In 1941, Swiss engineer George de Mestral was hunting in the Alps with his dog, when he noticed burrs stuck to his jacket, pants, hat, and his pup. Being the egghead that he was, de Mestral examined the burrs under a microscope. He discovered their 鈥渟tickiness鈥� was due to tiny hooks and loops. This discovery dominated the next decade of de Mestral’s life as he burrowed his intellect into recreating burrs鈥� 鈥済rab-ability鈥� with synthetic materials. And on one magical day, Presto Chango!, the world has Velcro.

This is probably the most famous example of 鈥渂iomimicry,鈥� the imitation of nature’s strategies to solve human design challenges. Now, a less well-known example but a much more intriguing one (sorry, de Mestral) is the life and music of 鈥淟and of 10,000 Lakes鈥� local Dave Simonett, founder and lead singer of Trampled By Turtles.

Simonett grew up in Mankato, Minnesota, about 80-miles southwest of the Twin Cities at the confluence of the Minnesota and Blue Earth rivers. Like the rest of the state, winters there are bitterly cold, summers are hot, muggy, and buggy. And as is ever the Minnesotan way, Simonett spent his youth loving that unloveable weather. No matter Mother Nature’s temperament, Simonett was in the woods. When he formed Trampled By Turtles in Duluth in 2003, Simonett’s lifelong connection to nature鈥攈iking, skiing, fishing鈥攃ombined in his music with other influences, like his love of the in-your-face tempo of punk and grunge bands and the songwriting of legendary fellow Minnesotan, Bob Dylan.

In the runup to the in Denver (where Trampled By Turtles will create a booty-shaking ruckus on June 1), I interviewed Simonett for an episode of the 国产吃瓜黑料 Podcast, which you can listen to here. Here are some excerpts from our conversation that highlight Simonett鈥檚 decades-long love affair with Minnesota and its lasting influence on his music.

A MINNESOTAN SURPRISE

国产吃瓜黑料: If somebody stopped you on the street and said, 鈥淗ey, who are you? What do you like to do?鈥� Would you say, outdoorsman? Would you say, conservationist? Would you say, hunter?

Simonett: Yeah, I’d probably start with those.

国产吃瓜黑料: Oh, before musician?

Simonett: Well, it depends on what point in life I guess I’d be asked. I think right now, at this point, even though music still takes up more of my time than anything else, my passions are split a little bit more equally nowadays. It’s more like a life’s work.

国产吃瓜黑料: You are an outdoorsy guy. You were a scout as a kid. You grew up in Minnesota, which though incredibly maligned like the rest of the Midwest, is double stuffed with frothing outdoor folks and adventures. What makes outdoor adventure in Minnesota unique and inspiring?

Simonett: Well, the natural beauty here is not as obvious. I like to say humble, but聽 it’s not of its own volition. It’s just the way the land is. We have our prairies and our hardwood forest in the southern part of the state, and then the northern parts are boreal and a lot of pine birch, kind of reminiscent of maybe what people would think of as Maine. What people think of here is lakes. And that’s something we have a lot of.聽 The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is probably our crown jewel of a landscape that’s still left to be a wild place. It’s pretty far out and I’d put a sunrise there up against any sunrise anywhere.

DEAR BOUNDARY WATERS, DAVE LOVES YOU

国产吃瓜黑料: For folks who have not been exposed to the beauty of the Boundary Waters, give me your 30-second elevator pitch on it to those who might be like, 鈥淎hhhh, Minnesota, c’mon!鈥�

Simonett: Right? It sounds buggy.

国产吃瓜黑料: Well, the mosquito is the state bird of Minnesota.

Simonett: And you won’t find any more of them than in the Boundary Waters if you go at a certain time of year, ha! But the Boundary Waters is a little over a million acres of woods and mainly lakes, thousands of lakes interconnected by portages. It’s part of the Superior National Forest and it’s named the Boundary Waters because it’s on the boundary of Minnesota and Canada. When you get a couple lakes into that wilderness, you might as well be in 1849 or something. It gets pretty far out and you can go deep as you want.

When I was young, a little bit of an initiation in that place was to paddle out to the middle of a lake, dip your cup in the lake, and drink the cup of water. That鈥檚 just as an example of what a bastion of clean water it is. And so I do a lot of work now on that place. If I’m gonna spend my time involved in something, this is where I get the most meaning in these places. I’m gonna work on protecting that.

THE JOY OF COLDER THAN HELL WINTERS

Simonett: I like winter. Half the stuff I like to do outside is when it’s snowing.

国产吃瓜黑料: I love winter too. But winter in Minnesota is a different animal altogether.

Simonett: It’s a good time to write songs, ha!

国产吃瓜黑料: Exactly. You’ve said that Northern Minnesota winters have inspired your music. And I think, in regard to the Midwest鈥檚 unfair poo-pooed-ness, the bitter cold winters have a lot to do with that. What do you think is the most unappreciated part of Minnesota winters?

Simonett: It gets dark at 4:30 here and I crave my little writing studio and a guitar. And that’s when my psyche wants to do it the most. And I try to honor that. There’s lots I want to do outside in the winter too, but it’s kind of a time where you can give yourself the leniency to look inside and try to make something. That’s what I’ve always used that time for. And that is the thing I look forward to, writing

国产吃瓜黑料: Do you think that because of that, you are writing slower laments or are you writing dancier, more uptempo tunes?

Simonett: Like trying to overcorrect?

国产吃瓜黑料: Yeah.

Simonett: It’s hard to say, but I think that kind of stuff is more phase of life for me or reactions to creative whims. I think the weather in the wintertime will give me a space to do it. But I don’t know if that’s like, 鈥淥h, I’m gonna write sad songs ’cause it’s cold outside.鈥� That being said, look at reggae music and where that comes from. That’s a lot of happy stuff. Maybe I’m completely wrong about that. Hahaha!

DIRT-FOOTED HOOTENANNY VS. MELLOW INSTRUMENTAL

国产吃瓜黑料: I know that you don’t like labeling your music or boxing it into a specific genre, but I will say, Roots music, Bluegrass, Americana, Trampled By Turtles could fall under these if someone were to box you guys in. Ha!

Simonett: Haha! Yeah, if you wanted to limit us. Ha!

国产吃瓜黑料: Those genres very often present a frenetic dancey pace. They create a dirt-footed hootenanny. For instance, 鈥淲ait So Long鈥� and 鈥淐odeine.鈥� Those tunes of yours are incredibly aggressive. Where does that edge come from and does your time outside inspire it? Ease it? Do both?

Simonett: Both those songs are like 15 years old. When I was younger, I had a lot of punk rock left over. When I was a teenager, that’s what I was into. And I was a young man then. I had a lot of energy.

国产吃瓜黑料: Oh, so it was like angry young man music?

Simonett: Yeah, and you feel things real big and loud. I did anyway. It’s been a while since I’ve written a song like that. To be honest with you, I’m really trying, especially in music, but generally in life, as a husband, as a father, to grow older gracefully.

国产吃瓜黑料: Does that mean softer?

Simonett: I think it just means being true to where you are at the time. If I were to try to write a song like 鈥淐odeine鈥� now, I would be lying. It would be me trying to reach for something that’s not there.

国产吃瓜黑料: On the other end of the tempo spectrum is a song like 鈥淟utsen.鈥� That’s nearly a10-minute beautiful, mellow instrumental. So where does that energy come from?

Simonett: That’s easier for me to point at. Lutsen is a little ski town in northern Minnesota on Lake Superior.

国产吃瓜黑料: Love Lutsen. It鈥檚 the first place I skied in Minnesota where I didn鈥檛 hear my turn. I love Lutsen.

