Ep. 204: It Should Be Difficult to Get Lost Forever

what do you call these advanced readers copies? They call them arcs in the business um giant quote from John Krakauer. A brave and marvelous book, a page turner that will rip your heart out. The books called The Adventurer's Son by Roll and dial and it tells the story. You just give me the one sentence. It tells a story about looking for my son who went missing in Costa Rica. That's a good job. Yeah, a heartbreaking story about raising an outdoor son and then losing him in the jungle

and trying him. Uh. Also called you before we start recording. You mentioned Um that you're not a hunter, but your hunt and you're not a Yeah, you're not a climber, but you climb. No no, no, no no. So I'm not a hunter, but I do hunt, and I love to hunt, you know. And uh, but what makes you not a hunter? I don't know if you even realize that. But we were talking about this earlier. You've hunted Moosa my brother Danny. Yeah, you live in Alaska. I live in Alaska. Yeah. And we got a bull and a

cow the same day. And and your brother Dan and my friend Chris Flowers, who's a friend of his. Two they cleaned the bull and I cleaned the cow, and so, um, but I I hunt for a year. I really like. I like to eat year. I try to. I didn't hunt this year fish, I know. You know I only dip net. Yeah. I'm not really a fisherman, um, but I do dip net. I'm kind of like a you know, very efficient fisherman. Yeah, I sam and dip net. You know. It's I'd like to do that. Um, I don't. I

don't have the patients for hooking line. You know. It's just I can't fly fishing. I love the idea of fly fishing. I think it's marvelous. I think it's one of the most beautiful activities. You know, an outdoor person could do, but I can't do it. It's just you have to stay in one place and I can't do that. What strikes she is beautiful about it, all the flailing around. No, I think the idea of it, that the beauty is that you have to be an ecologist. You have to

be like a practicing apple apply to collegist. You've got to think about what the fish is going to eat. And it's actually people go down to the to the fly shop and they feel like what should I come on? Well, that's why I'm not efficient. I like the idea of it. I don't want to do it. But as far as like not being a hunter, just because I don't, uh, you know, I don't shoot my gun very often, you know, I I probably I didn't even know what was called

processing until a few years ago. What do you think it was called butchering um? And I like to clean animals. I think that's you know, like I don't really like to kill them. I mean, I've killed a lot of moose, I've killed a lot of caribou, I've killed a bear, links I killed a lot of animals, but I don't I'm not a great shot, you know, and I don't like to go shoot my gun. I gotta. I got a lot of guns, but I don't really like them. But I really like to clean them, you know, like

I like to. I feel like if I I feel like I do a good job, I take them apart real efficiently. They're super clean, and a moose is a big animal to take apart. I'd love to get a buffalo. That's my kind of dream. I've I've spent enough money putting in for the lottery of the buffalo in Alaska to just go buy you know, somebody's buffalo over but spreads it out nicely for you. Yeah, well, I feel like you should. I feel it's be able to cli.

I mean, if I would like to think that with with your approach, I would in my in my hope you would be like, yeah, I'm a hunter, Well I hunt, you know, And I I would like let me finish off the thought about I'm a climber but I don't climb. Well, I want to get into that, so yeah, we'll leave hunting behind and get into that. Yeah, And I think I wanted you to talk about when you quit climbing, when I quit climbing. Sure, Yeah, if that if that's

a good way of explaining it. Yeah, why why quit climbing? Yeah, it's it's like a chapter in my book, right, And you're an alpinist. An alpinist yep, I was an alpinist. Yeah. An alpinist is like a climber, you know. I think of climbers generally, most people think of climbers are sort of like rock climbers. There's ice climbers and rock climbers.

But an alpinist to somebody who just rock climbs and ice climbs so that they have the skills and the technique to go to the big mountains and climb the big mountains that have rock and ice and their remote and they're in the wilderness and they have weather, and it's just like it's kind of like you're living on

the mountain trying to get up it. Yeah. As a not climber, I've often fantasized that, uh, if I wasn't into what I was into, if I didn't hunting fish and stuff, that I would I would want to pursue that. But they get whittled away, they do. It's dangers, you wind up, but you get to be forty and all your friends are dead. Yeah, well, you know, I feel lucky to have made it as far as I didn't. I quit when I was about twenty five and had a lot of friends die. I had a lot of

friends die. Yeah, I um, and they still die. I mean like today, you know, more good climbers die than bad climbers. You know, like, if you're a bad climber, you kind of realized right away that this is maybe not for you. It's dangerous, maybe you get out of it. But if you're a good climber, you just keep climbing harder and harder things and going to wilder and wilder places until, you know, until you get killed. Because the mountains don't care how good you are. Yeah, you know,

you well, you know we've established that. You know, my brother and Hunter with him, his old roommate Jared. You might have known. He died on K two. He wentn't attempted K too, got knocked in the head, wought up in a hospital in Pakistan, came home, recovered the next season, went back and died and he kind of like knew what was gonna happen. Yeah. Yeah, Well there's two guys, Kyle Dempster and his partner. They climbed a mountain in

Pakistan and they didn't make it to the top. They were repelling down and like an anchor pulled or something like that. They filled several hundred feet, broke a leg, came back the next year and disappeared on the same mountain, both of them. Yeah, and they were like the two best. There's an award called the Pola or like you know, the Golden ice Axe, and this kid, Kyle Dempster, he'd won it twice as the best climber in the world basically, and then you know, he died. So, yeah, the mountains

don't care how good you are. Is that what got you to Alaska climbing mountains? Well? No, you know, when I was a kid, I went to Alaska because I had um some uncles who lived up there and they worked in a coal mining kind of It wasn't really a town. It was sort of like a camp in the Alaska Range. Yeah, that's a crazy story in your book about just getting sent up to hang out with your uncles and they weren't that interested and really washed and after you well, yeah, it was busy working. Yeah,

and it was a great time. And that's how I kind of fell in love with Alaska. I was nine, and I had back in those days, you know, we didn't really have There was no there were no computers obviously, and this place didn't even have like telephones or TV. And so I got a taxidermy correspondence course that you used to be able to get this tax d correspondence course and probably put off some beautiful work. I managed.

I mounted a raven, I put some caribou antlers that were involved together, and um, so I got the whole course. Was you're supposed to get it over a year. I said, hey, I'm going to Alaska. Send it all to me right now. So I had the whole course and I took it up there, and I had a bunch of glass eyes and excelsior and wire and and that's what I kind of did nine years old. You know it was it was awesome. You got to go a little ferl work exactly. It ruined me for life. Yeah, you know, I could

do whatever I wanted. I had a motorcycle and uh, and my uncle had this dog. It was named Moose and it was half wolf, and he would I would go out all day with Moose and and then they gave me a motorcycle, but I couldn't really, it was too big for me. You know how you see kids on bicycles that are too big and you know they can hardly get up on him. Well with a motorcycle, and you have to jump up and kick started. You know, if you don't get it going, it falls down. And

you know, the lever I don't remember. I forget which side was which, but the maybe the clutch or the break lever, one of them were was broke off. Because I've fallen down somebody, there's no going back from that. You get that taste of freedom at nine years old and being like, oh I'm capable of doing all these things. That's it. Yeah, And so I you know, I went

back to, uh the lower forty eight East Coast. I was in Virginia, and as soon as I graduated from high school, you know, there's only one place I wanted to go, and it was back to Alaska. But um so anyway, I've been. I've been living in Alaska for about forty years now. I like it. You know, your brother, do you think your brother will ever leave? He talks about it. He says he's getting sick of wet brush.

His wife's doesn't want to leave. He kind of wants he wants to hang out somewhere to his dry grass instead of wet brush. So he's kind of wanting to, uh come back down here, but no, he's he's just up there his gripe about it, um two grapes, wet brush, and everything is like everything is such a production. M Like anytime you go to hunt, it's like his boats and journeys, and you don't just like go out messing around for a couple of hours, Like everything is a production.

I don't know. I don't I don't know. I went fat biking yesterday. Um, well you know I traveled yesterday. The day before yesterday, one of my former gratitudents came by and it was like ten below twelve below where we went biking. It was probably like fifteen or twenty below, and that was like right out my door. And I live right in town. I live in town, like in midtown.

He hunts time again local and fishes. But I think it like I think hes talking about kind of the more, you know, like you don't go and have a like your tree stand out in your backyard and you go out there and sit for white tails every night. Well probably not. Yeah, but I've hunted moves within view of my house, like I've killed a moose and I can see when my house is. Yeah, but you know, um,

I understand what you're saying. But I never lived in the other way, like I moved to Alaska when I was sixteen, and so I don't really I never lived you know, I never hunted deer. I've shot one deer. I don't really like dear meet that much. I probably shouldn't say that, but you know, you know, when you're talking about riding that motorcycle, it's too big for you. My friend dear Drew, it was just telling me about they had horses when they were little, and she said

they were so small that they would put grain down. Yeah, so the horse had leaned down and get the grain and they jump and straddle it behind the ears and to jerk its head up and they'd slide down into position and ride off. Oh that's cool, that's really cool.

