Live It Up with Mountain Life

2025 Canadian Geographic Wildlife Photographer of the Year, Maxime Légaré-Vézina is based out of Quebec city and has been shooting photos of wildlife since about 2014, and full time since 2022. Sometimes he sits in the weather all day and waits for the perfect shot, sometimes a grizzly bear charges him. We dig into  all the Max's favourite animals, and what kind of mindframe and work it takes...

Host Feet Banks kicks off season six of Live it Up with Mountain Life by speaking to his favourite snowboarder and medieval sword enthusiast, Jess Kimura. A celebrated badass street rider, Jess is a fearless force of positive change for her sport, founding both The Uninvited video series and The Uninvited Invitational all-women's shred comp. She stops by in person to talk about that, firewood...

Nicholas Thompson is an author and a journalist, a musician, and one of the smartest people we know. But before and beyond that, Nick is a runner.  Marathons, ultramarathons, cross country, ripping around a park with a kid, running to work, rain, fog, sleet, hail. Nick is ready to hit the trail. And he has new book out called The Running Ground: A Father, A Son, and the Simplest of Sports. Host Fe...

Veronica Woodruff is an outdoor recreationalist and an environmental scientist. She's spend more than half her life living in the mountains of BC, and her latest book, Blind Drunk: A Sober Look at Our Boozy Culture examines the unique role alcohol plays, not only in mountain culture and ski town, but in western society at large. A mix of pertinent personal anecdotes and memoir with well-resea...

Taylor Godber is a professional big mountain snowboarder on the North Face team. She’s also a chef, an artist, a writer, a lover of dogs, surfer, adventurer, picnic-er, and a very kind soul.  Taye was the founding editor of Mountain Life: Below Zero our annual winter publication that Covid shut down. Nowadays we see her in the pages of Mountain Life shredding steep, exposed lines on dream trips in...

A true adventurer, Matt is a climber, surfer, paddler, and mad-genius tinkerer/inventor/self-taught engineer who's company Sea to Sky Cable Cam has helped him travel the world to help capture top adventure and nature stories. To mix it up, this month we also have climber/Mountain Lifer Trevor McDonald in the studio joining the conversation to chime in with his own insights and questions. This...

Ben Poechman is a snowboarder and an artist and a true-grit farm kid who finds a way to make things happen with the resources he's got. As summer winds down and we start looking at the pow days to come, Ben chimes in with his story, his ideas, and some good advice on what to do when all you have to ride is a crappy ditch in the middle of the country. Watch Ben in the North Face flick Halation...

Spencer Seabrooke is an airtime master, a highliner, base jumper, a snowboarder, climber, mountaineer, jindle boarder and all-around adventure seeking kinda dude. And he knows a lot about airtime. In 2016 he was featured in the highlining documentary "Untethered" walking a then-world record highline in Squamish BC with no safety tether. He's also known as a co-founder of SlacklifeBC...

Sonnie Trotter is a climber and an author. Raised in Ontario, he started climbing as a teenager and never looked back. Over the past 25+ years Sonnie has pioneered some of the hardest routes in Canada and been on big walls all over the world with other icons of the sport. He's climbed competitively, professionally, and has also spent months on the road travelling and climbing with his wife an...

Stephan Kesting is on the show today. He’s an adventurer and an author (and a jui jitsu master and a firefighter) who recently paddled a canoe over 1600 km through some of the most bug infested terrain in Northern Canada...alone, on a single, transplanted kidney. And it took him 41 days, which is pretty wild considering a whole lot of the journey was paddling upstream. Stephan talks about the risk...

Jody MacDonald has sailed around the world twice but says she got seasick almost every day for ten years. She’s also visited over 100 countries and creates incredible, award winning photographs everywhere she goes. To celebrate International Women's Day, host Feet Banks gets the honour of connecting with Jody as she motorcycles through the Himalaya to discuss ditching the office job, leaning...

Darren Rayner grew up making fun little movies and shred edits with his buddies and, when he was still in college, co-founded Voleurz, a badass, grassroots Canadian clothing company that also made films and generally helped push mountain culture down a more creative path. As time went by, Darren pivoted a bit and founded Magnafire Media, a Vancouver-based creative studio and production facility th...

