Speaker 1: This is Me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely
Speaker 1: bug bitten in my case underwear listening Hunt podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are
Speaker 1: the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the
Speaker 1: Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store. Nor
Speaker 1: where you stand with on X. All right, we have
Speaker 1: a special guest today, Roman dial Um, who has a
Speaker 1: new book out with a gigantic I have the the
Speaker 1: what do you call these advanced readers copies? They call
Speaker 1: them arcs in the business um giant quote from John Krakauer.
Speaker 1: A brave and marvelous book, a page turner that will
Speaker 1: rip your heart out. The books called The Adventurer's Son
Speaker 1: by Roll and dial and it tells the story. You
Speaker 1: just give me the one sentence. It tells a story
Speaker 1: about looking for my son who went missing in Costa Rica.
Speaker 1: That's a good job. Yeah, a heartbreaking story about raising
Speaker 1: an outdoor son and then losing him in the jungle
Speaker 1: and trying him. Uh. Also called you before we start recording.
Speaker 1: You mentioned Um that you're not a hunter, but your
Speaker 1: hunt and you're not a Yeah, you're not a climber,
Speaker 1: but you climb. No no, no, no no. So I'm
Speaker 1: not a hunter, but I do hunt, and I love
Speaker 1: to hunt, you know. And uh, but what makes you
Speaker 1: not a hunter? I don't know if you even realize that.
Speaker 1: But we were talking about this earlier. You've hunted Moosa
Speaker 1: my brother Danny. Yeah, you live in Alaska. I live
Speaker 1: in Alaska. Yeah. And we got a bull and a
Speaker 1: cow the same day. And and your brother Dan and
Speaker 1: my friend Chris Flowers, who's a friend of his. Two
Speaker 1: they cleaned the bull and I cleaned the cow, and so, um,
Speaker 1: but I I hunt for a year. I really like.
Speaker 1: I like to eat year. I try to. I didn't
Speaker 1: hunt this year fish, I know. You know I only
Speaker 1: dip net. Yeah. I'm not really a fisherman, um, but
Speaker 1: I do dip net. I'm kind of like a you know,
Speaker 1: very efficient fisherman. Yeah, I sam and dip net. You know.
Speaker 1: It's I'd like to do that. Um, I don't. I
Speaker 1: don't have the patients for hooking line. You know. It's
Speaker 1: just I can't fly fishing. I love the idea of
Speaker 1: fly fishing. I think it's marvelous. I think it's one
Speaker 1: of the most beautiful activities. You know, an outdoor person
Speaker 1: could do, but I can't do it. It's just you
Speaker 1: have to stay in one place and I can't do that.
Speaker 1: What strikes she is beautiful about it, all the flailing around. No,
Speaker 1: I think the idea of it, that the beauty is
Speaker 1: that you have to be an ecologist. You have to
Speaker 1: be like a practicing apple apply to collegist. You've got
Speaker 1: to think about what the fish is going to eat.
Speaker 1: And it's actually people go down to the to the
Speaker 1: fly shop and they feel like what should I come on? Well,
Speaker 1: that's why I'm not efficient. I like the idea of it.
Speaker 1: I don't want to do it. But as far as
Speaker 1: like not being a hunter, just because I don't, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't shoot my gun very often, you know,
Speaker 1: I I probably I didn't even know what was called
Speaker 1: processing until a few years ago. What do you think
Speaker 1: it was called butchering um? And I like to clean animals.
Speaker 1: I think that's you know, like I don't really like
Speaker 1: to kill them. I mean, I've killed a lot of moose,
Speaker 1: I've killed a lot of caribou, I've killed a bear,
Speaker 1: links I killed a lot of animals, but I don't
Speaker 1: I'm not a great shot, you know, and I don't
Speaker 1: like to go shoot my gun. I gotta. I got
Speaker 1: a lot of guns, but I don't really like them.
Speaker 1: But I really like to clean them, you know, like
Speaker 1: I like to. I feel like if I I feel
Speaker 1: like I do a good job, I take them apart
Speaker 1: real efficiently. They're super clean, and a moose is a
Speaker 1: big animal to take apart. I'd love to get a buffalo.
Speaker 1: That's my kind of dream. I've I've spent enough money
Speaker 1: putting in for the lottery of the buffalo in Alaska
Speaker 1: to just go buy you know, somebody's buffalo over but
Speaker 1: spreads it out nicely for you. Yeah, well, I feel
Speaker 1: like you should. I feel it's be able to cli.
Speaker 1: I mean, if I would like to think that with
Speaker 1: with your approach, I would in my in my hope
Speaker 1: you would be like, yeah, I'm a hunter, Well I hunt,
Speaker 1: you know, And I I would like let me finish
Speaker 1: off the thought about I'm a climber but I don't climb. Well,
Speaker 1: I want to get into that, so yeah, we'll leave
Speaker 1: hunting behind and get into that. Yeah, And I think
Speaker 1: I wanted you to talk about when you quit climbing,
Speaker 1: when I quit climbing. Sure, Yeah, if that if that's
Speaker 1: a good way of explaining it. Yeah, why why quit climbing? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's like a chapter in my book, right, And
Speaker 1: you're an alpinist. An alpinist yep, I was an alpinist. Yeah.
Speaker 1: An alpinist is like a climber, you know. I think
Speaker 1: of climbers generally, most people think of climbers are sort
Speaker 1: of like rock climbers. There's ice climbers and rock climbers.
Speaker 1: But an alpinist to somebody who just rock climbs and
Speaker 1: ice climbs so that they have the skills and the
Speaker 1: technique to go to the big mountains and climb the
Speaker 1: big mountains that have rock and ice and their remote
Speaker 1: and they're in the wilderness and they have weather, and
Speaker 1: it's just like it's kind of like you're living on
Speaker 1: the mountain trying to get up it. Yeah. As a
Speaker 1: not climber, I've often fantasized that, uh, if I wasn't
Speaker 1: into what I was into, if I didn't hunting fish
Speaker 1: and stuff, that I would I would want to pursue that.
Speaker 1: But they get whittled away, they do. It's dangers, you
Speaker 1: wind up, but you get to be forty and all
Speaker 1: your friends are dead. Yeah, well, you know, I feel
Speaker 1: lucky to have made it as far as I didn't.
Speaker 1: I quit when I was about twenty five and had
Speaker 1: a lot of friends die. I had a lot of
Speaker 1: friends die. Yeah, I um, and they still die. I
Speaker 1: mean like today, you know, more good climbers die than
Speaker 1: bad climbers. You know, like, if you're a bad climber,
Speaker 1: you kind of realized right away that this is maybe
Speaker 1: not for you. It's dangerous, maybe you get out of it.
Speaker 1: But if you're a good climber, you just keep climbing
Speaker 1: harder and harder things and going to wilder and wilder
Speaker 1: places until, you know, until you get killed. Because the
Speaker 1: mountains don't care how good you are. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: you well, you know we've established that. You know, my
Speaker 1: brother and Hunter with him, his old roommate Jared. You
Speaker 1: might have known. He died on K two. He wentn't
Speaker 1: attempted K too, got knocked in the head, wought up
Speaker 1: in a hospital in Pakistan, came home, recovered the next season,
Speaker 1: went back and died and he kind of like knew
Speaker 1: what was gonna happen. Yeah. Yeah, Well there's two guys,
Speaker 1: Kyle Dempster and his partner. They climbed a mountain in
Speaker 1: Pakistan and they didn't make it to the top. They
Speaker 1: were repelling down and like an anchor pulled or something
Speaker 1: like that. They filled several hundred feet, broke a leg,
Speaker 1: came back the next year and disappeared on the same mountain,
Speaker 1: both of them. Yeah, and they were like the two best.
Speaker 1: There's an award called the Pola or like you know,
Speaker 1: the Golden ice Axe, and this kid, Kyle Dempster, he'd
Speaker 1: won it twice as the best climber in the world basically,
Speaker 1: and then you know, he died. So, yeah, the mountains
Speaker 1: don't care how good you are. Is that what got
Speaker 1: you to Alaska climbing mountains? Well? No, you know, when
Speaker 1: I was a kid, I went to Alaska because I
Speaker 1: had um some uncles who lived up there and they
Speaker 1: worked in a coal mining kind of It wasn't really
Speaker 1: a town. It was sort of like a camp in
Speaker 1: the Alaska Range. Yeah, that's a crazy story in your
Speaker 1: book about just getting sent up to hang out with
Speaker 1: your uncles and they weren't that interested and really washed
Speaker 1: and after you well, yeah, it was busy working. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it was a great time. And that's how I
Speaker 1: kind of fell in love with Alaska. I was nine,
Speaker 1: and I had back in those days, you know, we
Speaker 1: didn't really have There was no there were no computers obviously,
Speaker 1: and this place didn't even have like telephones or TV.
Speaker 1: And so I got a taxidermy correspondence course that you
Speaker 1: used to be able to get this tax d correspondence
Speaker 1: course and probably put off some beautiful work. I managed.
Speaker 1: I mounted a raven, I put some caribou antlers that
Speaker 1: were involved together, and um, so I got the whole course.
Speaker 1: Was you're supposed to get it over a year. I said, hey,
Speaker 1: I'm going to Alaska. Send it all to me right now.
Speaker 1: So I had the whole course and I took it
Speaker 1: up there, and I had a bunch of glass eyes
Speaker 1: and excelsior and wire and and that's what I kind
Speaker 1: of did nine years old. You know it was it
Speaker 1: was awesome. You got to go a little ferl work exactly.
Speaker 1: It ruined me for life. Yeah, you know, I could
Speaker 1: do whatever I wanted. I had a motorcycle and uh,
Speaker 1: and my uncle had this dog. It was named Moose
Speaker 1: and it was half wolf, and he would I would
Speaker 1: go out all day with Moose and and then they
Speaker 1: gave me a motorcycle, but I couldn't really, it was
Speaker 1: too big for me. You know how you see kids
Speaker 1: on bicycles that are too big and you know they
Speaker 1: can hardly get up on him. Well with a motorcycle,
Speaker 1: and you have to jump up and kick started. You know,
Speaker 1: if you don't get it going, it falls down. And
Speaker 1: you know, the lever I don't remember. I forget which
Speaker 1: side was which, but the maybe the clutch or the
Speaker 1: break lever, one of them were was broke off. Because
Speaker 1: I've fallen down somebody, there's no going back from that.
Speaker 1: You get that taste of freedom at nine years old
Speaker 1: and being like, oh I'm capable of doing all these things.
Speaker 1: That's it. Yeah, And so I you know, I went
Speaker 1: back to, uh the lower forty eight East Coast. I
Speaker 1: was in Virginia, and as soon as I graduated from
Speaker 1: high school, you know, there's only one place I wanted
Speaker 1: to go, and it was back to Alaska. But um
Speaker 1: so anyway, I've been. I've been living in Alaska for
Speaker 1: about forty years now. I like it. You know, your brother,
Speaker 1: do you think your brother will ever leave? He talks
Speaker 1: about it. He says he's getting sick of wet brush.
Speaker 1: His wife's doesn't want to leave. He kind of wants
Speaker 1: he wants to hang out somewhere to his dry grass
Speaker 1: instead of wet brush. So he's kind of wanting to,
Speaker 1: uh come back down here, but no, he's he's just
Speaker 1: up there his gripe about it, um two grapes, wet brush,
Speaker 1: and everything is like everything is such a production. M
Speaker 1: Like anytime you go to hunt, it's like his boats
Speaker 1: and journeys, and you don't just like go out messing
Speaker 1: around for a couple of hours, Like everything is a production.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't I don't know. I went
Speaker 1: fat biking yesterday. Um, well you know I traveled yesterday.
Speaker 1: The day before yesterday, one of my former gratitudents came
Speaker 1: by and it was like ten below twelve below where
Speaker 1: we went biking. It was probably like fifteen or twenty below,
Speaker 1: and that was like right out my door. And I
Speaker 1: live right in town. I live in town, like in midtown.
Speaker 1: He hunts time again local and fishes. But I think
Speaker 1: it like I think hes talking about kind of the more,
Speaker 1: you know, like you don't go and have a like
Speaker 1: your tree stand out in your backyard and you go
Speaker 1: out there and sit for white tails every night. Well
Speaker 1: probably not. Yeah, but I've hunted moves within view of
Speaker 1: my house, like I've killed a moose and I can
Speaker 1: see when my house is. Yeah, but you know, um,
Speaker 1: I understand what you're saying. But I never lived in
Speaker 1: the other way, like I moved to Alaska when I
Speaker 1: was sixteen, and so I don't really I never lived
Speaker 1: you know, I never hunted deer. I've shot one deer.
Speaker 1: I don't really like dear meet that much. I probably
Speaker 1: shouldn't say that, but you know, you know, when you're
Speaker 1: talking about riding that motorcycle, it's too big for you.
Speaker 1: My friend dear Drew, it was just telling me about
Speaker 1: they had horses when they were little, and she said
Speaker 1: they were so small that they would put grain down. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so the horse had leaned down and get the grain
Speaker 1: and they jump and straddle it behind the ears and
Speaker 1: to jerk its head up and they'd slide down into
Speaker 1: position and ride off. Oh that's cool, that's really cool.
Speaker 1: Good way to mount. So get into the being an
Speaker 1: alpinist and then kind of like when you got scared
Speaker 1: you had your boy at that point in time, or
Speaker 1: did you not know I wasn't too married married, yeah,
Speaker 1: but I was with the same woman I am now
Speaker 1: she remember you had like kind of a like a
Speaker 1: a sort of an epiphany. Sure, well, you know I
Speaker 1: would climb these mountains, you know, like and I would
Speaker 1: ski into some really distant mountains, like one time when
Speaker 1: I was twenty one, the year I graduated from college. Uh,
Speaker 1: like over spring break, the sky and I Steve will
Speaker 1: we skied sixty miles in and climb out Debra, which
Speaker 1: is a beautiful mountain. You can see it from Fairbanks,
Speaker 1: and Fairbanks is in the middle of the state, and
Speaker 1: it's cold and dry all winter, and you can just
Speaker 1: see these mountains on the skyline. They're beautiful and it's cold,
Speaker 1: so they get they look real close because the cold
Speaker 1: air magnifies the mountains. And in the winter you can't
Speaker 1: do anything but look at the mountains and the sun
Speaker 1: just kind of rolls along the top. It's freaking beautiful.
Speaker 1: And Mount Debra is the prettiest one. And we skied
Speaker 1: in sixty miles, climbed the west face, a big steep face.