Good way to mount. So get into the being an alpinist and then kind of like when you got scared you had your boy at that point in time, or did you not know I wasn't too married married, yeah, but I was with the same woman I am now she remember you had like kind of a like a a sort of an epiphany. Sure, well, you know I would climb these mountains, you know, like and I would ski into some really distant mountains, like one time when

I was twenty one, the year I graduated from college. Uh, like over spring break, the sky and I Steve will we skied sixty miles in and climb out Debra, which is a beautiful mountain. You can see it from Fairbanks, and Fairbanks is in the middle of the state, and it's cold and dry all winter, and you can just see these mountains on the skyline. They're beautiful and it's cold, so they get they look real close because the cold

air magnifies the mountains. And in the winter you can't do anything but look at the mountains and the sun just kind of rolls along the top. It's freaking beautiful. And Mount Debra is the prettiest one. And we skied in sixty miles, climbed the west face, a big steep face. Um you had to like scratch out a pad to sleep on the way up, like a little ledge and climbed it and came down and Um, and then we were gonna go climb Mount Hey is the highest in

the range. But we chickened out repelling over this pass and skied out. We ran out of food. I had to break into some guys cash his food, his cash. You like a little cabin on stilts next to his cabin, looking for food, and I found dry dog food. Ate the dry dog food, you know, because I was so hungry. Um skied out and I was like, I'm not gonna

climb anymore. This is ridiculous, you know, And I it was miserable, you know, hungry, You know, like where you hungry where you eat half rations for a couple of days, and then you go to like quarter rations and then you're eight rations, and then you eat your last apricots, splitting it with your partner, and then you look where you dropped some gorp in the snow three weeks ago, and you're pawing through the snow looking for the gorp, and instead of sitting on your pack and eating a

chocolate bar, you sit on your pack and then you fall asleep because you don't have anything else to do, and you're hungry, and I thought, you know, this climate is nuts and I want to quit. But I it was like being an alcoholic. I think, you know, like an alcoholic says, I'm not drinking anymore, but the next weekend they drink anyway, and uh, and I would go back and climb some more. And I've really I've been with this girl. You know. I met her when she

was eighteen. I was nineteen, and I, you know, I wanted to get married and have a family. But it wasn't until this one particular climb where I realized, you know what climbing was just kind of more or less about luck. You know, it wasn't really about how good you were. And and I tell the story, and that's that's an interesting perspective, just the luck factor. I had a couple of things I noted in the book. One that just like how tense things get with climbing partners,

where you mentioned um getting into getting into a fist fight. Yeah, well yeah, you know he um picking up and continuing right. Well, we didn't. We didn't really we we didn't get in a We we had verbal fights, you know, on climbs, but we never had a fist fight on the climb. We had the fist fight you know back in town. Yeah, I never had a fist fight it, I mean, that would be a bummer. Maybe it was the girlfriend, you know, he said, the one of the guys in his climbing circle.

He's like, yeah, you know, we could tell he was never going to be very good because he always had a girlfriend. Yeah, that's for sure. You know I didn't. I didn't really, you know, but this this this particular climb when a cornice broke and uh and Chuck Comstock, the guy that I had gotten into a fight within town, and he had just untied from the rope like we were. We'd climbed this really, you know, steep face took several days to get up camped on top. It was in

marches like thirty below. And then we were feeling so full of ourselves we decided to go down this ridge that I don't even climbed once. And the people who went up it didn't want to go back down, and

we were like, oh, we can go down it. So we went down and had all these cornices, you know, going both ways, and explain explained people are what a cornice is, because this is really there's another thing I wanted to ask you about when you're in your climbing discussion was what I had no idea that this happens. What you do in one of those breaks a cornice when it breaks, well, you know, well how you and your partner working tandem to not die. But first, some

people water cornice. Cornice, Well, you know, if if you don't live in a snow area, a cornice kind of looks like a frozen wave of snow, but instead of like the ocean and and wind pushing the ocean into a wave, the wind pushes the snow over the crest of a mountain ridgeline, and then it builds like a frozen wave up on top, and and the wind keeps piling up more and more snow until um, you know, it's kind of flat on top, and you are walking

on this ridge. You might not really know where you're overhanging, you know, the top of this cornice. And then um, in certain places in the world, and in the Alaska Range in particular, you'll get um moist air blowing from the ocean side and it condenses on the mountain like the ice that used to build up in people's refrigerators. If you have an old freezer, for example, with a bad gasket and got a bunch of meat in there.

You know, if you've got a bad gasket, you get that rhiny ice around the edge, and that rhyme ice can build into this huge bulge, like a overhanging bulge, you know, like it can be you know, twenty or thirty ft of overhang, this big rime bulge. And then on top of that, the wind is usually blows from the ocean side and it will blow snow that makes this frozen wave on the other side. So you kind of have a sort of like a double cornice where you got an overhanging wave on one side and then

this big bulging rhyme on the other. So it's kind of an unstable feature. And you know, in rock climbing they have cams and petons and stuff you can stick in a crack, and in ice climbing they got screws you can screw into the waterfall. But on this ridge climbing, you know, you can't really protect it. So the only thing you can do is if the thing breaks, you gotta go off the other side. So the rope kind of goes over both sides of the mountain. Jump off

the side. Yeah, you gotta jump and then the rope cuts into the cornice. Yeah it stops. Yeah, it would be hard, yeah, exactly. And it's uh, it's kind of a mythical thing, like nobody ever thinks you're ever gonna have to do it, and very few people have actually done it as far as I know, and so on this particular. But like when it does happen, like what a leap of faith? Man, Yeah, what a leap of faith. And then you kind of have to hope you're going off the right side, you know. But this it was

pretty obvious. He had broken the cornice side, the soft you know, windside, and I went off on the rhemy side, and uh, and then you know, fell a long ways. I thought I was going to die or at least get broken, and um, because I tumbled because it's like a big cart wheel, because he went straight down when he broke the cornice. He could he falls straight down and he's out ahead of me, and I jumped off and then I had to pendel him down, you know,

over a bunch of space. And if you hadn't done that, we probably both would have gone off the same side and tumbled down and got broken up. Yeah it would, he just would have yanked me off. So but yeah, it did. And I was like, yeah, this is it. Um, you know, we skied out, and you know, I actually right after that, I thought, you know, I might come back and climb that mountain. But I skied back to town and uh and went and I was telling the stories about this climb, and I was like, you know,

this is nuts. I think I'm just gonna get married. So I got married like just like that was March and I was married in June and then and then so that was like the end of my climbing. And um, not a big wedding, right if I remember right, you know, I don't know. They were twenty or thirty people. Was in a big field, you know, outside of Fairbanks. It wasn't huge, no, not at all. And my my parents were there. Her her parents didn't come, you know, because

they didn't think of a wedding should be outside. They should thought it should be in a church, you know, but so decided not to come. With all that'll fix you. Yeah, but she you know, Peggy's the youngest of ten kids and and uh and her parents, you know, maybe they didn't have a lot left for her by the end. Yeah, I don't know. They were tapped out. I think so.

So when you quit like kind of like that biggest form of adventure, but when you had your kid, you really focused heavily on I would say that an extreme version, a pretty extreme version of of a association with nature an adventure. Sure. I mean I I did, guy did crazy stuff. Well, I mean I still like being outside. I mean you can't. If you live in Alaska you don't like being outside, You're not really gonna like live in there much because that's that's what Alaska has a

lot of. And um. And I had found that I liked going to the mountains, Like I didn't like just climbing the mountains, but I like like skiing into the mountains or um. On another trip, we we climbed the mountain and then we rafted out and um. And one time I had gone into the mountains with this guy, Karl Tobin and another guy and we didn't get up the peak. We got avalanched off and I was aunty because I wanted to do something. I said, Hey, let's

just ski out to the highway. It was like fifty five miles and I'm like, no, we don't want to ski, We're gonna stay here. So I skied out by myself, and the year before i'd skied out from a different mountain in a parallel out, and I thought, wow, I wonder which way is faster. You know, this was like nineteen eighty um three, so it was a long time ago, and I thought, wow, I know how to find out. It's like fifty sixty miles. We should have a ski

race and see what is the fastest way. In fact, let's just have a wilderness ski race across the Alaska Range from highway to highway, like a hundred fifty miles. And you know, there hadn't been any I mean, they're they're ultra running wasn't a thing yet, especially and no

ultra skiing. And so that I was like twenty twenty years old maybe, and uh I met a guy at a like on campus at the university, and he had a fire and he had an idea for like a foot race across the Kenai Pencil and the Kenai pensils like that when you look at a map of Alaska and you know anchorages right down there in the southern part and the Kenai pencils that little kind of like that moose bell that hangs down from Alaska and uh.

And he was going to have a race from Hope to Homer across the Keenai pencil and he called it a foot race. And the rules were really simple. Everything you needed you had to carry with you and you including all your food, and you couldn't use any roads, and you couldn't use any pack animals, and you couldn't use any motorized vehicles, and you couldn't get any help from anybody along the way. And he envisioned a swimming the rivers. And I saw this idea. I was like, wow,

that's the same idea that I have. But you know, um, I want to do a ski race you guys? Well kid, because he was in his thirties, Well kid, and he was a mountain guide. Well kid, why did you come down and do do my race and then we'll do yours. So I went down there, and um, and there was an old man there and he says, hey, kid, where's your tent? I said, I didn't bring a tent. I'm not taking a tent. I'm going light. And he says, well, where are you gonna sleep? Tonight, and I said, I'm

just gonna sleep out here in my baby sacs. Well, come on into my tents. So I slept in his tent and I looked at him. He was like my age now, actually is younger than I am now. And I thought, this guy is not going to finish this. He shouldn't even be here, you know. And then I saw some other guy and he looked kind of clumsy. Well, the clumsy guy caught up with me the first day after I had gone like forty miles all the only trail we all did. We hiked the trail, the whole

forty miles trail. The first day's like a hundred fifty mile race. You had to carry all your food and everything with you. And I was I had skis with me because I was going to ski across the harding ice field, because I didn't want to have to swim all these rivers, because that's how we're going to cross the river. You're gonna go up higher and ski where it's frozen. Yeah, And but because I didn't want to

swim river, Swimming glacial rivers seems stupid to me. And so um, we got to the first glacial river and usually you wait for the you know, the morning, because the sun melts the snow on the glacial rivers and then in the morning the waters down, and it seemed like a smarter time to swim it. And we're waiting. Yeah, yeah, it's been cold on it. So we're waiting around and everybody catches us, Me and this guy man's or we're

out in the front. And then that old man, I'm like what he caught up to us and he pulls out of his pack like these Viking horn hat, you know, like some soft goofy hat, and he puts it on. He goes, you know, what are you guys doing here? You young guys should have been to uh halfway to Homer by now. And we're like, yeah, well we got stuck by the river. He goes, yeah, you young guys.

You don't know. Then and eat too much and then and then he reaches into his pack and he pulls out this little inflatable raft kind of like the pack raft you used when you went, you know, on your buffalo hunt in Alaska, but this was like a kmart vinyl raft and he pulls it. I says, you guys can't swim these glacial rivers. You know, they're too swift and cold and dangerous. He says, uh, you know, old age and treachery will beat youth and skill every time.

