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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, he was one of twelve instructors sent to Kodiak Island to teach SEALs how to survive winter in the mountains, and he helped build the clothing system special ops still uses today. On this episode of the Backcountry Manifesto, John is swinging by the studio to talk backcountry survival and building the kit that will keep you safe, capable, and comfortable wherever your outdoor adventures take you.  This is not a Sitka ad. It's a top-to-bottom walk through a brand-agnostic backcountry kit from the dude who actually wrote the manual. What's the one piece of gear a survival instructor won't leave the truck without? Why is your 30-degree sleeping bag not actually a 30-degree bag? What the hell is a "possibles pouch?" Barklow's got answers.   LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE John's website: https://knowledgefromstorms.com/ John's IG: https://www.instagram.com/jbarklow/ PRE-ORDER Knowledge from Storms: https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Storms-Surviving-Toughest-Environments/dp/1250461707 John's survival class: https://outdoorclass.com/instructors/john-barklow/   Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025 #podcast #survival #survivalgear #wilderness #gear #backpacking

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 two years, and watched the ice crush her. This week on The Backcountry Manifesto, bestselling historian and Outside editor-at-large Hampton Sides is back for part two, this time on In the Kingdom of Ice. We talk about: The newspaper baron who bankrolled the whole expedition because Arctic disasters sold papers August Petermann, the armchair German mapmaker whose "open polar sea" theory sent them north, and who hanged himself before anyone could prove him wrong Emma De Long's "letters to nowhere," and the trunk Hampton found in a stranger's attic The canned tomatoes quietly poisoning the crew with lead The gale that scattered the boats and decided who lived If you're into polar survival, forgotten American history, or watching very confident experts get people killed, this episode is for you.   LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE Hampton's Website In the Kingdom of Ice The Wide Wide Sea Orson Welles' radio dramatization The Fram Museum Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025 #podcast #polarexpedition #explorer #history #sailing

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 his final voyage burning villages over a stolen goat? Hampton Sides — one of America's great narrative historians and author of The Wide Wide Sea — joins us to unravel Captain Cook's final voyage: the secret hunt for the Northwest Passage, a cannibalism cold case in New Zealand, and the leading medical theory for what actually went wrong inside Cook's head. This is Part 1 of two with Hampton — next week: In the Kingdom of Ice. LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE The Wide Wide Sea: https://www.amazon.com/Wide-Sea-Imperial-Ambition-Contact/dp/0385544766 Hampton's Website: https://hamptonsides.com The Captain Cook Society: https://www.captaincooksociety.com Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025 #podcast #captaincook #explorer #history #sailing

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 bird species in his career, and has become one of paleontology's most outspoken critics of the commercial fossil trade. He's the critic who gets called by journalists every time a T. rex goes up for auction. We get into how a dinosaur actually ends up at auction versus in a museum, why the "public trust" system exists, and the case of Stan the T. rex as a cautionary tale for why the public/private discussion matters. LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE Carthage College Paleontology: https://www.carthage.edu/biology/paleontology/ Society of Vertebrate Paleontology: https://vertpaleo.org/ Avisaurus Darwini: https://www.fieldmuseum.org/about/press/predatory-birds-from-the-same-fossil-formation-as-sue-the-t-rex Thomas Carr's Paper: https://palaeo-electronica.org/content/2025/5499-t-rex-endangered-species Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025 #podcast #dinosaur #trex #tyrannosaurus #paleontology #fossils

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 Sobolonye, many of whom depended upon the wilderness to make their livings, and so were forced to venture into the tiger's domain. But as villagers did their best to avoid the animal -- with varying levels of success -- a heavily armed, special government anti-poaching unit, known as Inspection Tiger, sought the animal out. Led by Yuri Trush, Inspection Tiger began prowling the wilderness bordering Sobolonye, searching for signs of the man-eater, and looking to put an end to its attacks.  John Vaillant is the author of The Tiger, The Golden Spruce, and Fire Weather, a Pulitzer finalist, and a Baillie Gifford winner.   LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE The Tiger: https://www.amazon.com/Tiger-Vengeance-Survival-Vintage-Departures/dp/0307389049 Conflict Tiger (2006): https://www.sashasnow.com/conflict-tiger Our episode with John on Fire Weather: https://youtu.be/81kwnFFtqP8 John Vaillant's X: https://x.com/JohnVaillant John Vaillant's BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/johnvaillant.bsky.social   Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025 #podcast #animalattack #tiger #siberiantiger #nature

