Ryan Wichelns is the founding editor of Trails Magazine. It is the only independent, quality-over-quantity, and print-only magazine for backpackers and those who love to sleep in the dirt. He is also an outdoor-adventure and environmental freelance writer and journalist. His work has appeared in Backpacker Magazine, Outside Online, Gear Junkie, and more. Ryan first appeared in episode 12 and again in episode 100 . You can learn more about Trails Magazine at trailsmag.net . Ryan Wichelns, welcome...
Dec 31, 2023•33 min•Season 1Ep. 215
At the age of 22 she had a spinal injury that ended her dreams of becoming an athlete. Through a lot of pain, disappointment and treatment she slowly got better. Two years later she wanted to prove to herself that she could still achieve big goals so she set out to cycle the Iron Curtain Trail also known as Eurovelo 13 . The route took her from Norway on the Barents Sea through 19 countries ending on the Black Sea at the Turkish-Bulgarian border. It was 5 months and 5,600 miles of cycling a dive...
May 09, 2021•50 min•Season 1Ep. 214
In 2015, with his friend Tarran , he completed a kayaking adventure along the Amazon River, traveling from the headwaters of the Rio Mantaro, high in the Peruvian Andes, to the Atlantic Ocean in Brazil. It was 400 miles of trekking followed by 3,600 miles of kayaking for 4.5 months. You can learn more about Olie and his adventures at oliehuntersmart.com . Olie Hunter Smart, welcome back to the show. Olie appeared first in TPZ episode 204 about his walk across India I interviewed West Hansen abou...
Apr 25, 2021•59 min•Season 1Ep. 213
The first part of his 40,000-kilometer cycling journey took him from England to Tbilisi Georgia. After a winter break in England earning money, he reunited with his bike and continued through central Asia along the Pamir highway and into the Whakan Valley. He was denied a visa to China so he chose to cycle India from south to north. His adventure continued into Nepal, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and down Australia from Darwin to Adelaide enduring the relentless heat of the Outback. It...
Apr 11, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 212
In the summer of 2019, Anna Welch traveled from New Zealand to San Francisco to begin cycling across the United States. She was inspired by the Kate Harris book Lands of Lost Borders – A Journey on the Silk Road . She wanted to see a cross-section of American culture and geography in a way that tested her mental and physical limits. She followed the Western Express and Trans Am routes, using maps from the Adventure Cycling Association completing her journey to Yorktown Virginia in 83 days. Anna ...
Mar 28, 2021•44 min•Season 1Ep. 211
In 2018 they began a long cycling adventure, heading east from their home country the Netherlands. Some of the places they have cycled include Turkey, Iran, Oman, and Japan. They’ve experienced the extremes of the high mountain passes through central Asia and the heat and humidity of SE Asia. Along the way they captured these moments with their cameras and created some of the best cycling videos on YouTube. Their channel is called Wheels to Wander and you can find them at their website wheelstow...
Mar 14, 2021•59 min•Season 1Ep. 210
He lives a life of adventure as a travel writer and broadcast journalist, reporting from over 100 countries in the past decade. Back in 2016 he sailed and cycled from China to London in 133 days. The main legs of this journey were a 28-day yacht race across the North Pacific then cycling across the USA in 49 days before getting back into the race on a different crew and sailing 11 days across the North Atlantic from New York to Derry/Londonderry in Northern Ireland. His latest creation is a vide...
Feb 28, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 209
Christine Ka’aloa runs the YouTube channel GrrrlTraveler . It’s a channel that takes you inside her solo travel adventures around the world. Before YouTube, she lived in New York City for over 8 years, working in tv and video production including working with MTV. When the economy slowed in 2009, she decided to take a gap year to travel abroad. She spent time living in South Korea teaching English before spending 7 months backpacking in India and SE Asia. She also runs a companion travel blog at...
Feb 14, 2021•46 min•Season 1Ep. 208
Photo credit: Susanna Oreskovic In the late 1920s, the husband-and-wife duo Don and Phyllis Munday believed there was an undiscovered peak in the Coast Range about 200 miles north of Vancouver which was an uncharted part of the province. They called it Mystery Mountain and set out to find it. They achieved their goal in 1928, reaching the lower summit of Mystery Mountain which became known as Mount Waddington , the highest peak inside British Columbia at 13,186 ft. About 90 years later, a team o...
Jan 31, 2021•50 min•Season 1Ep. 207
Her travels have taken her all over the world. Her first big adventure was traveling solo through parts of East and West Africa using public transportation. She is also into cycle-touring and spent 2.5 months in SE Asia, 5 weeks in Patagonia, and most recently was back in Africa cycling from Luxor Egypt to Khartoum Sudan. In 2019 she competed in the first Bike Nonstop US race from Portland Oregon to Washington DC. It was her first experience in an ultra-distance cycling race and she completed it...