And he blew up his raft. Yeah exactly, and he paddled across and he almost won the race and without running a step. You know. But anyway, when I saw that pack raft um, I thought, yeah, that's why, that's what I want one of those. And and just crossing like a hundred fifty miles of Alaskan wilderness. It took me a week, you know, which is like nowadays we do.

Not me, I'm kind of too old for that, but you know that nowadays people do like a hundred fifty miles across Alaskan wilderness in like three days or less. And but to have that kind of freedom, to be able to go through trackless wilderness like with rivers and glaciers and bogs and dealing with bears and boulders some bad brush, it was an incredible sense of freedom. I don't understand how when you guys are doing these races.

I understand Danny is the first one to talk about this, but you guys use the mountain bikes, but there's no but totally off trail. You're riding on gravel bars. I have done, asker or what No, Yeah, sometimes I have done. I did one of those races with a mountain bike, um with my son, because I didn't want him to hurt his feet, because when you want when you go fifty miles in a day, it hurts your feet, you know. And uh, I didn't really want him. He was sixteen.

He wanted to do one of these races, and I said, well, let's just use our mountain bikes and uh. And so when you take a mountain bike, you know, you have to go to the right place. Like I wouldn't do it on the Keyni because it's too brushy. But the Talquita Mountains are real nice and there's a bunch of a TV trails for like fifty miles. So we rode and then the a TV trails ended, and then what you do is you kind of push your bike up

a hill and then you coast down the tundra. So it's you can you know, you can really milk the tune. You don't just ride the steepest way down. You kind of go at a real gentle angle to milk it, you know. And so you can hike up the trail, hike up the hill pushing your bike like you know, a mile an hour, which is the usual hike and speed. But then when you go down you're going like three or four miles an hour, which is much faster. And

then there's game trails. If you get good at following game trails, you know, Moose trails aren't so good, but Cariboo trails are good. Bear trails are pretty good. As Danny was telling me too, is you said a lot of times you're not down in the valley floor, you're not down in the rocks. He talked about like trying to like going going on sign going up the sides

a little bit looking for good trails. Oh yeah, like that's I love following trails, and I you know, I got into the mountain bike and thing like I we I got into the mountain bike and think for about ten years because the hiking was kind of easy. Anybody can hike anywhere just you can hike in a straight line if you wanted to, but with a bike you can't. You get punished if you go in a bad place. You know, you're just pushing your bike or carrying it.

And you're thinking why did I bring it? And so so you're always looking for good You have to be like you have to know how to read the landscape and how to find good traveling conditions and find gravel bars, like I used to say, gravel bars, game trails, and glaciers. Those were the best writing. And if you go late in the season, the glaciers, especially nowadays, all the snow is kind of melted off and you can right on

the bare ice. So yeah, I went from Canada to Lake Clark with a mountain bike in nineteen It was eight hundred miles or so. And there were these three hikers and they started ahead of us, and it was sort of like a race to see who would be the first people to traverse the Alaska Range, which goes kind of from Canada over to Lake Clark, which is to the west of Anchorage. And they left, you know, six weeks ahead of us, and they started a hundred

miles shorter route than we did. We started right at the Canadian border and they started over by Toke and uh they were when we left the Canadian border on the fourth of July. They were in Mountain Dnally National Park at condition to having a party for the fourth of July, and we caught him. We caught him at Rainy Pass. Uh, not really passed near Rainy Pass where the you know the I didarad goes over the Alaska Range called Roan Roadhouse. Actually we didn't catch them there.

They left us a note because we had a food cash there and uh. And there were three of us on our mountain bikes and a really good mountain bike riding right after that. Because they're all these buffalo trails. There's another buffalo herd on the cuscal Quim on the South Fork or the customer Quim and the hertman and buffalo. They don't like brush, they don't like logs, and so whenever there was a log they would walk around the logs or there were all these buffed out single tracks

that we were riding, you know, in the wilderness. It was like spectacular. And then we we had pack raphs, so whenever we were going down river, if the river got big enough, we would just put our pack rafts on our put our mountain bikes on our pack rafts

and then float down. And we caught these hikers and then we traveled with them and we were all going to finish together, but we had a bike problem with a break or something, and they hiked off into the fog and then we never saw him again, and we ended up getting to the end faster than they did. So anyway, that was you know, I was into mountain bikes for a while, but using them as sort of a wilderness travel tool because walking is kind of it's not,

it's just it's easy. I like walking, and I do that. I'm an old man now, so I do a lot more walking. I don't do those bike trips anymore. But they were really sad. Almost sixty. Yeah, i'll be sixty this year. Yeah, I'm feeling it. Really. You look fine? Yeah, he's all great. Yeah, well I can't walk fifty miles in a day anymore. No one can. Nobody should let me put it there like people don't huh. Yeah they're

the smart. But yeah, you only compare yourself to yourself, right, Yeah, if your measure was just the average person, it would be pretty dizzy. How old are you? Uh huh? Well do you need to use reading glasses yet? Uh huh? Do you forget like where your keys are and stuff like that? Well, that's coming me and Anthony, here were out ice fishing yarday, and we were trying to we're trying a little we're trying to put some like seven X tip it um through, you know, the size eight. Dude,

we're cursing up storm ACX. Neither of us had our See Steve, you have your old man glasses. I forgot mine too. Oh yeah, like holding it up to the light and messing with it and yeah, look I have to carry him around like all that same time. But you know what, I like those clicker little dealies. But um, when you got a hat on, they start to be painting the gas, yeah, or a hood. Yeah, lots of things good for sitting around. That's about all I do

right now, but a lot of sitting. Yeah it's winter time, and yeah I'm a professor, so I don't have a I gotta teach my classes and write my papers and stuff like that. But summertimes coming and I'll get out again, like I'm really. The brook Strange is my sort of favorite mountain range right now. I love the Brooks Range. Have you been to the Bookstrange the many times? Lets just say many times? But yeah, what do you have you hunted up there? Then? What do you like sheep

or caribou caribou? Huh? Where'd you go? Handful of places so out. I spent some time with some anthropologists um up in the npr A. Yeah, like the Utcock area. I would talk ut yeah, and then hunted over um hunted caribou a little bit south of there. Oh yeah, that was in your book those archaeologists, right, yeah, and

then um south of hunt a handful. Hunted a handful of those rivers that are on the north slope, on the north slope east of the pipeline, like the Hula Hula or the ja Go or the Chillic or the Canning, none of those, but the stuff that flows into the sag Sag okay, Yeah, yeah, I've hunted ca yep, the Sagram talk yeah, like you. It's a pretty the Attican Gorge. It's a nice way to get my son. And I

did a caribou packgraph cariboo hunt. We paddled through that Attic and gorge and then hunted cariboo along the sag And because you can get five miles from the road really easy that way. Uh. Talk about your son a little bit, having him and kind of what you you know, you know, tell everybody about sort of like the philosophy had exactly you did stuff, I say, nearly you did stuff with your boy that that would strike a lot

of people's maybe even irresponsible. Probably. Yeah. Well, you know, um, my dad didn't do as much with me as I wish that he had done. You know, my parents divorced when I was pretty young, and and my dad hadn't his his parents had divorced, and so he didn't really

know how to be a dad. And maybe I didn't either, you know, But I did know that I wanted to have a better relationship with my son, you know, and I wanted to do stuff with him, like from the beginning, you know, and I wanted him to enjoy what we were doing, and so and so, you know, from a young age, like I would take him out, you know, on nature walks, or we'd go to the ocean. He liked to tide pool like everybody does, you know, especially when I was in grad school and the coast of California.

There's all kinds of cool things and it's just a fascinating place. And then when I worked on my pH d, I did this canopy project in Puerto Rico in the Caribbean and h his his name he back then was Cody, you know, his name was Cody Roman dial and Um. And he and I went to scope out where I would stay before my daughter and wife came out to Puerto Rico to join up with us. So, you know, we wandered around the rain force. He was three years old, you know, and it was fun. He liked it, you know.

And I tried to be real. I want, I didn't want to like freak him out. I didn't want to like make him carry a pack or be uncomfortable, because I wanted him to want to go out, you know what I mean. I wanted him to be a partner. I wanted. I mean I wanted. I wanted him to be a partner. Now. I wanted him to be like at the point where he would carry my stuff instead of me carrying his stuff, you know what I mean. And I think it's a pretty long game. I was

playing a long game. Yeah, I mean, I think I know you your father probably took you out right, and I I love going out with my son, and I tried I didn't want to spoil it, you know what I mean. I want, I was playing the long game. I ever wanted to spoil it. And when he was six, you know, I wanted to take him on a wilderness trip in Alaska and um because we just moved back

up there. I got a job as a professor up there, and and I wanted to go a place where there it was sort of safe, like no big glacial rivers, you know. I didn't want to have to take a pack raft and deal with carrying that kind of stuff. And I didn't want it there'd be any grizzly bears, you know. And so I found this island and the allusions called Umnak, and it had a geyser base, and I thought he might want to see these is it like a little miniature yellow Stone. I thought that'd be

a cool place to go. So I, I don't know, somehow I wrangled a way to get out to this the third Alusian island, like Unimac is the first one, and then Unalaska where Dutch harbors, and then there's Umnak. And Umnak had like the secret military base in World War two on one end, and it has a an old alley village on the other end and the reindeer wild cattle yep, it has reindeer and wild cattle and it's you know, there's no reindeer. Yeah, they introduced him there,

and they're kind of weird colors. Stuff. That's become like a popular thing as far as it strikes me to me when people from the Lower forty eight want to go up and hunt cariboo in Alaska but they wind up hunting like introduced reindeer on one of the Aleutian islands. Well, um, people, but it's like it was like you could go hunt cariboo where cariboo live. Yeah, well, you know, I've never

shot a reindeer. Um. I think a lot of those Western Arctic cariboo though, like the ones up around the uticac in An n p r A, I think a lot of those have reindeer blood in them. Yeah. I mean like geneticist like people like tax on Um has just regarded all of one one species. Yeah, but I mean yeah, but they're they're a different animals and they

look different and act different everything. So anyway, I took my son out there, and he was six, and we walked across this island like sixty miles, and I carried everything and sometimes I carried him and and it was like a life changing thing for both of us and I the six years old and sixty miles. How many days like a week? I think it was like seven days and then we got stuck out there for another week.