Speaker 1: Um you had to like scratch out a pad to
Speaker 1: sleep on the way up, like a little ledge and
Speaker 1: climbed it and came down and Um, and then we
Speaker 1: were gonna go climb Mount Hey is the highest in
Speaker 1: the range. But we chickened out repelling over this pass
Speaker 1: and skied out. We ran out of food. I had
Speaker 1: to break into some guys cash his food, his cash.
Speaker 1: You like a little cabin on stilts next to his cabin,
Speaker 1: looking for food, and I found dry dog food. Ate
Speaker 1: the dry dog food, you know, because I was so hungry.
Speaker 1: Um skied out and I was like, I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: climb anymore. This is ridiculous, you know, And I it
Speaker 1: was miserable, you know, hungry, You know, like where you
Speaker 1: hungry where you eat half rations for a couple of days,
Speaker 1: and then you go to like quarter rations and then
Speaker 1: you're eight rations, and then you eat your last apricots,
Speaker 1: splitting it with your partner, and then you look where
Speaker 1: you dropped some gorp in the snow three weeks ago,
Speaker 1: and you're pawing through the snow looking for the gorp,
Speaker 1: and instead of sitting on your pack and eating a
Speaker 1: chocolate bar, you sit on your pack and then you
Speaker 1: fall asleep because you don't have anything else to do,
Speaker 1: and you're hungry, and I thought, you know, this climate
Speaker 1: is nuts and I want to quit. But I it
Speaker 1: was like being an alcoholic. I think, you know, like
Speaker 1: an alcoholic says, I'm not drinking anymore, but the next
Speaker 1: weekend they drink anyway, and uh, and I would go
Speaker 1: back and climb some more. And I've really I've been
Speaker 1: with this girl. You know. I met her when she
Speaker 1: was eighteen. I was nineteen, and I, you know, I
Speaker 1: wanted to get married and have a family. But it
Speaker 1: wasn't until this one particular climb where I realized, you
Speaker 1: know what climbing was just kind of more or less
Speaker 1: about luck. You know, it wasn't really about how good
Speaker 1: you were. And and I tell the story, and that's
Speaker 1: that's an interesting perspective, just the luck factor. I had
Speaker 1: a couple of things I noted in the book. One
Speaker 1: that just like how tense things get with climbing partners,
Speaker 1: where you mentioned um getting into getting into a fist fight. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well yeah, you know he um picking up and continuing right. Well,
Speaker 1: we didn't. We didn't really we we didn't get in
Speaker 1: a We we had verbal fights, you know, on climbs,
Speaker 1: but we never had a fist fight on the climb.
Speaker 1: We had the fist fight you know back in town. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I never had a fist fight it, I mean, that
Speaker 1: would be a bummer. Maybe it was the girlfriend, you know,
Speaker 1: he said, the one of the guys in his climbing circle.
Speaker 1: He's like, yeah, you know, we could tell he was
Speaker 1: never going to be very good because he always had
Speaker 1: a girlfriend. Yeah, that's for sure. You know I didn't.
Speaker 1: I didn't really, you know, but this this this particular
Speaker 1: climb when a cornice broke and uh and Chuck Comstock,
Speaker 1: the guy that I had gotten into a fight within town,
Speaker 1: and he had just untied from the rope like we were.
Speaker 1: We'd climbed this really, you know, steep face took several
Speaker 1: days to get up camped on top. It was in
Speaker 1: marches like thirty below. And then we were feeling so
Speaker 1: full of ourselves we decided to go down this ridge
Speaker 1: that I don't even climbed once. And the people who
Speaker 1: went up it didn't want to go back down, and
Speaker 1: we were like, oh, we can go down it. So
Speaker 1: we went down and had all these cornices, you know,
Speaker 1: going both ways, and explain explained people are what a
Speaker 1: cornice is, because this is really there's another thing I
Speaker 1: wanted to ask you about when you're in your climbing
Speaker 1: discussion was what I had no idea that this happens.
Speaker 1: What you do in one of those breaks a cornice
Speaker 1: when it breaks, well, you know, well how you and
Speaker 1: your partner working tandem to not die. But first, some
Speaker 1: people water cornice. Cornice, Well, you know, if if you
Speaker 1: don't live in a snow area, a cornice kind of
Speaker 1: looks like a frozen wave of snow, but instead of
Speaker 1: like the ocean and and wind pushing the ocean into
Speaker 1: a wave, the wind pushes the snow over the crest
Speaker 1: of a mountain ridgeline, and then it builds like a
Speaker 1: frozen wave up on top, and and the wind keeps
Speaker 1: piling up more and more snow until um, you know,
Speaker 1: it's kind of flat on top, and you are walking
Speaker 1: on this ridge. You might not really know where you're overhanging,
Speaker 1: you know, the top of this cornice. And then um,
Speaker 1: in certain places in the world, and in the Alaska
Speaker 1: Range in particular, you'll get um moist air blowing from
Speaker 1: the ocean side and it condenses on the mountain like
Speaker 1: the ice that used to build up in people's refrigerators.
Speaker 1: If you have an old freezer, for example, with a
Speaker 1: bad gasket and got a bunch of meat in there.
Speaker 1: You know, if you've got a bad gasket, you get
Speaker 1: that rhiny ice around the edge, and that rhyme ice
Speaker 1: can build into this huge bulge, like a overhanging bulge,
Speaker 1: you know, like it can be you know, twenty or
Speaker 1: thirty ft of overhang, this big rime bulge. And then
Speaker 1: on top of that, the wind is usually blows from
Speaker 1: the ocean side and it will blow snow that makes
Speaker 1: this frozen wave on the other side. So you kind
Speaker 1: of have a sort of like a double cornice where
Speaker 1: you got an overhanging wave on one side and then
Speaker 1: this big bulging rhyme on the other. So it's kind
Speaker 1: of an unstable feature. And you know, in rock climbing
Speaker 1: they have cams and petons and stuff you can stick
Speaker 1: in a crack, and in ice climbing they got screws
Speaker 1: you can screw into the waterfall. But on this ridge climbing,
Speaker 1: you know, you can't really protect it. So the only
Speaker 1: thing you can do is if the thing breaks, you
Speaker 1: gotta go off the other side. So the rope kind
Speaker 1: of goes over both sides of the mountain. Jump off
Speaker 1: the side. Yeah, you gotta jump and then the rope
Speaker 1: cuts into the cornice. Yeah it stops. Yeah, it would
Speaker 1: be hard, yeah, exactly. And it's uh, it's kind of
Speaker 1: a mythical thing, like nobody ever thinks you're ever gonna
Speaker 1: have to do it, and very few people have actually
Speaker 1: done it as far as I know, and so on
Speaker 1: this particular. But like when it does happen, like what
Speaker 1: a leap of faith? Man, Yeah, what a leap of faith.
Speaker 1: And then you kind of have to hope you're going
Speaker 1: off the right side, you know. But this it was
Speaker 1: pretty obvious. He had broken the cornice side, the soft
Speaker 1: you know, windside, and I went off on the rhemy side,
Speaker 1: and uh, and then you know, fell a long ways.
Speaker 1: I thought I was going to die or at least
Speaker 1: get broken, and um, because I tumbled because it's like
Speaker 1: a big cart wheel, because he went straight down when
Speaker 1: he broke the cornice. He could he falls straight down
Speaker 1: and he's out ahead of me, and I jumped off
Speaker 1: and then I had to pendel him down, you know,
Speaker 1: over a bunch of space. And if you hadn't done that,
Speaker 1: we probably both would have gone off the same side
Speaker 1: and tumbled down and got broken up. Yeah it would,
Speaker 1: he just would have yanked me off. So but yeah,
Speaker 1: it did. And I was like, yeah, this is it. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, we skied out, and you know, I actually
Speaker 1: right after that, I thought, you know, I might come
Speaker 1: back and climb that mountain. But I skied back to
Speaker 1: town and uh and went and I was telling the
Speaker 1: stories about this climb, and I was like, you know,
Speaker 1: this is nuts. I think I'm just gonna get married.
Speaker 1: So I got married like just like that was March
Speaker 1: and I was married in June and then and then
Speaker 1: so that was like the end of my climbing. And um,
Speaker 1: not a big wedding, right if I remember right, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know. They were twenty or thirty people. Was
Speaker 1: in a big field, you know, outside of Fairbanks. It
Speaker 1: wasn't huge, no, not at all. And my my parents
Speaker 1: were there. Her her parents didn't come, you know, because
Speaker 1: they didn't think of a wedding should be outside. They
Speaker 1: should thought it should be in a church, you know,
Speaker 1: but so decided not to come. With all that'll fix you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but she you know, Peggy's the youngest of ten kids
Speaker 1: and and uh and her parents, you know, maybe they
Speaker 1: didn't have a lot left for her by the end. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. They were tapped out. I think so.
Speaker 1: So when you quit like kind of like that biggest
Speaker 1: form of adventure, but when you had your kid, you
Speaker 1: really focused heavily on I would say that an extreme version,
Speaker 1: a pretty extreme version of of a association with nature
Speaker 1: an adventure. Sure. I mean I I did, guy did
Speaker 1: crazy stuff. Well, I mean I still like being outside.
Speaker 1: I mean you can't. If you live in Alaska you
Speaker 1: don't like being outside, You're not really gonna like live
Speaker 1: in there much because that's that's what Alaska has a
Speaker 1: lot of. And um. And I had found that I
Speaker 1: liked going to the mountains, Like I didn't like just
Speaker 1: climbing the mountains, but I like like skiing into the
Speaker 1: mountains or um. On another trip, we we climbed the
Speaker 1: mountain and then we rafted out and um. And one
Speaker 1: time I had gone into the mountains with this guy,
Speaker 1: Karl Tobin and another guy and we didn't get up
Speaker 1: the peak. We got avalanched off and I was aunty
Speaker 1: because I wanted to do something. I said, Hey, let's
Speaker 1: just ski out to the highway. It was like fifty
Speaker 1: five miles and I'm like, no, we don't want to ski,
Speaker 1: We're gonna stay here. So I skied out by myself,
Speaker 1: and the year before i'd skied out from a different
Speaker 1: mountain in a parallel out, and I thought, wow, I
Speaker 1: wonder which way is faster. You know, this was like
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty um three, so it was a long time ago,
Speaker 1: and I thought, wow, I know how to find out.
Speaker 1: It's like fifty sixty miles. We should have a ski
Speaker 1: race and see what is the fastest way. In fact,
Speaker 1: let's just have a wilderness ski race across the Alaska
Speaker 1: Range from highway to highway, like a hundred fifty miles.
Speaker 1: And you know, there hadn't been any I mean, they're
Speaker 1: they're ultra running wasn't a thing yet, especially and no
Speaker 1: ultra skiing. And so that I was like twenty twenty
Speaker 1: years old maybe, and uh I met a guy at
Speaker 1: a like on campus at the university, and he had
Speaker 1: a fire and he had an idea for like a
Speaker 1: foot race across the Kenai Pencil and the Kenai pensils
Speaker 1: like that when you look at a map of Alaska
Speaker 1: and you know anchorages right down there in the southern
Speaker 1: part and the Kenai pencils that little kind of like
Speaker 1: that moose bell that hangs down from Alaska and uh.
Speaker 1: And he was going to have a race from Hope
Speaker 1: to Homer across the Keenai pencil and he called it
Speaker 1: a foot race. And the rules were really simple. Everything
Speaker 1: you needed you had to carry with you and you
Speaker 1: including all your food, and you couldn't use any roads,
Speaker 1: and you couldn't use any pack animals, and you couldn't
Speaker 1: use any motorized vehicles, and you couldn't get any help
Speaker 1: from anybody along the way. And he envisioned a swimming
Speaker 1: the rivers. And I saw this idea. I was like, wow,
Speaker 1: that's the same idea that I have. But you know, um,
Speaker 1: I want to do a ski race you guys? Well kid,
Speaker 1: because he was in his thirties, Well kid, and he
Speaker 1: was a mountain guide. Well kid, why did you come
Speaker 1: down and do do my race and then we'll do yours.
Speaker 1: So I went down there, and um, and there was
Speaker 1: an old man there and he says, hey, kid, where's
Speaker 1: your tent? I said, I didn't bring a tent. I'm
Speaker 1: not taking a tent. I'm going light. And he says, well,
Speaker 1: where are you gonna sleep? Tonight, and I said, I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna sleep out here in my baby sacs. Well,
Speaker 1: come on into my tents. So I slept in his
Speaker 1: tent and I looked at him. He was like my
Speaker 1: age now, actually is younger than I am now. And
Speaker 1: I thought, this guy is not going to finish this.
Speaker 1: He shouldn't even be here, you know. And then I
Speaker 1: saw some other guy and he looked kind of clumsy. Well,
Speaker 1: the clumsy guy caught up with me the first day
Speaker 1: after I had gone like forty miles all the only
Speaker 1: trail we all did. We hiked the trail, the whole
Speaker 1: forty miles trail. The first day's like a hundred fifty
Speaker 1: mile race. You had to carry all your food and
Speaker 1: everything with you. And I was I had skis with
Speaker 1: me because I was going to ski across the harding
Speaker 1: ice field, because I didn't want to have to swim
Speaker 1: all these rivers, because that's how we're going to cross
Speaker 1: the river. You're gonna go up higher and ski where
Speaker 1: it's frozen. Yeah, And but because I didn't want to
Speaker 1: swim river, Swimming glacial rivers seems stupid to me. And
Speaker 1: so um, we got to the first glacial river and
Speaker 1: usually you wait for the you know, the morning, because
Speaker 1: the sun melts the snow on the glacial rivers and
Speaker 1: then in the morning the waters down, and it seemed
Speaker 1: like a smarter time to swim it. And we're waiting. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's been cold on it. So we're waiting around and
Speaker 1: everybody catches us, Me and this guy man's or we're
Speaker 1: out in the front. And then that old man, I'm
Speaker 1: like what he caught up to us and he pulls
Speaker 1: out of his pack like these Viking horn hat, you know,
Speaker 1: like some soft goofy hat, and he puts it on.
Speaker 1: He goes, you know, what are you guys doing here?
Speaker 1: You young guys should have been to uh halfway to
Speaker 1: Homer by now. And we're like, yeah, well we got
Speaker 1: stuck by the river. He goes, yeah, you young guys.
Speaker 1: You don't know. Then and eat too much and then
Speaker 1: and then he reaches into his pack and he pulls
Speaker 1: out this little inflatable raft kind of like the pack
Speaker 1: raft you used when you went, you know, on your
Speaker 1: buffalo hunt in Alaska, but this was like a kmart
Speaker 1: vinyl raft and he pulls it. I says, you guys
Speaker 1: can't swim these glacial rivers. You know, they're too swift
Speaker 1: and cold and dangerous. He says, uh, you know, old
Speaker 1: age and treachery will beat youth and skill every time.