Dave: Ha, yeah!. It鈥檚 as close as we get to real mountain skiing in the Midwest. I’d been spending a lot of time up there. It’s incredibly beautiful. I was doing some skiing, but also just hanging in the area by Lake Superior. It’s kind of our version of an ocean up there, with the same kind of gravitational pull on the people around it. It’s cold,听 it’s harsh. You go down to the lake and it’s like a nightmare sometimes. Like if you could turn a nightmare into water. So many ships have sunk in that nasty body of water. It reminds you real fast about where you are in the pecking order of things. And at the same time, you might wake up the next morning and it’s glass, and the sun’s coming up, it’s beautiful. That 鈥淟utsen鈥� song was that. That’s what I was trying to capture, comprehending where I was.

MY VELCRO IS YOUR VELCRO

国产吃瓜黑料: In regard to your time outside, your conservation efforts, and your love of Minnesota, if you were to take one of those things away, could you still write and perform the way that you do?

Dave: It sounds kind of self-important or something, but to me those are just little different parts of who I am. We’re all a product of space and time, right? I’m a product of where I live, what’s going on with me at this moment. And so you’d have to put me in somewhere real hard to escape for me not to find my space outdoors. I mean, I sometimes use touring to find new places to hunt and fish, which has been great. Last year and last summer, we went out to Montana. And both of those times I ended up on some really great fly fishing days with some buddies out there. When I’m home, I wouldn’t pop out to Montana and go fly fishing.

国产吃瓜黑料: The greatest work boondoggle of all time, ha! The music is whatever, but really what I’m trying to do is land a giant rainbow.

Dave: Haha! Yeah! I think for me, I really just hope an audience feels like we did the best we could. I hope they thought that their time was well spent.

I can write a hundred songs in this room and never play ’em for anybody. They’d still be songs and they’d still be mine. But there’s an interesting relationship that happens when you open that up to the world and I try to remain mystified by that. It’s scary and beautiful. I do enjoy that part of it. I don鈥檛 know if it鈥檚 like a 鈥渋f a tree falls in the forest鈥澛� kind of a thing, where it鈥檚, 鈥淐an a song exist if nobody hears it?鈥� I don’t know.

国产吃瓜黑料: I feel like there needs to be a bumper sticker that reads, 鈥淧eak Minnesota: Juicy Lucy, Tater Tot Hotdish, Trampled By Turtles,鈥� not necessarily in that order.

Dave: It’s a lot of responsibility, but we’ll take it.

You could win a trip to the 国产吃瓜黑料 Festival and meet Trampled By Turtles backstage!

Donate to Save the Boundary Waters at and you鈥檒l be entered to win round-trip travel, 3-night hotel stay, VIP passes to 国产吃瓜黑料 Festival, a signed Deering banjo, and even a Colorado adventure picked by the band. Enjoy VIP perks like private lounges, bars, and shaded seating while catching sets from Trampled By Turtles, Lord Huron, Khruangbin, and more.

NO PURCHASE OR DONATION IS NECESSARY TO ENTER TO WIN. A PURCHASE OR DONATION WILL NOT IMPROVE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED.聽TO ENTER WITHOUT DONATING CLICK聽.

See the聽听补苍诲听聽for more details.

The post Trampled by Turtles鈥� Songs Were Born in the Wilds of Minnesota appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and then things got really shitty real quick for Indigenous people. The European colonization of America began the centuries-long murderous legacy of trauma and displacement of Native people under the guise of expansion and elitism. This legacy isn鈥檛 just historical but persists in institutionalized racism, public actions, and everyday language, which many communities continue to experience today. Picture a spectrum with voter suppression, unfair lending practices, severe disparities in health and health care, and disproportionately high rates of being killed during a police encounter on one side and white Instagram models wearing headdresses to Coachella on the other.

But that legacy of trauma is also perpetrated in more insidious ways, even in the crunchy, GORP-eating, COEXIST bumper sticker world of the outdoor community.

Earlier this fall, Black Diamond posted a video of skiers arching turns on an untouched powdery slope on its Instagram account. It was a dreamy ski clip that ended oddly when someone off camera said, 鈥淲e own this range.鈥� When who is Lakota, saw the clip, he felt hurt and confused that a brand would want to represent themselves with aggressive, combative, domineering language. He commented as such on BD鈥檚 post. He remixed the video to his own , placing text over the footage that read: 鈥淧OV: A ski brand or publication says some colonial BS like 鈥榳e own this range鈥� or 鈥榗onquered a peak鈥欌�e don鈥檛 let people talk about mountains like that in ski culture anymore.鈥�

During the first few hours of posting, Connor received thousands of likes and hundreds of supportive comments. He also received polite requests for a nuanced explanation of the harm caused, with some commenters pointing toward long-celebrated quotes from famous outdoors people, like Sir Edmund Hillary鈥檚, 鈥淚t鈥檚 not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.鈥� Connor engaged with these comments openly and honestly. 鈥淚ntention and impact are not the same thing,鈥� he told me during a recent phone call. 鈥淚鈥檝e worked with Indigenous kids and women, who all say, 鈥業鈥檓 so put off by the culture of skiing that I don鈥檛 want to get into it, because it鈥檚 all, conquer this, own that, shred it, stomp it, and the language just feels very violent, and how I feel about skiing isn鈥檛 violent.鈥� And so, I get someone who鈥檚 like, 鈥業 don鈥檛 think conquer is a violent word.鈥� Yeah, well, from your lens it isn鈥檛 a violent word. There was no violence experienced on your end of the barrel of the gun. But for the people who were in the crosshairs, that all comes off as violent. If you鈥檙e Native American and someone says, 鈥榳e conquered this place, we own this place now,鈥� that recalls memories of violence, of trauma.鈥�

In the comment section of his post, during those first few hours, folks were receptive to Connor鈥檚 explanation of word choice in ski culture, and the exchanges were civil. To their credit, Black Diamond acted quickly鈥攖hey deleted the original post within 24 hours, issued a public apology, and their social media manager personally apologized to Connor.聽 Black Diamond emailed Connor an apology and requested his consulting rates and availability to lead a DEI athlete training (at the time of publication, Connor had not been officially hired for the training and was still awaiting a response from Black Diamond). It was a quick and sincere response to Connor鈥檚 feedback, showing that even brands can model responsiveness in building a more inclusive community. Unfortunately, comments on the post devolved into a hellscape of sun-cooked porta potty thrown atop a tire fire.

An accurate number of the racist and bigoted comments Connor received on his post and in his direct messages is hard to calculate. There were so many that he had to block and report accounts, delete comments and messages, turn off comments on the post, and scrutinize new comments on pre-existing and unrelated posts. Friends and followers who stood up to trolling in support of Connor would later tell him they received racist and/or bigoted messages, even death threats. I contacted close to 20 accounts who commented on Connor鈥檚 post in a questionable way to hear their perspective, maybe even change it. Four responded. One told me that my Irish ancestors would hang me for 鈥減icking that side.鈥� One responded with a series of memes suggesting they鈥檇 burn down my house and that they sexually pleasure themself to photos of my face. One admitted they could understand how 鈥渃onquer鈥� is a harmful word to an Indigenous person and that language can be damaging but saw no issue with calling Connor a homophobic slur. I did have a civil exchange with the fourth respondee, who identified as white and male (he did not feel comfortable sharing his age), but he ultimately doubled down on his belief that words cannot cause harm, even slurs. It was not a great day to go interneting.

The concept and impact of harmful language can, at times, be difficult to grasp for white skiers. A simple change could make a big difference. If ski enthusiasts embraced language that reflects a relationship of respect with the land, it might feel more welcoming to skiers from all backgrounds. To contextualize it, I asked Connor if a fair comparison for outrage would be white folks taking issue with an Indigenous skier creating a reel of a jib session filmed on the grounds of a Catholic church in which someone could be heard saying, 鈥淚 just crucified this!鈥� He told me a more apt comparison would be if he filmed himself skiing in Germany using 鈥渉olocaust鈥� as a descriptor for skiing. Connor was quick to tell me the motivations for his post and how he interacts with people in person and online. In general, it is not about calling folks out but rather in. Connor figures the skiers in the BD post most likely won鈥檛 have a combative relationship with the mountains. They probably are grateful for them, even love them. But we鈥檝e been conditioned to describe skiing as having dominion over the land. And in any other circumstance, that type of language would be ridiculous.

