Grounded In Traditions

Speaker One 0:01 Hi, I'm Rose from Sandpoint, Idaho, and you're listening to the wild idea. Bill Welcome to a special set of stories about our wild and connected world what we call the wild idea Podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Bill Hodge, and along with my good buddy and co host, Anders Reynolds, we bring a passion for wild places and wild ideas that live at the intersection of wild nature and human nature, and together, we bring a combined 30 plus year track record of fighting for land protections, fighting for land stewardship and occasionally fighting each other. And with that, Anders, how about this special holiday Anders Reynolds 0:40 edition, gobble, gobble, Bill, Bill 0:44 gobble, gobble, indeed. Anders Reynolds 0:46 Let's talk for a minute about this episode, and maybe some episodes to come. You and I have been thinking a lot about how to shape this Thanksgiving week podcast. It's a holiday that demands to be looked at critically, to be examined with clear eyes, and we'll come back to that in a minute. But in talking about how to handle it, we kept coming back to this idea that Thanksgiving doesn't just mark a one day celebration, it's the unofficial beginning of a whole season of celebrations, a whole season of traditions, a stretch of weeks that whether or not you celebrate Hanukkah or Christmas or Kwanzaa or Santa Lucia or Boxing Day or Saturnalia or whatever, is a time when people reconnect to the rituals that make them feel grounded. Bill 1:42 Yeah, as we've talked about this, you know, this time of year is full of stories. Some are familiar, passed down over generations. Others are brand new, but no less meaningful. You and I have been very busy collecting stories over the past few weeks, but before we get into today's episode, we thought it might be nice to share with our community where we're going over the next couple of months. So coming up in December, we've got just a slate of great folks joining us for conversations we have. The journalist and author, Ben Goldfarb, we're going to be talking about beavers. We're going to be talking about crossings, road crossings, the impacts that roads have on ecology. We're going to talk about somebody who not only lives his life in the wilderness, but lives his life thinking about wilderness, and he lives his life with a rather robust herd of mules. And that is our friend Chris. Ire otherwise known as mule dragger. For those of you who may know him from Instagram, we get to catch up with good news. We get some more good news. Some of our listeners may remember that earlier this year, we had a conversation with Ann Robinson, otherwise known as good news, when she was halfway through her hike from Georgia to Maine. We caught up with her at Harpers Ferry West Virginia, at that midway mark, and now we're going to catch up with her now that she's completed her through hike of the Appalachian Trail. And we're also going to catch up with the former director of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, Martha Williams. That will be a great discussion about the plight of some of our most imperiled species. And then Christmas week brings a very special gift when we'll talk about the ways growing up on a Christmas tree farm shaped the values of someone who today is focused on the conservation of national forests in the southern Appalachians. After that comes New Year's Day, when we'll be joined by another very special guest to make a few personal and professional resolutions for 2026 Anders Reynolds 3:38 Ooh is is one of yours, securing some money for the podcast. Is one of them paying me? Is one of them maybe recording a live appeal for money. I can sing that Sarah McLachlan arms of the angels song behind it if you want. We can do it right now. We can cut it live. You know, I'm afraid that Bill 3:55 would have the opposite effect of what you're thinking so, but we'll save those resolutions for later. How about that? And then coming up in January, and we're really excited about the entire month of January, we are going to be diving in to the roadless rule. Some of our listeners may remember that we had a great conversation with Chris Wood, the CEO of Trout Unlimited, was also on the policy staff at the Forest Service when the roadless rule was written. Well, we think the roadless rule warrants an even deeper dive than that. Amazing, I don't know, 45 minutes we had with Chris and so the month of January, we're going to dedicate to that rule. We're going to check in on some places where this proposed rescission of the roadless rule could touch down in really harmful ways. We're going to pull our community together to have an actual interactive experience talking about the roadless rule, and we've got some really, really interesting episodes to dive into that that I'm super excited about. And January is going to be fun. Obviously it's going to be timely, depending on whether the Administration decides to hold another comment period on their proposed. Decision of the rodents rule, but that's kind of what we have coming up in January. Anders Reynolds 5:03 That's right, and the reason we picked January is that it's the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the rule, so it's a perfect time to celebrate it. But we could keep going. We could keep going beyond January. I won't