But when we landed at this you know, one side at this secret military base wasn't secret but from World War two is secret. And there was a family living there who were trying to make money off the cattle that were kind of feral on the island, and um, you know, I'll never forget. The father was like, well, what's your name? I said, Oh, I'm Roman dial and he goes, he bends over, he goes, well, what's your name, little fella, And my son goes, I'm Roman two. And

he'd never said, you know, his name was Roman. And I was like blown away. I mean like, I don't know, it's kind of maybe embarrassing, but I think, you know, as a his father's you kind of do want your son to, you know, do the stuff you want to do is to have him call himself because that was his middle name, and ever after that he was Roman. It was like a little validation of dad. It kind of is, yeah, you know, do you have kids, No,

you should. Steve's wife would agree. Yes, it is not for due to lack of trying on my wife's part, not that she's trying to have kids. Was like Steve clar I got a whole pile of them. Man, yeah, well good three young kids. Oh really? Yeah? I love I love being a dad. It was awesome. And I have to two young kids too, And that's why I think, you know, we could all relate to what you're saying. You know, you want them to have a good time, you want them to do. What's the things you do.

One of the things that I found really interesting about your book is how you incorporated your kids into your work a little bit. You talked about that being in the canopy, right, so you're you're scientists, you're doing research, and kids love to do that. So as they grew older, they're helping you with that. And I found that really interesting. And do you think that helped foster their love of

the outdoors and nature? Well, I hope so. But you know, they they know my my daughter, um, I pushed her too hard because if you have like two kids and they're say, like, my kids are two years or three years apart, and you're kind of this is your first you know, we don't get a lot of chances with kids,

you know what I mean. And so when you got like a four year old and you want to take them on a hike, you know, you're like, oh, I'm going to four year old pace, but the two year old who's there is just like struggling to keep up. And then they end up hating that. Like you have

that issue with my kids, same thing. I've seen it like in multiple like they grow up and then the older ones like this outdoor stud and then the younger ones like you know, stay at home or right four wheel ers something like that, and and I've watched it now and that's that's the answer I've come up with.

It's like my hypothesis is that we tend we think we're being real easy on our kids, and we're being easy on the older one, but then the younger one is like, uh, you know, I don't know, but you're the youngest of your three brothers, of you three, right, and you turned out okay, I guess yeah, but raising

them it's hard. I have to we have spread that significant ability, you know, when I think in a decade it probably won't be but right now, I mean it's a huge difference between a nine year old and a four year old. Oh yeah, you can't. It's hard to take them both on the same trip, I know, And

that causes attention. That caused a lot of tension to my wife because she's like, why is I'm like, she goes like the older one, but when he was four, he would go do that like because it was only one and keeping one kid drying warm is different than keeping three kids drying warm. So it's like, I don't know, I mean, I don't know what to do. Yeah, I don't. I don't know, Like I need to hire someone to come along, because it's hard to keep three people warm

and dry. So the ones, the one at nine when he was whatever he had, he had had more experiences. We're all checking muskrat traps this morning, um, and you know I grabbed him because he's like up and gets his clothes on by himself, and you know when I had to like wake up and get his clothes on. So it's got lazy. I've been trying to leave home my twelve year old and take out my eight year old daughter once in a while. That goes over real

well down right, and that's difficult. He gets annoyed, but I say, look, I've done plenty things just you and I. You know, hann and I. You know, this is just for her, but it's I don't know what the easy answers, but I I had to do that to avoid that problem. Oh, they look gut shot when you bring that up. Well, I'm glad you're doing that, because I remember when I came back from that, I'm not trip. My daughter's like, Dad, when when are you? When? When are you and me

gonna do a six day trip? You know? She wanted to do one and I was like, oh, it's coming. And I never did one until she was kind of grown up, and then it was too late, you know. And I look back and I think, oh, I wish I had done that, because you know, she's not really an outdoorsy person, although I asked her once. I said well, what is it mean to be outdoorsy for a girl? And she goes, oh, it means you can go to the bathroom outside. Yeah, that's a measure like how comfortable

you are being outside? I propose your friend of mine and Tracy the other day, said there's a good little spot to go pee, and she said, I'll just wait, there you are. Yeah, I guess not outdoorsy. She's pretty out of that. Yeah, but yeah, she viewed it like, you know, would rather hold it than p outside. Well, I mean, would imagine every time you had to pee, you had to pull your pants down, especially if it's like windy and snowy. And yeah, yeah, I think that's

why they have skirts. They should get they should have really good outdoor skirts. So that you just guess, yeah, were you were? You? I'm gathering you weren't surprised when your kids started doing Um, when your son, who will call Roman Roman? Yeah you call him Roman, of course, yeah, I I he wouldn't let me call him Cody, like he wouldn't let me call him Cody. And um. Yeah, So anyway, he got to late teens, early twenties, Yeah,

started doing crazy as trips by himself. You know, I I don't know if he I'll tell you what happened is he Um, he went away to college, and he met a girl in college, and she was from Chicago, and and he brought her to Alaska and he took her out on a bunch of trips. And that's when I knew he was sort of serious about her because you know, he'd grown up thinking that trips were about family, you know, like other kids the school it would be like, oh, come on, let's go, but he would go with them,

but they didn't really know enough. You know. He's like he used to going out with like me and my friends, and and we were we'd go really light and we could get along with nothing. And then he'd go with these kids who were kind of clumsy and had too much stuff, and he, you know, he didn't really seem right. He wanted to go with with me and Peggy and

our family and or my friends. And so when he came to Alaska, you know, one summer with his girlfriend, and he took her like sea kayaking and backpacking and rafting. That's when I knew he was serious about her, because like he was taking her on these trips and taking care of her and and uh, and he you know, he wasn't really a risk taker, you know, like I, you know, I hadn't and I don't really have anymore.

All my testosterones kind of drained away and so I don't I don't really need the adrenaline rush that I used paying a really nice getting old. Yeah, well this Feller used to be a lot more sort of adrenaline um chasing, and but my son wasn't. He was kind of like my wife. He he was more risk averse, you know, my wife, it was sort of That's why I loved her, and I feel like she's a good

balance for me. Is because she doesn't need to like scare her I mean, she likes to scare herself, but she doesn't have to scare herself at the level that I do. And I mean everybody likes to scare themself. That's why amusement park rides are fun, you know, as long as you're not going to get hurt. Getting scared as fun and um and so, but he was more thoughtful about getting hurt. He didn't really want to get

hurt and uh. And so the trips that he would do, we're not quite as crazy as the trips that I had done, you know. And uh. But he would go out and he was exploring things. And by the time he was in his late teens in his twenties, he was doing things on his own and really enjoying it. And uh. And when he headed to Central America, you know, that was a really big varience in the sense that you know, he was traveling through foreign countries on his

own for like six months. I'd never done anything like that, you know, and especially not in my twenties, um and speaking Spanish and doing some pretty I think, you know, amazing wilderness trips in Central America. Yeah, but that was like a different kind of the difference with the approach he was taken on this trip which we're talking about the like this is the trip that ended up being his last trip. Well, no, like before like because he

went he went to Mexico. I went down there and sawm and who went back rafting, and then this is all one continuous, one continuous thing he was on from country to country, country to country. Within that like a lot of people do that. I mean a lot of people will go and do you know we used to do a little bit of that stuff, like go down and kind of do like the tracking around, riding buses. Sure,

Disney villagis. But what he The weird part about it that I thought it was just unusual is he was putting in jungle tracks sometimes like kind of off trail and like little trans sax and like doing like jungle trips, heading off by himself into kind of like the same way if you were up in Alaska you want to go do a trip. It has never occurred to me that you'd go and do a trip to the jungle, right, go to a foreign country, find a remote area, and

then just go wander around and there. Right. Yeah. No, I I was actually, you know, as a father, I was really torn, you know, like I was proud of him for doing that, you know what I mean, like I kind of raised him with that, not with that. I wanted him to do that kind of thing. But then when he was doing it, I was like, oh my god, you know what I mean, Like I don't know. I guess if you were in the military and uh, and then your son joined the military, you'd be both

proud and terrified at the same time. And so I was like I was really proud of what he was doing, but I was terrified, you know, like I was, Oh my god, I can't believe he's doing that. I you know,

I wouldn't. I've never done anything like that, and I couldn't do anything like that, and he's doing it, and uh, you know, at one point he said he was going to go to this ruin, you know, in this deep wilderness in Guatemala, and he told me how he was going to go in the back way and it was going to be like, you know, this long wilderness walk and and I wrote him an email because he kept in touch with me, he said, here's what I'm gonna do and uh. And then usually he go do it

and he'd say, hey, i'm back. I'll tell you about it, you know, a couple of days, and he'd write a big, long story about it. And so he wrote me and said here's what I'm gonna do, Dad, And I wrote him back. I said, no, don't do that. You know, that's don't do it. That's too dangerous. I don't want you to do that. You know, there's I've made all, you know, I went through all the reasons not to. But I didn't send that email. I wrote it, but I didn't send it to him. And then I wrote

another one. I tried to like tone it down, and I wrote another one and I couldn't send him there all like don't do it. And I was telling him, like all the things people had said to me over the years, like taking a mountain bike across the Alaska Range, what kind of id it? Or you you know, Oh you're gonna walk across the wrangel Saint Elias in October. No, you're not. You know what I mean. I kind of

have spent forty years listening to people say that. But a difference, not to discredit the feats you did, but the difference there is you could rattle off because of your familiarity with the state, you could rattle off the reasons why not. And when you get into being like someone who's from the north and they go down and there in this area, um, you wouldn't be able to make a you wouldn't really have what it takes to

make a comprehensive list of the potential problems. Well, he he kind of he'd been to the tropics a lot, you know, like when he was three years old, he spent you know, almost you know, seven months in Puerto Rico and then then we traveled the world, and he'd been to Costa Rica twice, you know when he was taking you know, he went down there on a tropical ecology class. I taught there, and he went down there with me when I did a research project. There's spent

a lot of time in Borneo. I spent a lot of time He and I spent two months like in a junk in Borneo at a research station, and he'd already been there like three times, so he knew the rainforest, you know. He like I remember, like he studied ants, like he knew which ants were dangerous and which ones weren't. So when one time he went to Australia, he goes, Dad, look at this ant. It jumps and he had it on a stick, you know, and he was showing it to me, and I was like, oh, here, so let

me see that aunt. You know, like you can put an ant on your finger, and I put it on my fingers. As soon as I put on my finger, poom, it stung me like a hammer had hit me, you know. And I was like ah and he was like, yeah, Dad, I knew that was like a bad aunt, you know.