鈥淚t鈥檇 be like dancing with your grandma at a wedding and then you jump up and you鈥檙e like, 鈥楩uck yeah, bitch! Told you I had the moves,鈥欌�� he described to me. 鈥淓verybody would be like, 鈥楧ude, what鈥檚 wrong with this kid?鈥� That鈥檚 how I feel in my relationship with the mountains. This is my respected, cherished elder.鈥� Connor wants skiers to shift our language to represent our true feelings. And that is not a hard concept to grasp. Think about it. We don鈥檛 don eyeblack and listen to Jock Jams before we ski. We鈥檙e not physically besting an opponent. Skiing is not a football game, so why do we talk about skiing like a contact sport with a scoreboard? Maybe it鈥檚 time to embrace language that truly reflects our connection to the mountains鈥� and community rather than a win-at-all-costs mentality. We鈥檇 get dumped on our asses if we smooched our significant other and yelled out, 鈥淪layed it!鈥� We don鈥檛 use meathead language in our love affairs. Skiing is no exception.

One of the things I love most about skiing is the universal language of the pursuit of joy. Laughter and those barbaric yawps, yippees, and woooohoooos we bark out in communal elation at the bottom of an epic wiggle do not need Google Translate to be understood. Shouldn鈥檛 we all want as many people as possible to feel that? The answer is yes. And that means that, at the very least, we need to think about what we鈥檙e saying and be open to hearing someone else鈥檚 perspective. Unfortunately, the internet is filled with hateful dickalopes. But you don鈥檛 have to be a hood-wearing Klan member to say something hurtful.

After Connor and I talked about racism-net, our conversation moved to a subject decidedly less awful: powder skiing. Connor and I are friends, and we鈥檝e shared a handful of frosty days filled with featherlight snow that has risen to our eyeballs. We often joke about 鈥渟toke鈥� and 鈥渇low鈥� and how we whiff when describing the magic of skiing. I told Connor the person who described it best was mystic, author, and powder skiing legend Dolores LaChappelle. 鈥淒id you just hear what you said,鈥� he asked me. 鈥淵ou said something I take issue with.鈥� To describe LaChappelle, I used the word 鈥減ioneering.鈥� I hadn鈥檛 even realized it. My intention was not to cause any harm, but I had. And I immediately thought, No, no, no. You鈥檙e my friend. I鈥檓 on your side. I鈥檓 a good guy. I felt like I needed to defend myself. But Connor pointed out that we must accept when we鈥檙e wrong to be a good guy, for skiing to be more inviting and inclusive.

What is more important to us: the words we use to describe skiing or skiing itself? I think it鈥檚 fair to assume that skiing would still be a joy-filled event if skiers everywhere went mute tomorrow. If the community we love is built upon that joy, then considering how our language reflects our shared respect and love for the mountains is a small but worthy endeavor. No one鈥檚 getting canceled, the woke police鈥攚hatever that is鈥� isn鈥檛 going to confiscate your boots and skis, and no one鈥檚 ski membership is being revoked. Being wrong is uncomfortable, but that鈥檚 all it is. If we get called on something, we are not at risk of losing anything. We only stand to gain understanding.

鈥淚 want you to know how I feel when you say this or that,鈥� Connor says. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 just bring it up with the outcome in mind of like, I want you to be different. I want you to know why I鈥檓 different, and to decide if that鈥檚 a reason worth changing something small about yourself.鈥�

The post Skiing Isn鈥檛 About 鈥淐onquering鈥� the Mountains鈥擨t鈥檚 Time to Change the Language appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

Bigger is always better, isn鈥檛 it? Why eat one donut when you can have a box? Burgers taste better with an extra patty on top. A 10K trail race doesn鈥檛 come close to the adventure of a double-stuffed ultramarathon. One hundred days of skiing are far more smile-inducing than a handful. But none of this rings true for the father of microadventures: writer, lecturer, and professional adventurer Alastair Humphreys.

Humphreys defines a microadventure as 鈥渁 shorter, simpler, cheaper, more local, more accessible version of what you deem to be an adventure. It鈥檚 something that you can squeeze in around the margins of real life.鈥�

Before coining the term and starting the bite-sized adventure movement in 2011, Humphreys accomplished many out-of-this-world physical feats. He first gained notoriety in the adventure community in 2005 when he completed a four-year, 46,000-mile bike ride around the world. He also rowed across the Atlantic Ocean, walked across India, ran 150 miles in the heat of the Sahara Desert, and pack rafted Iceland.

Each time Humpreys returned home to Britain from one of his super-sized adventures, he鈥檇 do what nearly all professional adventurers do: write articles about the trip, then a book, then go on a speaking tour. In his estimation, he was paid to push himself to the limit, have fun, and chat about it. And he loved it. But as he repeated this formula over a decade, Humphreys noticed an alarming pattern during his lectures.

鈥淲hat struck me was that I was regularly talking to audiences of hundreds of people who really liked hearing about stories of adventure,鈥� Humphreys recalls. 鈥淏ut those hundreds of people weren鈥檛 going off and having adventures themselves.鈥� Humphreys figured there was one main reason folks stopped before they鈥檇 even started: the unofficial but not-unspoken grading system of the outdoors, in which we deem certain adventures worthy because of their epic-ness or unworthy in their lack thereof.

To destroy that barrier and help democratize adventure, Humphreys kicked off his microadventure movement. Over the last 12聽years he鈥檚 been advocating for the value of small jaunts: a jump in the river, a run around the neighborhood, camping in your backyard. Since then, microadventuring has become Humphreys鈥檚 way of life. We asked him to reminisce about his all-time personal favorites. Here鈥檚 what he said:

Walking Around the M25 In a Week 聽(The One That Started It All)

The M25 is a circle around London and it鈥檚 120 miles. And it鈥檚 famous in Britain for being a road that everyone hates. It鈥檚 just synonymous with traffic jams and just dreary commuter life.

But聽it took me to places I鈥檇 never been before. I found some pockets of wildness and beauty amongst all these boring commuter towns. There鈥檚 some fields, there鈥檚 some small little woodlands, there鈥檚 tiny little streams. The snow was on the ground, so you could see there鈥檇 been rabbit footprints running through it.

And that was a really big moment for me in thinking, actually, this isn鈥檛 worse than an adventure at all. A microadventure isn鈥檛 worse. It鈥檚 just different. It鈥檚 like having an espresso. It鈥檚 just a short shot of adventure.

Cooking in the Woods with a Friend

We went just for an overnight, carrying a steel cauldron that must鈥檝e weighed 30 pounds. It was absolutely ridiculous. We had sacks of fresh vegetables and a bottle of red wine and cooked all that stuff in the woods.

If you like microadventures just eating cereal bars, then go for it. But if you want to take a huge cauldron and cook a feast, then that鈥檚 cool too. It鈥檚 a broad church. And I have to say that was considerably more fun than sleeping for the night in a freezing cold tent on an ice cap in Greenland.

Camping in Austin, Texas

I just drove literally following my nose until I got to some fields, found a bridge over a little creek, parked the car, went down to the little creek, and set up my bivvy bag for the night. Then I started to hear country music. Paddling down the river towards me was a bunch of Texan people who鈥檇 been out fishing and were incredibly drunk. They were just amazed when they found this English gentleman planning to sleep on their riverbank.

(Note: the Texans split a bottle of whiskey and a sack of burgers with Humphreys and they talked all night.)

Welsh Inner Tubing

I was in Wales with a bunch of friends and we went to a tractor shop, a place where they sell the huge wheels for tractors. We bought the inner tubes, which are massive. They thought we were a bunch of complete weirdos. We got four tractor inner tubes and we just drifted down a river on these inner tubes and then camped for the evening on the riverbank. The inner tubes transformed into luxurious armchairs for the night.