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 that surrounds them. We get the three worst things he's ever felt, a brush with an Australian plant that resulted in six months of nerve damage, a twelve-foot Komodo dragon (that he decided to leave alone), and the Bigfoot episode that got him briefly declared a fraud by the national media.   LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE https://www.bravewilderness.com/ Coyote's Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@BraveWilderness⁩   Coyote's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coyotepeterson/ Coyote's TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@coyotepetersonofficial That Bear Kid: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt36400177/ Komodo Dragon episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkwlxY1iLXo David Blaine Cobra-Kiss: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0naO3xh07s8   Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025 #podcast #coyotepeterson #bravewilderness #komododragons #wildlife

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 The Tiger: https://www.amazon.com/Tiger-Vengeance-Survival-Vintage-Departures/dp/0307389049 John's X: https://x.com/JohnVaillant John's Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/johnvaillant.bsky.social   Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025 #podcast #wildfire #forestfire #climatechange #firestorm

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 ocean floor. This past summer, Mike's crew pulled 1,051 silver coins off the seabed and made national news. He flew from Florida to Montana to tell us how it actually works: the "breadcrumb trails" of coins scattered a mile from the wreck, the magnetometers and metal detectors, the short summer dive season, and the "you never really own the treasure, you just hold onto it for a while" philosophy that comes with a quarter-century of doing it. He brought real pieces of eight to pass across the table, walked us through the legendary Mel Fisher and the $400 million Atocha, and got into the thorny ethics of who really gets to keep history. Whether you're here for shipwrecks, colonial history, or just a great real-life treasure story, this one's got gold, pirates, hurricanes, and a lead box packed with 16,000 pearls.   1715 Fleet Society: https://1715fleetsociety.com

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 again for 20 years. This is the story of what happened next: two decades of trying to bury his own identity, and then a bug-fearing 24-year-old's decision to travel days up the Orinoco River to find the mother he thought had abandoned him. What he found reframed his entire life — a family, a new name, a brother he would later grieve in a Yanomami funeral, and a scientific calling studying the Yanomami gut microbiome, which may hold clues to the diseases of the modern world. David is a microbiome researcher at the University of Guelph, the founder of the Yanomami Foundation, and the subject of the new documentary WAYUMI. This is one of the most singular life stories we've ever had on the show. Venezuelan Earthquake Relief Fund: https://welove.foundation WAYUMI Official Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3aWDwQNTqk Yanomami Foundation: https://www.yanomamifoundation.org/ David's book, The Way Around: https://www.amazon.com/Way-Around-Finding-Mother-Yanomami/dp/0062382128 David's book, GOOD: https://nbmpub.com/products/good David's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidalexandergood

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 Shapiro — a contributor to The New York Times and The Atlantic — spent five years going where no Earhart biographer had gone before. What she found isn't the flawless icon, but a real and complicated woman. Today, Laurie gives us a portrait of the person behind the legend and a deep dive into Earhart's final flight and July 1937 disappearance over the Pacific: a stretched budget, a dropped antenna on the Lockheed Electra, an alcoholic navigator hired because he was cheap, and a pilot who was sick, exhausted, and out of fuel as she searched for tiny Howland Island. We get into the enduring mystery and the theories it spawned — and why the real story of what happened to Amelia Earhart may be sadder, and more human, than any of them. Shapiro's book, The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage That Made an American Icon, was named a New Yorker Best Book of 2025.   Laurie Gwen Shapiro Website Amelia Earhart Project Recordings The Aviator and the Showman   Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025

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 fake it for the camera. We flew Cody up to Bozeman, took him duck hunting at the crack of dawn (his very first time), and then sat down for one of the most no-BS survival conversations we've ever recorded. Hayden throws him a series of escalating worst-case scenarios: a desert breakdown, a broken leg in the Colorado high country, a hiker lost at an alpine lake. Cody refuses every easy answer, demanding context and walking through what staying alive actually requires (hint: it's rarely the sexy stuff). Along the way: the physics of freezing to death, why your survival shelter should be invisible, the truth about what survival television did to his profession, and the on-camera stand that cost him his show. Producer Andrew even gets pulled in to defend his off-grid cabin.   LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE The Survival Show Keep Your Ass Alive Podcast Cody's Book 98.6 Degrees: The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive (2003) Cody's Book When All Hell Breaks Loose (2007)   Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025

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 handful of fishermen found him off Marie Galante. In this conversation, Steven walks us through all of it — diving into the flooded, pitch-black cabin to grab his ditch kit, coaxing a single pint of fresh water a day out of a temperamental solar still, spearfishing the dorado that became both his food and his "spiritual companions," and the Day-43 disaster when his spear gun punctured the raft a thousand miles from land. But this is less a blow-by-blow than a master class in the psychology of survival from a philosophy major who treats reality as something to be accepted exactly as it is. We get into the divided self, the brutal "recoil" of giving up, why denial is the number one enemy, and how an ocean nearly killed him and gave him a life.