Speaker 1: And he blew up his raft. Yeah exactly, and he
Speaker 1: paddled across and he almost won the race and without
Speaker 1: running a step. You know. But anyway, when I saw
Speaker 1: that pack raft um, I thought, yeah, that's why, that's
Speaker 1: what I want one of those. And and just crossing
Speaker 1: like a hundred fifty miles of Alaskan wilderness. It took
Speaker 1: me a week, you know, which is like nowadays we do.
Speaker 1: Not me, I'm kind of too old for that, but
Speaker 1: you know that nowadays people do like a hundred fifty
Speaker 1: miles across Alaskan wilderness in like three days or less.
Speaker 1: And but to have that kind of freedom, to be
Speaker 1: able to go through trackless wilderness like with rivers and
Speaker 1: glaciers and bogs and dealing with bears and boulders some
Speaker 1: bad brush, it was an incredible sense of freedom. I
Speaker 1: don't understand how when you guys are doing these races.
Speaker 1: I understand Danny is the first one to talk about this,
Speaker 1: but you guys use the mountain bikes, but there's no
Speaker 1: but totally off trail. You're riding on gravel bars. I
Speaker 1: have done, asker or what No, Yeah, sometimes I have done.
Speaker 1: I did one of those races with a mountain bike,
Speaker 1: um with my son, because I didn't want him to
Speaker 1: hurt his feet, because when you want when you go
Speaker 1: fifty miles in a day, it hurts your feet, you know.
Speaker 1: And uh, I didn't really want him. He was sixteen.
Speaker 1: He wanted to do one of these races, and I said, well,
Speaker 1: let's just use our mountain bikes and uh. And so
Speaker 1: when you take a mountain bike, you know, you have
Speaker 1: to go to the right place. Like I wouldn't do
Speaker 1: it on the Keyni because it's too brushy. But the
Speaker 1: Talquita Mountains are real nice and there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: a TV trails for like fifty miles. So we rode
Speaker 1: and then the a TV trails ended, and then what
Speaker 1: you do is you kind of push your bike up
Speaker 1: a hill and then you coast down the tundra. So
Speaker 1: it's you can you know, you can really milk the tune.
Speaker 1: You don't just ride the steepest way down. You kind
Speaker 1: of go at a real gentle angle to milk it,
Speaker 1: you know. And so you can hike up the trail,
Speaker 1: hike up the hill pushing your bike like you know,
Speaker 1: a mile an hour, which is the usual hike and speed.
Speaker 1: But then when you go down you're going like three
Speaker 1: or four miles an hour, which is much faster. And
Speaker 1: then there's game trails. If you get good at following
Speaker 1: game trails, you know, Moose trails aren't so good, but
Speaker 1: Cariboo trails are good. Bear trails are pretty good. As
Speaker 1: Danny was telling me too, is you said a lot
Speaker 1: of times you're not down in the valley floor, you're
Speaker 1: not down in the rocks. He talked about like trying
Speaker 1: to like going going on sign going up the sides
Speaker 1: a little bit looking for good trails. Oh yeah, like
Speaker 1: that's I love following trails, and I you know, I
Speaker 1: got into the mountain bike and thing like I we
Speaker 1: I got into the mountain bike and think for about
Speaker 1: ten years because the hiking was kind of easy. Anybody
Speaker 1: can hike anywhere just you can hike in a straight
Speaker 1: line if you wanted to, but with a bike you can't.
Speaker 1: You get punished if you go in a bad place.
Speaker 1: You know, you're just pushing your bike or carrying it.
Speaker 1: And you're thinking why did I bring it? And so
Speaker 1: so you're always looking for good You have to be
Speaker 1: like you have to know how to read the landscape
Speaker 1: and how to find good traveling conditions and find gravel bars,
Speaker 1: like I used to say, gravel bars, game trails, and glaciers.
Speaker 1: Those were the best writing. And if you go late
Speaker 1: in the season, the glaciers, especially nowadays, all the snow
Speaker 1: is kind of melted off and you can right on
Speaker 1: the bare ice. So yeah, I went from Canada to
Speaker 1: Lake Clark with a mountain bike in nineteen It was
Speaker 1: eight hundred miles or so. And there were these three
Speaker 1: hikers and they started ahead of us, and it was
Speaker 1: sort of like a race to see who would be
Speaker 1: the first people to traverse the Alaska Range, which goes
Speaker 1: kind of from Canada over to Lake Clark, which is
Speaker 1: to the west of Anchorage. And they left, you know,
Speaker 1: six weeks ahead of us, and they started a hundred
Speaker 1: miles shorter route than we did. We started right at
Speaker 1: the Canadian border and they started over by Toke and
Speaker 1: uh they were when we left the Canadian border on
Speaker 1: the fourth of July. They were in Mountain Dnally National
Speaker 1: Park at condition to having a party for the fourth
Speaker 1: of July, and we caught him. We caught him at
Speaker 1: Rainy Pass. Uh, not really passed near Rainy Pass where
Speaker 1: the you know the I didarad goes over the Alaska
Speaker 1: Range called Roan Roadhouse. Actually we didn't catch them there.
Speaker 1: They left us a note because we had a food
Speaker 1: cash there and uh. And there were three of us
Speaker 1: on our mountain bikes and a really good mountain bike
Speaker 1: riding right after that. Because they're all these buffalo trails.
Speaker 1: There's another buffalo herd on the cuscal Quim on the
Speaker 1: South Fork or the customer Quim and the hertman and buffalo.
Speaker 1: They don't like brush, they don't like logs, and so
Speaker 1: whenever there was a log they would walk around the
Speaker 1: logs or there were all these buffed out single tracks
Speaker 1: that we were riding, you know, in the wilderness. It
Speaker 1: was like spectacular. And then we we had pack raphs,
Speaker 1: so whenever we were going down river, if the river
Speaker 1: got big enough, we would just put our pack rafts
Speaker 1: on our put our mountain bikes on our pack rafts
Speaker 1: and then float down. And we caught these hikers and
Speaker 1: then we traveled with them and we were all going
Speaker 1: to finish together, but we had a bike problem with
Speaker 1: a break or something, and they hiked off into the
Speaker 1: fog and then we never saw him again, and we
Speaker 1: ended up getting to the end faster than they did.
Speaker 1: So anyway, that was you know, I was into mountain
Speaker 1: bikes for a while, but using them as sort of
Speaker 1: a wilderness travel tool because walking is kind of it's not,
Speaker 1: it's just it's easy. I like walking, and I do that.
Speaker 1: I'm an old man now, so I do a lot
Speaker 1: more walking. I don't do those bike trips anymore. But
Speaker 1: they were really sad. Almost sixty. Yeah, i'll be sixty
Speaker 1: this year. Yeah, I'm feeling it. Really. You look fine? Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's all great. Yeah, well I can't walk fifty miles
Speaker 1: in a day anymore. No one can. Nobody should let
Speaker 1: me put it there like people don't huh. Yeah they're
Speaker 1: the smart. But yeah, you only compare yourself to yourself, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: if your measure was just the average person, it would
Speaker 1: be pretty dizzy. How old are you? Uh huh? Well
Speaker 1: do you need to use reading glasses yet? Uh huh?
Speaker 1: Do you forget like where your keys are and stuff
Speaker 1: like that? Well, that's coming me and Anthony, here were
Speaker 1: out ice fishing yarday, and we were trying to we're
Speaker 1: trying a little we're trying to put some like seven
Speaker 1: X tip it um through, you know, the size eight. Dude,
Speaker 1: we're cursing up storm ACX. Neither of us had our
Speaker 1: See Steve, you have your old man glasses. I forgot
Speaker 1: mine too. Oh yeah, like holding it up to the
Speaker 1: light and messing with it and yeah, look I have
Speaker 1: to carry him around like all that same time. But
Speaker 1: you know what, I like those clicker little dealies. But um,
Speaker 1: when you got a hat on, they start to be
Speaker 1: painting the gas, yeah, or a hood. Yeah, lots of
Speaker 1: things good for sitting around. That's about all I do
Speaker 1: right now, but a lot of sitting. Yeah it's winter time,
Speaker 1: and yeah I'm a professor, so I don't have a
Speaker 1: I gotta teach my classes and write my papers and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. But summertimes coming and I'll get out again,
Speaker 1: like I'm really. The brook Strange is my sort of
Speaker 1: favorite mountain range right now. I love the Brooks Range.
Speaker 1: Have you been to the Bookstrange the many times? Lets
Speaker 1: just say many times? But yeah, what do you have
Speaker 1: you hunted up there? Then? What do you like sheep
Speaker 1: or caribou caribou? Huh? Where'd you go? Handful of places
Speaker 1: so out. I spent some time with some anthropologists um
Speaker 1: up in the npr A. Yeah, like the Utcock area.
Speaker 1: I would talk ut yeah, and then hunted over um
Speaker 1: hunted caribou a little bit south of there. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: that was in your book those archaeologists, right, yeah, and
Speaker 1: then um south of hunt a handful. Hunted a handful
Speaker 1: of those rivers that are on the north slope, on
Speaker 1: the north slope east of the pipeline, like the Hula
Speaker 1: Hula or the ja Go or the Chillic or the Canning,
Speaker 1: none of those, but the stuff that flows into the
Speaker 1: sag Sag okay, Yeah, yeah, I've hunted ca yep, the
Speaker 1: Sagram talk yeah, like you. It's a pretty the Attican Gorge.
Speaker 1: It's a nice way to get my son. And I
Speaker 1: did a caribou packgraph cariboo hunt. We paddled through that
Speaker 1: Attic and gorge and then hunted cariboo along the sag
Speaker 1: And because you can get five miles from the road
Speaker 1: really easy that way. Uh. Talk about your son a
Speaker 1: little bit, having him and kind of what you you know,
Speaker 1: you know, tell everybody about sort of like the philosophy
Speaker 1: had exactly you did stuff, I say, nearly you did
Speaker 1: stuff with your boy that that would strike a lot
Speaker 1: of people's maybe even irresponsible. Probably. Yeah. Well, you know, um,
Speaker 1: my dad didn't do as much with me as I
Speaker 1: wish that he had done. You know, my parents divorced
Speaker 1: when I was pretty young, and and my dad hadn't
Speaker 1: his his parents had divorced, and so he didn't really
Speaker 1: know how to be a dad. And maybe I didn't either,
Speaker 1: you know, But I did know that I wanted to
Speaker 1: have a better relationship with my son, you know, and
Speaker 1: I wanted to do stuff with him, like from the beginning,
Speaker 1: you know, and I wanted him to enjoy what we
Speaker 1: were doing, and so and so, you know, from a
Speaker 1: young age, like I would take him out, you know,
Speaker 1: on nature walks, or we'd go to the ocean. He
Speaker 1: liked to tide pool like everybody does, you know, especially
Speaker 1: when I was in grad school and the coast of California.
Speaker 1: There's all kinds of cool things and it's just a
Speaker 1: fascinating place. And then when I worked on my pH d,
Speaker 1: I did this canopy project in Puerto Rico in the
Speaker 1: Caribbean and h his his name he back then was Cody,
Speaker 1: you know, his name was Cody Roman dial and Um.
Speaker 1: And he and I went to scope out where I
Speaker 1: would stay before my daughter and wife came out to
Speaker 1: Puerto Rico to join up with us. So, you know,
Speaker 1: we wandered around the rain force. He was three years old,
Speaker 1: you know, and it was fun. He liked it, you know.
Speaker 1: And I tried to be real. I want, I didn't
Speaker 1: want to like freak him out. I didn't want to
Speaker 1: like make him carry a pack or be uncomfortable, because
Speaker 1: I wanted him to want to go out, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean. I wanted him to be a partner.
Speaker 1: I wanted. I mean I wanted. I wanted him to
Speaker 1: be a partner. Now. I wanted him to be like
Speaker 1: at the point where he would carry my stuff instead
Speaker 1: of me carrying his stuff, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: And I think it's a pretty long game. I was
Speaker 1: playing a long game. Yeah, I mean, I think I
Speaker 1: know you your father probably took you out right, and
Speaker 1: I I love going out with my son, and I
Speaker 1: tried I didn't want to spoil it, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. I want, I was playing the long game.
Speaker 1: I ever wanted to spoil it. And when he was six,
Speaker 1: you know, I wanted to take him on a wilderness
Speaker 1: trip in Alaska and um because we just moved back
Speaker 1: up there. I got a job as a professor up there,
Speaker 1: and and I wanted to go a place where there
Speaker 1: it was sort of safe, like no big glacial rivers,
Speaker 1: you know. I didn't want to have to take a
Speaker 1: pack raft and deal with carrying that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: And I didn't want it there'd be any grizzly bears,
Speaker 1: you know. And so I found this island and the
Speaker 1: allusions called Umnak, and it had a geyser base, and
Speaker 1: I thought he might want to see these is it
Speaker 1: like a little miniature yellow Stone. I thought that'd be
Speaker 1: a cool place to go. So I, I don't know,
Speaker 1: somehow I wrangled a way to get out to this
Speaker 1: the third Alusian island, like Unimac is the first one,
Speaker 1: and then Unalaska where Dutch harbors, and then there's Umnak.
Speaker 1: And Umnak had like the secret military base in World
Speaker 1: War two on one end, and it has a an
Speaker 1: old alley village on the other end and the reindeer
Speaker 1: wild cattle yep, it has reindeer and wild cattle and
Speaker 1: it's you know, there's no reindeer. Yeah, they introduced him there,
Speaker 1: and they're kind of weird colors. Stuff. That's become like
Speaker 1: a popular thing as far as it strikes me to
Speaker 1: me when people from the Lower forty eight want to
Speaker 1: go up and hunt cariboo in Alaska but they wind
Speaker 1: up hunting like introduced reindeer on one of the Aleutian islands. Well, um, people,
Speaker 1: but it's like it was like you could go hunt
Speaker 1: cariboo where cariboo live. Yeah, well, you know, I've never
Speaker 1: shot a reindeer. Um. I think a lot of those
Speaker 1: Western Arctic cariboo though, like the ones up around the
Speaker 1: uticac in An n p r A, I think a
Speaker 1: lot of those have reindeer blood in them. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: mean like geneticist like people like tax on Um has
Speaker 1: just regarded all of one one species. Yeah, but I
Speaker 1: mean yeah, but they're they're a different animals and they
Speaker 1: look different and act different everything. So anyway, I took
Speaker 1: my son out there, and he was six, and we
Speaker 1: walked across this island like sixty miles, and I carried
Speaker 1: everything and sometimes I carried him and and it was
Speaker 1: like a life changing thing for both of us and
Speaker 1: I the six years old and sixty miles. How many
Speaker 1: days like a week? I think it was like seven
Speaker 1: days and then we got stuck out there for another week.