Scheduled Nights Outdoors

What I鈥檝e found really helpful is to schedule adventure. One way I started doing that was by putting into my diary the first Wednesday of every month, go climb a tree. I did it for three years.

When your nine-to-five working day finishes, then begins the five-to-nine overnight microadventure time and seeing the five-to-nine as an adventure opportunity. What I鈥檝e really enjoyed is just getting into the habit of regularly sleeping on a hill for a night.

We did a year of go have a coffee outdoors once a month in different places. Go for a swim, then have a coffee. Go for a bike ride, then have a coffee. The point being, it doesn鈥檛 matter what you do. You just need to find a way within the framework of your own life to get out regularly, do a bit of exercise, and get out into nature.

The Next Big Little Thing

I bought the map for where I live. You would feel you know your local area quite well, but I decided to really try and get to know it. So once a week, for a year, I went out to explore one single grid square.

I try to walk it or cycle every footpath, every street in that area, go through every wood, and just try and learn everything I could about that one grid square. When I first had this idea, I thought I鈥檇 get quite bored and just wish that I was going to the Himalayas instead, because that sounds much more exciting.

But I soon realized that there was so much on this one small map that I live on that I鈥檇 never seen before in my life. And after a whole year of it, I鈥檇 been to 52 grid squares, but there are 400 on the map, which means I still need to go for another seven聽years before I鈥檝e ever even been to everywhere on my map.

As a young guy, I spent ten years of my life believing that the only place I could have adventure was by going to the very farthest end of the world.

And yet, right here, under my nose, is all sorts of nature and discovery that is just full of wonder.

Humphreys is writing a book about his year devoted to exploring the map of his home. Local will be published at the end of 2023.

The post The Microadventure-Filled Life of Alastair Humphreys appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

Courtney Wilson-Kwok told her story to producer Paddy O鈥機onnell for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Search and rescue actually has become my biggest passion. It’s something that if I were to win the lottery, it’s what I would do every day. You’re helping people, you’re outdoors, and you’re constantly learning.

Just when you think you know enough about something, someone throws you a curveball where you have to be innovative and you have to think outside of the box.

I have a couple of nicknames. Court, Wilson, C-Dubs. Someone called me Javelin at one point when I was working at a sports camp, because I was a javelin thrower in high school, and the kids at the sports camp thought that was hilarious. 鈥淵ou step out of line, I’m gonna throw you across the field.鈥�

I live in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. As my regular day job, I’m a registered kinesiologist at the Ottawa Hospital where I do brain injury rehab, helping people with brain injuries get back to their day jobs.

I’m part of Sauvetage B茅n茅vole Outaouais鈥擮ttawa Volunteer Search and Rescue. You can call the team SBO-OVSAR for short. We are a volunteer search and rescue team that spans the provinces of Eastern Ontario and Western Qu茅bec. So we cover 58,000 square kilometers to help find missing and overdue people who have gone out into the bush. I love being outdoors, and being a member of the search and rescue team.

A search that we were on that really exemplified the work that this team does occurred in the summer of 2020. Late one night, we got a message through dispatch, and all we were told at that point was we’ve been dispatched for a search. Please show up at these coordinates with all of your gear. Bring a lot of water, it’s gonna be hot. I showed up early that morning ready to go. We went through our briefing and we were informed that we were gonna be searching for an elderly individual who had dementia who had wandered away from home the night before. Their family had reported them missing.

There was definitely a sense of responsibility when you see the family out there and they’ve got so much hope. You could tell there was a mixture of emotion. There was concern, there was stress. You almost saw a sense of relief seeing how many members had shown up in addition to all the police officers on scene, saying, OK, there are a lot of people here, they’ll find him. And that’s kind of what we held onto through the day.

It was about 86 degrees. It was a hot day. And we get told, 鈥淟ighten your packs.鈥� It’s gonna be some very dense bush and we think, We’ll be fine, we train in this stuff all the time. What I didn’t know is this area was filled with what we call prickly ash, and it’s this invasive shrub or small tree. They have these large thorns and it creates this massive thicket. If you’ve ever read Harry Potter, it’s like being stuck in this devil’s snare where the more you struggle, the more it wraps itself around you, and the worse it gets.

So we finally get out there, we get deployed. Your job, with your GPS and your compass, and team members on either side of you, is you form this line. Because of how big this area was, the officers elected to have a much longer line鈥�10, 11 people. I believe we were spaced three to five meters apart. So you’re going in a straight line and whatever’s in front of you, you got to go through it, unless it’s a massive tree. You’re bush whacking.

There was a lot of checking back and forth. 鈥淗ey, can you clear around this rock? Can you check under this log? Because I can’t see.鈥� And that’s how you’re walking through this line, minding the person on either side and making sure that there is no stone left unturned.

We’re not just looking for the person, but we’re looking for clues. Anything to give us an idea of the direction they might be going in so that we can refine our search area. That could be keys, that could be clothing. It could be a cell phone, a wallet, a hat, a new water bottle, or a new granola bar wrapper. Something to suggest that somebody has been through here recently. We know with that kind of an area, people were not likely to go through there, so it would help to reassure us that we were on the right track. And we weren’t getting a whole lot of that.

The longer you go through the search, the more you start to think about what we call 鈥渓ost person behavior.鈥� Lost person behavior is something that our team uses to try and figure out where we need to start looking for people and what kind of areas they would be in. For someone with dementia, if you find them within less than 24 hours, there’s a 95 percent survival rate. Once it goes past that 24 hours, that survival rate drops to 77 percent, and so on and so forth. So we’re going on 24 hours here already, and you’re just praying that it’s not gonna be another day.

The longer the day goes on, the more stress starts to pile up. There are a lot of thoughts that are racing through my head. You start to question everything. Is it gonna go into an overnight search? Is it gonna go into a search the next day? Did I miss something? Is there something we should have been doing differently? How far into the bush did this person get, if they got there at all? Are we in the right area? I was definitely a little worried that we weren’t gonna find this person.

So we’re back in the bush, struggling through this prickly ash, we look like we’ve been on the losing end of a cat fight. People literally crawling on their elbows and knees through this bush. Looking at how hard the rest of your teammates are working, it motivates you to keep pushing forward. There was no sense of quitting. With this team though, you look at everyone, everyone’s gassed, exhausted, covered in sweat. It’s swampy, it’s soaking wet. Our boots are wet. And the further you get into this, the more worried you start to get.

At no point did we think we were gonna turn back. This team was gonna power through. We get to a point where someone stops the line. Everyone stays quiet. And then a whisper slowly starts to come down the line from one person to the next. And the whispers are that we found them.

My heart was pounding. I could hear it. I’m trying to control my breathing. Trying to be calm, to be collected. If they need me in there, then I’m ready to provide those skills and be there.

But I’m also worried. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what the injuries are, if there are injuries. I didn’t know whether they were alive or not. It is maybe a number of seconds before we get that second update, but it feels like an eternity.

Finally the word spread down the line that the subject is alive and that we were getting ready to extract them, help get them out of the bush. And that is the biggest sigh of relief you could ever imagine. You start to swell up with tears a little bit, you want to jump up and down. You want to scream.

There were a lot of hugs while we waited to be told what they wanted us to do next. And you just sort of reflect on all of this work has finally become a success for you and this team. It’s just the best feeling in the world. And you know that this is why you do this. There is this quiet pride that you have, knowing that you helped bring someone home the other night, especially knowing that this is a full nonprofit organization. Nobody on this team gets paid. And it’s one of the reasons that this team is so close. You work so hard, and you have these huge victories, and it really is a cool thing to be part of.