Aug 02, 2020•1 hr 18 min•Season 1Ep. 206
Her adventure began in Ushuaia Argentina in late January 2013. Nearly 7 months later she cycled into Santiago Chile after 4,600 km accomplishing her goal of unicycling through Patagonia. But the goal was more than just a cycling challenge. It was a way to meet people from different cultures and a way to discover herself at the same time. In 2016, she received the Kris Holm Evolution of Balance award that supports riders seeking creative and self-supported mountain unicycle adventures in remote p...
Jul 26, 2020•42 min•Season 1Ep. 205
At the end of 2016 he left his job to begin 2 months of planning for a walk across India from Turtuk in the north to Kanyakumari in the south. The walk would begin in 2017. The year marking 70 years of Indian independence. The goal of the expedition was to learn about how Independence and Partition affected the people that lived through it as well as to demonstrate that with careful planning and determination it is possible to walk over 7 months and 4,500 km through high altitude, extreme heat a...
Jul 19, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 204
When she was little, she dreamed of becoming a writer. But by her early forties, after dozens of jobs from teaching to real estate to selling insurance, she wondered why she had lost sight of that dream. So, in 2011 she set out from Belgrade Serbia on an old 8-speed mountain bike with a budget of 5 euros per day to begin cycling around the world. Along the way she overcame many hardships. But she took time off when needed to rest, earn money, and most importantly to begin writing books about her...
Jul 12, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 203
She left her job as a graphic designer and traveled to New Zealand to start her first bicycle tour. But when it was over, she knew she wanted more. A few years later in 2015 she cycled away from her home in Sweden with the plan to ride back to New Zealand. The journey took her through Europe, Turkey, and Iran before ending with an injured foot on the Pamir highway in Tajikistan. Back in Sweden after 4 months of recovery, she began again on a new route that would take her across Russia, Kazakhsta...
Jun 28, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 202
Karma is from Sweden and Scott from New Zealand. They have a passion for long-distance hiking and exploring the world. Not wanting to be owned by their stuff, they sold everything but the packs on their backs and in 2019 began a multi-year trek from North Cape at the top of Norway toward Bluff at the bottom of New Zealand. So far, their journey has taken them through 8 countries. They traveled through the UK during winter then into France and Spain where the adventure was paused in March 2020. Y...
Jun 21, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 201
Enjoy this bonus episode in celebration of reaching 200 episodes. 24 previous guests sent in recordings of what they are doing now.
Jun 16, 2020•54 min•Season 1Ep. 200
Back in 2006 while snowboarding in the French Alps, he met some backpackers and became fascinated with their lifestyle and tales of travel and adventure. Soon after, he quit his job and spent a year working and traveling Australia. A few years later, while backpacking and volunteering in Central America, he decided to retire the backpack and begin traveling in other ways. First, he built a bike-car that seats two cyclists in the front and two in the back. Its maiden voyage was from the UK to Ita...
Jun 14, 2020•54 min•Season 1Ep. 200
At age 15 he emigrated with his parents from Romania to Montreal Canada. He studied software engineering at University, but after graduation he decided to take another path in life. He left on a 9-month adventure to cycle the Americas from the top of Alaska to the bottom of South America, a 34,000 km journey that ultimately lasted more than 3 years. For this he was awarded the European Adventurer of the year in 2018. You can learn more at his website radupaltineanu.com . Radu Păltineanu, welcome...
Jun 07, 2020•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 199
In August 2019, he began a 780 km trek across Madagascar. Joined by three team members, the goal was to walk east to west along Madagascar’s longest river, the Mangoky. The journey was 29 days through jungles and across mountain ranges while avoiding crocodiles and the threat of armed bandits. Part of the adventure is to raise funds and awareness for the loss of wildlife and wild lands across Africa by working with the African Wildlife Foundation . You can learn more about Chaz and his adventure...
May 31, 2020•51 min•Season 1Ep. 198
He is on a mission to use human power to reach the peaks of the seven summits. After cycling to Nepal and summiting Mt. Everest in 2016, he set out on a new adventure to reach the top of Carstensz Pyramid , the highest peak of Mount Carstensz in the Popua Province of Indonesia. He began on bicycle from Nepal, crossing India, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia and ending 9,000 km later in East Java Indonesia. From there he continued by rowboat another 4,000 km to Papua Province, but because of local vio...