Speaker 1: But when we landed at this you know, one side
Speaker 1: at this secret military base wasn't secret but from World
Speaker 1: War two is secret. And there was a family living
Speaker 1: there who were trying to make money off the cattle
Speaker 1: that were kind of feral on the island, and um,
Speaker 1: you know, I'll never forget. The father was like, well,
Speaker 1: what's your name? I said, Oh, I'm Roman dial and
Speaker 1: he goes, he bends over, he goes, well, what's your name,
Speaker 1: little fella, And my son goes, I'm Roman two. And
Speaker 1: he'd never said, you know, his name was Roman. And
Speaker 1: I was like blown away. I mean like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's kind of maybe embarrassing, but I think, you know,
Speaker 1: as a his father's you kind of do want your
Speaker 1: son to, you know, do the stuff you want to
Speaker 1: do is to have him call himself because that was
Speaker 1: his middle name, and ever after that he was Roman.
Speaker 1: It was like a little validation of dad. It kind
Speaker 1: of is, yeah, you know, do you have kids, No,
Speaker 1: you should. Steve's wife would agree. Yes, it is not
Speaker 1: for due to lack of trying on my wife's part,
Speaker 1: not that she's trying to have kids. Was like Steve
Speaker 1: clar I got a whole pile of them. Man, yeah,
Speaker 1: well good three young kids. Oh really? Yeah? I love
Speaker 1: I love being a dad. It was awesome. And I
Speaker 1: have to two young kids too, And that's why I think,
Speaker 1: you know, we could all relate to what you're saying.
Speaker 1: You know, you want them to have a good time,
Speaker 1: you want them to do. What's the things you do.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I found really interesting about
Speaker 1: your book is how you incorporated your kids into your
Speaker 1: work a little bit. You talked about that being in
Speaker 1: the canopy, right, so you're you're scientists, you're doing research,
Speaker 1: and kids love to do that. So as they grew older,
Speaker 1: they're helping you with that. And I found that really interesting.
Speaker 1: And do you think that helped foster their love of
Speaker 1: the outdoors and nature? Well, I hope so. But you know,
Speaker 1: they they know my my daughter, um, I pushed her
Speaker 1: too hard because if you have like two kids and
Speaker 1: they're say, like, my kids are two years or three
Speaker 1: years apart, and you're kind of this is your first
Speaker 1: you know, we don't get a lot of chances with kids,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. And so when you got
Speaker 1: like a four year old and you want to take
Speaker 1: them on a hike, you know, you're like, oh, I'm
Speaker 1: going to four year old pace, but the two year
Speaker 1: old who's there is just like struggling to keep up.
Speaker 1: And then they end up hating that. Like you have
Speaker 1: that issue with my kids, same thing. I've seen it
Speaker 1: like in multiple like they grow up and then the
Speaker 1: older ones like this outdoor stud and then the younger
Speaker 1: ones like you know, stay at home or right four
Speaker 1: wheel ers something like that, and and I've watched it
Speaker 1: now and that's that's the answer I've come up with.
Speaker 1: It's like my hypothesis is that we tend we think
Speaker 1: we're being real easy on our kids, and we're being
Speaker 1: easy on the older one, but then the younger one
Speaker 1: is like, uh, you know, I don't know, but you're
Speaker 1: the youngest of your three brothers, of you three, right,
Speaker 1: and you turned out okay, I guess yeah, but raising
Speaker 1: them it's hard. I have to we have spread that
Speaker 1: significant ability, you know, when I think in a decade
Speaker 1: it probably won't be but right now, I mean it's
Speaker 1: a huge difference between a nine year old and a
Speaker 1: four year old. Oh yeah, you can't. It's hard to
Speaker 1: take them both on the same trip, I know, And
Speaker 1: that causes attention. That caused a lot of tension to
Speaker 1: my wife because she's like, why is I'm like, she
Speaker 1: goes like the older one, but when he was four,
Speaker 1: he would go do that like because it was only
Speaker 1: one and keeping one kid drying warm is different than
Speaker 1: keeping three kids drying warm. So it's like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know what to do. Yeah, I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't know, Like I need to hire someone to
Speaker 1: come along, because it's hard to keep three people warm
Speaker 1: and dry. So the ones, the one at nine when
Speaker 1: he was whatever he had, he had had more experiences.
Speaker 1: We're all checking muskrat traps this morning, um, and you
Speaker 1: know I grabbed him because he's like up and gets
Speaker 1: his clothes on by himself, and you know when I
Speaker 1: had to like wake up and get his clothes on.
Speaker 1: So it's got lazy. I've been trying to leave home
Speaker 1: my twelve year old and take out my eight year
Speaker 1: old daughter once in a while. That goes over real
Speaker 1: well down right, and that's difficult. He gets annoyed, but
Speaker 1: I say, look, I've done plenty things just you and I.
Speaker 1: You know, hann and I. You know, this is just
Speaker 1: for her, but it's I don't know what the easy answers,
Speaker 1: but I I had to do that to avoid that problem. Oh,
Speaker 1: they look gut shot when you bring that up. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm glad you're doing that, because I remember when I
Speaker 1: came back from that, I'm not trip. My daughter's like, Dad,
Speaker 1: when when are you? When? When are you and me
Speaker 1: gonna do a six day trip? You know? She wanted
Speaker 1: to do one and I was like, oh, it's coming.
Speaker 1: And I never did one until she was kind of
Speaker 1: grown up, and then it was too late, you know.
Speaker 1: And I look back and I think, oh, I wish
Speaker 1: I had done that, because you know, she's not really
Speaker 1: an outdoorsy person, although I asked her once. I said well,
Speaker 1: what is it mean to be outdoorsy for a girl?
Speaker 1: And she goes, oh, it means you can go to
Speaker 1: the bathroom outside. Yeah, that's a measure like how comfortable
Speaker 1: you are being outside? I propose your friend of mine
Speaker 1: and Tracy the other day, said there's a good little
Speaker 1: spot to go pee, and she said, I'll just wait,
Speaker 1: there you are. Yeah, I guess not outdoorsy. She's pretty
Speaker 1: out of that. Yeah, but yeah, she viewed it like,
Speaker 1: you know, would rather hold it than p outside. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, would imagine every time you had to pee,
Speaker 1: you had to pull your pants down, especially if it's
Speaker 1: like windy and snowy. And yeah, yeah, I think that's
Speaker 1: why they have skirts. They should get they should have
Speaker 1: really good outdoor skirts. So that you just guess, yeah,
Speaker 1: were you were? You? I'm gathering you weren't surprised when
Speaker 1: your kids started doing Um, when your son, who will
Speaker 1: call Roman Roman? Yeah you call him Roman, of course, yeah,
Speaker 1: I I he wouldn't let me call him Cody, like
Speaker 1: he wouldn't let me call him Cody. And um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So anyway, he got to late teens, early twenties, Yeah,
Speaker 1: started doing crazy as trips by himself. You know, I
Speaker 1: I don't know if he I'll tell you what happened
Speaker 1: is he Um, he went away to college, and he
Speaker 1: met a girl in college, and she was from Chicago,
Speaker 1: and and he brought her to Alaska and he took
Speaker 1: her out on a bunch of trips. And that's when
Speaker 1: I knew he was sort of serious about her because
Speaker 1: you know, he'd grown up thinking that trips were about family,
Speaker 1: you know, like other kids the school it would be like, oh,
Speaker 1: come on, let's go, but he would go with them,
Speaker 1: but they didn't really know enough. You know. He's like
Speaker 1: he used to going out with like me and my friends,
Speaker 1: and and we were we'd go really light and we
Speaker 1: could get along with nothing. And then he'd go with
Speaker 1: these kids who were kind of clumsy and had too
Speaker 1: much stuff, and he, you know, he didn't really seem right.
Speaker 1: He wanted to go with with me and Peggy and
Speaker 1: our family and or my friends. And so when he
Speaker 1: came to Alaska, you know, one summer with his girlfriend,
Speaker 1: and he took her like sea kayaking and backpacking and rafting.
Speaker 1: That's when I knew he was serious about her, because
Speaker 1: like he was taking her on these trips and taking
Speaker 1: care of her and and uh, and he you know,
Speaker 1: he wasn't really a risk taker, you know, like I,
Speaker 1: you know, I hadn't and I don't really have anymore.
Speaker 1: All my testosterones kind of drained away and so I
Speaker 1: don't I don't really need the adrenaline rush that I
Speaker 1: used paying a really nice getting old. Yeah, well this
Speaker 1: Feller used to be a lot more sort of adrenaline
Speaker 1: um chasing, and but my son wasn't. He was kind
Speaker 1: of like my wife. He he was more risk averse,
Speaker 1: you know, my wife, it was sort of That's why
Speaker 1: I loved her, and I feel like she's a good
Speaker 1: balance for me. Is because she doesn't need to like
Speaker 1: scare her I mean, she likes to scare herself, but
Speaker 1: she doesn't have to scare herself at the level that
Speaker 1: I do. And I mean everybody likes to scare themself.
Speaker 1: That's why amusement park rides are fun, you know, as
Speaker 1: long as you're not going to get hurt. Getting scared
Speaker 1: as fun and um and so, but he was more
Speaker 1: thoughtful about getting hurt. He didn't really want to get
Speaker 1: hurt and uh. And so the trips that he would do,
Speaker 1: we're not quite as crazy as the trips that I
Speaker 1: had done, you know. And uh. But he would go
Speaker 1: out and he was exploring things. And by the time
Speaker 1: he was in his late teens in his twenties, he
Speaker 1: was doing things on his own and really enjoying it.
Speaker 1: And uh. And when he headed to Central America, you know,
Speaker 1: that was a really big varience in the sense that
Speaker 1: you know, he was traveling through foreign countries on his
Speaker 1: own for like six months. I'd never done anything like that,
Speaker 1: you know, and especially not in my twenties, um and
Speaker 1: speaking Spanish and doing some pretty I think, you know,
Speaker 1: amazing wilderness trips in Central America. Yeah, but that was
Speaker 1: like a different kind of the difference with the approach
Speaker 1: he was taken on this trip which we're talking about
Speaker 1: the like this is the trip that ended up being
Speaker 1: his last trip. Well, no, like before like because he
Speaker 1: went he went to Mexico. I went down there and
Speaker 1: sawm and who went back rafting, and then this is
Speaker 1: all one continuous, one continuous thing he was on from
Speaker 1: country to country, country to country. Within that like a
Speaker 1: lot of people do that. I mean a lot of
Speaker 1: people will go and do you know we used to
Speaker 1: do a little bit of that stuff, like go down
Speaker 1: and kind of do like the tracking around, riding buses. Sure,
Speaker 1: Disney villagis. But what he The weird part about it
Speaker 1: that I thought it was just unusual is he was
Speaker 1: putting in jungle tracks sometimes like kind of off trail
Speaker 1: and like little trans sax and like doing like jungle trips,
Speaker 1: heading off by himself into kind of like the same
Speaker 1: way if you were up in Alaska you want to
Speaker 1: go do a trip. It has never occurred to me
Speaker 1: that you'd go and do a trip to the jungle, right,
Speaker 1: go to a foreign country, find a remote area, and
Speaker 1: then just go wander around and there. Right. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: I I was actually, you know, as a father, I
Speaker 1: was really torn, you know, like I was proud of
Speaker 1: him for doing that, you know what I mean, like
Speaker 1: I kind of raised him with that, not with that.
Speaker 1: I wanted him to do that kind of thing. But
Speaker 1: then when he was doing it, I was like, oh
Speaker 1: my god, you know what I mean, Like I don't know.
Speaker 1: I guess if you were in the military and uh,
Speaker 1: and then your son joined the military, you'd be both
Speaker 1: proud and terrified at the same time. And so I
Speaker 1: was like I was really proud of what he was doing,
Speaker 1: but I was terrified, you know, like I was, Oh
Speaker 1: my god, I can't believe he's doing that. I you know,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't. I've never done anything like that, and I
Speaker 1: couldn't do anything like that, and he's doing it, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, at one point he said he was going
Speaker 1: to go to this ruin, you know, in this deep
Speaker 1: wilderness in Guatemala, and he told me how he was
Speaker 1: going to go in the back way and it was
Speaker 1: going to be like, you know, this long wilderness walk
Speaker 1: and and I wrote him an email because he kept
Speaker 1: in touch with me, he said, here's what I'm gonna
Speaker 1: do and uh. And then usually he go do it
Speaker 1: and he'd say, hey, i'm back. I'll tell you about it,
Speaker 1: you know, a couple of days, and he'd write a big,
Speaker 1: long story about it. And so he wrote me and
Speaker 1: said here's what I'm gonna do, Dad, And I wrote
Speaker 1: him back. I said, no, don't do that. You know,
Speaker 1: that's don't do it. That's too dangerous. I don't want
Speaker 1: you to do that. You know, there's I've made all,
Speaker 1: you know, I went through all the reasons not to.
Speaker 1: But I didn't send that email. I wrote it, but
Speaker 1: I didn't send it to him. And then I wrote
Speaker 1: another one. I tried to like tone it down, and
Speaker 1: I wrote another one and I couldn't send him there
Speaker 1: all like don't do it. And I was telling him,
Speaker 1: like all the things people had said to me over
Speaker 1: the years, like taking a mountain bike across the Alaska Range,
Speaker 1: what kind of id it? Or you you know, Oh
Speaker 1: you're gonna walk across the wrangel Saint Elias in October. No,
Speaker 1: you're not. You know what I mean. I kind of
Speaker 1: have spent forty years listening to people say that. But
Speaker 1: a difference, not to discredit the feats you did, but
Speaker 1: the difference there is you could rattle off because of
Speaker 1: your familiarity with the state, you could rattle off the
Speaker 1: reasons why not. And when you get into being like
Speaker 1: someone who's from the north and they go down and
Speaker 1: there in this area, um, you wouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: make a you wouldn't really have what it takes to
Speaker 1: make a comprehensive list of the potential problems. Well, he
Speaker 1: he kind of he'd been to the tropics a lot,
Speaker 1: you know, like when he was three years old, he
Speaker 1: spent you know, almost you know, seven months in Puerto
Speaker 1: Rico and then then we traveled the world, and he'd
Speaker 1: been to Costa Rica twice, you know when he was
Speaker 1: taking you know, he went down there on a tropical
Speaker 1: ecology class. I taught there, and he went down there
Speaker 1: with me when I did a research project. There's spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time in Borneo. I spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time He and I spent two months like in
Speaker 1: a junk in Borneo at a research station, and he'd
Speaker 1: already been there like three times, so he knew the rainforest,
Speaker 1: you know. He like I remember, like he studied ants,
Speaker 1: like he knew which ants were dangerous and which ones weren't.