I think one thing that was important about this search for me personally is that it reminds you to trust yourself. But even more importantly, you have to trust your team. I trust that the people around me know exactly what they’re doing, and they’re working just as hard, and everyone’s in this together, and that’s huge. The camaraderie with this team is amazing, and it’s a group of people who challenge me and inspire me every day. And so it reminds you when you go through this kind of an experience and you have the outcome that we’ve always hoped for, and we’ve trained for that, you just want to keep doing it. I want to do it every day. I want to be out there with this team.

If there was a time machine 20 years ahead, I’ll still be with this team. I’ll be with them forever.

I freaking love this team.

Courtney Wilson Kwok is a member of the Ottawa Volunteer Search and Rescue Team, a winner of the 2022 Defender Service Award, established by Land Rover. These awards recognize the nonprofits doing selfless service for their communities every day. You can learn more about Ottawa Volunteer Search and Rescue at .

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Eeland Stribling told his story to producer Paddy O鈥機onnell for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I think the reason I was put on this planet is to make people laugh, to make people feel good. I don’t even say I’m a standup comedian鈥 do standup comedy. I don’t think that selfishly of like, Oh, I’m a great comedian, I’m a great whatever.

But, when I’m working with kids, I just get to be silly. I get to be myself.

Sometimes the kids I work with, they call me Mr. E or Mr. Strib. I am from Denver, Colorado, and I live in Denver, Colorado.
I don’t know if I do anything professionally. I think I do everything semi-pro. I work with a nonprofit that works in a couple of different schools. I’m an outdoor instructor, environmental educator.

I like going fishing, but I love going fishing for the purpose of a nap. If it’s kind of cool, and the sun’s just hitting the side of the bank, and there’s a warm spot, just the sound of the water. Or sometimes I’ll sleep with my feet in the water. I love a good nap.

I am also a standup comedian. I like to laugh and I like to be around stuff that’s just funny. I’m a bit facetious鈥攅verything, I think can be joked about. So I sort of move throughout the world, even talking to myself, saying stuff to myself that makes me laugh.

Every time I’m on stage I’m like, This is where I’m supposed to be.

I have a joke. I wrote it earlier this year, and it just goes, 鈥淚 think we need more diversity in the NBA. I would love to see an all white NBA team. We could call them the January Sixers.鈥� And that’s the whole joke. Sometimes it takes people a second to get it, but I’ve done it in conservative rooms and liberal rooms, and everyone, everyone loves it.

The same techniques that I use in a comedy club I use with students. Getting people engaged, making sure they’re listening, making sure they understand what’s going on. You get good at reading faces of people being confused, people being like, What the hell is he talking about? Whether that’s a kid who you’re trying to teach about boreal toads, or you’re trying to do a joke, you can learn, Oh, I should explain this part a little more.

With comedy, I’m like, 鈥淕o feel something with these jokes.鈥� Hopefully it’s positive, hopefully it’s laughter. And then with my students, it’s more like, 鈥淲e learned about this or we did this. Now go do it on your own. Go explore it on your own.鈥�
Last summer I took these students who were in foster care, and we all went fly fishing. None of the kids had been fly fishing before. One of the students really, really took a liking to it and was really, really enjoying it more than other kids.

He won a fly rod at the end of the day, and we were like, 鈥淗ey, don’t lose it. If you can use it, we’ll see you next time. We’ll love to have you bring out your rod.鈥� Then he came back the following spring this year, and he was so stoked to be there to fly fish.

We’re fishing at a private lake that we have access to so the kids can actually catch fish. He brings his own rod, and he’s super excited. He is like, 鈥淚 went once in between last time I saw you guys and I’m really excited to be here.鈥�

This is his third time fishing. He set up his own rod. He needed help threading the line through the guides, but he set up his own rod. As we’re doing the casting stuff for the other kids, he’s casting, and he caught one or two small bluegill.

Then another kid was struggling to cast. It just doesn’t look good, because these kids are in middle school, and it’s not going well. This young man sits down his rod from catching fish, walks over and is helping this kid cast the same way that we taught the whole class how to cast.

Watching this kid say, 鈥淚 love fly fishing,鈥� and then put it down and go help someone else who was at the same age, there was something about it that’s fucking dope. I wish I had a better vocabulary, but something about it just made me feel good.

Watching the kid the rest of the day, I was in full admiration of what being outside can do, what community looks like, what fly fishing instructing looks like.

I was jealous of how cool that was. Of course I help people fish, but sometimes I’m like, Ah, they’ll be okay, I’ll just fish for 20 minutes by myself and try to catch a fish or whatever. But when I’m with my students, I try to offer up the best version of myself, the version that’s honest, that’s, humble, that tries to make sure everyone feels welcome. I like to think that that rubbed off on that young man and he was like, Oh, I can share a part of myself and I can share this thing that I learned. I was more in the amazement of, That guy is gonna be like a great person. That kid almost taught me how to fish with other people better. And if that’s what the future of fly fishing looks like, that’s pretty special.

I just want people to feel like they can have a community in fly fishing, no matter what they look like or feel like or come from. Just making sure people feel welcome.

I love this quote, 鈥淚’m not the first, but I’m the catalyst.鈥� So it’s like, maybe no one will ever remember my name or know my name, but I gave them the best version of myself and they went and made it ten times better. They made themselves ten times better. They made other peoples鈥� lives ten times better.

Offer up the best version of yourself. And it’s not always gonna go well, sometimes people are gonna boo you, but that’s just because they’re all drunk on a Thursday night.

Not the kids. Just the comedy club. The kids are not drinking on Thursday night under my supervision.

Eeland Stribling is a wildlife educator, biologist, fly fisher, and very funny standup comedian. If you like to laugh, you should find a comedy club he’s telling jokes at by following him on Instagram .

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James Edward Mills told his story to producer Paddy O鈥機onnell for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

This is the first time that I’m doing this, with Black men on a trip led by Black men with the intention of telling the story of us as Black men. It was clear to me how unique an experience this was.

I live in Madison, Wisconsin, which is the ancestral homeland of the Ho-Chunk people near the University of Wisconsin鈥揗adison campus. I grew up in Los Angeles, California, in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains between Venice Beach and what is commonly called South Central Los Angeles.

I am a professional storyteller. So, I’m a journalist, a writer, photographer, a reluctant filmmaker.

I come to the world with a profound sense of optimism because as a storyteller, one of the things that I really enjoy doing is changing the ending. Something that my father once said a long time ago that I will take to my grave is, 鈥淭hings in life will work out as long as you insist that they do.鈥� So if I don’t like the outcome, I try to create a different one.

Halfway through my career, one of the things that I realized was that there were people in our community who looked like me that didn’t seem to have the same opportunities, and they also didn’t seem to have my same sense of optimism. My biggest passion, I think, comes from my desire to provide that sense of optimism that they too could have many of the same experiences that I’ve had in the outdoors, and hopefully creating an environment where there are more people who would ultimately advocate for the outdoors.

I was attending a conference in Old Fort, North Carolina about two years ago, called Outdoors for All. And it just happened that this little town was on one of the many trout streams in North Carolina, and I brought my waders and fly gear fully intending to fish. But what I didn’t realize was that there were five other Black dudes that were interested in fishing as well. And for the very first time in my personal and professional life, I’m on a trout stream with five other men of color, casting a fly rod.

I thought, God, wouldn’t it be cool if the five of us could get together and we can take one of these trips together and we can talk about our experiences as fly fishermen, and as Black men.

So, after we had this amazing experience in North Carolina, the five of us put together this little film project that we ultimately called Blackwaters. We just happened to be able to put the five of us on the Kobuk River in Alaska, in Gates of the Arctic National Park, to fish for northern pike in Grayling.

It’s Alaska in the summertime. So we are literally in the time of the midnight sun. The sun does not go down, so it never gets dark. It’s warm, the sky is completely blue. There’s an incredible amount of greenery in the background. We’re seeing grizzly bear tracks impressed in the sand.

