Latest / Adventure Sports Podcast / Ep. 1087: 10,000 Miles of Adventures in Alaska - Luc Mehl Revisited

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Ep. 1087: 10,000 Miles of Adventures in Alaska - Luc Mehl Revisited · Adventure Sports Podcast

0:08
[SPEAKER_04]: And I always knew I was going to come home.
0:09
[SPEAKER_04]: That was a big priority.
0:10
[SPEAKER_04]: Like, if I started dating a girl, it was kind of like, could she live in Alaska?
0:15
[SPEAKER_04]: Like, that was one of my... Yeah, and I was bad in a way that really, you know, limited my social, my romantic opportunities.
0:27
[SPEAKER_04]: But that's how big of a role Alaska played for me from the get-go.
0:33
[SPEAKER_00]: episode one thousand eighty seven loop mill on backpacking pack rafting skiing biking and ice skating ten thousand miles around Alaska you're listening to the adventure sports podcast we talk with adventurers from around the globe to bring you the inspiration and motivation you need to get started in the outdoors or to keep you moving if you're already there now here's your host Kurt Lindville
1:00
[SPEAKER_01]: High friends and happy independent state, Fourth of July here, state side.
1:06
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a revisited episode, but I love the sound of it.
1:09
[SPEAKER_01]: I love the idea of exploring vast wildernesses in a variety of ways, and Luke Mel did that one in spades.
1:17
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to take up the time.
1:19
[SPEAKER_01]: This is going to be a fun episode, so let me hand this over to Mason Gravity.
1:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Enjoy.
1:33
[SPEAKER_02]: Let me Alaska is always an amazing topic.
1:36
[SPEAKER_02]: That's like, you know, it's like the promised land to so many of us in the adventure world.
1:42
[SPEAKER_02]: And I don't know if anyone has seen more of it than Luke Mel here.
1:46
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm excited to get into these stories, Luke.
1:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome to the show.
1:50
[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you.
1:50
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I'm just like to be here.
1:51
[SPEAKER_04]: I've noticed on some of the other podcasts that you have a love for Alaska and so
1:58
[SPEAKER_04]: I appreciate that.
1:59
[SPEAKER_04]: Alaska's pretty amazing.
2:01
[SPEAKER_04]: Man, I got to say there are a bunch of people that have seen way more of the Alaska than I have.
2:04
[SPEAKER_04]: So disclaimer right away.
2:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I usually ask where you're coming from, but obviously you're there right now.
2:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Where specifically in Alaska do you call home?
2:16
[SPEAKER_04]: I live in Anchorage.
2:17
[SPEAKER_04]: I grew up in a village called McGrath.
2:19
[SPEAKER_04]: That's on the Costco Quim River.
2:21
[SPEAKER_04]: And I didn't have any say and grown up.
2:24
[SPEAKER_04]: There you know, that's where my folks moved my mom and my stepdad.
2:28
[SPEAKER_04]: So I didn't know any better.
2:29
[SPEAKER_04]: That was just normal.
2:31
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, have you seen a lot of change over over the years?
2:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, you know, travel is easier than it used to be.
2:37
[SPEAKER_02]: The Alaska Highway is more or less paved.
2:39
[SPEAKER_02]: There's, you know, there's ways of getting to Alaska a little bit easier.
2:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Have you seen a lot of change over the years or it has it kind of remain the same?
2:48
[SPEAKER_04]: No, I definitely seen changes.
2:50
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, the villages are all shrinking and I see that when I travel through and then
2:56
[SPEAKER_04]: Anchorage is growing into a real big city with big city problems, you know, the city's struggling to figure out how to manage the homeless population.
3:04
[SPEAKER_04]: And Alaska is a hard place to be homeless.
3:07
[SPEAKER_04]: I just can't even imagine.
3:09
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
3:10
[SPEAKER_04]: No, you can't imagine there's, you know, tent shelters along the green belts and just thinking about how hard it would be for these guys to go through the winter.
3:18
[SPEAKER_04]: So tons of changes here.
3:20
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
3:21
[SPEAKER_04]: And it's funny, I'll call you out a little bit like,
3:24
[SPEAKER_04]: When you bring up the roads changing, well, in the villages like where I grew up in the grass, there's no road to the village.
3:31
[SPEAKER_04]: You have to fly in.
3:32
[SPEAKER_04]: So just to give you a sense of how different that experience is and what probably most of your listeners, what most of their childhoods are like, it's just a different game grown up in the middle of the woods like that.
3:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, tell us that is that is remarkable.
3:49
[SPEAKER_02]: And now I grew up in the rural south, but you know, there's there's still a town and there's still plenty of roads and still, you know, big cities pretty close by no matter how far away you get.
4:01
[SPEAKER_02]: What in the world is it like to go grow up somewhere like that?
4:04
[SPEAKER_02]: And also what kind of things were you doing?
4:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Is it that stereotypical Alaskan survival kind of that we see on TV or was it, you know, more or less tame than that?
4:17
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, certainly less tame than survival.
4:20
[SPEAKER_04]: I think that the term we'd use here would be subsistence.
4:25
[SPEAKER_04]: And even though I was part of a white family there in the village, we were living often loose meat.
4:31
[SPEAKER_04]: That's every meal was like moose and a frozen vegetable and either potatoes or rice.
4:37
[SPEAKER_04]: My entire childhood was that diet.
4:42
[SPEAKER_04]: And yes, it was small town, population by a hundred
4:47
[SPEAKER_04]: I think now it's down to three hundred.
4:50
[SPEAKER_04]: One road, like a gravel road, and when I was there as kid in the eighties, people were driving three wheelers, and that was before three wheelers were deemed unsafe, and then people got four wheelers, and now there have been enough cars.
5:04
[SPEAKER_04]: Once a car gets to my graph, and that means flown in or barged in, even if it breaks down, and needs a bunch of repair, like it's somebody does that work.
5:13
[SPEAKER_04]: And so most people, I think at this point, are driving,
5:16
[SPEAKER_04]: cars and trucks and they're all beaters.
5:18
[SPEAKER_04]: They're like, gosh, our family vehicles there.
5:20
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, one of them starts with a screwdriver and one of them you basically have to jump like it's the super resourceful, right?
5:27
[SPEAKER_04]: I really like that aspect of the village life is that you're you need to be able to problem solve and and I think a bunch of that problem solving really seeing that as as as kind of the role model from especially my stepdad.
5:44
[SPEAKER_04]: put me in a good position to then start playing more outside and then it's like, well, of course, stuff breaks.
5:49
[SPEAKER_04]: Of course, things go wrong.
5:50
[SPEAKER_04]: And of course, there's a blizzard that blows through like that you're aware of all that.
5:55
[SPEAKER_04]: I think growing up in a nice lady village like on the grass.
5:59
[SPEAKER_02]: How does the family end up there?
6:01
[SPEAKER_02]: Because I'm looking at it on the map and you're in researching.
6:04
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just, it has so out there.
6:06
[SPEAKER_02]: How do you end up in that area in the first place?
6:09
[SPEAKER_04]: We ended up there because my stepdad took a job with a school district initially.
6:16
[SPEAKER_04]: I did a lot of area school district, like an administrative role.
6:19
[SPEAKER_04]: And then he met my mom in Montana, that's where I was born, and we moved up when I was four.
6:27
[SPEAKER_04]: And then he worked with the university system as a cooperative extension service.
6:32
[SPEAKER_04]: It's kind of like an academic resource for these communities.
