The Backcountry Manifesto

Joe Rogan may have said it best: If there was one human being I had to pick to help me survive a life-or-death emergency situation in the wilderness, without a shadow of a doubt, my choice would be John Barklow. That's the blurb on the cover of John Barklow's forthcoming survival book "Knowledge From Storms." John spent 20 years as a Navy diver, most of it around special operations -- after 9/11,...

Is there land at the North Pole, or just ice? Is the water up there frozen solid, or open ocean? In 1879 nobody actually knew, and the best science of the day was hilariously wrong: punch through the ice rim, it said, and you'd find a warm, open sea at the top of the world. The USS Jeannette sailed north to prove it. Her crew deliberately let the Arctic pack freeze in around the ship, drifted for...

In February 1779, the most famous explorer alive was hacked to death on a Hawaiian beach while his own men watched helplessly through field glasses from the ships. Weeks earlier, thousands of Hawaiians had greeted him as the god Lono — his arrival matched their prophecy down to the shape of his sails. So what happened? And why had the most rational, even-keeled commander in the Royal Navy spent hi...

There are now more scientifically valuable T. rex fossils in private hands than in public museums. This is the finding of a peer-reviewed study published last year by this week's guest, Dr. Thomas Carr, a tyrannosaur paleontologist and Associate Professor of Biology at Carthage College. Carr designed one of the largest meat-eating-dinosaur exhibits in North America, has named several dinosaur and...

In 1997, a suspected poacher in the Russian wilderness shot a tiger and failed to kill it, instead wounding the animal -- and making it incredibly dangerous. Over the following days, the tiger terrorized the man it believed was responsible, doing so with an eerie sense of focus and cold calculation.  After killing him, the tiger turned his attention to the residents of the nearby village of Sobolo...

Coyote Peterson runs the largest wildlife channel on YouTube: 21.8 million subscribers, five billion views, an Emmy, and a body of work he describes as a mix of Steve Irwin, Steven Spielberg, and Bear Grylls. But who is he really? This week, Coyote drops by the studio to talk about his life and adventures -- and the occasional misadventure -- as he works to educate his viewers on the wild world th...

With the Canadian fires spreading wildfire smoke across the country, Pulitzer Prize finalist John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather, swings by the studio to tell the story of the Fort McMurray fire -- a catastrophe many consider to be the most notorious wildfire in Canadian history.   LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE Fire Weather: https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Weather-Front-Lines-Burning/dp/0525434240...

Captain Mike Perna has spent 25 years doing something most people think only happens in movies: diving for sunken Spanish treasure. Off Florida's Treasure Coast lie the scattered remains of the 1715 Plate Fleet — eleven galleons loaded with New World gold and silver that a hurricane drove onto the reefs in a single night, killing over a thousand people and strewing their cargo across miles of ocea...

David Good grew up with one foot in suburban Pennsylvania and the other in the Amazon rainforest. His father, anthropologist Ken Good, spent 12 years living with the Yanomami — one of the last relatively isolated peoples on Earth — and married David's mother, Yarima, the daughter of a headman. Then, when David was six, Yarima walked back into the jungle and didn't come out. He wouldn't see her aga...

Who was responsible for the disappearance of Amelia Earhart? Was it her oft-drunk but undeniably brilliant navigator, Fred Noonan? Her publicist husband, George Putnam, who pushed his wife toward the PR stunt of the century despite her relative mediocrity as a pilot? Or was it Earhart herself, whose sudden fame had begun to cloud the thing a pilot needs most: her judgment? Journalist Laurie Gwen S...

Cody Lundin has spent 34 years keeping people alive. Almost none of it looks like what you've seen on TV. He's the founder of Arizona's Aboriginal Living Skills School, an EMT since 1993, the author of 98.6 Degrees: The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive and When All Hell Breaks Loose, and one of the two original hosts of Discovery's Dual Survival. He built (and nearly broke) his career by refusing to...

Steven Callahan should have died at sea. In early 1982, roughly a week out of the Canary Islands, something — he's convinced it was a whale — holed his self-built 21-foot sloop Napoleon Solo in the middle of the night. What followed became one of the most famous survival stories ever told: 76 days adrift in a five-and-a-half-foot inflatable raft, alone, crossing nearly the entire Atlantic before a...