Speaker 1: So when one time he went to Australia, he goes, Dad,
Speaker 1: look at this ant. It jumps and he had it
Speaker 1: on a stick, you know, and he was showing it
Speaker 1: to me, and I was like, oh, here, so let
Speaker 1: me see that aunt. You know, like you can put
Speaker 1: an ant on your finger, and I put it on
Speaker 1: my fingers. As soon as I put on my finger, poom,
Speaker 1: it stung me like a hammer had hit me, you know.
Speaker 1: And I was like ah and he was like, yeah, Dad,
Speaker 1: I knew that was like a bad aunt, you know.
Speaker 1: And uh So he was really well aware of what
Speaker 1: was dangerous and what was not because he'd been he'd
Speaker 1: grown up in the tropics, and he that's part of
Speaker 1: the reason he was risk averse, because a lot of
Speaker 1: the things that are really cool in the tropics, like
Speaker 1: colorful things especially, can be nasty. So based off of that,
Speaker 1: did you whittle your email down eventually to like, just
Speaker 1: don't do it because I don't like it in your head.
Speaker 1: I didn't. I whittled the email down to, hey, watch
Speaker 1: out for ferti lances and bushmasters and you know, be careful.
Speaker 1: And I sent I sent it away, and I didn't
Speaker 1: tell him not to do it. I couldn't, you know,
Speaker 1: how could I? You know, it was his trip and
Speaker 1: he came back and it was like, you know, an
Speaker 1: amazing experience from he wrote me like the six thousand
Speaker 1: word you know, story about it and m and I
Speaker 1: was super proud of him. I sent it to all
Speaker 1: my friends, you know, like wow, look what he did.
Speaker 1: And um. And then he did some even more like
Speaker 1: amazing trips you know that were amazing in different ways.
Speaker 1: Like he he went down this river in Honduras through
Speaker 1: what he called like the cocaine hub of Central America,
Speaker 1: because like what happened is, you know, the Americans disrupted
Speaker 1: the typical cocaine trafficking route from Colombia. So the Colombians
Speaker 1: changed it up and they sent it across sort of
Speaker 1: the southern Caribbean to this part of Honduras, like the
Speaker 1: Mosquito coast, and then they ran it across Honduras up
Speaker 1: these rivers and then into guatemal and then it went
Speaker 1: overland into Mexico. And so the river is where it all.
Speaker 1: All the cocaine trade goes through, so um or transport,
Speaker 1: and he went down that river with this Canadian and
Speaker 1: I had no idea that that stuff was going on.
Speaker 1: You know, he didn't tell me about that. He just said, Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm going through this biosphere reserve and it's a big
Speaker 1: wilderness area. But because it's a wilderness area, it's also
Speaker 1: a good place for you know outlaws too. So anyway,
Speaker 1: he had like all these really you know, wild and
Speaker 1: crazy experiences that he told me about afterwards. Usually you know,
Speaker 1: he'd said, I'm gonna go do this, Like he said, Hey,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go down the Patuca River through the Mosquetilla
Speaker 1: and and then he sent this email about what it
Speaker 1: was like when he came back. So when he went
Speaker 1: missing in Costa Rica, I went down there up. Hold
Speaker 1: that thought from me because the trip that he went
Speaker 1: missing on, Um were there red flags in your mind
Speaker 1: about that trip? Well, I didn't really know he was
Speaker 1: heading on that. Like what happened there is um it
Speaker 1: was in the summer, and in the summer you know,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm kind of busy doing stuff, and he was
Speaker 1: communicating with us and and he and I he'd asked
Speaker 1: me about like maps, Hey, Dad, do you have any
Speaker 1: secret sources for good topo maps? Because I think he
Speaker 1: you know, I kind of knew maybe he'd mentioned it
Speaker 1: or we talked about but I I sort of thought
Speaker 1: he wanted it to cross the Darian Gap, you know,
Speaker 1: in the highway, which is sort of you know, like
Speaker 1: I think we all want to do it, but none
Speaker 1: of us really should do it. And um, and I had,
Speaker 1: you know, I think I would have told him, don't
Speaker 1: do it. But I was sort of I don't want
Speaker 1: to say I was pleased that he was thinking about it,
Speaker 1: but I don't know, you know, like you kind of
Speaker 1: rooting him on in a way. I guess I kind
Speaker 1: of was. And I, you know, I I sent him
Speaker 1: some map ideas, you know, even though it wasn't specifically
Speaker 1: about the Darian and uh. And so anyway, we we
Speaker 1: were talking back and forth about maps, and I came
Speaker 1: back from a pack rafting trip in the Tachita Mountains,
Speaker 1: and you know, there was an email there it was like,
Speaker 1: you know, the best map yet. So I just thought
Speaker 1: it was about maps, and I took off because Peggy,
Speaker 1: my wife, was like, hey, you've been gone. You know.
Speaker 1: We had to go dipping out some salmon. This is
Speaker 1: the time when all the salminar and let's go. So
Speaker 1: we went down to the Kenye and UM had some
Speaker 1: house projects. When I got back and we hadn't heard
Speaker 1: We didn't hear from him, you know, and I kept
Speaker 1: expecting to hear from him, but I hadn't really read
Speaker 1: the email, you know, like I really I still feel
Speaker 1: guilty about that, and I didn't really read it through
Speaker 1: when I should have. And when we got back, and
Speaker 1: you know, we were in Lows shopping for something to
Speaker 1: work on the house, and Peggy got nauseated. We were
Speaker 1: talking like, hey, haven't why I haven't heard from Rom
Speaker 1: and she got nause and we went home and I
Speaker 1: read this email and it was like, you know, holy
Speaker 1: can I say on him? Holy ship? I read the
Speaker 1: email and he you know, he was supposed to have
Speaker 1: been back like ten days before, you know, and I
Speaker 1: just felt awful that I hadn't looked and I felt
Speaker 1: even worse, like he's he's missing. I haven't heard from
Speaker 1: We should have heard from me he was only going
Speaker 1: to be in there for like five days. A five
Speaker 1: day trip would was definitely abnormal for sure. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean he he would that would never. It would be
Speaker 1: way out of the ordinary. You know. He usually like
Speaker 1: when he came back from that crossing in Guatemala, you know,
Speaker 1: he says, hey, I just got out. I'll tell you
Speaker 1: more later, just to let us know, because you guys
Speaker 1: had a little bit of a protocol just from your
Speaker 1: experiences too, about sort of the importance of your outdate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he grew up with that. You know, he grew up
Speaker 1: with like being we would always responsible. You know, I
Speaker 1: didn't want to freak my wife. I had a wife
Speaker 1: and kid at home. I had to make sure that
Speaker 1: I came back when I said I was gonna come back,
Speaker 1: or if I didn't, they knew I would be back,
Speaker 1: and then we would. You know. He grew up with that,
Speaker 1: and he was a responsible kid about that. So he
Speaker 1: always let us know. So when you know he had
Speaker 1: I didn't hear, I rushed down, you know, like I
Speaker 1: left the next day and uh. And so that's kind
Speaker 1: of like the third part of that book is about
Speaker 1: looking for him down there, and and it was frustrating
Speaker 1: to get down there and have all these people. He
Speaker 1: brought a friend down. Yeah, well I needed somebody, you know,
Speaker 1: and so I brought um tiber Zone down who speaks
Speaker 1: fluent Spanish and I you know, he's the kind of
Speaker 1: guy that you know, one time I I was going
Speaker 1: to the him Alaya to look for these ice worms
Speaker 1: in the him Alaya and that my collaborator, another scientists
Speaker 1: couldn't go. And so my my collaborators, it was Thursday
Speaker 1: and we're supposed to leave on Sunday. And he's like, hey,
Speaker 1: I can't go. And I'm like, hey, Ty, can you
Speaker 1: go to China next week? And He's like sure when
Speaker 1: you know and uh. And so Ty was the kind
Speaker 1: of guy he could drop everything. Like at one point,
Speaker 1: Ty went to every continent every year, you know, and
Speaker 1: and every continent. He went to every continent he was
Speaker 1: paid to go, you know, like he was a guide,
Speaker 1: or he was um doing logistics in that Arctica, or
Speaker 1: he was doing medicine in Africa. You know, he was
Speaker 1: that kind of guy. And he he his his mom
Speaker 1: is is Vietnamese and his dad is Italian, and so
Speaker 1: he looks like he's from anywhere, you know, and he's
Speaker 1: got a big smile. He's real gregarious, and you know,
Speaker 1: he's super strong, but he's kind of you know, I
Speaker 1: don't know. He just looked like you would like him.
Speaker 1: You know, if he was here, we would all like
Speaker 1: him immediately. So I needed him with me because I'm
Speaker 1: not the kind of guy people usually like right away
Speaker 1: wherever for that matter, I don't know, but he is,
Speaker 1: and so I needed him to come. And he we
Speaker 1: went down there, and he has jungle experience, and we've
Speaker 1: done a lot of stuff together. And your initial impulse
Speaker 1: was to go where you now understood that he went. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and just like like physically look for him, like look
Speaker 1: around to find him a long route. Well, yeah, well
Speaker 1: he told me where he was going. He sent a map,
Speaker 1: you know. He said, I'm gonna go up this river
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna go out this river. It's gonna take
Speaker 1: five days. He was very specific, and and I took
Speaker 1: that as I mean, I would send somebody that, and
Speaker 1: I have, you know, for forty years, I've sent people
Speaker 1: that kind of thing, because hey, look, if I don't
Speaker 1: show up, come get me. If I'm not here by
Speaker 1: this day, come get me. You know, you know, officials
Speaker 1: down there though, we're no. They just thought he was
Speaker 1: some kid who was you know, ran off. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: the backpackers we were talking about earlier, who traveled through
Speaker 1: Central America and you know, hang out at the hostel
Speaker 1: and smoked cigarettes and talk about how they'd like to
Speaker 1: do stuff, but they don't do anything, you know, And
Speaker 1: so they just thought he was you know, hanging out
Speaker 1: with a drug dealer and uh or his just ignoring
Speaker 1: his parents. You know, none of that added up. So
Speaker 1: it was very frustrating to me, who had had spent
Speaker 1: this life. So I wrote this because you're just another
Speaker 1: You're just another parent who thinks their kids an angel, exactly,
Speaker 1: and you just clearly can't see that he whatever, ran
Speaker 1: off of the girl. That's it. It's exactly. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: I it was really painful, I mean to like sort
Speaker 1: of first of all, to have my son missing, you know,
Speaker 1: and it's like I've spent you know, more than half
Speaker 1: my life and his whole life doing stuff with him,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. And I like just playing cards,
Speaker 1: you know, or chess or watching TV, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean, but kind of the stuff that really bonds us.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that's part of what like hunt,
Speaker 1: seeing or being outdoors really bonds us in a really
Speaker 1: very deeply human way, and especially with your kids, you know,
Speaker 1: or your wife and your friends and so um. It
Speaker 1: was just like it was a real insult to this
Speaker 1: injury of loss to lose my son and then have
Speaker 1: people tell me like I didn't know him or this
Speaker 1: is what he was doing, and and so the book
Speaker 1: is a lot about that, you know what I mean
Speaker 1: for sure, it's it's like that's like one of the
Speaker 1: aching parts about it. You know, you spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time on this. I don't want I don't we
Speaker 1: don't need to spend a ton of time on it
Speaker 1: right now, but like I want to get to how
Speaker 1: you actually searched, but try to explain to people like
Speaker 1: the false lead that emerges, you mean, the potala, which
Speaker 1: which takes months, like for months, it tooks year, it
Speaker 1: took years. Take at that point where people are like,
Speaker 1: this is what happened, and and you're like that that's
Speaker 1: not what happened. But it was like, why can't this
Speaker 1: guy see that this is what happened, But explain this guy, well,
Speaker 1: he's sort of he was like the pariah of the
Speaker 1: Ossa Peninsula. So the Osa Peninsula is like this elbow
Speaker 1: that sticks out in southern Coasta Rica on the Pacific
Speaker 1: side near the border with Panama. And it's a pretty
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's a pretty rural and area. Very
Speaker 1: wild too. There's the biggest national park. I think it's
Speaker 1: the biggest national park in Coasta Rica. Corcovado National Park
Speaker 1: is there. Like it's wild enough where there's like like
Speaker 1: illegal gold miners. Yeah, it's totally wild setting up camps
Speaker 1: that no one knows about. Yeah. Well, you know, it's
Speaker 1: wild enough to have jaguars and bush masters and herpie eagles,
Speaker 1: you know, and all the monkeys that people like living
Speaker 1: out there that no one knows about. Right and then
Speaker 1: and then it's so big and and it used it's
Speaker 1: got gold miners who like hang out in the park
Speaker 1: and they hide out and the rangers go in and
Speaker 1: and and then the west coast of the park. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, used to be able to hike around there,
Speaker 1: and the west coast was a great place to hike.
Speaker 1: But I think there's a lot of cocaine boats that
Speaker 1: come up and bring drugs from Panama now and they've
Speaker 1: they've shut all the hiking down on the west coast
Speaker 1: along the beach basically north of sir Aino, which is
Speaker 1: the most touristic part. And it's it's really a remote
Speaker 1: You can't drive into the park. You have to hike
Speaker 1: into it. And now they don't let you hike there
Speaker 1: without having a guide, and they only let you hike
Speaker 1: on certain trails. And the rangers go in there and
Speaker 1: they chase the miners out, and they change chase the
Speaker 1: poachers out and um. And then there's this out just
Speaker 1: outside the park. There's a big mining community. But it's
Speaker 1: all it's all like hike in mine, like I don't know,
Speaker 1: backcountry mining, Like it's hand back Yeah, I got all.