6:36
[SPEAKER_04]: So that's why we were there and actually I wish
6:39
[SPEAKER_04]: We had time to tell a little bit about my stepdad story.
6:42
[SPEAKER_04]: He first came up to Alaska with a rodeo, straight out of high school.
6:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh my gosh, man.
6:48
[SPEAKER_04]: So he like fell in love, you know, as a nineteen year old bear back, whatever, Bronco guy and fell in love with Alaska.
6:56
[SPEAKER_04]: And then my back to Montana to do his education work and and moved up to Alaska quite a bit later.
7:02
[SPEAKER_04]: But a lot of people come up for a seasonal job.
7:07
[SPEAKER_04]: and then just fall in love with it and stay.
7:10
[SPEAKER_04]: I like those stories.
7:12
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, one of the first things you notice that when you look at the graph from above is its proximity to the Cascog Quim River, if that's how you pronounce it, how much is that river involved in your life or how big a part of everything is that waterway?
7:31
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, that's right.
7:32
[SPEAKER_04]: Everything is the cuscoquim river.
7:35
[SPEAKER_04]: And traditionally that means that the indigenous communities and ape communities had fish camps up and down the rivers.
7:43
[SPEAKER_04]: And I think McGrath as a town site was there because that's as far up they could get a barge.
7:50
[SPEAKER_04]: And there is some mining up some of the tributary rivers that flow in near McGrath.
7:55
[SPEAKER_04]: And so they were all of the transport was on the rivers because there are no roads, right?
8:01
[SPEAKER_04]: and the village was there early and I guess in aviation days, but yeah, primarily in the summer, people are on riverboats and then they've been to people are on snow machines, taking the river and then also taking overland crossings because the terrain's really flat out there.
8:17
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's so striking is how flat it is.
8:20
[SPEAKER_02]: You're not, you know, I mean, you are a long ways, but by a last container, you're not that far from, you know, the mountain range that has Denali, you feel like it would be maybe, you know, more mountains in the area, but, you know, what a lot of people don't realize, there's a lot of flat area throughout Alaska.
8:36
[SPEAKER_02]: T's been, I don't mean to harp on this so much.
8:38
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just so dang interesting.
8:40
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know.
8:40
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm sure you're used to it.
8:41
[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, I love talking about it because it's an amazing, I mean,
8:47
[SPEAKER_04]: Alaska has these these these tracks of continuous wildlands right like that's what makes it so unique that that whether you've identified that as as part of your appreciation for Alaska or not like that's how I think of it and and McGrath me and on a river in the middle of a huge flat valley like I didn't know mountains existed from
9:10
[SPEAKER_04]: from the graph.
9:11
[SPEAKER_04]: And honestly, I didn't know rocks existed as a little kid.
9:14
[SPEAKER_04]: I remember the discovery that there was rock under soil because, you know, what we see on the river banks and everything that's just silt gravel and sand.
9:24
[SPEAKER_04]: So it took leaving the graph to kind of understand and get into mountain sports.
9:29
[SPEAKER_04]: And with my dad being in Montana, the whole time I was going down in Montana.
9:34
[SPEAKER_04]: So I saw the rocky use.
9:35
[SPEAKER_04]: I did camping and campgrounds with my dad.
9:39
[SPEAKER_04]: That was totally different than the sort of outdoor recreation experience in the graph.
9:44
[SPEAKER_04]: So I got to see both, both ends of it.
9:47
[SPEAKER_02]: It's unreal in you mentioned leaving the graph and leaving the graph you did you in fact have accumulated now over ten thousand miles of travel over Alaska by by your own power ski foot bike pack raft all over Alaska even ice gates you mentioned that when did you start getting out there and exploring what was the the what what initiated that I guess and what age
10:16
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, it wasn't the childhood in the graph.
10:20
[SPEAKER_04]: During those years, going outside, usually meant going up river to our cabin.
10:27
[SPEAKER_04]: But that's like, it was a pretty cold experience.
10:30
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, you're on a snow machine for an hour.
10:32
[SPEAKER_04]: They would literally use a bungee strap to strap me onto my mom around the backs.
10:38
[SPEAKER_04]: I wouldn't fall off the snow machine when we're going on these bumpy trails.
10:43
[SPEAKER_04]: And then you get to a cabin that's like,
10:45
[SPEAKER_04]: twenty below and it takes hours to get it up to temperature.
10:47
[SPEAKER_04]: You're just blazing through wood and do like my parents keep their cabin at like eighty five degrees.
10:53
[SPEAKER_04]: It's pretty funny just because you're using wood as a heat source.
10:57
[SPEAKER_04]: And so so that wasn't I think for Francis for my stepdad that was fun.
11:05
[SPEAKER_04]: But culturally, you know, when people are going outside, they're they're doing it to bring something home and maybe that's firewood or maybe that's
11:14
[SPEAKER_04]: helps if they're trapping fish, you know, hunting.
11:18
[SPEAKER_04]: So it wasn't, there wasn't any culture of recreation just for the fun of it.
11:25
[SPEAKER_04]: With the exception of one guy, there's a German guy that they would go biking and go skiing just for fun.
11:29
[SPEAKER_04]: And that was, that was weird, right?
11:31
[SPEAKER_04]: He was like Peter was the German guy that goes biking for fun.
11:36
[SPEAKER_04]: So
11:37
[SPEAKER_04]: I didn't see your mountain sport for fun until I moved into Anchorage for high school.
11:44
[SPEAKER_04]: And I met friends that were snowboarding and rock climbing and started going out with them.
11:49
[SPEAKER_04]: And then also when I was doing these camping trips with my dad in Montana, it's like, okay, so you don't, this doesn't have to be worked and it doesn't have to be freezing cold.
11:57
[SPEAKER_04]: And I loved it.
11:57
[SPEAKER_04]: I loved the climbing I didn't high school and I studied geology in college and grad school.
12:03
[SPEAKER_04]: It's another way to get outside and to keep me in the mountains.
12:07
[SPEAKER_04]: But I didn't get, I didn't dive deep into the miles that you're talking about, the ten thousand miles until I came back to Alaska after finishing some graduate programs.
12:18
[SPEAKER_04]: So that was around two thousand and eight.
12:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Was there as you went out to the world got your education?
12:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Was there this realization of like, holy cow, the place I left was an amazing playground.
12:34
[SPEAKER_02]: I know for me, you know, you don't think much about home until you're gone and see the world in a new way.
12:40
[SPEAKER_02]: And then every time I feel like I go back home now, it's like, oh, I never noticed this before.
12:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Let me go explore that and it's all these things I'm now interested in that I just didn't know about then.
12:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Did you experience that as well?
12:53
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, I didn't.
12:54
[SPEAKER_04]: I always knew that what Alaska had was really special and I always missed it.
13:01
[SPEAKER_04]: I came home, you know, every summer break, as many winter breaks as I could.
13:06
[SPEAKER_04]: I, of course, it didn't help, you know, that my high school friends classmates would send updates, you know, about whatever they're skiing or all the cool stuff they're doing outside while I'm living in Minnesota for college and
13:19
[SPEAKER_04]: California and Massachusetts, these stakes that had less less operative tunidies to get into the mountains.
13:26
[SPEAKER_04]: And I always knew I was going to come home.
13:28
[SPEAKER_04]: That was a big priority.
13:29
[SPEAKER_04]: Like if I started dating a girl, it was kind of like, could she live in Alaska?
13:34
[SPEAKER_04]: Like that was one of my, yeah.