I’m not seeing any fish anywhere, but I’m certain that they’re down there because people told me that they are there. I just have to figure out what I need to do in order to catch them. My good friend Nick Brooks, had never been fishing on this big of a river. He’s the kind of guy that needs to have a successful experience on this trip.

We get to a spot along the river that is shallow, but it’s moving really fast. All of a sudden, there’s this big flash of movement, and a fish bit on something. I had no idea what it was, but I was sure that it wasn’t an insect. And I’m thinking, Oh, there’s probably something like a minnow or some type of smaller fish that they’re biting on.

So I changed up the combination going from a fly to what’s commonly known as a streamer, and within two casts, I landed this fish, and I’m not kidding you, it was the biggest fish I’ve ever caught in my entire life. It was as long as my arm.

I said, 鈥淣ick here, this is what I used. You should try it.鈥� He hadn’t caught a single fish the entire time we were there. And in the same spot where I caught this fish with a little bit of information, I was able to give him the resources that he needed to be able to land a fish.

And the next thing you know, everybody in our group is landing these huge Northern Pikes.

This is the first time that I’ve had this experience exclusively with Black men. I really took that to heart. Once the color barrier is broken, so to speak, it should indeed be the rule that everyone can have these kinds of positive experiences in the outdoors. It should be that simple. I think at this moment, for the first time, I think I actually believed that it would be possible, because it was happening to us.

The rule should be that everyone has access to experiences like this. That you don’t necessarily need to have some exceptional person to break the color barrier and go out there and have this amazing experience that will inspire a generation to do similar things.

For the purposes of this film project, one of the things that I really want us to do is to be able to demonstrate our experience, but also encourage people to have similar experiences of their own so that one day they will be so commonplace that we don’t even bother talking about them anymore. That there is indeed an expectation that things like this happen all the time, because we insist that they do.

I think more than anything else I’ve learned that we can decide to be the heroes of our own stories or the victims of our circumstance. And personally, I would much rather be the hero of a story that I’m gonna write. I want to be the hero of a story that I’m going to share and encourage other people to have.

James Edward Mills is a freelance journalist who specializes in stories about outdoor recreation, environmental conservation, and sustainable living. You can follow his adventures and his work on Instagram t. His film Blackwaters will premiere in August. Find screening dates at .

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Shelby Stanger told her story to producer Paddy O’Connell for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

It’s about day four of this surf trip, standup paddle surfing these remote waves off of Indonesia. And I could have played the journalist card, but eventually I had to get out of the boat and actually ride some waves, and I was terrified. I decided to drop in on this one wave, and I really believe one wave can totally change your life. It did for me.

There’s definitely nicknames: Shelby Stranger, Stanger Mouse. But people don’t use that a lot anymore. Shelby Stanger is a pretty rare wild name itself, so that’s usually what I go by.

I grew up in Cardiff by the Sea, California on the beach, and I live one town over in Solana Beach.

I am a podcaster, a storyteller, a people talker. I love people. I’m the author of a new book, Will to Wild: 国产吃瓜黑料s Great and Small to Change Your Life. I’m a surfer. I鈥檓 passionate about helping people improve their lives using nature and adventure. I’m a lover of harmless, debaucherous, joyful, fun.聽 Someone drew a sand wiener on the beach the other day and I was running and I saw it and it just made me laugh out loud. So I partake in sometimes drawing an occasional sand wiener on the beach, too.

It was 2009. I just quit my lucrative, stable job at Vans to become a freelance journalist, which was definitely not a guarantee. I found myself on a surf trip in the middle of the Indian Ocean with some of the top watermen in the world, surfing these waves that were way out of my league.

I’d never ridden waves like that in my life. These waves broke over sharp coral reefs, with fish below that could rival any aquarium. I was used to surfing on waves that were kind of soft and broke on sand, so the consequences were pretty low if I fell. And I had a lot to prove, not just to these guys, but mostly to myself.

Here I was flailing, trying to keep up with them in these waves where I kept trying to surf and I’d fall. My board was too small, I’d get held underwater, and I was scared.

There was this guy on the trip named Brian Keaulana. He happens to be one of the lead stunt men on all the movies filmed in Hawaii. He’s this legendary lifeguard, he’s literally linked to Hawaiian royalty.

All of a sudden, Brian and I are the only ones out in the ocean. And we’re at this place called Muts, which in Australian slang translates to vagina. It was called Muts because it forms a barrel and there’s a hole inside, and whoever named it was disgusting. But despite its sexist name, it was a beautiful left, and I’m a goofy foot. So I was in the right spot with the right guy.

A wave starts coming towards us and it’s shaped almost like a triangle, this thing had a big point. And he looks at the wave, he looks at me, he looks back in the wave and he says, 鈥淪helby, you gonna go?鈥�

And I wanted to go. I mean, I definitely wanted to go, but I was terrified. Falling could mean wrecking the surfboard I just borrowed, wrecking my face, or making a total fool of myself, but I just was like, OK, when Brian Keaulana asked you, 鈥淎re you gonna go,鈥� it really means you better go, or you鈥檙e gonna be sorry.

So I turned my board around. I pointed it towards where I needed to go. There was no beach. It was just a reef break in the middle of nowhere. And I paddled my little heart out.

The wave picked me up, picked my board up. Somehow I got to my feet and I started zooming at what felt like lightning speed. My fins made an actual hissing sound. I was going so fast. It was sort of like riding a skateboard down a steep hill, and it started wobbling, and I was like, Oh, great. But I kept saying, make it, make it, make it.

I was pretty sure I was gonna fall, but I just had faith, I was like, I’m gonna make it, make it, make it, make it.

Then this wave started to get really steep. So steep that it threw its lip over my head.

I was in the barrel for what felt like forever, but was probably in reality a fraction of a second, and I would normally close my eyes because it’s kind of like going down a really steep roller coaster. It’s really scary. And you know, sometimes you just close your eyes in those scary moments. But I’m so glad I had them open because all I saw was crystal clear water all around me.

It was just an incredible feeling. I’ve never seen anything like that, haven’t since, and my cells just felt electrified.

Now, after the wave ended, I was like, Man, the only thing that would’ve been even cooler is if someone had been there to actually capture this wave. All of a sudden a hand rises out of the water with a camera housing, and the photographer for the trip just happened to be in the channel right then. Caught it all on film, and you can see me in this photo. I have the worst style. I’m in poo stance, my butt is sticking out into the air. I’m bent over. It’s not what a cool surfer looks like. Most surfers see that wave and they’re like, 鈥淵ou weren’t really barreled.鈥� I’m like, 鈥淲hatever.鈥�

Everybody knows there’s something magical about water hitting water. It’s why we go to waterfalls. It’s why we go to rivers. It’s why we go watch waves break. Scientists have tried to explain why there’s some theory about negative ions, but I couldn’t really dig up any research that officially proves it.

But I would later interview an older surfer named Mickey Munoz. He’s this old, legendary surfer, and he said he once caught a wave so good in Indonesia, he came out the other side 10 years younger. He says the wave literally changed his cells, and I got what he meant finally at that moment. I feel like sometimes we do an adventure and it gives us so much courage, so much stoke, so much thrill, so much beauty, so much awe, that we’re changed.

And that wave in some ways really changed me because it gave me courage. I dropped in on a wave that absolutely terrified me. It was so thrilling. And when you do a big adventure, you have that moment forever for the rest of your life, and it’ll carry you.

I had been really stuck and scared to quit a job that was perfect on paper and at the height of the recession everybody told me I was so lucky for having. It was the envy of many friends. I had made a lot of pro-con lists about quitting my job to become an adventure journalist, and it never added up on paper. Being an adventure journalist is a really dumb idea, and everybody told me that, but I wanted to do it. I wanted to try it. I wanted to tell stories.

I knew I needed to change my situation. I was just scared.