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 adrift in a rowboat never to be seen again. Then we zoom all the way out. This is a two-hour tour through the early America that gets left on the cutting-room floor — the fur trade and the "perfect trade good" of alcohol, John Adams' filthiest joke, the cannibalized girl of Jamestown, Columbus's fall from hero to villain, Cahokia's lost pyramid city, the Vikings who quit North America, and the 1680 Pueblo Revolt that scrubbed an empire off the map. It's bloody, it's funny, and it'll permanently change how you hear the word "Thanksgiving." If you love history that refuses to flatten people into heroes or villains, this one's for you.   CREDITS Hosting by Hayden Sammak Production by Andrew O'Neill “Welcome to the Backcountry” theme song by Logan Roth, Will Brown, Arjun Dube and produced at Treacle Mine Studios, Phila, PA Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025

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-Day, on-sight free solos in Yosemite, V11 on the board) who's running the most committed satire in outdoor media. This one goes everywhere: Lincoln's Yosemite "tear" and a storm-soaked bail off the Nose, a surprise call to climbing legend John Long, the Alex Honnold text and the Climbing magazine hit piece, and an extended phone-in from Cedar Wright, who makes the full punk-rock case for why this stuff matters. It's funny, it's genuinely unsettling when the talk turns to mortality, and it's impossible to look away from. Whether you think he's the future of the sport or a tragedy waiting to happen, you'll understand exactly why everyone's arguing about him. In this episode, we talk about: The Yosemite Tear: El Cap & the Nose-in-a-Day Phoning John Long About the Nose Record Bailing Off the Nose in a Snowstorm Viral Clips & the Parody of Climbing Ego How Free Soloing Began College Dropout to Content Hustle Courting the Haters Risk, Death, and Mindset Family Silence & Attempted Interventions Honnold's Text & the Climbing Magazine Drama Climbing Idols: Honnold, Croft & Dean Potter Teaming Up with Cedar Wright Lifetime Bucket List: Free Rider to Everest Free Solo vs. Trad: The Pinnacle Debate   LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE https://www.instagram.com/lincolnclimbs/ https://www.youtube.com/@UCynU0ZTas1hr6HMg-XAnTBA  Our episode with Jamie Leibert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FHdEmyKRQw Our episode with John Long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kDnVzaNE7g Climbing Magazine Article: https://www.climbing.com/culture-climbing/lincoln-knowles-going-viral-free-soloing/ Jayme Moye: https://jaymemoye.com/published/   Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025 #podcast #rockclimbing #freesolo #climbing

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 (Andrew does NOT like caves), Adam gets into the gear, the 9-inch passages, and the very real ways a cave can kill you — plus the full story of a teenager trapped a mile deep, 24,000-year-old mummified animals, and a quarter-mile traverse with no floor.   In this episode, we talk about: Becoming a Caver: Beyond "Spelunking" The Record: The Farthest You Can Get From Rescue Cave Conservation & the Technical Side of Caving Mummified Animals & 1890s Newspapers The Real Hazards: Lost, Stuck, and Hypothermic A Teenager Trapped a Mile Underground Surface Chaos, Three Agencies & "Lavender Larry" The "Atom Smasher" & Making a Cave Passable What Lies Beneath: A Quarter Mile With No Floor Living Underground: Multi-Day Cave Camps Who Owns a Cave? Permits & Land Access Nutty Putty & How Dangerous Caving Really Is Naming Discoveries: "To Boldly Go" How You Actually Map a Cave (and the LiDAR Future) Black Hills Institute: Dinosaurs & a New Plesiosaur Where to Start Caving & Farewell   CONNECT!  Catch up with Hayden on IG, TikTok, and more: https://linktr.ee/Hayden_Sammak Follow TBM on Youtube, IG, and everywhere else: https://linktr.ee/BackcountryManifesto   CREDITS Intro and Animations by Barry Thompson Photograph Contributions for Animation by Carver Weeks Additional Graphics by Andrew O’Neill  Production Assistance by John Stock  “Welcome to the Backcountry” theme song by Logan Roth, Will Brown, Arjun Dube and produced at Treacle Mine Studios, Phila, PA   Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025 #podcast #cave #rescue #cavediving #laos