13:38
[SPEAKER_04]: And that was bad in a way that really, you know, limited my social, my romantic opportunities.
13:46
[SPEAKER_04]: But that's how
13:47
[SPEAKER_04]: big of a role Alaska played for me from the get go.
13:51
[SPEAKER_02]: That's pretty cool to hear.
13:52
[SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, that's definitely going to limit your options.
13:54
[SPEAKER_02]: There's there's a lot of people out there that could not put up with the extremes there, but you're built for you.
14:03
[SPEAKER_02]: That's really cool to know that you've always known that it was something special.
14:07
[SPEAKER_02]: So what did it look like for you to start really diving into your home state?
14:13
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, I started in small.
14:15
[SPEAKER_04]: I think like most people, when I was in high school, my high school actually had a backpacking course, so we could take for PE credit.
14:23
[SPEAKER_04]: And so those were my first overnight, couple night trips, and they were on the trail system.
14:28
[SPEAKER_04]: There's an area called the Keynipen in Celeste, South of Anchorage that just has hundreds of miles of awesome trails and cabins.
14:37
[SPEAKER_04]: It's just a real, real gem for
14:41
[SPEAKER_04]: for the steep part of that learning curve where you go out and realize you got the wrong shoes or are carrying too little or too much or whatever.
14:49
[SPEAKER_04]: So I had this awesome learning environment to kind of cut my teeth.
14:54
[SPEAKER_04]: And I gosh, I've made some really embarrassing mistakes in those early years, but I think everybody has.
15:02
[SPEAKER_04]: I'll just give you one, for example, on one of my first trips, I carried two courts of liquid milk.
15:11
[SPEAKER_04]: because like, that's what I drink at home, right?
15:14
[SPEAKER_04]: I have my Cheerios and milk for breakfast.
15:16
[SPEAKER_04]: So of course that's what I'm gonna do.
15:17
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm Saturday morning on a camping trip or something.
15:22
[SPEAKER_04]: And then of course, flash forward twenty years when I'm doing some of these pretty ambitious trips on my own.
15:28
[SPEAKER_04]: And it's like, I'm not even bringing, you know, some people cut their toothbrush in half.
15:32
[SPEAKER_04]: It is like, no, no toothbrush.
15:34
[SPEAKER_04]: I can't afford that extra weight.
15:36
[SPEAKER_04]: So just that whole progression.
15:38
[SPEAKER_04]: That started for me in high school.
15:40
[SPEAKER_04]: and making a lot of mistakes and learning from them.
15:42
[SPEAKER_04]: And then when I moved back to Alaska after grad school, and my grad program since it was geology, I just happened to study like one of the densest rocks that you can find on the surface of the earth.
15:55
[SPEAKER_04]: It's a rock that comes from the upper mantle that was pressed, it's actually denser than the surface of the earth.
16:02
[SPEAKER_04]: So it's a rare one to find, which also means it's a heavy one to find.
16:06
[SPEAKER_04]: So I was in great hiking shape.
16:09
[SPEAKER_04]: and got home and just dove deep learned how to ski.
16:15
[SPEAKER_04]: Took every opportunity to get outside.
16:16
[SPEAKER_04]: I wouldn't even check the weather.
16:18
[SPEAKER_04]: This has been a funny change for me as I get older.
16:20
[SPEAKER_04]: Now I check the forecast and I'm like, oh, there's some clouds.
16:24
[SPEAKER_04]: Maybe I'll wait in that phase of my evolution.
16:27
[SPEAKER_04]: I didn't, the weather didn't matter.
16:30
[SPEAKER_04]: I was going to go out no matter what.
16:31
[SPEAKER_04]: So I just logged a lot of days.
16:33
[SPEAKER_04]: And then there are these events and maybe you can direct
16:37
[SPEAKER_04]: here, your readers to some maybe Roman dials podcast here where he talks a little bit about the wilderness classics, which are these, they're not, they're not officially erased because there's no prize and there's no sponsorship and they can't be races to go through some of the parklands and areas that we travel through.
16:58
[SPEAKER_04]: But you're given a starting point in any point.
17:01
[SPEAKER_04]: They're usually, hundred and fifty or two hundred miles apart.
17:05
[SPEAKER_04]: And then
17:06
[SPEAKER_04]: And then you just do the course you make your own course and you're responsible to get yourself out of trouble if needed.
17:13
[SPEAKER_04]: And I did my first of those wilderness classics.
17:16
[SPEAKER_04]: That first summer, her first winter rather coming back up from grad school.
17:22
[SPEAKER_04]: And that environment, the wilderness classics allowed me to learn a ton more about what my body was capable of and to manage all the little stuff that goes wrong.
17:36
[SPEAKER_04]: And so I, gosh, I probably done twelve or fourteen of those at this point.
17:40
[SPEAKER_04]: And with each one, just came out of that thinking, like, oh, I know more about what food I need to eat or oh, I guess I didn't need a tent after all.
17:50
[SPEAKER_04]: So I learned a ton from those events and then started applying those two, like, bigger objectives.
17:55
[SPEAKER_04]: Like, Denali was the first one.
17:58
[SPEAKER_04]: We took that same sort of ultra-light travel strategy and applied it to a big mountain.
18:04
[SPEAKER_04]: Denali and took
18:05
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't know, twenty-five days to do that.
18:08
[SPEAKER_04]: That was a transition for me to realize I could start making up my own dry my own routes on the map.
18:16
[SPEAKER_04]: I guess would be a good way to say it.
18:19
[SPEAKER_04]: And then trying to complete those courses.
18:22
[SPEAKER_02]: So it sounds like those courses really started opening that world to you.
18:26
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm sure, you know, I mean, I tell you what I've been in places that just feel that the adventures feel endless.
18:34
[SPEAKER_02]: And I keep, you know, I don't want to keep sound like just the geekiest fanboy of Alaska.
18:40
[SPEAKER_02]: I can't imagine how much more you felt that feeling of once you have these skills in place, how much there is out there to explore.
18:49
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm sure it's just overwhelming in the area you're in, even deciding which way to go, which area to explore, which area to push.
18:56
[SPEAKER_02]: It's really an unexplored frontier in a lot of ways.
19:02
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, yes and no.
19:05
[SPEAKER_04]: For sure, what you're describing about the unlimited options,
19:10
[SPEAKER_04]: I can definitely relate to the unexplored frontier part.
19:14
[SPEAKER_04]: That's a little inaccurate.
19:16
[SPEAKER_04]: I think given the native history here, and it's, and I'm just mentioning it because it's something I'm paying more attention to as I get older.
19:26
[SPEAKER_04]: It's easy to imagine these landscapes as being unexplored and, you know, I haven't been calling them wilderness forever, but they have all had
19:37
[SPEAKER_04]: people traveling through for hundreds and thousands of years.
19:40
[SPEAKER_04]: And so I'm personally just kind of trying to rebrand that for myself as wild lands to remind myself that unexplored by white guys like me, yes, but not unexplored.
19:54
[SPEAKER_04]: But yeah, more specifically what you're talking about.
19:58
[SPEAKER_04]: When I first did my first hundred mile trip and I was just, that was amazing to me that I could travel a hundred miles.
20:06
[SPEAKER_04]: And I heard heard about other people doing that kind of trip those long trips.
20:11
[SPEAKER_04]: And I didn't understand how that was possible.
20:13
[SPEAKER_04]: Like how do you travel a hundred miles off trail?
20:17
[SPEAKER_04]: Like how do you even navigate that?
20:18
[SPEAKER_04]: What do you bring that that was that seemed so impossible to me?