And uh So he was really well aware of what was dangerous and what was not because he'd been he'd grown up in the tropics, and he that's part of the reason he was risk averse, because a lot of the things that are really cool in the tropics, like colorful things especially, can be nasty. So based off of that, did you whittle your email down eventually to like, just don't do it because I don't like it in your head.

I didn't. I whittled the email down to, hey, watch out for ferti lances and bushmasters and you know, be careful. And I sent I sent it away, and I didn't tell him not to do it. I couldn't, you know, how could I? You know, it was his trip and he came back and it was like, you know, an amazing experience from he wrote me like the six thousand word you know, story about it and m and I was super proud of him. I sent it to all my friends, you know, like wow, look what he did.

And um. And then he did some even more like amazing trips you know that were amazing in different ways. Like he he went down this river in Honduras through what he called like the cocaine hub of Central America, because like what happened is, you know, the Americans disrupted

the typical cocaine trafficking route from Colombia. So the Colombians changed it up and they sent it across sort of the southern Caribbean to this part of Honduras, like the Mosquito coast, and then they ran it across Honduras up these rivers and then into guatemal and then it went overland into Mexico. And so the river is where it all. All the cocaine trade goes through, so um or transport, and he went down that river with this Canadian and I had no idea that that stuff was going on.

You know, he didn't tell me about that. He just said, Oh, I'm going through this biosphere reserve and it's a big wilderness area. But because it's a wilderness area, it's also a good place for you know outlaws too. So anyway, he had like all these really you know, wild and

crazy experiences that he told me about afterwards. Usually you know, he'd said, I'm gonna go do this, Like he said, Hey, I'm gonna go down the Patuca River through the Mosquetilla and and then he sent this email about what it was like when he came back. So when he went missing in Costa Rica, I went down there up. Hold that thought from me because the trip that he went missing on, Um were there red flags in your mind about that trip? Well, I didn't really know he was

heading on that. Like what happened there is um it was in the summer, and in the summer you know, I'm I'm kind of busy doing stuff, and he was communicating with us and and he and I he'd asked me about like maps, Hey, Dad, do you have any

secret sources for good topo maps? Because I think he you know, I kind of knew maybe he'd mentioned it or we talked about but I I sort of thought he wanted it to cross the Darian Gap, you know, in the highway, which is sort of you know, like I think we all want to do it, but none of us really should do it. And um, and I had, you know, I think I would have told him, don't

do it. But I was sort of I don't want to say I was pleased that he was thinking about it, but I don't know, you know, like you kind of rooting him on in a way. I guess I kind of was. And I, you know, I I sent him some map ideas, you know, even though it wasn't specifically about the Darian and uh. And so anyway, we we were talking back and forth about maps, and I came back from a pack rafting trip in the Tachita Mountains, and you know, there was an email there it was like,

you know, the best map yet. So I just thought it was about maps, and I took off because Peggy, my wife, was like, hey, you've been gone. You know. We had to go dipping out some salmon. This is the time when all the salminar and let's go. So we went down to the Kenye and UM had some

house projects. When I got back and we hadn't heard We didn't hear from him, you know, and I kept expecting to hear from him, but I hadn't really read the email, you know, like I really I still feel guilty about that, and I didn't really read it through when I should have. And when we got back, and you know, we were in Lows shopping for something to

work on the house, and Peggy got nauseated. We were talking like, hey, haven't why I haven't heard from Rom and she got nause and we went home and I read this email and it was like, you know, holy can I say on him? Holy ship? I read the email and he you know, he was supposed to have been back like ten days before, you know, and I just felt awful that I hadn't looked and I felt even worse, like he's he's missing. I haven't heard from We should have heard from me he was only going

to be in there for like five days. A five day trip would was definitely abnormal for sure. Yeah, I mean he he would that would never. It would be way out of the ordinary. You know. He usually like when he came back from that crossing in Guatemala, you know, he says, hey, I just got out. I'll tell you more later, just to let us know, because you guys had a little bit of a protocol just from your experiences too, about sort of the importance of your outdate. Yeah,

he grew up with that. You know, he grew up with like being we would always responsible. You know, I didn't want to freak my wife. I had a wife and kid at home. I had to make sure that I came back when I said I was gonna come back, or if I didn't, they knew I would be back, and then we would. You know. He grew up with that, and he was a responsible kid about that. So he always let us know. So when you know he had I didn't hear, I rushed down, you know, like I

left the next day and uh. And so that's kind of like the third part of that book is about looking for him down there, and and it was frustrating to get down there and have all these people. He brought a friend down. Yeah, well I needed somebody, you know, and so I brought um tiber Zone down who speaks fluent Spanish and I you know, he's the kind of guy that you know, one time I I was going to the him Alaya to look for these ice worms in the him Alaya and that my collaborator, another scientists

couldn't go. And so my my collaborators, it was Thursday and we're supposed to leave on Sunday. And he's like, hey, I can't go. And I'm like, hey, Ty, can you go to China next week? And He's like sure when you know and uh. And so Ty was the kind of guy he could drop everything. Like at one point, Ty went to every continent every year, you know, and and every continent. He went to every continent he was paid to go, you know, like he was a guide, or he was um doing logistics in that Arctica, or

he was doing medicine in Africa. You know, he was that kind of guy. And he he his his mom is is Vietnamese and his dad is Italian, and so he looks like he's from anywhere, you know, and he's got a big smile. He's real gregarious, and you know, he's super strong, but he's kind of you know, I don't know. He just looked like you would like him. You know, if he was here, we would all like

him immediately. So I needed him with me because I'm not the kind of guy people usually like right away wherever for that matter, I don't know, but he is, and so I needed him to come. And he we went down there, and he has jungle experience, and we've done a lot of stuff together. And your initial impulse was to go where you now understood that he went. Yeah, and just like like physically look for him, like look around to find him a long route. Well, yeah, well

he told me where he was going. He sent a map, you know. He said, I'm gonna go up this river and I'm gonna go out this river. It's gonna take five days. He was very specific, and and I took that as I mean, I would send somebody that, and I have, you know, for forty years, I've sent people that kind of thing, because hey, look, if I don't show up, come get me. If I'm not here by this day, come get me. You know, you know, officials down there though, we're no. They just thought he was

some kid who was you know, ran off. Yeah, like the backpackers we were talking about earlier, who traveled through Central America and you know, hang out at the hostel and smoked cigarettes and talk about how they'd like to do stuff, but they don't do anything, you know, And so they just thought he was you know, hanging out with a drug dealer and uh or his just ignoring his parents. You know, none of that added up. So it was very frustrating to me, who had had spent

this life. So I wrote this because you're just another You're just another parent who thinks their kids an angel, exactly, and you just clearly can't see that he whatever, ran off of the girl. That's it. It's exactly. Yeah. And I it was really painful, I mean to like sort of first of all, to have my son missing, you know, and it's like I've spent you know, more than half my life and his whole life doing stuff with him,

you know what I mean. And I like just playing cards, you know, or chess or watching TV, you know what I mean, but kind of the stuff that really bonds us. I mean, I think that's part of what like hunt, seeing or being outdoors really bonds us in a really very deeply human way, and especially with your kids, you know,

or your wife and your friends and so um. It was just like it was a real insult to this injury of loss to lose my son and then have people tell me like I didn't know him or this is what he was doing, and and so the book is a lot about that, you know what I mean for sure, it's it's like that's like one of the aching parts about it. You know, you spent a lot

of time on this. I don't want I don't we don't need to spend a ton of time on it right now, but like I want to get to how you actually searched, but try to explain to people like the false lead that emerges, you mean, the potala, which which takes months, like for months, it tooks year, it took years. Take at that point where people are like, this is what happened, and and you're like that that's

not what happened. But it was like, why can't this guy see that this is what happened, But explain this guy, well, he's sort of he was like the pariah of the Ossa Peninsula. So the Osa Peninsula is like this elbow that sticks out in southern Coasta Rica on the Pacific side near the border with Panama. And it's a pretty it's you know, it's a pretty rural and area. Very wild too. There's the biggest national park. I think it's the biggest national park in Coasta Rica. Corcovado National Park

is there. Like it's wild enough where there's like like illegal gold miners. Yeah, it's totally wild setting up camps that no one knows about. Yeah. Well, you know, it's wild enough to have jaguars and bush masters and herpie eagles, you know, and all the monkeys that people like living out there that no one knows about. Right and then and then it's so big and and it used it's got gold miners who like hang out in the park and they hide out and the rangers go in and

and and then the west coast of the park. Um, you know, used to be able to hike around there, and the west coast was a great place to hike. But I think there's a lot of cocaine boats that come up and bring drugs from Panama now and they've they've shut all the hiking down on the west coast along the beach basically north of sir Aino, which is the most touristic part. And it's it's really a remote You can't drive into the park. You have to hike

into it. And now they don't let you hike there without having a guide, and they only let you hike on certain trails. And the rangers go in there and they chase the miners out, and they change chase the poachers out and um. And then there's this out just outside the park. There's a big mining community. But it's all it's all like hike in mine, like I don't know, backcountry mining, Like it's hand back Yeah, I got all.

