small village in Western Alaska, you picked up a flight service and the guy who owns the services, like, he isn't really know, I've never met him before.
44:41
[SPEAKER_03]: So he doesn't know my background or my background or our experience in Alaska.
44:46
[SPEAKER_03]: So he's kind of like, I can't just go draw these people in the wilderness.
44:49
[SPEAKER_03]: They're going to die.
44:50
[SPEAKER_03]: So he's like, I got to send you with a guide, you know, and because he runs fishing and hunting trips.
44:55
[SPEAKER_03]: So he sends us with this kid's friend.
44:57
[SPEAKER_03]: North Carolina who is his first summer up there and he's going to be our guide you're guiding him So we jump on the trip and Wade the owner of the flight services like I've never you know Nobody's ever completed this one that I know off so we got on get on there and it is the coolest trip But the weather in the Western Alaska be really bad we get destroyed by weather.
45:19
[SPEAKER_03]: We barely get out
45:20
[SPEAKER_03]: And we're basically we're floating 10 miles, I think it's a 190 mile trip floating 10 miles walking 20 floating 10 walking 20 floating 40 walking 20 floating 30 something like and we start going and we make it two days in and the guide is like my because he brought giant heavy
45:40
[SPEAKER_03]: leather boots.
45:42
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
45:42
[SPEAKER_03]: And we're like, you know, the answer to adventure travel in Alaska is 10 shoes because it's tundra.
45:47
[SPEAKER_03]: You don't need the cushion.
45:48
[SPEAKER_03]: You just need something that's light when it's wet.
45:51
[SPEAKER_03]: His knee gets sore.
45:52
[SPEAKER_03]: So we drop him off at the first river we get to and say you can go back to town from here.
45:58
[SPEAKER_03]: So he has up on a solo mission in the pack raster of the Oh, well, and we're going to continue on and at this point, he realizes that we know what we're doing way better than he knows what he's doing.
46:09
[SPEAKER_03]: And so he tells Wade, hey, these guys are going to be fine.
46:11
[SPEAKER_03]: So we're, but he has one of the enriches and so we're trying to stay in contact with the way every day with the other reaches.
46:17
[SPEAKER_03]: And we keep going, well, the weather's been so bad they haven't been able to fly for like a week.
46:22
[SPEAKER_03]: And we eventually make it to the connect talk river, which is very popular fishing river and
46:28
[SPEAKER_03]: And finally, the weather clears a little bit and some planes get in to drop, you know, people offloading with rafts to fishing trips.
46:34
[SPEAKER_03]: And we run into one of these groups.
46:35
[SPEAKER_03]: And they are just like, where did you guys come from?
46:39
[SPEAKER_03]: Because here we are, we're in boats.
46:42
[SPEAKER_03]: And they know, nobody's been in a plane in a week.
46:44
[SPEAKER_03]: It's just been fogged at the deck.
46:45
[SPEAKER_03]: We're like, oh, we started up on the North fork of the Kieserol.
46:49
[SPEAKER_03]: And the guides are like the fishing guides are like,
46:51
[SPEAKER_03]: looking at us like that's like a hundred miles that way over those mountains like how did you get it's couldn't believe right was such a cool trip
46:59
[SPEAKER_03]: The porthogs during the video are for they were troopers because they survived the entire trip, but they were in over their head in terms of just learned a lot.
47:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
47:08
[SPEAKER_03]: And they got sometimes you can have a trip in Alaska and just have a totally amazing experience last summer when up there.
47:13
[SPEAKER_03]: And it was 75 degrees north of the arch circle for the entire week.
47:17
[SPEAKER_03]: We were in T-shirts every day.
47:19
[SPEAKER_03]: And it was relaxing and easy.
47:21
[SPEAKER_03]: And in this trip it was 20 not winds blowing rain all day every day and you were just soaked to the bone and
47:27
[SPEAKER_03]: kind of, and so these poor kids, but they did it.
47:31
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm proud of them, but it was a cool trip.
47:34
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's the kind of thing that's possible if this approach to adventure is really cool.
47:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and there was a section on that trip.
47:41
[SPEAKER_03]: Like I want to say that out of the five different rivers we get on that trip, where you need sections of them, four of them are well-known, popular, you know, flight services, flight people into do float trips and fishing trips on those rivers.
47:54
[SPEAKER_03]: But one of them, we were probably the first people out of Florida because we had to walk in and we ended up in the headwaters and exploded this class two canyon
48:03
[SPEAKER_03]: that was so beautiful, so intimate, just this little gorge that you wouldn't even know it existed.
48:10
[SPEAKER_03]: And it was one of the prettiest sections I've ever done in any river anywhere.
48:14
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's the discovery that I like is sort of you get to see new things that nobody's ever seen.
48:19
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow.
48:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, Thor, we burned up our time already.
48:22
[SPEAKER_01]: But I love that story.
48:23
[SPEAKER_01]: I love the idea of pack rafting.
48:26
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's amazing.
48:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Matter of fact, I'm actually in the market for something.
48:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe I should talk to you about what I should get, but thank you very much for your time today.
48:34
[SPEAKER_01]: I appreciate it.
48:36
[SPEAKER_01]: I love the whole concept, such a cool way to experience nature.
48:41
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, this was such a fun conversation.
48:43
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know if you really enjoyed it.
48:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, absolutely.
48:45
[SPEAKER_01]: For all the listeners out there, Thor, Tini, the company is Alpaca, Raffs, or Raffting?
48:52
[SPEAKER_01]: How do you know?
48:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Alpaca Raff?
48:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Alpaca Raffed, and so your web address is AlpacaRaff.com, is that right?
48:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
49:00
[SPEAKER_01]: except Elpaca has an extra letter in it.
49:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah.
49:03
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a pun.
49:04
[SPEAKER_03]: This is a little trivia.
49:05
[SPEAKER_03]: The original name was AL-PACK-A raft.
49:12
[SPEAKER_03]: So we were trying to be more delivered about the fun and then it just turned into Elpaca.
49:16
[SPEAKER_01]: So you have to put a K.
49:17
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't help back at a fine duplet.
49:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Very cool.
49:21
[SPEAKER_01]: What are the other ways that people can learn more?
49:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Take class.
49:24
[SPEAKER_03]: So we're talking about Steve Fassbinder.
49:25
[SPEAKER_03]: They have a guide service called Four Corner Skides, where they do Pack Refing Trips all over the West and down in the Mexico.
49:32
[SPEAKER_03]: Really cool stuff like that.
49:33
[SPEAKER_03]: are social medias.
49:35
[SPEAKER_03]: I hope it's fairly inspirational.
49:37
[SPEAKER_03]: We don't try not to share location, but you know, you can start to see what people can do with pack graphs.
49:42
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's cool.
49:43
[SPEAKER_03]: And then the American PackRafting Association, which is a smaller organization, but they put on get together, and annual meetup, and they have instructional stuff, and a lot of ways to learn.
49:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, everybody, you heard it here from the OGMself.
49:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you again, Thor, and for everyone out there.
50:02
[SPEAKER_01]: However, you find your fun and the great outdoors, make sure that you do get out there and have some fun.
50:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks so much.