Speaker 1: They hike in and their sluice boxes they are like
Speaker 1: three ft long, and there their shovels or metal shovels,
Speaker 1: but they've whittled some piece of hardwood down to stick
Speaker 1: into the shovel. When it handles break, they just make
Speaker 1: a new one. And they live in these plastic you know, tarps,
Speaker 1: and they're they're running water is through plastic pipes that
Speaker 1: they use to kind of drain areas to mind for
Speaker 1: it's all by hand, you know. And uh so anyway, Um,
Speaker 1: there's this one mining trail that goes from one mining
Speaker 1: community all the way to the coast, and everybody thought
Speaker 1: that they'd seen my son with this guy pot Laura
Speaker 1: and his name Potalora's. It was like his nickname for
Speaker 1: parrot foot, because he had like a deformity of his foot,
Speaker 1: and nobody liked him, and he nobody liked him, and
Speaker 1: he was the pariah of those you know, and anything
Speaker 1: that bad that happened, they blamed it on him. Even
Speaker 1: his own family didn't like him. And so he was
Speaker 1: with this gringo who apparently looked like my son, and
Speaker 1: everybody was sure that my son had been with him.
Speaker 1: And uh, and he didn't do a whole hell of
Speaker 1: a lot to dispel the notion that he had been
Speaker 1: with your son. Oh no, he encouraged it. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: fed it. He came up, he spun all these stories.
Speaker 1: I don't want to tell too much because my publisher
Speaker 1: will want somebody to buy the book. And if I
Speaker 1: tell you the whole story, nobody will want to read it.
Speaker 1: But um, but is not true. If I tell the story,
Speaker 1: nobody will want to read it. I don't think that
Speaker 1: that's true. Maybe the page one yeah, well, the Podalora story,
Speaker 1: it just it never went away, you know, like right
Speaker 1: up to the end, it never went away. And uh
Speaker 1: and I just I just couldn't see Roman like walking
Speaker 1: with this guy, you know, like it would be I
Speaker 1: think I used the phrase in the book, it would
Speaker 1: be like this guy because I talked, I interview people,
Speaker 1: you know, I followed the Potalora troil, you know, I
Speaker 1: I talked to the people. I mean, I hiked into
Speaker 1: the jungle. I spent like weeks in the jungle, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean. I hiked all around like I
Speaker 1: you know, illegally eventually legally. Yeah, that's everything I wanted
Speaker 1: to bring up that you wanted to go in. And Okay,
Speaker 1: so the book gets into spends a lot of time
Speaker 1: on all the what everyone else is telling you must
Speaker 1: have happened. Yeah, and you needing to be the like
Speaker 1: naive rube who insists that you're right while everyone else
Speaker 1: is behind your back, probably saying like this guy has
Speaker 1: no idea. Probably, yeah for sure. But I mean, like
Speaker 1: I knew my son, you know, and I can't get
Speaker 1: his bank records. I couldn't get it took us two
Speaker 1: years to get his bank records. But I you know,
Speaker 1: I knew my son, and I've been in the jungle
Speaker 1: enough to know that I could look, and I wanted
Speaker 1: people to help me, and so the only people I
Speaker 1: could really get to help me because the officials did
Speaker 1: everything they could to keep me out. Yeah that's what
Speaker 1: That's what I was gonna ask you about his. They
Speaker 1: literally forbid you, threatened me, threatened to arrest me to
Speaker 1: go forbid you, Um, you cannot go look for your son. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's pretty much what they said. Yeah, you know, And
Speaker 1: I went down there to look for his months long, Yeah,
Speaker 1: for yeah, months, And I went down there specifically to
Speaker 1: look for him, Like I have to go out on
Speaker 1: illegal minor trails sometimes with illegal miners to try to
Speaker 1: find your way in there to look around. Right, Why,
Speaker 1: I they knew it much better than I did, So
Speaker 1: I I got miners and poachers to help me out,
Speaker 1: you know, because nobody else that the officials wouldn't and
Speaker 1: under Yeah you're under threat of arrest. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: that one. I remember one time I had like this
Speaker 1: kind of bushy beard and I shaved it off because
Speaker 1: I knew they were looking for me, and I hid
Speaker 1: in the car, you know, I mean, um, because I
Speaker 1: I needed to find him, you know, and I was
Speaker 1: gonna do whatever it took. So I must be so frustrating.
Speaker 1: It's so many levels to be kept out from that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was like trying to I felt like it was
Speaker 1: like some kind of football game where they're trying to
Speaker 1: tackle me, but I'm trying to get to the end
Speaker 1: zone there, you know, and I the officials were trying
Speaker 1: to keep me from going that direction. Um, but the
Speaker 1: locals were really helpful, you know, like the people who
Speaker 1: lived there, and they're very family oriented and they understood,
Speaker 1: you know, what I was trying to do. And uh,
Speaker 1: and my friends you know, came down and helped me.
Speaker 1: But then they'd come down and I realized how dangerous,
Speaker 1: dangerous it was to have people who didn't have any
Speaker 1: experience in the jungle and have them with me, you know,
Speaker 1: because there's snakes. And I mean it sounds cliche to say, oh,
Speaker 1: there's snakes, but there really are snakes, you know, like yeah,
Speaker 1: there it's full on, you know, like you should you
Speaker 1: get hit and you're gonna like you got an hour,
Speaker 1: you're gonna be dead basically. Yeah, And you know you're
Speaker 1: a couple of hours in and you're they're not gonna
Speaker 1: get a helicopter in there. And there's like three snakes
Speaker 1: you kind of have to really watch out for. There's
Speaker 1: you know, the palm vipers that hang kind of like
Speaker 1: right at eye level and you don't see them, you know.
Speaker 1: And this kid came down. I really like this kid, Todd.
Speaker 1: He came down to help, and he almost walked into one.
Speaker 1: He did, he walked literally and he almost got hit.
Speaker 1: Um tivers oone. He stepped over a log and there
Speaker 1: was a palm viper coiled up on the log. He
Speaker 1: didn't see it. I saw it when I walked up
Speaker 1: to the log, and I was like, holy cow, I
Speaker 1: can't bring my friends down here. This is too dangerous.
Speaker 1: You know. Then there's fairtal answers. Those are the ones
Speaker 1: that are definitely poisonous. And I never saw a bush master,
Speaker 1: but they're the really bad ones. And you know, it's
Speaker 1: just it was dangerous, you know. And I I could
Speaker 1: see why they didn't want me in there, but um,
Speaker 1: and they didn't know me, you know, like I had
Speaker 1: to get you know, the Lieutenant governor of Alaska tore like,
Speaker 1: who does know me? To write a letter and say no,
Speaker 1: you Roman, Diald knows what he's doing. You know, he's
Speaker 1: been around, you know, you can you can trust his judgment. Um.
Speaker 1: But you know, they wanted to protect me. They didn't
Speaker 1: want me to get into trouble. And I could see
Speaker 1: their side, but but the other side of me, there
Speaker 1: there's no stopping me. You know, I was going to
Speaker 1: do whatever it took, and I you know, I had
Speaker 1: to sell my soldier reality TV eventually, you know, I
Speaker 1: didn't know it was reality TV, but it turned into
Speaker 1: reality TV. Yeah. I'll ask about that in a second.
Speaker 1: But another thing I wanted to touch on is you, Um,
Speaker 1: initially you felt like there was like a race against
Speaker 1: the clocks. Yeah. No, I pictured him. He was like
Speaker 1: I could see him in the tent and it was
Speaker 1: all soggy and wet and cold because the rainforest is
Speaker 1: actually cold, especially here you're in the mountains, and when
Speaker 1: it rains, you know, the rains coming from thirty thousand
Speaker 1: feet up, so it's cold, comes down and chills you.
Speaker 1: And I could see him like in this tent. He
Speaker 1: was broken and hey dad, where are you? I'm out
Speaker 1: of food. That's what went through my head. And so
Speaker 1: I was trying to find him, and people were trying
Speaker 1: to keep me out. You know it was it was terrible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was terrible. Do you I don't think forgiving if
Speaker 1: you bring this up in your book, but some of
Speaker 1: the local response to you, did you ever get a
Speaker 1: sense that it was just like another view of American exceptionalism,
Speaker 1: where you have this place where, no doubt many many
Speaker 1: people go missing because of drug trafficking, because of you know,
Speaker 1: human migration, because of whatever reason. But then everyone needs
Speaker 1: to drop everything and get everyone on board because an
Speaker 1: American is missing. No. I never felt that, and I
Speaker 1: never asked for that, you know what I mean. Like
Speaker 1: I didn't ask for the helicopter. I didn't ask for
Speaker 1: the whole army of Red Cross people. I would have
Speaker 1: done it myself. I would have preferred if they would
Speaker 1: just like, let me do this. Like here's the way
Speaker 1: I sort of feel is um and this is maybe
Speaker 1: a little too libertarian for most people. But to be
Speaker 1: part of society, we've had to give up everything. Okay,
Speaker 1: Like society is great, but we don't get to take
Speaker 1: care of ourselves. You get a doctor to take care
Speaker 1: of you, there's no justice. We don't take care of
Speaker 1: our own justice. We have a justice system that takes
Speaker 1: care of that. We don't get rid of. If if
Speaker 1: somebody is breaking into your house, you can't do anything
Speaker 1: about that. You've got to call the police. You don't
Speaker 1: do anything for ourselves. It's all we get to do
Speaker 1: is put food in our mouths. Now maybe you know,
Speaker 1: and maybe we can reproduce the letter whom I defend myself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so the authorities. That's it, That's what it comes
Speaker 1: down to. So to be part of society, we've given
Speaker 1: up all these things that when we were like primitive humans,
Speaker 1: we did ourselves. You know, like we don't even like
Speaker 1: build your house anymore. You have somebody else build your house.
Speaker 1: You know. We don't really get to do much. And
Speaker 1: so this seems really important to me, is to take
Speaker 1: care of my family member, you know, But we don't
Speaker 1: get to do that. No, we have specialized teams who
Speaker 1: are going to do that, but they're never going to
Speaker 1: be as invested in it as as as we are.
Speaker 1: Uh follow a rail right, a wounded animal trail. I
Speaker 1: don't want anybody else out there messing with the evidence,
Speaker 1: and I want to be the one collecting it and
Speaker 1: processing it. And again nobody's more invested in the person
Speaker 1: that sent the bullet or the arrow. Right, were you
Speaker 1: feeling any of that? Like, if I involve a lot
Speaker 1: of people, then I'm gonna miss critical information and I
Speaker 1: may be the best person to decipher that. Absolutely, that's
Speaker 1: that's I think that's a really good analogy. That's kind
Speaker 1: of how I felt. But I know, I maybe I
Speaker 1: was just too emotional about it, you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: And I should have just got out of the way,
Speaker 1: but there was no way I was going to. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it was a there's an enormous amount of variables
Speaker 1: where um, you can't you're not able to rule out
Speaker 1: foul play. So you're trying to get into the jungle. Look,
Speaker 1: but you're also looking at everyone you walk by, and
Speaker 1: everyone's backpack. You're curious about what are their shoes, and
Speaker 1: you know what gear your son had, and you're trying
Speaker 1: to see, like, am I going to see someone come
Speaker 1: by with a pair of Solomon shoes on? Oh? And
Speaker 1: then the long guy was on the oath of the
Speaker 1: more you heard about these stories, you know, like the
Speaker 1: Austrians who lived in this little town and sold gold,
Speaker 1: and how they had been killed. They disappeared, but there
Speaker 1: was blood on their walls and and somebody was driving
Speaker 1: their car around and using their A t M card
Speaker 1: and but they never found a body until years later
Speaker 1: when bones washed out. And then there was the Canadian
Speaker 1: woman who was shot in the head and they didn't
Speaker 1: have any idea who did that. And then there was
Speaker 1: another woman, an American who was smothered in her bed,
Speaker 1: you know, in an iPod or iPad were stolen, and
Speaker 1: so you heard about these things along you were there,
Speaker 1: and then you'd hear about this guy Patalora who some
Speaker 1: people would say, oh, yeah, he's a murderer, he's killed people,
Speaker 1: he killed your son and blah blah blah, and and
Speaker 1: there I mean it is, it's kind of a lawless place.
Speaker 1: And uh and if there's nobody and there's nobody, and yeah,
Speaker 1: they don't they don't they like you could, no matter
Speaker 1: what happens, exists with out of body, there's no murder. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like those Austrians. They everybody knew who did it because
Speaker 1: he was driving their car around and spending their A
Speaker 1: t M money and they knew that he had done it.
Speaker 1: But until they found this body two years later, the
Speaker 1: bones that had washed out of this river bank. Um,
Speaker 1: then they realized, okay, yep, you're the one. There's a body. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you even go arrange and meet with the guy
Speaker 1: who's claiming to have been one of the last people
Speaker 1: to see your son alive. Right. Well, I was eager
Speaker 1: to meet the guy who his name was Jenkins. And
Speaker 1: I was eager to meet him because when early on
Speaker 1: in the search, um, when they'd kicked me out of
Speaker 1: the search because I was emotionally unstable as what they said, Um,
Speaker 1: were you looking back now? No, I was, and I
Speaker 1: was very calm, you know. It was the guy who
Speaker 1: was in charge of the search was emotionally unstable from
Speaker 1: my perspective, and he just didn't He just didn't, you know, Um,
Speaker 1: maybe like you know, I this friend, this mutual friend
Speaker 1: I have with your brother named Chris. You know. He
Speaker 1: he'll complain that I have a Type A personality whatever
Speaker 1: that is exactly. But I said that you do, yeah,
Speaker 1: and I guess I guess what that means. Maybe he
Speaker 1: doesn't know I have a Type A is what he says.
Speaker 1: So when we get together with another pilot, he is
Speaker 1: a pilot. So when Type A is get together, there's
Speaker 1: not enough oxygen in the room to breathe, you know.
Speaker 1: And so a lot of these guys who are in
Speaker 1: charge of things are type A, like a pilot, and
Speaker 1: so the guy in charge of the search was type
Speaker 1: and there I was, you know, like, no, we've got
Speaker 1: to do what my son said. And he's like, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm in charge here, and he pushed me out,
Speaker 1: and I was very calm because I've been in some
Speaker 1: sketchy situations, you know, I've been in I don't know,
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to brag here or anything. I'm just
Speaker 1: trying to say that I know that when things are bad,
Speaker 1: you've got to be calm, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: And you've been on searches. I've been on searches, yea.
Speaker 1: I found people. That's why I thought I could find
Speaker 1: my son, because I've I found people before, like in storms.
Speaker 1: And so I was there and this guy kicked me out,
Speaker 1: and then um ty was I was able to I
Speaker 1: was able to talk his way and they walked down
Speaker 1: this trail and they got to this village and this
Speaker 1: guy said, oh, hey, I met I met somebody in
Speaker 1: the jungle and he said his name was Roman. And
Speaker 1: that's when I knew that they really this guy had
Speaker 1: really seen him, because everybody else called my son Cody
Speaker 1: because that's the name that was on the flyers. So
Speaker 1: the name on the on the flyers was Cody Roman
Speaker 1: Dial and in Costa Rica, um his middle name, you know,
Speaker 1: it would be like a second last name, So everybody
Speaker 1: had like down there in Costa Rica, the first name
Speaker 1: is your given name, and then the last name is
Speaker 1: your father's family name, and your second your middle name
Speaker 1: is your mother's middle name. And so everybody called my
Speaker 1: son Cody. Nobody called him Roman unless you've met him.