Happy Holidays! We’re re-gifting this episode. Well, not really. It’s a brand new episode but, for the first time ever, we are having a guest back on the pod for round two.  Frank Wolf is on the show today. It’s the Re-Wolf. Writing his own epitaph on a freezing trip in the Arctic, Frank says, “Frank was a somewhat notable person who wrote some things and made a few strange and mediocre films abou...

Alenka Mali is a big mountain snowboarder, climber, BASE jumper, jindleboarder and general mountain sport badass. Last winter, she produced a film called "The Beginning", which examines her unique mountain-based upbringing in Slovenia and Argentina and her quest to do a snowboard BASE jump in the mountains near her home in Squamish, BC. Instagram: @alenkaamali website: alenkamali.com  

On September 8, 2022 everything went sideways for Charlie Adams . He had a little side hustle working as a tree surgeon. He was working on a tree in Tiny Township. It was the last tree of the day. He was 35 feet up when disaster struck.  “The tree split and broke underneath me,” he recalls. “I rode it to the ground then another piece came down and hit me. So I broke my neck, which wasn’t too serio...

Most anyone who’s paid attention to any ski or bike mags over the past two decades should know who Blake is. He has more than 300 covers to his credit, a photo of the year award from Powder Magazine and there’s a pretty good chance many of your favourite outdoor images were crafted by his mind, eye, lens and work ethic. He's a genius, a father, a successful commercial photographer, but most o...

As one of the main characters in Red Bull's documentary The Engine Inside , Jay Bearhead has seen it all; residential schools, drug abuse, alcoholism, homelessness. But it's his rise from those lows that are inspirational. In part it was the bicycle that saved his life. And now he's giving back; he's teaching indigenous youth how to harness the power of two wheels (or two edges...

For the 50th episode of Live it Up with Mountain Life, host Feet Banks connects with Sandy Ward (Kelkeláokik)—snowboarder, mountain biker, filmmaker, guide to be, and a trailblazer at helping indigenous youth enjoy and reconnect to the land and their culture through sport. With a big movie about to premiere at Crankworx Whistler's Dirt Diaries contest, Sandy discusses the hectic pace of being...

The briefest history of Great Lakes surfing according to Grumpy Bob: The Wyldewood Surf Club was formed in 1965 out of Port Colbourne, Ontario and from its very beginnings was an international club with both Canadian and American members. Wyldewood Surf Club member Bob Sobering (AKA Grumpy Bob) began surfing in 1970, then picked it up again in the '90s. He’s a divisive figure in the Great Lak...

Mountain Gazette owner, publisher, and editor Mike Rogge is on the front lines of preserving print media and promoting the value of an analog experience. The Gazette is currently tallest poppy in what seems to be a fairly healthy ecosystem of magazines aimed at outdoor people who understand the power of a physical experience and want something tangible out of life. He also really loves skiing. mou...

Imagine losing everything in the wilds of the Northwest Territories. That's what happened to Chris Larkin. After living for two winters alone in a cabin in the wilderness, his canoe capsized on the infamous Mountain River. Larkin lost everything except his knife, a couple of matches and the clothes on his back. There were over 200 kilometres between him and civilization. 200 kilometres of rel...

They call Jazmine Lowther "the Gazelle." Not because she grazes on grasslands and can grow antlers out of her head, but because she's very fast and nimble. An all-round mountain athlete and member of The North Face team, Jazmine has recently been turning heads as an elite ultra runner, competing with the world's best on 50km to 100 km courses around the globe. She also writes a...

Feet Banks connects with Stan Rey, a master of the goggle tan and one of the most personable professional freeskiers in the game. Always ready to joke around in front of the camera and happy to share the stoke or his knowledge with anyone who needs it, Stan is a natural-born backflipper who grew up mostly in Whistler and has raced gates, ski cross and into the hearts of freeski fans around the wor...

Today's guest is legendary ski mountaineer Greg Hill . Back in 2010 he was all over ski media; he climbed and skied two million vertical feet, climbing 71 mountains in both North and South America over 266 days of ski-touring. He was the first North American to climb and ski 40,000 vertical feet in 24 hours and he even set a world record of 50,000 feet in 24 hours. Simply put, the man is a ma...

Mercedes Nicoll has competed in four winter Olympics for women’s halfpipe, and seven world championships. She’s been the Canadian National Champ five times, has eight world cup podiums and is a shining example of what it means to love competition and the camaraderie of sport. These days she’s a coach, a writer, a public speaker, an organizer of fun, and host of the podcast Dropping In with Mercede...