20:23
[SPEAKER_04]: That once I did it, I gosh, I just felt so proud and I had learned so much and it like you're saying it made me want more and sick.
20:31
[SPEAKER_04]: wherever I finished that first trip, I wanted to start the next one.
20:34
[SPEAKER_04]: And honestly, I'm still kind of doing that.
20:36
[SPEAKER_04]: I have this map of Alaska and all the routes that I've done, and I look at it, and I look for gaps parts of the state that I haven't traveled through.
20:45
[SPEAKER_04]: And I try to think how could I see that?
20:49
[SPEAKER_04]: For me so much of this game or this hobby is to collect the landscape, like visually, I'm a real visual person.
21:01
[SPEAKER_04]: I love art and landscapes, and so I'm basically trying to see as much of that as possible.
21:08
[SPEAKER_04]: And in Alaska, it's limitless.
21:11
[SPEAKER_04]: Like, my wife would love to be doing more travel, like international travel.
21:15
[SPEAKER_04]: She wants to do more of that.
21:17
[SPEAKER_04]: And when we leave, I generally feel like, ah, this is a window when I could have done a trip at home, because I really wanted to visit the Tel-Kitnas, or I really wanted to see this part of the Brooks Rain in Europe, or whatever.
21:29
[SPEAKER_04]: I honestly get a little bit stressed out about it because I'm not going to come anywhere close to seeing what I want to see just here within Alaska.
21:38
[SPEAKER_02]: That is really interesting because, you know, we do have, you know, almost this pressure to see more of the world, but when you start to realize just how much is right there in your own backyard, it can totally fulfill that desire to explore.
21:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I feel that way where I live and it's nothing in comparison, nothing in comparison as far as vastness.
22:00
[SPEAKER_02]: So when you are doing these trips, these off-trail,
22:04
[SPEAKER_02]: trips what what is the objective what is the goal you know is it are they loops are they out and backs are you trying to summit something or is it literally just see this area and get back as safely as possible yeah my my objectives are almost always I guess I'll call it a traverse because it's it's not a loop and it's not an out and back I really like to start at one point and finish somewhere else and
22:34
[SPEAKER_04]: And part of that, again, is that my motivation is to collect as much of the landscape as possible.
22:39
[SPEAKER_04]: So a loop would do that for sure.
22:42
[SPEAKER_04]: But an out in the back, I always feel like, it's like, dang it, I just saw this.
22:47
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
22:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
22:48
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, which is a silly, I mean, a lot of this is silly, right, to put as much time and resources into this.
22:55
[SPEAKER_04]: But it's meaningful, and I'm sure it's meaningful for a lot of your community too.
23:00
[SPEAKER_04]: But the trips that I'm doing, I'm identifying a starting point and a finished point.
23:05
[SPEAKER_04]: It's kind of inspired by those early wilderness classics.
23:08
[SPEAKER_04]: And specifically what I'm doing here where there is such limited road coverage, which is a good thing for me, is I call it the logistics by convenience.
23:19
[SPEAKER_04]: It's basically trying to figure out where are the easy places to start and finish.
23:24
[SPEAKER_04]: And then I'll sculpt the trip around those rather than having a big objective in mind,
23:31
[SPEAKER_04]: ahead of time.
23:31
[SPEAKER_04]: So let me give you an example from outside of Alaska that might be more relevant.
23:37
[SPEAKER_04]: So I still have a bunch of family down in Montana and I went down for my stepbrothers wedding and he's in Missoula and then I've got family to visit and great falls.
23:47
[SPEAKER_04]: And so I thought, how can I connect these points?
23:53
[SPEAKER_04]: And I ended up kind of creating a
23:58
[SPEAKER_04]: I've done this twice now, but one time with a bike route, so where I bike that distance and cut through a bunch of four service roads and cow pastures and all this.
24:08
[SPEAKER_04]: But that same mentality, what I'm doing in Alaska, like, what are the easy places to connect up here?
24:15
[SPEAKER_04]: It's a village, you know, something that you can fly into more affordably than having to charter a plane.
24:22
[SPEAKER_04]: For example,
24:24
[SPEAKER_04]: You can maybe fly to a village for two hundred fifty dollars, but to charter that same length of a flight to get dropped in the middle of the mountains might cost fifteen hundred dollars.
24:35
[SPEAKER_04]: So there's a there's an economic incentive to use the the easy logistical points of the road system and the villages.
24:44
[SPEAKER_04]: So I'll choose one village, choose another village, and then and then do a bunch of homework to try to figure out how I'm going to connect them.
24:51
[SPEAKER_02]: I was going to ask, you know, how much do you know about these routes you're going into?
24:57
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, the terrain because I'm sure, I mean, you can be get clipped out.
25:02
[SPEAKER_02]: You could run into, you know, crevices.
25:04
[SPEAKER_02]: You can run into so many things that might be, uh, impossible being, you know, off trail trips.
25:11
[SPEAKER_02]: How much do you know about these areas when you're going into them?
25:14
[SPEAKER_02]: And also,
25:16
[SPEAKER_02]: are most of these, at least to your knowledge the first time someone's done them.
25:22
[SPEAKER_02]: No, or not, maybe this, you know, I know we've talked about the native, uh, uh, the natives who have been there for years and so I, I mean, by a trip report standards.
25:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Is it the first?
25:32
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, first, first sport.
25:33
[SPEAKER_04]: I think that in, yeah, that's how I'm thinking about it is for the first time first sport.
25:38
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
25:38
[SPEAKER_04]: Recreation.
25:39
[SPEAKER_04]: That's the distinction for me.
25:46
[SPEAKER_04]: Um, I know a lot about the course before going on it.
25:52
[SPEAKER_04]: If you take your both your listeners and your other podcast presenters and line them up on a spectrum between cool and dorky, I'm like, I'm real close to that dorky limit.
26:08
[SPEAKER_04]: And I, and it's, you know, I loved school.
26:11
[SPEAKER_04]: I loved the ten years that I studied geology.
26:16
[SPEAKER_04]: that got me real familiar with maps and with very software and then I worked for ten years doing GIS work, geography work and data science work and through that I was exposed to a lot of resources for that could be used for trip planning.
26:35
[SPEAKER_04]: So we weren't using a trip planning we were using them to say map, Sam and distribution or sea ice or something.
26:43
[SPEAKER_04]: But then I thought, oh my gosh, I can use this to draw a route, save it between these villages or across this mountain range, and then also to anticipate conditions.
26:55
[SPEAKER_04]: And so depending on the scope of my trip, I'll spend days or weeks or months in that planning phase and collecting as much information as I can.
27:07
[SPEAKER_04]: And this is not a
27:12
[SPEAKER_04]: romantic style of adventure for a lot of people and that this style does not appeal to people and I'm totally comfortable with that.
27:18
[SPEAKER_04]: I think I think the difference is that people who don't like this style think it takes away some of the like on the fly adventure decision making.
27:30
[SPEAKER_04]: My counter argument to that or why it works so well for me is that if I do the homework ahead of time, I go out there and then I can actually just
27:39
[SPEAKER_04]: enjoy my time more there.
27:41
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't have to stress out about how many days it is until our next cash of food or in a witch valley we're going to go into.
27:52
[SPEAKER_04]: So I just get to hike or ski or bike whatever I'm doing ice skate and it allows me to relax a little bit and cover more ground because so much of the homework is already done.