Speaker 1: He would say, yeah, I'm Roman. And he also kept
Speaker 1: secret certain pieces of gear that you knew he had,
Speaker 1: and other stuff like that. Oh yeah, I mean little
Speaker 1: things that you knew no one else news and you
Speaker 1: can try to sort out the bs from the reality
Speaker 1: exactly exactly. So when I met this guy Jenkins, who
Speaker 1: said he'd met Rome, and I, you know, like I
Speaker 1: quizzed him, and this guy's a minor, he's an illegal miner. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he had great risk to himself, you know, and
Speaker 1: I kind of figured, yeah, if he's risking his himself
Speaker 1: to ton of tell this, then I know he's he's
Speaker 1: telling the truth. I mean, that's how we like, if
Speaker 1: you expose yourself or put yourself at risk, you know,
Speaker 1: like if you handicap yourself, that's a way of sending
Speaker 1: an honest message. Like there's this idea about animals with
Speaker 1: big horns, like like I don't know if you've ever
Speaker 1: seen a moose, like a big moose go through thick
Speaker 1: alders and they get hung up. It's a lot of work,
Speaker 1: you know. There's horns way a lot, and they're like
Speaker 1: and and there's this idea that a moose or any
Speaker 1: other big animal that's got big horns. It's a message
Speaker 1: that they send out like I'm such a badass that
Speaker 1: I can walk around with this huge handicap, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean. It's like an honest message, like I
Speaker 1: am a badass, and here's how I'm going to show you.
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna handicap myself. So for this minor come
Speaker 1: forward at great risk to himself, you know, it was
Speaker 1: he was sending an honest message because he was handicapping himself.
Speaker 1: He could he could be arrested for being where he was,
Speaker 1: and yet he came forward to say, yeah, I met
Speaker 1: this guy named Roman who said he was a biologist
Speaker 1: from Alaska, and I was like, where was that? And uh,
Speaker 1: I didn't ask the authorities. Hey, let's go up there tomorrow.
Speaker 1: I was like, you know, I went up there with
Speaker 1: the illegal minor and we snuck up there and I
Speaker 1: went up there. I got another poacher to go up
Speaker 1: there too, and we went up there and he showed
Speaker 1: us the spot. And I kept going back to that
Speaker 1: area and um, and then eventually even to the point
Speaker 1: where you guys are repelling into areas, well, yeah, I did.
Speaker 1: I we did a traverse across this big high plateau
Speaker 1: and um, and we left the plateau. We left the
Speaker 1: little trails like there's these trails are They're about like
Speaker 1: game trails. They really are there, game trails that people
Speaker 1: also will kind of maintain a nick with their machete
Speaker 1: and stuff. And and we left those little trails and
Speaker 1: we dropped off the plateau and it was really slippery,
Speaker 1: and I could see it was steep and slippery, and
Speaker 1: I could see, you know in Hollywood movies where like
Speaker 1: when somebody falls down and they slide for like five
Speaker 1: minutes and they end up in a creek, and that
Speaker 1: always seems so corny and stupid like that would never happen.
Speaker 1: Then I realized, oh, this is where that could happen,
Speaker 1: the sea, And so I was thinking that could have
Speaker 1: happened to him, and he could have slid into like
Speaker 1: where he had been seen he just climbed up out
Speaker 1: of this canyon and and people thought he had climbing gear,
Speaker 1: you know, to have made it out of there. Um,
Speaker 1: but he didn't. And that little canyon, I imagine maybe
Speaker 1: he could have slipped trying to get back in it somehow.
Speaker 1: And so the only way in was to repel down
Speaker 1: waterfalls to get into it. And I thought maybe he'd
Speaker 1: slipped in there. So we went down and did some
Speaker 1: canyonarian there was. He wasn't there, obviously, but I went
Speaker 1: in there looking and uh, because I thought, you know,
Speaker 1: he had been in this area. He I thought he
Speaker 1: had to be close by, So I just kept looking.
Speaker 1: It seems like a perfect crew to kind of know
Speaker 1: where where the arm is in that terrain, like poachers
Speaker 1: and illegal miners, as far as like everybody knows an
Speaker 1: area and where like, oh yeah, that would be a
Speaker 1: good spot for something bad to happen. This would be
Speaker 1: a good spot to stay out of that stuff, you know, right,
Speaker 1: And to be with those guys, I'd much rather be
Speaker 1: with them than with these you know, Red Cross volunteers
Speaker 1: who were all coming from the big city and they
Speaker 1: were you know, kind of like fleshy and pale, and
Speaker 1: you know, I had too much gear and had never
Speaker 1: been in country like that. Whereas the miners and the
Speaker 1: and the poachers, you know, they've got to be super
Speaker 1: careful because it's like they're not gonna be able to
Speaker 1: get a rescue from the Park Service as something happens
Speaker 1: to them. So the whole point with them is to
Speaker 1: be where no one knows where you are. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: they are skinny and tough, and you know, they're out
Speaker 1: in the on all the time. They know what to
Speaker 1: avoid and what you can use. And yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: they were like the perfect guys to be you know.
Speaker 1: But I it didn't matter to me who I was with.
Speaker 1: I just needed to get in there, and whoever was
Speaker 1: going to go with me, that's who I was going
Speaker 1: to take. Explain you met You made a remark about
Speaker 1: sold yourself to reality TV. Yeah, well, you know, um,
Speaker 1: give it whatever version of that you're comfortable with. What
Speaker 1: did it? Well, you know, um, what I I when
Speaker 1: I I mentioned those that race where Dick Griffith pulled
Speaker 1: a pack raft out and told me that old age
Speaker 1: and treachery beats youth and skill every time. And that
Speaker 1: was when I was twenty one, and then by the
Speaker 1: time I was in my thirties, those um that Eco
Speaker 1: Challenge race, which was a big television race that Mark Burnett,
Speaker 1: you know, who kind of put reality TV on the map.
Speaker 1: So he started the Eco Challenge and I did a
Speaker 1: bunch of those races, and I could see like every
Speaker 1: time I did one of those races, um, not every time,
Speaker 1: but most of the time, I was on a team
Speaker 1: that they watched, you know what I mean, Like they
Speaker 1: followed with the camera and so then i'd see the
Speaker 1: television show. I'm like, I wasn't there. That's not the
Speaker 1: race I was in, right, you know what I was like?
Speaker 1: This is so I was real a little really apprehensive
Speaker 1: about television. I've done from the science side. I've done
Speaker 1: some sort of documentaries you know, about tree climbing and stuff,
Speaker 1: and and I didn't really like TV, you know, because
Speaker 1: it never seemed to be Now, I'm sure your TV
Speaker 1: show is not like this, but I never saw like
Speaker 1: what I did on that show. You know, it just
Speaker 1: they rearranged things and they cut it up and it
Speaker 1: looks like reality, but it's really not. I I much
Speaker 1: prefer writing or radio. I don't know why. So I
Speaker 1: was apprehensive. I didn't want to deal with TVM. But
Speaker 1: somebody got through to Peggy and and uh and what
Speaker 1: they said is, hey, you know, I I lost my
Speaker 1: father and I think it was Honduras or El Salvador,
Speaker 1: and he was killed, he was murdered, and I spent
Speaker 1: ten years trying to bring his murderer to justice. And
Speaker 1: I wasn't able to do it till I brought a
Speaker 1: camera down there, and the local people just opened right
Speaker 1: up to me. Once I had a camera. They thought
Speaker 1: everything they said was being sent by satellite and being transmitted.
Speaker 1: It was like a truth serum. This is the way
Speaker 1: to find your son. So these are producers reaching out.
Speaker 1: They look for stories like this, yep, and that they
Speaker 1: think are going to make dramatic TV. And they find
Speaker 1: people and reach out and do that right. And I mean,
Speaker 1: I had lots of you know, producers, but this one
Speaker 1: was different. And they got to Peggy. I don't want
Speaker 1: to say they got to her but they convinced her,
Speaker 1: and I was like, yeah, that sounds good. And then
Speaker 1: they offered up this like it sounded really good to me.
Speaker 1: They said, um, hey, here's what we'll do. We'll get
Speaker 1: a cayraminal investigator, which I had no experience doing that.
Speaker 1: And then by that point, you know, this is like
Speaker 1: a year later, the foul play seemed just as likely
Speaker 1: as anything else. But I also wanted to keep looking
Speaker 1: in the jungle. And they got this p J. You know,
Speaker 1: a pair of jumper, one of those Air Force guys
Speaker 1: that know they can do everything. You know, they're scrawny
Speaker 1: little guys. They can jump out of airplanes and swim
Speaker 1: and you know, they swim underwater if they pass out.
Speaker 1: That's how you know you can be a PJ too.
Speaker 1: You swim underwater to you pass. Professional rescuer, they're professional rescue. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They can shoot guns, they can save lives, they can
Speaker 1: do it all. And I have a bunch of friends.
Speaker 1: They did the Wilderness Classic race and they would win,
Speaker 1: and super cool guys. And I met this guy Ken.
Speaker 1: He'd done a race I put on, an Armed Forces
Speaker 1: Eco Challenge race that I put on, and he had
Speaker 1: been on the winning team like two years in a row,
Speaker 1: and so um, I was like, wow, yeah, he'd be great.
Speaker 1: He and I can go in the jungle and look
Speaker 1: and this you know, retired d E a agent. He
Speaker 1: can do the criminal investigations. He'd spent twenty five years
Speaker 1: in Latin America. You know. He was like ten feet
Speaker 1: tall and bald, with like you know, an a R
Speaker 1: fifteen tattoo down his arm or something like that. I
Speaker 1: don't really remember, but its people open right up. That's yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, and it seemed like the team, you know,
Speaker 1: and uh, and I had done enough with television to
Speaker 1: know that they were really for Nagio. Well you know,
Speaker 1: they were an independent producer and they were trying different
Speaker 1: show different channels, and they ended up selling the show
Speaker 1: or you know, getting financing from Natural. They sold the proposal,
Speaker 1: and they had a couple of different I don't watch TV,
Speaker 1: so I don't really know all of them. But it's
Speaker 1: hilarious that that, you know, like the reputation that National
Speaker 1: Geographic has was sort of like the truth, you know,
Speaker 1: and like the but then the TV is they don't
Speaker 1: know Richard Murdoch is the one who owns it now,
Speaker 1: you know, it's like it's not national. It's not the
Speaker 1: national geographic that Rupert, thank you. It's not the nation
Speaker 1: geographic that your parents grew up with, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. It's not that they would be happy with
Speaker 1: you if they knew you hunted either. Probably not those guys.
Speaker 1: Those guys are horrible. Well I so, I I you know,
Speaker 1: I was I. I asked these guys on the telephone,
Speaker 1: you know, like, Hey, is this reality TV? Or is
Speaker 1: this the doct coumentary? And and and by the way,
Speaker 1: you know, what's what's the death difference between to you guys,
Speaker 1: you know, not to these producers. I asked, what's the
Speaker 1: difference to you guys between reality TV and a documentary?
Speaker 1: And there's just long pause on this conference call, and
Speaker 1: then I, you know, looking back, I'm kind of like, oh,
Speaker 1: they this was reality all along, you know, And they said, oh, well,
Speaker 1: reality TV is is when it's really overproduced. And um so, anyway,
Speaker 1: that became like my code word. Whenever I thought they
Speaker 1: were doing something to kind of manipulate me or Peggy
Speaker 1: for their show, I'd say, hey, this feels a little overproduced,
Speaker 1: and I would put a stop to it if I could.
Speaker 1: But we went down there, and I thought that the
Speaker 1: television would be able to get permits to get into
Speaker 1: the park because I had been my big bugaboo, my
Speaker 1: big stumbling block was trying to was to get permits
Speaker 1: where I could go into the park to look around.
Speaker 1: I mean I ultimately did even in the first six
Speaker 1: weeks while I was down there. I was able to
Speaker 1: do it thanks to you know, me Treadwell and these
Speaker 1: other guys who new people in Costa Rica and and um.
Speaker 1: But my experience with television shows is they were really
Speaker 1: good at getting permits. They had whole divisions who would
Speaker 1: get permits in parks and things. So I thought, oh,
Speaker 1: this sounds great. We'll have you know, the x d
Speaker 1: E A guy do criminal investigation on the outside, and
Speaker 1: me and Ken will go on the inside and I
Speaker 1: can pick up where I left off, keep searching legally
Speaker 1: and everywhere I want. But it turned out they couldn't
Speaker 1: get permits to go in. So everything became about, you know,
Speaker 1: the criminal investigation, and the only thing the criminal investigation
Speaker 1: could come up with was this Potdalora story. And Potdalora
Speaker 1: spun it even crazier, you know, and you know, with
Speaker 1: more murderers and like cutting up my son and feeding
Speaker 1: him to the sharks and stuff like he's schizophrenic. He
Speaker 1: he was, Yeah, so anyway, it's just you know, and
Speaker 1: they bought that hook line and saying oh yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean the TV people they made little re enactments. Oh
Speaker 1: it was horrible. And then this guy Carson, who was
Speaker 1: this x d E A guy he was mad at
Speaker 1: me and offended that I didn't embrace his ideas. I'm like,
Speaker 1: you know, I remember when I first met him, and
Speaker 1: they fired up the cameras and you know, Carson's like,
Speaker 1: tell me everything you can't You didn't say I can't
Speaker 1: tell me everything you know about your son. I'm like, wow,
Speaker 1: you know, how can I tell you everything I know
Speaker 1: about my son? Like in five minutes on the television camera.
Speaker 1: And so I just told him the same story I've
Speaker 1: been telling for a year, you know, like I knew
Speaker 1: my son. I raised him in the wilderness. He uh
Speaker 1: had been on a six month trip through south through
Speaker 1: Central America. He'd done some really radical, crazy things already.
Speaker 1: He has a lot of experience and uh, and I
Speaker 1: laid it all out and then it was like he
Speaker 1: didn't even hear me, you know, and then anything I
Speaker 1: ever told him. He just dismissed it, and it is
Speaker 1: everything was about his hypothesis, you know. And I'm a scientist,
Speaker 1: and it's just it's hard for me to throw away
Speaker 1: data or to discount things, you know, like I don't.