And so I think that what it taught me was that some things in life aren’t gonna make sense on paper, and that sometimes you can’t make a decision using a pro-con list. It doesn’t always add up. Just like sometimes you’re gonna drop into a wave that you think you’re not gonna make, and you end up making it.

I could have just stayed on the boat where the only thing that was sure is that I would end up seasick or sunburned. But dropping in, sure, I might’ve gotten worked, I might not have made the wave, I might’ve fallen, I might’ve hit my head, I might’ve damaged the surfboard. But I ended up catching the ride of my life.

So, go. You have nothing to lose.

It’s always better to at least try than to be stuck in fear and not go. And then once we do that out in the wild, we can take that to the rest of our everyday life. It’s gonna be a lot of work, but go for it anyway.

Shelby Stanger is an adventure journalist and creator of the podcast. Shelby has surfed all over the world and her new book is out now.

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Conor Hall told his story to producer Paddy O鈥機onnell for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I was a college athlete. I was in great shape. A little swollen lymph node on my neck. I’d gone in to have them take a look at that, not really thinking it was anything at all. I was told I had big tumors in my chest between my heart and my lungs up through my neck. And I really thought that I was gonna die.

My full name is Conor Hall. In terms of nicknames, the most prominent one is probably El Presidente, or Prez for short. I currently live in Denver, Colorado, but I grew up in Crestone, Colorado, which is one of the, and I say this fondly, but probably one of the weirder mountain towns out there. I think it’s impossible to grow up in Crestone Colorado and not come out with some endearingly weird tendencies.

I’m a horrible singer, but I love karaoke. It gets the people going.

I’m a complete political nerd; I’ve spent a long time working in Colorado politics to promote causes that I believe in and care about. I serve as Colorado’s director of the Outdoor Recreation Industry Office. So I do a lot of economic development work, a lot of stewardship, conservation work, a lot of education, workforce development work, and a lot of work around public health and more equitable access to the outdoors. I honestly think I have the best job in government.

I also love, maybe not surprisingly, to do just about anything outside. Hiking, camping, snowboarding, kayaking, SUP-ing, anything that gets me out. The through line in those passions really come back to community.

There was this running joke in my middle school, high school, and college friends that I was invincible. There were just a very high amount of these very close calls with death or extreme injury that I kept walking away from. Falling off a cliff, being missed by a giant rock in a climbing mishap. I had to do an unplanned emergency unassisted landing in cow pasture in a skydiving mishap. I’d been in a horrendous mountain biking wreck. I rolled a car multiple times, dodging a deer. Every single time I walked away completely fine. That just really starts to permeate into your mentality. That’s really how I, for better or for worse, looked at myself. So to get this diagnosis鈥his was a whole different thing.

It was the last day of my sophomore year in college at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. I had been taking like ten credits over the credit limit, was burning the midnight oil, so I had gotten pretty sick. I just thought it was a bad cold. I went down to the little health services center. I’d got something for my cold, a decongestant. I was walking out and I had this little swollen lymph node on my neck and I was like, 鈥淗ey, should I be concerned at all about this?鈥� They’re like, 鈥淣o, probably not, but we’ll get a scan just in case.鈥�

So I went down to the local hospital and got a scan. Then things started to get weird. Noone would tell me the results. They took me back to the school, and there was a lot of whispering. They asked if I could bring in my twin brother, who went to school with me there, for the news. And they got my mom on the phone. And that’s when I knew this was something that was probably pretty bad.

The CT scan had revealed two major tumors in my chest, wrapped between my heart and my lungs, 11 or 12 centimeters. And then tumors all up through my neck and my lymph nodes. Basically spells out that I have Hodgkin鈥檚 lymphoma, stage two bulky.

Everyone was crying. I think I was the only one who wasn’t crying. I immediately went into that mode of trying to comfort everyone and tell everyone that it was gonna be fine, when in reality I did not think it was gonna be fine.

It wasn’t until probably an hour later when I was finally alone just sitting on my dorm bed, where it all started to hit me, and I just completely broke down. Just feeling these feelings of pity and fear and anger all wash over me. It was just such a scary thing. My immediate connotation with the word cancer was death.

I had to focus on the treatment full-time. So that’s what I did. I’d go in to do my chemotherapy treatment every two weeks. I was in there for five hours where they just pump all of these chemicals into you. And it is an awful experience. There’s no way to sugarcoat that.

I couldn’t go to school that next semester, and so I came up with this whole plan to stay mentally sharp. I taught myself economics and stock trading. I was learning Spanish, and came up with 50 books to read. And then, to try to stay physically sharp too, after every session, I would go play sand volleyball with all my friends. We’d do three, four hours of hard, intense, sand volleyball, and sometimes I had to push a little bit to make that happen. But there was something so important to me to physically get out there with those guys, but also just mentally, emotionally, to know that I could still do that.

It was tough and awful and scary, but I certainly felt that it was important to maintain that positive attitude, just finding ways to live beyond that diagnosis.

A couple months after I finished treatment, I went on a First Descents program. This nonprofit that helps young people battling cancer, who’ve survived cancer, heal through adventure; through kayaking and rock climbing and surfing.

I was like, Well, I don’t need a support group, but I’ll go do a free adventure for a week anytime. You don’t have to twist my arm. I went surfing in North Carolina, and I met these 12 other young people from all around the country, all different walks of life, all different types of cancer, and we spent this amazing week together.

There’s something so incredibly re-empowering about riding your first wave, or cresting a rock wall, or running your first rapid after months, sometimes years of this body-breaking, mind-melting treatment. Just that you can still do some of these things, that you’re still powerful.

But the most important thing was the community that was built there. It turns out I actually did need a support group. Especially at a young age, facing your own mortality like that, the highs and the lows and the loneliness. These people all intimately understood that, and had battled with that. And that comes out as you’re waiting to catch a wave or you’re sitting around the campfire. It is truly healing through nature and healing through adventure.

And so I just saw and deeply experienced firsthand the effect of community and the power of it. You can be vulnerable, and there’s a lot of power and good in that. It’s a really natural way for any young person to build community and to get that kind of re-empowerment.

I left that trip and I said, I’m gonna do anything I can to help this organization, and to make sure that any person in my shoes, anyone battling cancer, who has survived cancer, has access to this type of healing and this type of community. So that’s what I’ve done for the past 10, 11 years now.

I’m really happy to say I just celebrated 11 years in remission. I feel incredibly lucky and incredibly blessed. When I sum it up in a sentence, I always say it was a blessing I would never wish upon anyone else.

I think it amplified those deeply-held values of relationships, of community, of really appreciating and enjoying life. Even if you feel alone in that moment, there are always people there that will support you. Even sometimes complete strangers, because I think people are inherently, deeply good. Every person in this world has some community. Reach out and ask for it.

Conor Hall is the director of the for the state of Colorado. When he’s not improving access to the outdoors or enjoying it himself, you can find him trying to sing 鈥淒on’t Stop Believing鈥� at a karaoke bar. Learn about the incredible work First Descents does by visiting .

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Vasu Sojitra told his story to producer Paddy O鈥機onnell for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Telling my parents that I’m gonna be a professional skier was fairly far-fetched. I come from a South Asian background, Indian-American. There’s not many professional skiers that come from India. It鈥檚 definitely breaking the mold of what folks that look like me typically do. It was a massive shift in my trajectory as a human in society.

My name is Vasu Sojitra. Some people call me Voss for short 鈥� don’t wanna say the 鈥渟u鈥� part, I don’t know. I identify as a disabled person. I have one leg, and I also am South Asian, so I have multiple identities. I grew up in Connecticut and also partly in India.

I fell in love with skiing when I was around ten, so I started going up to Vermont a lot, a little later in my teens. I went to school there at the University of Vermont.

I feel like one of the bigger challenges is trying to figure out what we want to do with our lives, and that was definitely something I was trying to figure out in my late teens, early twenties. I was in engineering for my college career. I needed to get out of that school as quickly as possible. Because I realized I do not like structure as much as I thought I did. But I did pretty well as an engineer. So I was like, OK, cool. I’m good at something, but do I like it? Maybe, maybe not.