28:04
[SPEAKER_04]: So
28:09
[SPEAKER_04]: The simple answer to question is that I think I know a lot before I go in and the complicated answer is I spent a bunch of time doing homework and creating this pretty complicated trick plan at Google Earth and carrying it on my phone with Gaia.
28:25
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm happy to talk about some of those specific
28:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely, let's go ahead and get into some more detail, but I do want to mention, you know, it's the same thing with podcasting.
28:37
[SPEAKER_02]: I know they don't seem at all related, but the more prepared I am for an interview, the more fun I have, the more I get to just know, I know the story, I know where we can go back to, like you know the trail, so you can take these side trips with confidence, knowing you know where to go back to.
28:53
[SPEAKER_02]: And when I'm not prepared for an interview, gosh, I stress out like, oh, I'm not going to know enough.
28:58
[SPEAKER_02]: For you, there's really no way to prepare enough because it's like you've got a lifetime of these adventures and literally books of knowledge to go through.
29:09
[SPEAKER_02]: When you're doing these trips before we get into hard core, how you plan these and what you're using, do you try to hit covering a few different sports like skiing and biking or pack rafting?
29:23
[SPEAKER_02]: I know you've obviously written a book about pack rafting.
29:26
[SPEAKER_02]: What are you trying to combine as many of these as possible or only doing the sports that are necessary to get it done?
29:34
[SPEAKER_04]: Before I address that, I want to say I love what you just said about preparation for the podcast and that being relatable to you.
29:41
[SPEAKER_04]: I've had trouble or you could probably tell a struggle to try to convey that and what you said is exactly right.
29:48
[SPEAKER_04]: That's super cool and glad you mentioned that.
29:52
[SPEAKER_04]: As far as modes of transport.
29:55
[SPEAKER_04]: This again is really governed by that, where am I going to start and where am I going to finish?
30:00
[SPEAKER_04]: And then within that, I want to travel as efficiently as possible.
30:06
[SPEAKER_04]: And so I'll break that trip down into segments.
30:09
[SPEAKER_04]: And if there's a segment that can be biked, I'll try to bik it.
30:13
[SPEAKER_04]: And if there is a segment that can be floated, I definitely want to float it because it's a lot easier on my body to float a river.
30:23
[SPEAKER_04]: And it's also a nice change of muscle groups where my favorite ships are where you know, I hike for a couple days.
30:30
[SPEAKER_04]: My legs are tired.
30:31
[SPEAKER_04]: And then I paddle through a day or a couple days.
30:33
[SPEAKER_04]: And that gives my legs a chance to recover.
30:36
[SPEAKER_04]: I blow out my arms, my back.
30:39
[SPEAKER_04]: And I sit back to hiking.
30:42
[SPEAKER_02]: And you still cover tons of miles.
30:45
[SPEAKER_04]: And you get to cover tons of miles if you're traveling as efficiently as possible.
30:49
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
30:50
[SPEAKER_04]: So it's.
30:52
[SPEAKER_04]: I can give you a concrete example of this when we did decide to go up Denali.
30:58
[SPEAKER_04]: We didn't want to pay to go from the base camp to the traditional trip.
31:04
[SPEAKER_04]: I think there's generally a price tag of, I don't know, seven thousand dollars or something to to fly into the base camp, fly out of base camp and do it that way.
31:13
[SPEAKER_04]: So we decided to go from the road system and to the road system.
31:17
[SPEAKER_04]: And then when I broke that down into
31:21
[SPEAKER_04]: how we could possibly do that.
31:24
[SPEAKER_04]: We started by biking on the Denali Highway, the road that goes, or the park highway that goes toward Denali.
31:33
[SPEAKER_04]: And we biked on it after it was first plowed, but before it was plowed all the way to the end of the road, so it wasn't open for business.
31:42
[SPEAKER_04]: But round it up a bunch of friends, bikes,
31:45
[SPEAKER_04]: said, hey, who wants to go bike in this weekend and by the way, can you carry this trailer with a bunch of our food?
31:54
[SPEAKER_04]: And so we bike, I don't know, sixty miles or something and then left our bikes there literally in the ditch, picked them up months later and switched to skis.
32:06
[SPEAKER_04]: And so then we're on skis for two weeks, little more than two weeks to go up an alley and go down the other side of an alley.
32:14
[SPEAKER_04]: And then friends had buried pack rafts for us at base camp.
32:18
[SPEAKER_04]: And so we found a little wand that had our name on it and dug down and unearthed this care package with boats and then switched out and floated down to the town of Tupita.
32:31
[SPEAKER_04]: So that was a
32:35
[SPEAKER_04]: I guess that's probably the first trip that I truly did with that multi-sport technique.
32:39
[SPEAKER_04]: And I loved it.
32:40
[SPEAKER_04]: It was so cool to start on bikes with friends, where they could come in for a couple of days and turn around.
32:45
[SPEAKER_04]: And then to switch to skis, where the ski and was good.
32:49
[SPEAKER_04]: And then to switch to boats to have a couple of days on the water to finish things out.
32:53
[SPEAKER_04]: That added a lot to the trip.
32:58
[SPEAKER_04]: And part of what it added for me is that a friend of mine
33:04
[SPEAKER_04]: that stuck with me and I'll use my words instead of hers.
33:06
[SPEAKER_04]: But if you just fly in, for example, to Denali, you miss out on all that scenery and that experience of getting to that point.
33:17
[SPEAKER_04]: And I get it that people are busy and it's easier to do that.
33:20
[SPEAKER_04]: But for me, I had the time, I had to fitness, it added a lot for me to go under my own power to the base of the mountain, go up and over it, and then go under my own power, where I guess the river is power.
33:34
[SPEAKER_04]: to finish out in that community of tapina.
33:36
[SPEAKER_04]: So I really appreciate the approach that's part of the trip for me.
33:45
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, going somewhere under your own power just makes it turns up the vividness.
33:52
[SPEAKER_02]: It turns up the beauty.
33:54
[SPEAKER_02]: It turns everything up to eleven versus getting there in easy way.
33:58
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's, you know, like you said, it's no one's necessarily no one's fault, you know, depending on the time.
34:02
[SPEAKER_02]: It's better to see it than not.
34:04
[SPEAKER_02]: But if you do have that ability, I'm sure, and especially experiencing it over so, you know, a number of different mediums allows you to have
34:13
[SPEAKER_02]: an amazingly well-rounded experience.
34:17
[SPEAKER_02]: That's so cool.
34:18
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a great example.
34:20
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it felt, it was great.
34:22
[SPEAKER_04]: And it was lucky.
34:24
[SPEAKER_04]: We had great conditions as well.
34:28
[SPEAKER_04]: But we were just playing.
34:29
[SPEAKER_04]: It's just like everything on these learning curves.
34:33
[SPEAKER_04]: They were just learning how to make a podcast or how to plan a trip through the mountains.
34:39
[SPEAKER_04]: That was one step further from the comfort zone.
34:43
[SPEAKER_04]: longer miles longer trip colder temperatures.
34:48
[SPEAKER_04]: And then alert a bunch from that trip and then a and then chosen objective for the next trip that that would build from that.
34:55
[SPEAKER_04]: That's that's basically been my strategy.
34:58
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, you know, we always talk about we have I used to ask like how does a how do you plan for your next venture to get the idea, but gosh, it's it's always the same answer like you the more you learn about a place you're thinking about it while you're out on the trip and so you kind of have an idea of what you want to do next already.
35:15
[SPEAKER_02]: And so after about five hundred of those same answers, I was like, I'm good.