They hike in and their sluice boxes they are like three ft long, and there their shovels or metal shovels, but they've whittled some piece of hardwood down to stick into the shovel. When it handles break, they just make a new one. And they live in these plastic you know, tarps, and they're they're running water is through plastic pipes that they use to kind of drain areas to mind for

it's all by hand, you know. And uh so anyway, Um, there's this one mining trail that goes from one mining community all the way to the coast, and everybody thought that they'd seen my son with this guy pot Laura and his name Potalora's. It was like his nickname for parrot foot, because he had like a deformity of his foot, and nobody liked him, and he nobody liked him, and he was the pariah of those you know, and anything that bad that happened, they blamed it on him. Even

his own family didn't like him. And so he was with this gringo who apparently looked like my son, and everybody was sure that my son had been with him. And uh, and he didn't do a whole hell of a lot to dispel the notion that he had been with your son. Oh no, he encouraged it. Yeah, he fed it. He came up, he spun all these stories. I don't want to tell too much because my publisher will want somebody to buy the book. And if I tell you the whole story, nobody will want to read it.

But um, but is not true. If I tell the story, nobody will want to read it. I don't think that that's true. Maybe the page one yeah, well, the Podalora story, it just it never went away, you know, like right up to the end, it never went away. And uh and I just I just couldn't see Roman like walking with this guy, you know, like it would be I think I used the phrase in the book, it would be like this guy because I talked, I interview people, you know, I followed the Potalora troil, you know, I

I talked to the people. I mean, I hiked into the jungle. I spent like weeks in the jungle, you know what I mean. I hiked all around like I you know, illegally eventually legally. Yeah, that's everything I wanted to bring up that you wanted to go in. And Okay, so the book gets into spends a lot of time on all the what everyone else is telling you must

have happened. Yeah, and you needing to be the like naive rube who insists that you're right while everyone else is behind your back, probably saying like this guy has no idea. Probably, yeah for sure. But I mean, like I knew my son, you know, and I can't get his bank records. I couldn't get it took us two

years to get his bank records. But I you know, I knew my son, and I've been in the jungle enough to know that I could look, and I wanted people to help me, and so the only people I could really get to help me because the officials did everything they could to keep me out. Yeah that's what That's what I was gonna ask you about his. They literally forbid you, threatened me, threatened to arrest me to go forbid you, Um, you cannot go look for your son. Yeah,

that's pretty much what they said. Yeah, you know, And I went down there to look for his months long, Yeah, for yeah, months, And I went down there specifically to look for him, Like I have to go out on illegal minor trails sometimes with illegal miners to try to find your way in there to look around. Right, Why, I they knew it much better than I did, So I I got miners and poachers to help me out, you know, because nobody else that the officials wouldn't and

under Yeah you're under threat of arrest. Yeah, I mean that one. I remember one time I had like this kind of bushy beard and I shaved it off because I knew they were looking for me, and I hid in the car, you know, I mean, um, because I I needed to find him, you know, and I was gonna do whatever it took. So I must be so frustrating.

It's so many levels to be kept out from that. Yeah, I was like trying to I felt like it was like some kind of football game where they're trying to tackle me, but I'm trying to get to the end zone there, you know, and I the officials were trying to keep me from going that direction. Um, but the locals were really helpful, you know, like the people who lived there, and they're very family oriented and they understood,

you know, what I was trying to do. And uh, and my friends you know, came down and helped me. But then they'd come down and I realized how dangerous, dangerous it was to have people who didn't have any experience in the jungle and have them with me, you know, because there's snakes. And I mean it sounds cliche to say, oh, there's snakes, but there really are snakes, you know, like yeah, there it's full on, you know, like you should you get hit and you're gonna like you got an hour,

you're gonna be dead basically. Yeah, And you know you're a couple of hours in and you're they're not gonna get a helicopter in there. And there's like three snakes you kind of have to really watch out for. There's you know, the palm vipers that hang kind of like right at eye level and you don't see them, you know. And this kid came down. I really like this kid, Todd. He came down to help, and he almost walked into one. He did, he walked literally and he almost got hit.

Um tivers oone. He stepped over a log and there was a palm viper coiled up on the log. He didn't see it. I saw it when I walked up to the log, and I was like, holy cow, I can't bring my friends down here. This is too dangerous. You know. Then there's fairtal answers. Those are the ones that are definitely poisonous. And I never saw a bush master, but they're the really bad ones. And you know, it's

just it was dangerous, you know. And I I could see why they didn't want me in there, but um, and they didn't know me, you know, like I had to get you know, the Lieutenant governor of Alaska tore like, who does know me? To write a letter and say no, you Roman, Diald knows what he's doing. You know, he's been around, you know, you can you can trust his judgment. Um. But you know, they wanted to protect me. They didn't

want me to get into trouble. And I could see their side, but but the other side of me, there there's no stopping me. You know, I was going to do whatever it took, and I you know, I had to sell my soldier reality TV eventually, you know, I didn't know it was reality TV, but it turned into reality TV. Yeah. I'll ask about that in a second. But another thing I wanted to touch on is you, Um, initially you felt like there was like a race against

the clocks. Yeah. No, I pictured him. He was like I could see him in the tent and it was all soggy and wet and cold because the rainforest is actually cold, especially here you're in the mountains, and when it rains, you know, the rains coming from thirty thousand feet up, so it's cold, comes down and chills you. And I could see him like in this tent. He was broken and hey dad, where are you? I'm out

of food. That's what went through my head. And so I was trying to find him, and people were trying to keep me out. You know it was it was terrible. Yeah, it was terrible. Do you I don't think forgiving if you bring this up in your book, but some of the local response to you, did you ever get a sense that it was just like another view of American exceptionalism, where you have this place where, no doubt many many people go missing because of drug trafficking, because of you know,

human migration, because of whatever reason. But then everyone needs to drop everything and get everyone on board because an American is missing. No. I never felt that, and I never asked for that, you know what I mean. Like I didn't ask for the helicopter. I didn't ask for the whole army of Red Cross people. I would have done it myself. I would have preferred if they would just like, let me do this. Like here's the way I sort of feel is um and this is maybe

a little too libertarian for most people. But to be part of society, we've had to give up everything. Okay, Like society is great, but we don't get to take care of ourselves. You get a doctor to take care of you, there's no justice. We don't take care of our own justice. We have a justice system that takes care of that. We don't get rid of. If if somebody is breaking into your house, you can't do anything about that. You've got to call the police. You don't

do anything for ourselves. It's all we get to do is put food in our mouths. Now maybe you know, and maybe we can reproduce the letter whom I defend myself. Yeah, and so the authorities. That's it, That's what it comes down to. So to be part of society, we've given up all these things that when we were like primitive humans, we did ourselves. You know, like we don't even like build your house anymore. You have somebody else build your house.

You know. We don't really get to do much. And so this seems really important to me, is to take care of my family member, you know, But we don't get to do that. No, we have specialized teams who are going to do that, but they're never going to be as invested in it as as as we are. Uh follow a rail right, a wounded animal trail. I don't want anybody else out there messing with the evidence, and I want to be the one collecting it and processing it. And again nobody's more invested in the person

that sent the bullet or the arrow. Right, were you feeling any of that? Like, if I involve a lot of people, then I'm gonna miss critical information and I may be the best person to decipher that. Absolutely, that's that's I think that's a really good analogy. That's kind of how I felt. But I know, I maybe I was just too emotional about it, you know what I mean, And I should have just got out of the way,

but there was no way I was going to. Yeah, and it was a there's an enormous amount of variables where um, you can't you're not able to rule out foul play. So you're trying to get into the jungle. Look, but you're also looking at everyone you walk by, and everyone's backpack. You're curious about what are their shoes, and you know what gear your son had, and you're trying to see, like, am I going to see someone come

by with a pair of Solomon shoes on? Oh? And then the long guy was on the oath of the more you heard about these stories, you know, like the Austrians who lived in this little town and sold gold, and how they had been killed. They disappeared, but there was blood on their walls and and somebody was driving their car around and using their A t M card and but they never found a body until years later

when bones washed out. And then there was the Canadian woman who was shot in the head and they didn't

have any idea who did that. And then there was another woman, an American who was smothered in her bed, you know, in an iPod or iPad were stolen, and so you heard about these things along you were there, and then you'd hear about this guy Patalora who some people would say, oh, yeah, he's a murderer, he's killed people, he killed your son and blah blah blah, and and there I mean it is, it's kind of a lawless place.

And uh and if there's nobody and there's nobody, and yeah, they don't they don't they like you could, no matter what happens, exists with out of body, there's no murder. Yeah, like those Austrians. They everybody knew who did it because he was driving their car around and spending their A t M money and they knew that he had done it. But until they found this body two years later, the bones that had washed out of this river bank. Um,

then they realized, okay, yep, you're the one. There's a body. Yeah, so you even go arrange and meet with the guy who's claiming to have been one of the last people to see your son alive. Right. Well, I was eager to meet the guy who his name was Jenkins. And I was eager to meet him because when early on in the search, um, when they'd kicked me out of the search because I was emotionally unstable as what they said, Um, were you looking back now? No, I was, and I

was very calm, you know. It was the guy who was in charge of the search was emotionally unstable from my perspective, and he just didn't He just didn't, you know, Um, maybe like you know, I this friend, this mutual friend I have with your brother named Chris. You know. He he'll complain that I have a Type A personality whatever that is exactly. But I said that you do, yeah, and I guess I guess what that means. Maybe he doesn't know I have a Type A is what he says.

So when we get together with another pilot, he is a pilot. So when Type A is get together, there's not enough oxygen in the room to breathe, you know. And so a lot of these guys who are in charge of things are type A, like a pilot, and so the guy in charge of the search was type and there I was, you know, like, no, we've got

to do what my son said. And he's like, hey, you know, I'm in charge here, and he pushed me out, and I was very calm because I've been in some sketchy situations, you know, I've been in I don't know, I'm not trying to brag here or anything. I'm just trying to say that I know that when things are bad, you've got to be calm, you know what I mean. And you've been on searches. I've been on searches, yea.

I found people. That's why I thought I could find my son, because I've I found people before, like in storms. And so I was there and this guy kicked me out, and then um ty was I was able to I was able to talk his way and they walked down this trail and they got to this village and this guy said, oh, hey, I met I met somebody in the jungle and he said his name was Roman. And that's when I knew that they really this guy had really seen him, because everybody else called my son Cody

because that's the name that was on the flyers. So the name on the on the flyers was Cody Roman Dial and in Costa Rica, um his middle name, you know, it would be like a second last name, So everybody had like down there in Costa Rica, the first name is your given name, and then the last name is your father's family name, and your second your middle name is your mother's middle name. And so everybody called my son Cody. Nobody called him Roman unless you've met him.