Your social studies teacher gave you Henry Hudson in about two sentences: a guy, a river, New York. Dr. Peter Mancall — USC historian and author of Fatal Journey and the new continental history Contested Continent — is here to give you the other 99%. We start with Hudson's doomed final voyage: iced into the bottom of Hudson Bay for a brutal winter, a starving crew, a mutiny, and a captain set adri...

Lincoln Knowles is 21 years old, lives out of his Jeep, and has the climbing internet at war with itself. To half the community he's a reckless idiot free soloing a harder route every day until he falls; to the other half he's the funniest, most self-aware thing to happen to the sport in years. The truth — as Hayden finds out — is that the kid is a genuinely elite climber (a sub-10-hour Nose-in-a-...

Adam Weaver holds the world record for the farthest anyone has ever traveled from a cave entrance — miles of crawling and climbing into a place no helicopter or rescue team can reach. He edits NSS News, America's only national caving magazine, and was recently tapped by ABC News to break down the Laos cave rescue for the public. In one of the most genuinely unsettling episodes we've recorded (Andr...

Is Everest still a climber's ultimate test, or has it become too crowded and controversial? This week on The Backcountry Manifesto, Everest historian, climber, and 1999 Mallory expedition participant Tom Pollard joins host Hayden Sammak in PART 3 of our discussion to share his gripping firsthand stories. We dive into Tom's four Everest attempts, his 2016 summit triumph, the evolution of guiding fr...

On this episode of the Backcountry Manifesto, we're taking you on a Montana backcountry adventure guided by the one and only Dr. Hoby Wedler . Dr. Hoby is a wildly popular sensory storyteller who explores the world around him using sound, smell, taste and touch to offer his fans and followers a unique perspective on the world around him.  From foraging early-season chanterelles in undisclosed fore...

On the 50th anniversary of Jaws, are we headed for a real-life Amity Island catastrophe with rising shark encounters off Cape Cod, or is the hype around white sharks getting way overblown? What's really drawing these apex predators back to our shores, and how worried should beachgoers be? This week on The Backcountry Manifesto, Dr. Greg Skomal -- the leading expert on Atlantic white sharks -- dive...

Is the Yellowstone Supervolcano really going to erupt and end life as we know it, and with the recent and unexpected geothermal events in Biscuit Basin, how worried are the scientists that study the Yellowstone caldera? Is it true the animals of Yellowstone are fleeing, signaling an eruption may be on the immediate horizon? This week on the show, Dr. Mike Poland -- scientist in charge of the Yello...

After years of searching, third generation Montanan rancher Clayton Phipps and his friends Mark Eaton and Chad O'Connor, discover one of the greatest dinosaur fossil specimens of all time: the remains of two perfectly preserved dinosaurs seemingly locked in battle. The find is worth millions, and quickly becomes the focus of not only the paleontological world, but an intense legal battle over who...

Peter Larson, President of the Black Hills Institute for Geological Research, is one of the most knowledgable paleontologists working today. His museum, located in the Hill City, South Dakota, boasts the highest concentration of dinosaur bones of any museum on earth. While to many, Pete's known for his work as a leading expert in the study of theropods, particularly T. rex, he's also known for bei...

The man who inspired Jurassic Park and acted as a technical advisor on the first six films, Jack Horner swings by the studio to talk all-things dinosaurs. We cover everything from dinosaur ontogeny, to his controversial dino chicken project, as well as the man himself. One of the most famous paleontologists, if not, THE most famous paleontologist, of the last century, this is an interview not to b...

When it comes to grizzly bears, no one gets closer than Casey Anderson. In fact, for 19 years, Casey's best friend WAS a grizzly bear named Brutus, who Casey would regularly wrestle, ride, and use as a teaching tool at the Montana Grizzly Encounter, a grizzly bear rescue he co-founded in his 20s. Today, he took a break from his busy career as a TV personality and conservation content creator to sw...

Let's get something out of the way: your social studies teacher sucked and Harriet Tubman was way cooler than whatever you learned in 5th grade. Dr. Edda Fields-Black, recent recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for her book, Combee, joins us in the studio to talk about the adventures of Tubman, who was not only a spy and underground railroad conductor, but also one of the most badass backcountry guide...

Mountain lions roam nearly all corners of the western landscape, from the wildest reaches of the backcountry to our own backyards. They're even present in urban areas -- everyone's heard reports of mountain lions showing up in surprising places, like within Los Angelos city limits. But how much do we know about these big cats? Do these large carnivores pose relatively little risk to humans and our...