35:20
[SPEAKER_02]: But I do want to ask this because this is unique to you.
35:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Choosing between your sports, because you've got pack wrapping, you've got cycling, you've got ice skating, literally, something we never talked about.
35:32
[SPEAKER_02]: And you've taken some long-ass trips, ice skating, how do you choose between that and why, why, some of that, those unique sports, especially ice skating, that's just so different.
35:45
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, that's a good question.
35:47
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't know if you haven't put that much thought into the modes of travel.
35:52
[SPEAKER_04]: And part of that is because the trip is largely governed by what I want to see.
35:59
[SPEAKER_04]: And then I match the gear to that.
36:01
[SPEAKER_04]: But I have had changes.
36:04
[SPEAKER_04]: I remember on a couple of my last, so there was a run of maybe six or seven years where I was doing a month-long ski traverse.
36:15
[SPEAKER_04]: glacier travel, same group of friends, not always the same group on each ship, but kind of the same community of friends and these awesome trips, really, really fun and meaningful trips for me.
36:28
[SPEAKER_04]: And gosh, on some of those, the last trips, I would be in the middle of a glacier, you know, we're roped up or slogging and I look around and be like, have I already seen this?
36:39
[SPEAKER_04]: I have kind of like a deja vu where the landscapes were starting to
36:44
[SPEAKER_04]: to blend together, and I had done enough glacier miles that that landscape was suddenly a little less rewarding, which sounds kind of criminal to say, but I had that realization.
36:57
[SPEAKER_04]: And since then, I'm doing less glacier travel and more looking for more variety in the landscape.
37:06
[SPEAKER_04]: Glaciers are awesome, and mountains are awesome in the winter, but you're really talking about a black and white landscape.
37:13
[SPEAKER_04]: These last few years I've been really excited about catching fall colors or trying to get out.
37:20
[SPEAKER_04]: It's a very beginning of spring when the brushes and the leaves haven't.
37:27
[SPEAKER_04]: The brush hasn't leafed out yet so you can still get through the woods without having to work too hard.
37:35
[SPEAKER_04]: So those are kind of giving me these different visual rewards.
37:42
[SPEAKER_04]: And you mentioned ice skating and that's a great example of that because turns out ice skating is done in really flat country.
37:50
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
37:51
[SPEAKER_04]: Ideally.
37:55
[SPEAKER_04]: So that's a huge difference for me to go from a Denali trip ten years ago to what I'm really excited about now, which is I would love to go icegate some swampy, marshy, boggy land.
38:12
[SPEAKER_04]: And it's a it's a totally different experience to see that and I and I wouldn't visit the marshes otherwise I'm not going to go out there in the summer.
38:21
[SPEAKER_04]: But if I go out there in the winter on skates.
38:24
[SPEAKER_04]: I didn't go up skating and I'm not a strong skater now, but I can go ten miles an hour on skates and it is so much fun.
38:32
[SPEAKER_04]: And I get to see.
38:34
[SPEAKER_04]: All sorts of crazy stuff that I wouldn't see otherwise, you know, you can, I've skated over Muscratt, like, tracked him on the surface of the ice and seen a beaver on there under the ice under me.
38:45
[SPEAKER_04]: And all these crazy frost crystals, because where there's a little chunk of open water that water vapor, you know, escapes and grows these beautiful, firm light crystals.
38:58
[SPEAKER_04]: So, yeah, if you were to force me to only choose one
39:03
[SPEAKER_04]: one sport right now would be ice skating.
39:05
[SPEAKER_04]: That's what I'm so excited about.
39:07
[SPEAKER_04]: It's so funny.
39:09
[SPEAKER_04]: It's totally weird.
39:11
[SPEAKER_04]: But we've had a couple trips now where we get to skate a hundred miles in a couple days.
39:15
[SPEAKER_04]: Like that's insane.
39:16
[SPEAKER_04]: That is so cool.
39:18
[SPEAKER_04]: So, hey, you got me excited.
39:20
[SPEAKER_04]: Just think about it.
39:21
[SPEAKER_02]: You know that I'll be honest, I'm trying to rack my brain all of our episodes.
39:25
[SPEAKER_02]: We've never talked a lot about like ex, but not expedition, but journeys, you know, journeys like multi day bike packing.
39:31
[SPEAKER_02]: We've had skateboarding on, you know, people that are skate touring skateboarding.
39:36
[SPEAKER_02]: We've had roller belating definitely, but ice skating.
39:41
[SPEAKER_02]: I skate touring or whatever you're going to, whatever you call it.
39:45
[SPEAKER_02]: It is pretty new.
39:46
[SPEAKER_02]: So I just imagine it's a lot of the same gear, obviously, with camping and staying warm in the winter.
39:52
[SPEAKER_02]: But these Nordic skates that are just longer have the ability to maybe handle some of the variables or inconsistencies of naturalize a little easier than something that's groomed, not groomed, but you know what I'm saying.
40:08
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm from Florida.
40:08
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know what tonne about ice.
40:10
[SPEAKER_02]: So.
40:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, you know, I was out west for years and we do actually have a pretty legendary ice skating area near our house, which is funny random, but in our hockey teams do pretty well funny enough.
40:26
[SPEAKER_02]: But what kind of unique elements does that add to your touring mindset that you already have?
40:37
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, let me fill in the gaps there a little bit because you're exactly right.
40:43
[SPEAKER_04]: These Nordic blades and Nordic because they're coming from Scandinavia and I think have been used there for hundreds of years.
40:53
[SPEAKER_04]: They're a long blade and it's like a steel blade and it's got an aluminum platform, a flat aluminum platform.
41:00
[SPEAKER_04]: that you put any ski binding on, and they're meant for like a skate ski, cross-country ski binding and boot.
41:08
[SPEAKER_04]: But we're actually putting our downhill bindings, at least a toepiece, like a tech toepiece for backcountry touring, and wearing a backcountry ski boot.
41:17
[SPEAKER_04]: So you've got a big beefy boot rather than, at least for me, my experience in hockey skates is that they're pretty darn uncomfortable, and they're pretty cold.
41:27
[SPEAKER_04]: They're really performance.
41:30
[SPEAKER_04]: So instead of that, you get a warmer, more comfortable boot, and you get this long blade that spues out the ice, and they're not real nimble.
41:39
[SPEAKER_04]: So you can't make real sharp turns, but you can cover it ground, they're faster.
41:45
[SPEAKER_04]: They are more similar to the speed skating, like the Olympic speed skating than they are to hockey skates.
41:53
[SPEAKER_04]: And as far as thinking about these trips,
42:00
[SPEAKER_04]: The big concern, of course, is breaking through the ice.
42:04
[SPEAKER_04]: And I'm not too worried about that on a lake.
42:08
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't want it to happen, but if it does, we're carrying an ice crew, we're carrying a rope to help somebody get out of the ice.
42:16
[SPEAKER_04]: What does scare me is skating over rivers, over moving water?
42:20
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, that absolutely terrifies me.
42:25
[SPEAKER_04]: Also because the where there's a current under the ice, the ice is
42:30
[SPEAKER_04]: thickness is not necessarily consistent.
42:34
[SPEAKER_04]: Even on a lake is not consistent, but at least you can kind of predict, you know, if there's water coming in or water going out, that's where there's going to be a thinner ice.
42:42
[SPEAKER_04]: So that's the, in terms of safety, that's the first thing we're paying attention to is the condition of the ice.
42:49
[SPEAKER_04]: There's a, there's a special ski pole, just like a normal ski pole, but it's got a real heavy steel tip.