What I did enjoy was experiencing the outdoors with my friends. I was kind of an arrogant teenager, just like, Oh, I’m a good enough skier. I don’t need to do anything here. This is fine. And then I was introduced to Vermont Adaptive. I was 21 years old at the time, and it was a pretty sunny day and we were on a ski lesson on a green circle, a typical trail that many people take to just go back to the lodge. I was on this lesson with another volunteer who was physically tethering this other individual, just so the participant would stay in control.

I was skiing next to him next to the edge of the ski run. So the trees were on the other side. I was trying to make sure he looked up and was trying to initiate some sort of turning. But at the end of the day, we were just mostly trying to have fun. The skier had a cognitive disability, and from what I can remember, I believe he was non-verbal, but he was just screaming and hooting and hollering and just having a day. And I think mostly it was based on the speed at which he was going and the wind in his face. We were all happy and joyous and making each other laugh and whatnot. And he was just having the time of his life jumping up and down and just hooting and hollering.

That’s when I stopped talking and just started observing. And I was just like, This is what it’s about. This is really cool. It really doesn’t matter what you look like, where you come from, who you are, or what your background is. This is what true joy is.

That was the moment I was like, Hell yeah. This is where I want to go, and these are the experiences that I want to help cultivate and create.

During the summer of 2014, a few of us decided we wanted to move out west and Montana was our choice. I decided that I wanted to work in the adaptive sports industry, and got my way into working at the local one here in Bozeman.

I was pretty persistent in building relationships with the program directors there and connecting with them and asking about job opportunities, internships, you name it. Just putting myself out there as much as possible, which might have come off as very, very persistent or annoying to some, who knows. I moved from the assistant program coordinator to the assistant director, to the director of the adaptive sports program.

That just filled my bucket and fueled everything that I was trying to do. I moved out of that program during COVID-19. I started realizing on-the-ground work like the stuff I was doing was really amazing and really impactful, but it wasn’t going to create the systemic change that I’m hoping for, providing better access to the outdoors to folks with disabilities or better educational standards, or just providing that representation and cultural relevancy to an industry that seems like it definitely needs it. I started really pushing into the behind the scenes work, whether it’s advisory committees, or DEI committees at the North Face or REI, or at other companies to help them shift their cultures.

As an athlete, I’m in front of the lens a lot, utilizing that representation to share the stories that aren’t being told, especially around disability and race. To showcase that we are human and we also like to have fun.

Adaptive sports are so much more than just the activity itself, but just a way to feel empowered, feel emboldened, and be able to express ourselves how we want to, regardless of how society might treat us.

Vasu Sojitra is a professional athlete and disability access strategist. He is a founding member of the , a co-founder of the , and a member of . Find out more at , and follow him on Instagram .

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Quinn Brett told her story to producer Paddy O鈥機onnell for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Right before I took that cam out, I remember saying to myself, I shouldn’t have done that. I fell twice the rope length, and hit the big cliff of El Capitan.

And then at some point I came to consciousness and I said, I can’t feel my legs.

I work for the National Park Service, and I鈥檓 an athlete. I was a professional rock climber, and now I am a disabled athlete. Primarily, hand cycling, water sports, and the Worm. I’m still really good at the Worm.

I spend my time trying to be outside as much as possible. I can move all day, every day, pretty excessively, maybe annoyingly. You spend time outside and then you earn the ice cream or the IPA.聽 In high school I discovered rock climbing and I wanted to learn more about it, and really dove into it. After college, I moved here to Estes Park, Colorado, and met an amazing amount of people who were into rock climbing, and they mentored me upwards into the sport.

The mental aspect is huge. How to overcome fears, how to stay calm. El Capitan is one of the quintessential iconic features of Yosemite National Park. It is a 3000-foot tall cliff, and the Nose is a rock climb in the center. It’s like a little prow feature.

In October 2017, my girlfriends Josie, Libby and I climbed a route on El Capitan in a day, setting a speed record for females. My headspace was a little off. My personal romantic relationship wasn’t doing so hot, and we got news that a good friend, Hayden Kennedy, and his partner had died in an avalanche. It struck all of our hearts, and climbing is something that we also fall back on, perhaps to distract ourselves from hardship, and so we decided we would still go climbing.

I am leading with placing gear, to a feature called the Boot Flake. That’s about 1500 feet up, but maybe 100 feet below the Boot Flake is another feature called the Texas Flake. It鈥檚 a big piece of rock that sticks out separately away from the main cliff of El Capitan. So I was on top of Texas Flake, and set sail on granite slab and clipped all of these bolts. The space between my gear was getting further and further apart. I was maybe 20 or 30 or 40 feet up from that last bolt. I had a cam in the crack, but I took the cam out for some reason, which is unusual for my protocol. I usually have two cams in, and in my rushedness or distracted brain, I took the cam out.

I reached across to my right hip to grab another piece of gear, and at that exact time, my foot or my hands or both slipped out of the rock. I just remember granite whooshing before my eyes as I fell.

I hit that Texas Flake with my back and my shoulder. I was just laying in the rubble, and my climbing partner Josie immediately initiated a rescue. My T-12 vertebrae shattered outwardly and inwardly into my spinal cord. I think I had four or five broken ribs. I had some internal bleeding, a punctured lung. My right scapula looks like a sledgehammer hit it. Fourteen staples in the back of my head. I had a pretty big swelling on the front of my head, like a hematoma. And paralysis, because of the shattered bone pieces in my spinal cord.

I vaguely remember people coming in and out of my ICU room. I was in the ICU for five days before my surgery, and I heard them say I was paralyzed. I remember laying in my bed and pointing at my toes and trying to wiggle them, and obviously nothing responded. It’s just fuckery. You have hope and you’re sad and you don’t get it, and you’re on drugs and you’re overwhelmed and you’re in pain. Of course I was in denial and of course I was mad and sad. I still have a lot of blame for myself, and disappointment and frustration. Where is that time travel machine? If I could only go back for that one second鈥hat the fuck was I doing.

I would rotate through friends, because with the bandwidth for friendships, the amount of listening that I needed, needed to be rotated and spread across different friends. It felt like it was too much if I were to go to one or three of them, I needed 10 of them to listen and console me and be there.

Use your community. You’re not alone as much as we feel like we are at times, because we are in our heads and we feel like nobody’s experienced this trauma or this grief, but somebody out there has. Talk to them. There’s somebody out there who maybe hasn’t experienced the exact same thing, but can share and corroborate on what you’re feeling.

I still struggle with it. I have a lot of shame still, being in public in my wheelchair. I get embarrassed about things like the amount of eyeballs I get when I hand cycle around Lake Estes. Or people being like, 鈥淵ou go girl.鈥� You don’t even know the shit that I was doing before; my heart rate is not even 100 right now. But I clearly still have that internal dialogue, and I talk to myself every day on the hand cycle. I’m like, What good does this do? Is it going to keep me inside? No. Get over yourself. Get outside. What is more important, being sulking inside and sitting on the couch and eating that ice cream, or going to fucking earn the ice cream? Why not try? That’s the human I’ve always been.

After I was injured in 2017, I returned to the National Park Service in a unique role. I’ve been educating on the type of mobility devices out there, opening doors for us to explore and be recreationally more adaptive on our trails in national parks. Also trying to measure our national park trails so we have more specific information, so the user can decide which trail works better for them rather than just being funneled to the one labeled accessible trail in our parks.

I’m gonna be an advocate louder than I can be for people with disabilities recreating in our national parks and in our public lands, and fo spinal cord research. Let’s amp it up, man. We got places to go, things to do.

Quinn Brett is an athlete, writer, public speaker advocate, and National Park Service employee. Her journey is documented in the film An Accidental Life. You can follow her adventures at and on Instagram .

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