May 17, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 197
They saved their money and quit their jobs to begin traveling the world with the goal of reaching all seven continents. Their fourth continent, Antarctica, is an expensive place to get to so they applied for jobs at McMurdo station , a US Antarctic research base with a summer population of about 1,200 people. You can learn more about their 5 months at McMurdo and their other travels at their website peregrination-travel.com as well their YouTube channel Peregrination . Zach and Leah, welcome to ...
May 10, 2020•54 min•Season 1Ep. 196
His passion is undertaking expeditions through the mountains, thousands of kilometers long, on foot and usually alone. These journeys provide an opportunity to look within and ponder life’s most profound questions. For more than 2 decades he has walked over 20,000 km through mountain ranges in Europe and Asia. In 2004 he did a first ever solo thru-hike of the Carpathian Mountains and in 2014 he hiked through the Zagros mountains in Iran. Inspired by a summer adventure in Iceland, he returned to ...
May 03, 2020•54 min•Season 1Ep. 195
The North Sea Cycle Route extends along the coastline of eight countries bordering the North Sea. It’s about 6,000 km long and is also known as EuroVelo 12 . It’s a diverse route covering land below sea level in the Netherlands to cliffs over 1,000 meters high in Norway. Laura Kennington completed this journey over 70 days in the summer of 2018. She has also recently authored a book titled Kairos , an ancient Greek word meaning the supreme moment, where she shares the stories and lessons learned...
Apr 26, 2020•33 min•Season 1Ep. 194
In February 2018, architects Guylee Simmonds and David Schnabel bought a marine survival lifeboat and spent a year converting it for a four-month, 5000 km voyage to the Arctic. Along with a dog named Shackleton, they traveled from the UK to Tromsø, the largest city in the Arctic, situated far north in the Norwegian Fjords. The aim of the expedition was to design a self-sufficient boat capable of taking on the harsh environments, explore the wild and isolated Arctic landscape, and document the ad...
Apr 19, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 193
Over the past decade she has done many adventures which have taken her to the Arctic, the Haute route, Bolivian high peaks, Denali, and Iceland to name a few. Her first time in the Amazon jungle was a short trip to Guyana in 2014. She went back in 2020 with the mission to cross the Kanuku mountain range. With a small group of Amerindian tribe members, the team completed the crossing after a few weeks in the mountains. They encountered jaguars, bushmaster snakes and bullet ants. You can learn mor...
Apr 12, 2020•43 min•Season 1Ep. 192
She is a Swiss outdoor explorer that likes the challenge of winter adventure. She has competed in 2 arctic winter races in Finland, the Rovaniemi 150 and 300 , as well as the Arrowhead 135 winter endurance race in northern Minnesota. In February 2019 she set out on an expedition called Arctic 1000, a 1000 km solo and unsupported trek in Lapland, the northern most region of Finland. Her planned route was from the Lapland capital Rovaniemi to Lake Inari and back, but due to equipment troubles her ...
Apr 05, 2020•41 min•Season 1Ep. 191
In the summer of 2012, while working a regular job and in search of a creative outlet, she decided to combine her passion for writing and travel to create the blog WonderfulWanderings.com . Little did she know less than 3 years later, she would quit that regular job to focus on the blog full time to serve a community of travelers. Beginning this year, she left her home base in Belgium and set off on an adventure to visit a new destination every month to try the location-independent lifestyle and...
Mar 29, 2020•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 190
While in Kyrgyzstan in 2018 he bought a Russian-made 1987 UAZ-452 van. After converting it into a campervan he drove off to explore central Asia, Iran, and Pakistan. After Pakistan, he shipped the van to Argentina where he has begun a multi-year road trip to Alaska. But before all of this, he lived on sailboats, cycled the length of New Zealand, and rode a motorcycle through Vietnam. You can learn more about these adventures at his YouTube channel Huub Vlogs . Huub van der Mark, welcome to The P...
Mar 22, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 189
She is one of the UKs most accomplished female adventurers whose achievements include summitting both Ama Dablam and Mount Everest, racing 1000 km across Mongolia on horseback, and completing the 243 km Kathmandu Coast to Coast race on New Zealand’s South Island. She is also the founder of How Many Elephants . An organization which raises the awareness of the plight of elephants in Africa and raises funds for anti-poaching projects. You can learn more at her website hollybudge.com . Holly Budge,...
Mar 15, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 188
Starting in Spain, she cycled 10,000 km across 13 countries to reach Ghana on a bike she built from recycled components. It was an adventure she called Ready Steady Slow in an effort to remind herself not to rush and to patiently take in everything going on around her. But going slow can be a difficult challenge when the setbacks begin to mount like colliding with a taxi in Senegal and injuring a knee to cycling through the desert in extreme heat to not having the correct tools to fix a disinteg...
Dec 08, 2019•1 hr 25 min•Season 1Ep. 187