Speaker 1: I'm not allowed to do that. I can't. It doesn't
Speaker 1: work for me to like throw away data to make
Speaker 1: something fit what I want to believe. And that's all
Speaker 1: this guy did, and just story. Everything had to fit
Speaker 1: the story. Oh it was painful. And then he was
Speaker 1: like offended that I wasn't like thankful to him for this.
Speaker 1: You know, it wasn't like watching reenactment of your son
Speaker 1: being dismembered by a machete. Well, I don't know. You can.
Speaker 1: You could probably tell it to me just as well
Speaker 1: as I could say, and it's it's not exactly something
Speaker 1: you want to see, you know. And I just but
Speaker 1: you were told to avoid it. Yeah, he said, don't
Speaker 1: watch it, you know. I mean, but I was in
Speaker 1: a hotel and it was advertised, you know, like what
Speaker 1: was the show called Missing Dial M Missing Dial? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know that, you know what. Yeah, I'm glad
Speaker 1: you just said that, because that's a stupid question when
Speaker 1: I asked you what it was like, Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: anybody should be like yeah, I just it's just it was, Ah,
Speaker 1: I don't know so anyway, Um, you know, maybe I
Speaker 1: was too hard on the TV, Like my agent seems
Speaker 1: to think I was too hard on the television people
Speaker 1: and in the book, yeah, in the book, and other
Speaker 1: people think I wasn't hard enough. I tried to be
Speaker 1: honest about how I felt. All I did was tell
Speaker 1: all I do in the book how I felt. You know.
Speaker 1: I used to be friends with the writer Chris off It,
Speaker 1: and uh, he wrote a book that was very critical
Speaker 1: of his family, and someone pointed out to him, uh,
Speaker 1: you know how he didn't really do a good job
Speaker 1: telling their side of the story. And he said, we'll
Speaker 1: have them write their own fucking book. Well, they made it,
Speaker 1: That's what I'm saying. They already made their own show.
Speaker 1: They made their own show. He had like, this is
Speaker 1: your turn. Now that's how I feel exactly. That's like
Speaker 1: like they got plenty of you know, people like I
Speaker 1: shouldn't give them an audience. I mean, they got all
Speaker 1: the audience they want. And I was grateful for the help,
Speaker 1: and I was grateful for what they did, and I
Speaker 1: mean they convinced me, and I was ready to believe
Speaker 1: him because I could. I gave up, you know. And
Speaker 1: plus you don't hire a consultant to argue with him, right,
Speaker 1: So I don't know. It was kind of a wild ride,
Speaker 1: you know. Like I I read it because I knew
Speaker 1: I was coming here, so I had to read it again,
Speaker 1: you know. Um, I mean I've read it a lot
Speaker 1: of times. I can I can read it pretty quick,
Speaker 1: and and when I read it sometimes I can't believe
Speaker 1: all that stuff happened, you know what I mean. It's
Speaker 1: sort of like it was a really unexpected turn. I
Speaker 1: was not anticipating. You know. I'm respecting your Um, I'm
Speaker 1: respecting your desire to not just divulge everything because I
Speaker 1: get it, you know, Um, I think people will buy
Speaker 1: your boat. I want people to buy your boat. But
Speaker 1: I'm trying to do this in a in a in
Speaker 1: a way that doesn't have any spoilers. Um. How when
Speaker 1: I read it, I I to be honest with you.
Speaker 1: In the end, I didn't. I don't feel that you're naive.
Speaker 1: You've being naive, But in the end, I wasn't. I'm
Speaker 1: not entirely convinced about the certain I'm not entirely convinced
Speaker 1: what happened to him. Yeah, well I know how convinced
Speaker 1: are you? So you know, it kind of kind of
Speaker 1: goes different ways, you know, Like I'm I don't think
Speaker 1: i'd ever you know, that's a really good question. I'm
Speaker 1: I I'm sure sure that he died either from a
Speaker 1: snake bite or a fallen tree, you know, because there
Speaker 1: wasn't any evidence that he was you know, like no,
Speaker 1: nothing was stolen, nothing, there's no you know, he wasn't.
Speaker 1: There's no marks on the bones, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: And it was just I've seen his bones. I saw
Speaker 1: his bones, So I just I can't see him being murdered,
Speaker 1: you know, like it didn't there there's a chance, you know,
Speaker 1: like aliens could have abducted him, killed him. I mean
Speaker 1: there's that chance, but I'm really the odds of that
Speaker 1: are so so super small, like having been there and
Speaker 1: where it happened, and who would who would have done it?
Speaker 1: I just I can't, like, um, you know, I've been
Speaker 1: around law enforcement enough now, like you know, and it
Speaker 1: sort of sounds cliche, but what would be the motive?
Speaker 1: You know, And it's just that nobody would have any
Speaker 1: motive for doing it. Um, you know, the miners wouldn't
Speaker 1: have any motive for doing it. So I'm pretty you know, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: at least that he died a natural death, you know,
Speaker 1: and that would be natural death. I know that he
Speaker 1: was killed by a tree or a snake bite occupation.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Well, I guess you're not a man.
Speaker 1: Not a man, right, Yeah, that's all I am with. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's maybe it's maybe it's natural to die
Speaker 1: from somebody else, but I would kind of That's kind
Speaker 1: of the dividing line for me. Is an actual death
Speaker 1: is where you die by like accident or nature, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean? Like, I guess accidents kind of
Speaker 1: fall into nature like an act of God. You know,
Speaker 1: an earthquake or even a car wreck could be considered
Speaker 1: unless somebody's drunk and they hit you and then somebody
Speaker 1: killed you. But if you know, if somebody's looking in
Speaker 1: their glove box and you t bone them and I
Speaker 1: don't know, um so um. Outside of the conclusion in
Speaker 1: the book, you just spam how how long trying to
Speaker 1: find find an answer? It was like two years, you mean,
Speaker 1: and then that's all you thought about for two years. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, I did, I did do some other stuff,
Speaker 1: you know, but yeah, it was always on my mind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it was very It was definitely a relief
Speaker 1: to to kind of get I mean, I'd still be looking,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, like I don't know when
Speaker 1: I would have stopped, to know when I would have stopped.
Speaker 1: Did you have some loss in in your relief though? Also,
Speaker 1: or you're like, oh, what what the hell do I
Speaker 1: do with my life now? M hm? Well, I definitely
Speaker 1: had a loss. Um, you know, I do I feel
Speaker 1: you know, it sounds not a corny but I do
Speaker 1: I feel broken, you know. Um, I put a lot.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was my son, you know. I mean
Speaker 1: if any of you guys lost your kids, you probably
Speaker 1: feel similarly, you know. I mean it's especially if you
Speaker 1: love your son and put stuff and or your daughter,
Speaker 1: you know, or your wife. But I'm really fortunate, you know.
Speaker 1: I have my wife and my daughter and my friends,
Speaker 1: and you know, I've got work and and it was
Speaker 1: worth it to write the book. I didn't write the
Speaker 1: book to make any money. I didn't write the book.
Speaker 1: I didn't write the book for money, you know. I
Speaker 1: wrote the book because I needed to tell the story.
Speaker 1: I wrote the book for me, and I wrote the
Speaker 1: book for my my family and my friends, so they
Speaker 1: knew what happened, you know. And I wondered about that
Speaker 1: because I used to field that anytime someone wrote a
Speaker 1: book about something damaging, that them having written a book
Speaker 1: about it was evidence that they were no longer damaged,
Speaker 1: because it's hard to write books. Huh. Well, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean. It's like you have to step outside
Speaker 1: of it and look at it. And so I was
Speaker 1: curious before meeting you. I was curious if you were
Speaker 1: um like, to what degree you were a mess, to
Speaker 1: what degree you were damaged by it or came out different,
Speaker 1: and how you came into it, you mean, ended writing
Speaker 1: the book. Yeah, my dad lost you know, beforefore I
Speaker 1: was born. My father lost his son, right, and you
Speaker 1: would you could hang out with him. I imagine there's
Speaker 1: people that knew him for ten years and didn't know
Speaker 1: that that happened. Uh huh. Well, I got stuck, right
Speaker 1: because I ran down there to look from my son.
Speaker 1: I wrote an email. I called people in CoA streak.
Speaker 1: I said, my son's missing, my son's missing. I gotta
Speaker 1: find him you gotta find him, Help me find him,
Speaker 1: you know. And I ran down there and I looked,
Speaker 1: and then people are like, hey, you know, I had
Speaker 1: to tell the story over and over and over, you know,
Speaker 1: and and then it just through a natural progression. It was,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm still looking for him, and I he's
Speaker 1: probably dead, but and people wanted to hear the story.
Speaker 1: And then there was the TV show, so I got
Speaker 1: used to telling the story, you know, like from the beginning.
Speaker 1: It's just it's like, you know, something like a stink
Speaker 1: in a room. You know, in your house, you've got
Speaker 1: a stink, you don't notice it anymore because you've lived
Speaker 1: with it, you know, Or a pain that you have
Speaker 1: to live with you don't hardly notice it. Or a sound,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. So having to tell the
Speaker 1: story was a natural thing. And when I was down there,
Speaker 1: you know, like I'm an older guy, so my memories
Speaker 1: kind of shaky, so I had to write everything down.
Speaker 1: And I ran down there with the notebook that had,
Speaker 1: you know, like the sketches for the remodel I was
Speaker 1: doing in my house and the shopping list to go
Speaker 1: dip netting. And then I ran down there with that
Speaker 1: notebook and then it was phone numbers the people to
Speaker 1: talk to and notes of what people said, and and
Speaker 1: then that notebook was filled up. And then it was
Speaker 1: stories and I was recording what people you know, that
Speaker 1: what they described, I was transcribing as they told me stories.
Speaker 1: And and then that was sort of I had to
Speaker 1: process what I was thinking, like what happened? Who? Who? How?
Speaker 1: What could have happened? And how did I feel? And
Speaker 1: and then it just you know, turned into three or
Speaker 1: four journals and I was like, wow, this is this
Speaker 1: is kind of a book. People would I want to
Speaker 1: straighten this out so people really know what happened here,
Speaker 1: especially after the TV show, You know, did you make
Speaker 1: any effort um two or was there any effort needed
Speaker 1: to make you know, some of these officials that weren't
Speaker 1: issuing permits or folks trying to really tell you like
Speaker 1: you don't know what you're doing that they knew the
Speaker 1: conclusion once. Once you found it, you would be like, hey,
Speaker 1: not every white dude missing a kid is crazy. Here's
Speaker 1: a good example. Like I was saying, well, like I
Speaker 1: was saying, well, here is he Well, here's what happened
Speaker 1: is um you know, it became big news because everybody
Speaker 1: had already heard about it, and in Costa Rico, when
Speaker 1: they found the body, you know, it was still news.
Speaker 1: So it was kind of clear to everybody what had
Speaker 1: actually happened, in the sense that it didn't really match
Speaker 1: up with with the TV show. People were freaked out
Speaker 1: by the TV show, at least in that area, you know,
Speaker 1: because of the way they portrayed the people who lived. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's like a handful of murderers walking around him among
Speaker 1: you right, Yeah, with machetes, people up feed them to
Speaker 1: sharks and they're just like hanging out now in town exactly.
Speaker 1: And they were freaked out. And I feel like that's
Speaker 1: part of the reason that, you know, my son's remains
Speaker 1: were found, is because this village was freaked out and
Speaker 1: they sent you know this, really this is really a
Speaker 1: miner in there to really look and I because and
Speaker 1: he did, he found him. So um So anyway, I'm
Speaker 1: kind of like I feel, I don't know, I don't
Speaker 1: you know, I didn't write the book to tell like, oh,
Speaker 1: I told you so you know what I mean. I
Speaker 1: didn't do it for that. I just I don't know.
Speaker 1: I I there's a lot of I mean, I wept
Speaker 1: a lot as I wrote that book. You know, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of harden there. I could never write another
Speaker 1: book like that, you know. I mean, I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't think. I hope I never have to write a
Speaker 1: book like I would never do that, I can. I
Speaker 1: think I can only write one book like that, you know.
Speaker 1: And and what what is the books out now? No,
Speaker 1: it'll be out in February, like, um, February is the
Speaker 1: release date. So in the in the process of writing
Speaker 1: the book, you I mean, you obviously were very close
Speaker 1: with your son. I knew a lot about him. But
Speaker 1: did you learn you did some research, you found out
Speaker 1: some things people he meant, did you learn more about
Speaker 1: him or things you didn't know? Oh? For sure? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean because you got into his emails. Well I
Speaker 1: got into his emails. Yeah, And I mean his friends
Speaker 1: gave me some of the stuff like from his you know,
Speaker 1: high school days and things like that and college days.
Speaker 1: And I did I learned a lot more about him,
Speaker 1: you know, things maybe that as a parent you really
Speaker 1: don't want to know. Um, but you kind of suspect
Speaker 1: and uh. And he's a normal kid, you know, and
Speaker 1: uh and I think too um to like take his
Speaker 1: emails and turn them into that second section. So there's
Speaker 1: three parts to the book. There's sort of raising him,
Speaker 1: and then there's his trip, and then there's looking for
Speaker 1: him and on his trip through Mexico and Central America. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, to really pick apart his emails and then
Speaker 1: rewrite them, you know what I mean? That was. I
Speaker 1: was like, wow, you know, and I kind of, um,
Speaker 1: you know, i'd read them before as emails, but I
Speaker 1: didn't really. I don't know when when something when you
Speaker 1: take something and it goes through your eyes and into
Speaker 1: your head and comes out your fingers, you process it
Speaker 1: a lot more thoroughly. And I wish I'd had a
Speaker 1: chance to tell him, you know. Yeah, I I just
Speaker 1: realized we're saying the book a lot. The name of
Speaker 1: the book, The Adventurer's Son by Roman dial Um available. Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know when we're gonna release this, but we'll
Speaker 1: make it. Go get the book and uh yeah, thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you, I think they will, and thank you for
Speaker 1: writing it. I mean, you know, you hear the there's
Speaker 1: we just even laugh about it where you guys hear
Speaker 1: books described as like brave. I said, know, what the
Speaker 1: hell does that mean? But um, it's a brave book,
Speaker 1: and that aks like retelling of things that are extraordinarily painful. Ah,
Speaker 1: And to to to go in and excruciating detail and
Speaker 1: to get to a part of a book where someone's
Speaker 1: calling up a trail and you see that they have
Speaker 1: a plastic sack with your boy's bones. Um, it's the
Speaker 1: heart wrenching The Adventures Son by Roman Dial and uh, Roman,
Speaker 1: thank you very much for coming on the show. Thanks
Speaker 1: for having me. It's a pleasure to meet you. Appreciate it.