He would say, yeah, I'm Roman. And he also kept secret certain pieces of gear that you knew he had, and other stuff like that. Oh yeah, I mean little things that you knew no one else news and you can try to sort out the bs from the reality exactly exactly. So when I met this guy Jenkins, who said he'd met Rome, and I, you know, like I

quizzed him, and this guy's a minor, he's an illegal miner. Yeah, and he had great risk to himself, you know, and I kind of figured, yeah, if he's risking his himself to ton of tell this, then I know he's he's telling the truth. I mean, that's how we like, if you expose yourself or put yourself at risk, you know, like if you handicap yourself, that's a way of sending

an honest message. Like there's this idea about animals with big horns, like like I don't know if you've ever seen a moose, like a big moose go through thick alders and they get hung up. It's a lot of work, you know. There's horns way a lot, and they're like and and there's this idea that a moose or any other big animal that's got big horns. It's a message that they send out like I'm such a badass that I can walk around with this huge handicap, you know

what I mean. It's like an honest message, like I am a badass, and here's how I'm going to show you. I'm just gonna handicap myself. So for this minor come forward at great risk to himself, you know, it was he was sending an honest message because he was handicapping himself. He could he could be arrested for being where he was, and yet he came forward to say, yeah, I met this guy named Roman who said he was a biologist from Alaska, and I was like, where was that? And uh,

I didn't ask the authorities. Hey, let's go up there tomorrow. I was like, you know, I went up there with the illegal minor and we snuck up there and I went up there. I got another poacher to go up there too, and we went up there and he showed us the spot. And I kept going back to that area and um, and then eventually even to the point where you guys are repelling into areas, well, yeah, I did. I we did a traverse across this big high plateau

and um, and we left the plateau. We left the little trails like there's these trails are They're about like game trails. They really are there, game trails that people also will kind of maintain a nick with their machete

and stuff. And and we left those little trails and we dropped off the plateau and it was really slippery, and I could see it was steep and slippery, and I could see, you know in Hollywood movies where like when somebody falls down and they slide for like five minutes and they end up in a creek, and that always seems so corny and stupid like that would never happen.

Then I realized, oh, this is where that could happen, the sea, And so I was thinking that could have happened to him, and he could have slid into like where he had been seen he just climbed up out of this canyon and and people thought he had climbing gear, you know, to have made it out of there. Um, but he didn't. And that little canyon, I imagine maybe he could have slipped trying to get back in it somehow. And so the only way in was to repel down

waterfalls to get into it. And I thought maybe he'd slipped in there. So we went down and did some canyonarian there was. He wasn't there, obviously, but I went in there looking and uh, because I thought, you know, he had been in this area. He I thought he had to be close by, So I just kept looking. It seems like a perfect crew to kind of know where where the arm is in that terrain, like poachers and illegal miners, as far as like everybody knows an area and where like, oh yeah, that would be a

good spot for something bad to happen. This would be a good spot to stay out of that stuff, you know, right, And to be with those guys, I'd much rather be with them than with these you know, Red Cross volunteers who were all coming from the big city and they were you know, kind of like fleshy and pale, and you know, I had too much gear and had never

been in country like that. Whereas the miners and the and the poachers, you know, they've got to be super careful because it's like they're not gonna be able to get a rescue from the Park Service as something happens to them. So the whole point with them is to be where no one knows where you are. Yeah, and they are skinny and tough, and you know, they're out in the on all the time. They know what to avoid and what you can use. And yeah, I mean they were like the perfect guys to be you know.

But I it didn't matter to me who I was with. I just needed to get in there, and whoever was going to go with me, that's who I was going to take. Explain you met You made a remark about sold yourself to reality TV. Yeah, well, you know, um, give it whatever version of that you're comfortable with. What did it? Well, you know, um, what I I when I I mentioned those that race where Dick Griffith pulled a pack raft out and told me that old age

and treachery beats youth and skill every time. And that was when I was twenty one, and then by the time I was in my thirties, those um that Eco Challenge race, which was a big television race that Mark Burnett, you know, who kind of put reality TV on the map.

So he started the Eco Challenge and I did a bunch of those races, and I could see like every time I did one of those races, um, not every time, but most of the time, I was on a team that they watched, you know what I mean, Like they followed with the camera and so then i'd see the television show. I'm like, I wasn't there. That's not the race I was in, right, you know what I was like? This is so I was real a little really apprehensive

about television. I've done from the science side. I've done some sort of documentaries you know, about tree climbing and stuff, and and I didn't really like TV, you know, because it never seemed to be Now, I'm sure your TV show is not like this, but I never saw like what I did on that show. You know, it just they rearranged things and they cut it up and it looks like reality, but it's really not. I I much prefer writing or radio. I don't know why. So I

was apprehensive. I didn't want to deal with TVM. But somebody got through to Peggy and and uh and what they said is, hey, you know, I I lost my father and I think it was Honduras or El Salvador, and he was killed, he was murdered, and I spent ten years trying to bring his murderer to justice. And I wasn't able to do it till I brought a camera down there, and the local people just opened right

up to me. Once I had a camera. They thought everything they said was being sent by satellite and being transmitted. It was like a truth serum. This is the way to find your son. So these are producers reaching out. They look for stories like this, yep, and that they think are going to make dramatic TV. And they find people and reach out and do that right. And I mean, I had lots of you know, producers, but this one

was different. And they got to Peggy. I don't want to say they got to her but they convinced her, and I was like, yeah, that sounds good. And then they offered up this like it sounded really good to me. They said, um, hey, here's what we'll do. We'll get a cayraminal investigator, which I had no experience doing that. And then by that point, you know, this is like a year later, the foul play seemed just as likely as anything else. But I also wanted to keep looking

in the jungle. And they got this p J. You know, a pair of jumper, one of those Air Force guys that know they can do everything. You know, they're scrawny little guys. They can jump out of airplanes and swim and you know, they swim underwater if they pass out. That's how you know you can be a PJ too. You swim underwater to you pass. Professional rescuer, they're professional rescue. Yeah. They can shoot guns, they can save lives, they can do it all. And I have a bunch of friends.

They did the Wilderness Classic race and they would win, and super cool guys. And I met this guy Ken. He'd done a race I put on, an Armed Forces Eco Challenge race that I put on, and he had been on the winning team like two years in a row, and so um, I was like, wow, yeah, he'd be great. He and I can go in the jungle and look and this you know, retired d E a agent. He can do the criminal investigations. He'd spent twenty five years

in Latin America. You know. He was like ten feet tall and bald, with like you know, an a R fifteen tattoo down his arm or something like that. I don't really remember, but its people open right up. That's yeah, you know, and it seemed like the team, you know, and uh, and I had done enough with television to know that they were really for Nagio. Well you know, they were an independent producer and they were trying different show different channels, and they ended up selling the show

or you know, getting financing from Natural. They sold the proposal, and they had a couple of different I don't watch TV, so I don't really know all of them. But it's hilarious that that, you know, like the reputation that National Geographic has was sort of like the truth, you know, and like the but then the TV is they don't know Richard Murdoch is the one who owns it now, you know, it's like it's not national. It's not the

national geographic that Rupert, thank you. It's not the nation geographic that your parents grew up with, you know what I mean. It's not that they would be happy with you if they knew you hunted either. Probably not those guys. Those guys are horrible. Well I so, I I you know, I was I. I asked these guys on the telephone, you know, like, Hey, is this reality TV? Or is this the doct coumentary? And and and by the way, you know, what's what's the death difference between to you guys,

you know, not to these producers. I asked, what's the difference to you guys between reality TV and a documentary? And there's just long pause on this conference call, and then I, you know, looking back, I'm kind of like, oh, they this was reality all along, you know, And they said, oh, well, reality TV is is when it's really overproduced. And um so, anyway,

that became like my code word. Whenever I thought they were doing something to kind of manipulate me or Peggy for their show, I'd say, hey, this feels a little overproduced, and I would put a stop to it if I could. But we went down there, and I thought that the television would be able to get permits to get into the park because I had been my big bugaboo, my big stumbling block was trying to was to get permits where I could go into the park to look around.

I mean I ultimately did even in the first six weeks while I was down there. I was able to do it thanks to you know, me Treadwell and these other guys who new people in Costa Rica and and um. But my experience with television shows is they were really good at getting permits. They had whole divisions who would get permits in parks and things. So I thought, oh,

this sounds great. We'll have you know, the x d E A guy do criminal investigation on the outside, and me and Ken will go on the inside and I can pick up where I left off, keep searching legally and everywhere I want. But it turned out they couldn't get permits to go in. So everything became about, you know, the criminal investigation, and the only thing the criminal investigation

could come up with was this Potdalora story. And Potdalora spun it even crazier, you know, and you know, with more murderers and like cutting up my son and feeding him to the sharks and stuff like he's schizophrenic. He he was, Yeah, so anyway, it's just you know, and they bought that hook line and saying oh yeah, I mean the TV people they made little re enactments. Oh it was horrible. And then this guy Carson, who was this x d E A guy he was mad at

me and offended that I didn't embrace his ideas. I'm like, you know, I remember when I first met him, and they fired up the cameras and you know, Carson's like, tell me everything you can't You didn't say I can't tell me everything you know about your son. I'm like, wow, you know, how can I tell you everything I know about my son? Like in five minutes on the television camera. And so I just told him the same story I've been telling for a year, you know, like I knew

my son. I raised him in the wilderness. He uh had been on a six month trip through south through Central America. He'd done some really radical, crazy things already. He has a lot of experience and uh, and I laid it all out and then it was like he didn't even hear me, you know, and then anything I ever told him. He just dismissed it, and it is

everything was about his hypothesis, you know. And I'm a scientist, and it's just it's hard for me to throw away data or to discount things, you know, like I don't. I'm not allowed to do that. I can't. It doesn't work for me to like throw away data to make something fit what I want to believe. And that's all this guy did, and just story. Everything had to fit the story. Oh it was painful. And then he was like offended that I wasn't like thankful to him for this.