42:55
[SPEAKER_04]: And you can use that tip and kind of a,
42:58
[SPEAKER_04]: calibrate like how hard you snap it at the ice and and I've got to the point with that with that pull where I can I can tell whether the ice will support me just based on a couple of smacks coming from this steel tipped ski pool so that's a really nice tool to help me the determine whether that whether it's appropriate to be on the ice or not and then another big factor is wind because
43:27
[SPEAKER_04]: The skates are super fast, but when we're trying to do these longer trips, if you have a headwind here, you really feel it and it's hard.
43:34
[SPEAKER_04]: And it's cold, right?
43:36
[SPEAKER_04]: By deep and by deep fault, we're talking about winter travel.
43:40
[SPEAKER_04]: So winter travel with a headwind with the wind chill can be really cold.
43:45
[SPEAKER_04]: Oh, I've got, I can tell you a couple of specific stories that will probably help the listeners get a picture for what I'm talking about.
43:53
[SPEAKER_04]: Do you have any questions on?
43:55
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, no questions on what I just described.
43:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, go ahead and tell your story.
43:58
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm just curious like, you know, if, if you ever found yourself in a situation where the ice wasn't strong enough or you had to, or, you know, no ice at all, I mean, I don't know if you ever come across that.
44:08
[SPEAKER_02]: But what happens when your medium changes on you drastically?
44:13
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, perfect.
44:15
[SPEAKER_04]: Okay.
44:15
[SPEAKER_04]: So let me, let me tell you about a trick we did out of Bethel, which is in Southwest Alaska and had a friend
44:24
[SPEAKER_04]: fly over there for work, you know, maybe the week before, and he said, hey, these these ponds are looking frozen, and then there's bear tundra between them.
44:33
[SPEAKER_04]: And this part of Alaska, it's called the YK Delta Yukon Cusco Quintelta.
44:38
[SPEAKER_04]: So it's a huge by huge, I mean, like hundred mile delta, where these big rivers break out, like infinite braids, and there are all these abandoned channels and abandoned ponds, you know, from the
44:53
[SPEAKER_04]: the thousands of years of these meandering rivers changing their channels.
44:59
[SPEAKER_04]: So for me as an icegator, what that means is that there's a lot of potential ice to connect from pond upon or on some of these frozen channels.
45:11
[SPEAKER_04]: And so we start in Bethel and we walk down to the ice, the town's right on the river.
45:20
[SPEAKER_04]: And the first thing we see is a semi truck drive by
45:24
[SPEAKER_04]: Bethel Lake McGrath has no roads to it.
45:27
[SPEAKER_02]: So I don't do this thing manifest on a nowhere.
45:30
[SPEAKER_02]: I would get there.
45:32
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I pretty sure it manifests out of nowhere and we're going to shake your head and say, am I seeing something?
45:37
[SPEAKER_04]: But sure enough, it's a big ass, semi-track, just hauling down the river.
45:44
[SPEAKER_04]: And so if you see that, you can be pretty confident about the isistigness and the appropriateness of being out there on ice skates.
45:54
[SPEAKER_04]: So it was hilarious.
45:56
[SPEAKER_04]: So we start and we start skating down the river.
45:59
[SPEAKER_04]: We've got a tailwind and that's not by mistake.
46:04
[SPEAKER_04]: Part of my homework is looking both at what the wind, you know, if there's a general wind direction and then also specifically like what's happening right now, what's the forecast for the week.
46:17
[SPEAKER_04]: So we've got a tailwind.
46:18
[SPEAKER_04]: We're going to push down the river on a great ice after the semi we see a guy
46:25
[SPEAKER_04]: Ice fishing, he's got a net underneath the ice, so two holes, so there may be thirty feet apart.
46:31
[SPEAKER_04]: And he's pulling the net through there and pulling fish out of the surface.
46:34
[SPEAKER_04]: So we stopped and chat with him for a little bit, super cool.
46:37
[SPEAKER_04]: And then we just go and go and go.
46:40
[SPEAKER_04]: And with that tailwind, we realized that when we would stop to try to take a break, it was just me and my wife Sarah.
46:48
[SPEAKER_04]: We'd stop and take a wake, put our backs the way I knew I put a puffy jacket on and it still was pretty uncomfortable.
46:56
[SPEAKER_04]: And eventually we realized that it was more comfortable to just stand side by side and get blown down the river while we're passing our fruit snacks and hot chocolate back and forth.
47:10
[SPEAKER_04]: Like that became our break.
47:13
[SPEAKER_04]: So such a different experience
47:18
[SPEAKER_04]: And pretty soon, we get off the river and we're in that delta section that's got all these ponds and everything.
47:24
[SPEAKER_04]: And just by luck, this was, I think, maybe a January trip or February trip.
47:32
[SPEAKER_04]: And there had been a warm spell in rain.
47:37
[SPEAKER_04]: And that rain had melted off all the ice on the tundra, but it had
47:44
[SPEAKER_04]: Where there already was a snow machine track, it just turned to the snow on the snow machine track into ice, and then it didn't melt.
47:52
[SPEAKER_04]: So basically, if you can picture this in your head, you've got a snow machine track of ice with grass on both sides of it.
48:00
[SPEAKER_04]: And so we were able to stay on that track and double pull, so using our ski poles to just propel ourselves forward for like, seventy miles.
48:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Holy crap, seventy.
48:13
[SPEAKER_04]: We started that day.
48:14
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, we probably got on the ice around noon.
48:17
[SPEAKER_04]: And these days are short for the winter.
48:21
[SPEAKER_04]: So we were probably off the ice by around five.
48:23
[SPEAKER_04]: And we had gone seventy miles.
48:26
[SPEAKER_02]: What would you have done if that hadn't of, you know, coincidentally formed that way?
48:33
[SPEAKER_04]: We would have walked from pond to pond.
48:36
[SPEAKER_04]: So we would have portaged.
48:38
[SPEAKER_04]: And that's another of the advantages of these skates is that
48:43
[SPEAKER_04]: You just step in and out of them because you're wearing a ski boot.
48:46
[SPEAKER_04]: So you walk the ski boot to the pond and then skate the pond and then take off the skate, walk the next one.
48:52
[SPEAKER_04]: So that was the plan.
48:54
[SPEAKER_04]: We didn't expect to be able to skate the snow machine track.
48:58
[SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes you win.
49:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you mentioned you're on the, you're over on the dorky side of the scale, but that sounds pretty cool to me, honestly.
49:07
[SPEAKER_04]: This, this trip wouldn't have been possible without all that homework.
49:11
[SPEAKER_04]: So that's part of this approach for me and why I'm so willing to put the time into the planning is that we just, there's no way we could have done this trip without having done research to satellite imagery in the weather forecasts.
49:30
[SPEAKER_04]: And just to go back to what you said, you know, about conditions changing and you run out of ice on that trip, we are working our way south and we
49:39
[SPEAKER_04]: It got warmer and warmer as we were going south to you know, seventy miles that first day, maybe forty the next and then we're out of ice and we've got open rivers to cross and or or streams rather and ice I'll have a memory of kind of seared in my brain that I'll always have where this was pretty early in the in the dating of my now wife and we have to cross this open water.
50:07
[SPEAKER_04]: It's only
50:09
[SPEAKER_04]: fifteen feet wide but the mud banks are another fifteen feet on each side and they're like knee deep super soft you know not quick sand but but real soft mud and we are carrying skis on this trip because we thought we might run into snow so I switched into my skis to to to walk over this mud to kind of to use them as like as snow shoes basically to spread out my weight to be my weight
50:37
[SPEAKER_04]: and I get to their side with some battle walking through this mud and I look back and Sarah's completely stuck in the mud.
