Exploring Deep Wilderness

Jon learns he is a lousy traveler in the spirit world but a great one in this world. He discusses the native Siberian attitude toward the relationship between mind, body, nature, and the spirituality. And he describes how he has incorporated this worldview into his own life and a seminar he is conducting this summer on the subject.

Seeing blue whales mating. A wolf welcomes you to the polar regions. A hawk or a deer in your back yard. Sometimes exploring deep wilderness comes down to individual moments of encounter.

As winter comes in, Jon defends the much-maligned cold. It's important to human health, important to ecology. There is no bad weather, he insists, only insufficient clothing.

Jon and his son-in-law decide to traverse the endless Bitterroot ridge that separates Montana from Idaho. It's like hiking the Appalachian Trail--only very high up and with no path and with one foot in one state and another in a different one.  

Jon tells two stories in which adventurers did not die because of some combination of luck and skill and analyzes which played what role.   

Jon pays tribute to an expedition partner who died skiing in Kyrgyzstan and tells about the walkabout Jon took on the frozen Kamchatka tundra. On this solo trek, Jon angers the FSB, goes looking for the holy stone of the Koryak tribes, gets caught in a killer storm, and finally takes a reckless, inrresponsible run on the perfect ski run created by the storm. A meditation on loss in the big, big empty.

After Misha's death (see Episode #9), Jon returns to the Village of Vyvenka on the frozen tundra of the Kamchatka Peninsula, having decided to go on a solo walk-about in 20-below-zero temperatures.  

Jon and Misha head off to Kamchatka. Only one of them makes it back. Misha wasn't killed on an expedition. He died, rather, in a hospital in the Russian Far East before the adventure even started. Jon talks about how he and Misha met, their long collaboration, Misha's recent decline, and his tragic death on the eve of their return to the Siberian tundra. 

While Jon is away in Kamchatka, we bring you this interview he did earlier this year with Jim Banks's Hemispheres show on KGNU public radio in Boulder CO. Jon talks about his spiritual journeys to Kamchatka over the past fifteen years, his explorations there of native Koryak religiosity, and his relationship with the ancient shaman woman named Moulynaut. 

Jon and his wife, Nina, hiking in the Bitterroot forest near their home in Montana, find some strange tracks in the snow: some human, and some canine. And they discover a person who seems to have teleported into the woods in the midst of a snowstorm. 

Jon heads off to a remote village in the Kamchatka peninsula in fear eastern Russia, where an old shaman woman once invoked the spirit raven to heal him. Follow @deepwilderness on Twitter for updates on a journey on skis across the tundra to find reindeer herders and who knows what else.

Barry Blanchard has known fear. The legendary big wall climber is the author of the new book, The Calling: A Life Rocked By Mountains. He talks to Jon Turk about a bad day on the world's highest vertical-distance wall climb: the Rupal Face of Nanga Parbat, an escarpment that rises at an average of 50 degrees for more than three miles. If you've never braced against an avalanche for fully 27 minutes amidst 70 mile per hour winds and three-foot an hour snowfall, if you've never dropped your ropes 10,000 feet because of miscommunication with your climbing partner, we have a whole new definition of fear for you. Oh, and there's no air up there either. 

Paul Attalla rowed across the Atlantic Ocean, finished third in a 500 mile kayak race having never done distance sea kayaking before, and won a non-stop bike race from Canada to Mexico. He knows something about exhaustion. He and Jon--who has island-hopped across the Pacific, circumnavigated Ellesmere Island, and gone around Cape Horn in a kayak--swap stories about being tired. Sharks, wolves, and a broken ore in the middle of the ocean.  

In which Jon talks about different kinds of skiing--in particular, the sort of back country skiing he does. Avalanches, evaluation of snow conditions, crazy steep drops, cliffs, and guys you've been skiing with for years who don't know your name and think your PhD is a new kind of ski binding.

Wherein Jon explains a bit about his background--being a classmate of George W. Bush at Andover, telling his mother he wanted to be an orthodontist. and then becoming an expedition sea kayaker instead--and wherein he answers questions from Episode #1: What is this podcast all about? How did you come to get covered stuck to the sheets with dried blood in the hotel if the crocodile didn't eat you? And what did you see when you paddled up the river for dinner with the spiritual descendant of the crocodiles? And, of course, we learn about what happens when waves break in open ocean and you're in a sit-on-top kayak and a little about the similitaries and differences between children and chickens.

Wherein we open in a hotel room in the Solomon Islands with a line of marching ants and total body pain and end by washing our face in a river by way of meeting the ancestor spirits of our host in a dugout canoe--spirits that take the visible form of man-eating crocodiles.