You know, it wasn't like watching reenactment of your son being dismembered by a machete. Well, I don't know. You can. You could probably tell it to me just as well as I could say, and it's it's not exactly something you want to see, you know. And I just but you were told to avoid it. Yeah, he said, don't watch it, you know. I mean, but I was in a hotel and it was advertised, you know, like what was the show called Missing Dial M Missing Dial? Yeah,

I don't know that, you know what. Yeah, I'm glad you just said that, because that's a stupid question when I asked you what it was like, Yeah, I mean anybody should be like yeah, I just it's just it was, Ah, I don't know so anyway, Um, you know, maybe I was too hard on the TV, Like my agent seems to think I was too hard on the television people and in the book, yeah, in the book, and other people think I wasn't hard enough. I tried to be honest about how I felt. All I did was tell

all I do in the book how I felt. You know. I used to be friends with the writer Chris off It, and uh, he wrote a book that was very critical of his family, and someone pointed out to him, uh, you know how he didn't really do a good job telling their side of the story. And he said, we'll have them write their own fucking book. Well, they made it, That's what I'm saying. They already made their own show. They made their own show. He had like, this is

your turn. Now that's how I feel exactly. That's like like they got plenty of you know, people like I shouldn't give them an audience. I mean, they got all the audience they want. And I was grateful for the help, and I was grateful for what they did, and I mean they convinced me, and I was ready to believe him because I could. I gave up, you know. And plus you don't hire a consultant to argue with him, right, So I don't know. It was kind of a wild ride,

you know. Like I I read it because I knew I was coming here, so I had to read it again, you know. Um, I mean I've read it a lot of times. I can I can read it pretty quick, and and when I read it sometimes I can't believe all that stuff happened, you know what I mean. It's sort of like it was a really unexpected turn. I was not anticipating. You know. I'm respecting your Um, I'm respecting your desire to not just divulge everything because I get it, you know, Um, I think people will buy

your boat. I want people to buy your boat. But I'm trying to do this in a in a in a way that doesn't have any spoilers. Um. How when I read it, I I to be honest with you. In the end, I didn't. I don't feel that you're naive. You've being naive, But in the end, I wasn't. I'm not entirely convinced about the certain I'm not entirely convinced what happened to him. Yeah, well I know how convinced are you? So you know, it kind of kind of goes different ways, you know, Like I'm I don't think

i'd ever you know, that's a really good question. I'm I I'm sure sure that he died either from a snake bite or a fallen tree, you know, because there wasn't any evidence that he was you know, like no, nothing was stolen, nothing, there's no you know, he wasn't. There's no marks on the bones, you know what I mean. And it was just I've seen his bones. I saw his bones, So I just I can't see him being murdered, you know, like it didn't there there's a chance, you know,

like aliens could have abducted him, killed him. I mean there's that chance, but I'm really the odds of that are so so super small, like having been there and where it happened, and who would who would have done it? I just I can't, like, um, you know, I've been around law enforcement enough now, like you know, and it sort of sounds cliche, but what would be the motive? You know, And it's just that nobody would have any motive for doing it. Um, you know, the miners wouldn't

have any motive for doing it. So I'm pretty you know, like, yeah, at least that he died a natural death, you know, and that would be natural death. I know that he was killed by a tree or a snake bite occupation. I don't know. Well, I guess you're not a man. Not a man, right, Yeah, that's all I am with. Yeah, I think it's maybe it's maybe it's natural to die from somebody else, but I would kind of That's kind

of the dividing line for me. Is an actual death is where you die by like accident or nature, you know what I mean? Like, I guess accidents kind of fall into nature like an act of God. You know, an earthquake or even a car wreck could be considered unless somebody's drunk and they hit you and then somebody killed you. But if you know, if somebody's looking in their glove box and you t bone them and I don't know, um so um. Outside of the conclusion in the book, you just spam how how long trying to

find find an answer? It was like two years, you mean, and then that's all you thought about for two years. Well, you know, I did, I did do some other stuff, you know, but yeah, it was always on my mind. Yeah, I mean it was very It was definitely a relief to to kind of get I mean, I'd still be looking, you know what I mean, like I don't know when I would have stopped, to know when I would have stopped.

Did you have some loss in in your relief though? Also, or you're like, oh, what what the hell do I do with my life now? M hm? Well, I definitely had a loss. Um, you know, I do I feel you know, it sounds not a corny but I do I feel broken, you know. Um, I put a lot. I mean, it was my son, you know. I mean if any of you guys lost your kids, you probably feel similarly, you know. I mean it's especially if you love your son and put stuff and or your daughter,

you know, or your wife. But I'm really fortunate, you know. I have my wife and my daughter and my friends, and you know, I've got work and and it was worth it to write the book. I didn't write the book to make any money. I didn't write the book. I didn't write the book for money, you know. I wrote the book because I needed to tell the story. I wrote the book for me, and I wrote the book for my my family and my friends, so they

knew what happened, you know. And I wondered about that because I used to field that anytime someone wrote a book about something damaging, that them having written a book about it was evidence that they were no longer damaged, because it's hard to write books. Huh. Well, you know what I mean. It's like you have to step outside of it and look at it. And so I was

curious before meeting you. I was curious if you were um like, to what degree you were a mess, to what degree you were damaged by it or came out different, and how you came into it, you mean, ended writing the book. Yeah, my dad lost you know, beforefore I was born. My father lost his son, right, and you would you could hang out with him. I imagine there's people that knew him for ten years and didn't know

that that happened. Uh huh. Well, I got stuck, right because I ran down there to look from my son. I wrote an email. I called people in CoA streak. I said, my son's missing, my son's missing. I gotta find him you gotta find him, Help me find him, you know. And I ran down there and I looked, and then people are like, hey, you know, I had to tell the story over and over and over, you know,

and and then it just through a natural progression. It was, you know, I'm still looking for him, and I he's probably dead, but and people wanted to hear the story. And then there was the TV show, so I got used to telling the story, you know, like from the beginning. It's just it's like, you know, something like a stink in a room. You know, in your house, you've got a stink, you don't notice it anymore because you've lived with it, you know, Or a pain that you have

to live with you don't hardly notice it. Or a sound, you know what I mean. So having to tell the story was a natural thing. And when I was down there, you know, like I'm an older guy, so my memories kind of shaky, so I had to write everything down. And I ran down there with the notebook that had, you know, like the sketches for the remodel I was doing in my house and the shopping list to go

dip netting. And then I ran down there with that notebook and then it was phone numbers the people to talk to and notes of what people said, and and then that notebook was filled up. And then it was stories and I was recording what people you know, that what they described, I was transcribing as they told me stories. And and then that was sort of I had to process what I was thinking, like what happened? Who? Who? How?

What could have happened? And how did I feel? And and then it just you know, turned into three or four journals and I was like, wow, this is this

is kind of a book. People would I want to straighten this out so people really know what happened here, especially after the TV show, You know, did you make any effort um two or was there any effort needed to make you know, some of these officials that weren't issuing permits or folks trying to really tell you like you don't know what you're doing that they knew the conclusion once. Once you found it, you would be like, hey, not every white dude missing a kid is crazy. Here's

a good example. Like I was saying, well, like I was saying, well, here is he Well, here's what happened is um you know, it became big news because everybody had already heard about it, and in Costa Rico, when they found the body, you know, it was still news. So it was kind of clear to everybody what had actually happened, in the sense that it didn't really match up with with the TV show. People were freaked out by the TV show, at least in that area, you know,

because of the way they portrayed the people who lived. Yeah, there's like a handful of murderers walking around him among you right, Yeah, with machetes, people up feed them to sharks and they're just like hanging out now in town exactly. And they were freaked out. And I feel like that's part of the reason that, you know, my son's remains were found, is because this village was freaked out and they sent you know this, really this is really a miner in there to really look and I because and

he did, he found him. So um So anyway, I'm kind of like I feel, I don't know, I don't you know, I didn't write the book to tell like, oh, I told you so you know what I mean. I didn't do it for that. I just I don't know. I I there's a lot of I mean, I wept a lot as I wrote that book. You know, there's a lot of harden there. I could never write another book like that, you know. I mean, I mean, I don't think. I hope I never have to write a

book like I would never do that, I can. I think I can only write one book like that, you know. And and what what is the books out now? No, it'll be out in February, like, um, February is the release date. So in the in the process of writing the book, you I mean, you obviously were very close with your son. I knew a lot about him. But did you learn you did some research, you found out some things people he meant, did you learn more about him or things you didn't know? Oh? For sure? Yeah,

I mean because you got into his emails. Well I got into his emails. Yeah, And I mean his friends gave me some of the stuff like from his you know, high school days and things like that and college days. And I did I learned a lot more about him, you know, things maybe that as a parent you really don't want to know. Um, but you kind of suspect and uh. And he's a normal kid, you know, and uh and I think too um to like take his emails and turn them into that second section. So there's

three parts to the book. There's sort of raising him, and then there's his trip, and then there's looking for him and on his trip through Mexico and Central America. Um, you know, to really pick apart his emails and then rewrite them, you know what I mean? That was. I was like, wow, you know, and I kind of, um, you know, i'd read them before as emails, but I

didn't really. I don't know when when something when you take something and it goes through your eyes and into your head and comes out your fingers, you process it a lot more thoroughly. And I wish I'd had a chance to tell him, you know. Yeah, I I just realized we're saying the book a lot. The name of the book, The Adventurer's Son by Roman dial Um available. Well, I don't know when we're gonna release this, but we'll

make it. Go get the book and uh yeah, thank you, thank you, I think they will, and thank you for writing it. I mean, you know, you hear the there's we just even laugh about it where you guys hear books described as like brave. I said, know, what the hell does that mean? But um, it's a brave book,

and that aks like retelling of things that are extraordinarily painful. Ah, And to to to go in and excruciating detail and to get to a part of a book where someone's calling up a trail and you see that they have a plastic sack with your boy's bones. Um, it's the heart wrenching The Adventures Son by Roman Dial and uh, Roman, thank you very much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to meet you. Appreciate it.