50:43
[SPEAKER_04]: And later she told me she was panicking a little bit because she thought, like, what if he leaves me here?
50:52
[SPEAKER_04]: Where in the middle and nowhere, you know, and we're just dating and it's like, how could that even be a possibility in your brain that I was like, no, I gotta keep going, man.
51:02
[SPEAKER_04]: So yeah,
51:06
[SPEAKER_04]: you know I go back and try to help her through this mud and and because things had fought out we decided to go inland into the mountains where we could we could get some snow and and that way we could we could go up high enough that we could cross some of these rivers um when they were narrower and and and that again was like when I had done the planning I knew that was a possibility and so I had that sort of
51:37
[SPEAKER_04]: I had researched that option and I had routes drawn and we were navigating on our phones.
51:43
[SPEAKER_04]: And so that's part of a two is anticipating what can go wrong and having these backup plans in place so that we can, if we don't finish the trip that we can at least get out safely.
51:56
[SPEAKER_04]: It's a big part of it.
51:57
[SPEAKER_04]: It really helps with the safety aspect.
52:00
[SPEAKER_02]: So having explored so much of Alaska and having so much that I'm sure still want to do, what has been maybe one of the unique aspects of what you've seen in Alaska that you know a lot of folks either don't know exists or don't know is out there doesn't fit the the stereotypical stuff we think about with Alaska.
52:20
[SPEAKER_04]: That's probably isn't quite the right answer, but I'm going to default back to that concept of these continuous tracks of wilderness.
52:29
[SPEAKER_04]: Um, just because that is, that is so unique and, and I think people probably have that sense for Alaska if they're looking at it on the map or Dukeler through one of these reality TV shows, but, but it's even bigger than that, like, when you're, when you're walking through it or skiing through it, it's just amazing to be able to, to visit somewhere that still has four hundred miles of, of travel that you can do without,
52:59
[SPEAKER_04]: without seeing a road without seeing a structure.
53:03
[SPEAKER_04]: That's just that's so special.
53:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Is there a route or a trip you want to do that that's really a kind of a top of your list that you're looking forward to like a bucket list maybe could you explain that a little bit?
53:20
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, so what I'm, I mentioned I have these lines on the map that I'm trying to connect and
53:29
[SPEAKER_04]: And this is kind of a doorky thing too.
53:32
[SPEAKER_04]: So there's a TV show called Molly of Denali animated kids move.
53:37
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, we widen all the time with my kids.
53:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
53:39
[SPEAKER_04]: All right.
53:40
[SPEAKER_04]: I think says something about from Cactovic down to Juno, always wanting to know more.
53:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
53:45
[SPEAKER_04]: Okay.
53:47
[SPEAKER_04]: So I have some, so I'm a, at some point I will have traveled from Cactovic down to Juno.
53:55
[SPEAKER_04]: I've got some gaps in the lines that connect to those communities.
54:00
[SPEAKER_04]: And so that's my big goal.
54:02
[SPEAKER_04]: That's what I'm trying to do in the next couple of years if I can.
54:06
[SPEAKER_04]: And they're pretty big gaps and it might not actually happen.
54:09
[SPEAKER_04]: But I just were huge fans of that show.
54:12
[SPEAKER_04]: And I thought, oh, that's perfect.
54:14
[SPEAKER_04]: I've already got those things started.
54:16
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, I've traveled maybe from Cacto Vic, about eight hundred miles to the west and from Juneau.
54:23
[SPEAKER_04]: all the way up through anchorage and maybe another couple hundred miles west of anchorage.
54:29
[SPEAKER_04]: And I have little pieces that are in between those two endpoints.
54:33
[SPEAKER_04]: So that's my big objective.
54:37
[SPEAKER_02]: No freaking away.
54:38
[SPEAKER_02]: You're getting cooler and cooler the longer you talk, honestly.
54:44
[SPEAKER_02]: I was going to ask you about that.
54:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, obviously, we watch it pretty up a couple times a week when we turn on PBS kids.
54:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And it definitely gets me eager to visit Alaska again, just because it seems so true to Alaska.
54:59
[SPEAKER_02]: And I was going to ask you being there, does that show have a presence at all or a reputation?
55:04
[SPEAKER_02]: And it sounds like it does.
55:06
[SPEAKER_04]: Everybody loves it.
55:07
[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, and really they've just done such a good job with like a native production team and writers and the stories they tell and it's all the parts of it that I can relate to from growing up in the graph or all really accurate.
55:23
[SPEAKER_04]: It's so cool.
55:24
[SPEAKER_04]: It really is a treat.
55:26
[SPEAKER_02]: no kid and man that is too cool to hear honestly from someone who has lived that life truly but shoot man while I hate to have to run but you know you obviously you have a book on pack rafting like the handbook of pack rafting do you see yourself writing it for any other of these sports that you're doing or do you feel just a particular expertise in that area pack rafting made sense because I have this kind of fifteen year arc where
55:54
[SPEAKER_04]: I got in over my head and then lost a friend, I had a friend drowned in a pack-wrecking incident.
56:02
[SPEAKER_04]: And then that forced me in the last seven years to just re-evaluate how I'm doing it.
56:07
[SPEAKER_04]: My whole relationship with the outdoors, you know, that was a real hard hit to me.
56:14
[SPEAKER_04]: And so, and I teach Swiftwater now, I really poured myself into it.
56:18
[SPEAKER_04]: So the pack-wrecking handbook
56:21
[SPEAKER_04]: It's awesome.
56:21
[SPEAKER_04]: I definitely recommend it.
56:22
[SPEAKER_04]: It's appropriate for beginners and experts too.
56:26
[SPEAKER_04]: I do.
56:27
[SPEAKER_04]: I love the writing process and I would like to write more and I anticipate writing something about these skating trips.
56:36
[SPEAKER_04]: What I'm working on right now, which might also be interesting of interest to your listeners, is I'm building an online course for this trip planning process for the Google Earth and the different satellite resources we use.
56:48
[SPEAKER_04]: So I can send you that information.
56:49
[SPEAKER_04]: That'll be ready in January of twenty twenty two.
56:53
[SPEAKER_04]: And then I get to start writing again.
56:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Gosh, well, Luke, this is awesome.
56:57
[SPEAKER_02]: And we're gonna have to have you back on and dive into one of these adventures more.
57:01
[SPEAKER_02]: Or dive into risk assessment.
57:04
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, yeah, we never even got into it.
57:06
[SPEAKER_02]: I know.
57:06
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you start telling stories, man.
57:09
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, it's all over.
57:10
[SPEAKER_02]: This is awesome.
57:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I tell you what, let's plan to have you back on sometime soon and focus on risk assessment.
57:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Because I think that just be such a cool topic to really dive into.
57:21
[SPEAKER_04]: Oh, I sure.
57:22
[SPEAKER_04]: I appreciate it being conversational and I love your enthusiasm for Alaska and for Molly.
57:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, thanks again, Luke.
57:29
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll talk soon.
57:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Friends, thank you so much for listening again today.
57:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Please don't forget comment, rate, review, Patreon, all the things, and also don't forget that we are on YouTube, not every episode, but all the fresh ones we try to post to YouTube video as well if you would like to see the people talking.
57:54
[SPEAKER_01]: So happy fourth of July, happy adventuring.