belabor the point, but we've already got a March episode about the Irish wilderness and a May episode commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of Cal wild. In the works, we have lost our minds. So for now, let's return to Thanksgiving. Bill you and I didn't want to center an episode that fell back on the familiar myths of this holiday, the ones that erase indigenous experiences. But we also didn't want to do the adverse and use the holiday as an excuse to confine Native Voices to a single date on the calendar and call that good. So we kept asking ourselves abstractly, what is this week about? And we settled on tradition. So this episode is going to focus on the many different ways people mark this season and the other traditions that connect us to place, to family and to each other every month of the year. For some, that might mean a Thanksgiving table. For others, it's a return to a favorite trail each spring or the same first night meal every time they camp, or, say, an annual weekend spent in Montana, annoying your co host from the back seat of his own truck. Bill 6:41 Well, that one's awfully specific. I wonder what that one's all about. Yeah. You know, this episode is a collection of those sort of stories, small, personal vignettes about how we make meaning in the world beyond the walls of our home, and how year after year, the places we love become a part of our own evolving traditions. So our first story, we want to bring to you, and all of these stories come from people that I would consider Friends of the wild, friends of the pod, and just plain friends. And our first friend to join us with the tradition is the stewardship director for American Whitewater, Kevin Colburn. I think the Speaker 1 7:19 best traditions are probably just things we imbue with meaning that get richer with repetition, you know, things we go back to again and again that are just recurring sources of depth in our lives. A tradition that works for me in that way is my returns to Montana with my daughter and my family and just myself sometimes, and it's largely because I lived there quite a while. It was a place that had deep resonance with me, kind of one of those places where you can do nothing and still feel like you're doing something and something meaningful that kind of reflects part of who you are and what you value in the world. So think of places kind of like people that way. It's people that you can just chill out with and do nothing, and it's the best time ever. That's how Montana was for me, and I've been going back every year since I moved away in 2014 so kind of had to move for family reasons. I had a young daughter, and I just felt like I owed it to her and to myself to maintain that connection over time. So I promised myself every year, as much as I could, I would go back and take my kiddo and we would do the things that I love to do in Montana for me, on my trips where I just go out on my own, I try to go out every Father's Day and just go paddling, you know, I just meet up with a buddy or two, some friends, and we go out, and we like to do exploratory boating in the back country. So go places we haven't been, where there's very little information, and you can still kind of have these kind of original experiences within our little subculture of paddling, you know, where we're out in the woods and you don't know what's around the next bend. And to me, that just sort of how I, how I connect with nature. You know, I think of, think of recreation, like different ways of spending time outdoors, as like a language. So for me, with paddling, I maybe have 5000 words that I can use to connect with nature and have a conversation when I'm in the woods paddling, when I'm hiking, maybe it's half that. When I'm mountain biking, it's like 5% of that, you know. So everybody kind of has this, these languages that they seek to connect with nature, and they find the languages that have the most words, you know. And that's kind of how I am with paddling. I'm out there, and I just have these rich, profound, peaceful, very connected experiences. So I try to do that every, every Father's Day for a few days. And then, you know, I really want to keep my daughter connected too. So I try to get her out as well. We always try to do a multi day. River trip, and we can, but sometimes it's just being a kid for her, you know, just being in the natural world swimming. She loves the clean water. She loves, like, kind of the little nervousness about bears. She loves, I don't know, probably just spending time with me and just the way that I am there, you know, just joyful and kind of the most myself. And she'll often remind me that she was born there and I wasn't. And then in recent years, it's been even funner, in some ways more fun, because I have a new wife, and she has two daughters, and I've spent the last few years taking her out and her daughters and getting to see the Northern Rockies through their eyes, kind of for the first time again. So these kind of annual pilgrimages, they're not many days, but they keep me connected to part of myself and part of home. For me, home is not one place for me. It never happened. Has been. I don't really have that fortune, good fortune, to have all my people and important places in one place. So my second home is not brick and mortar, it's public lands in the Northern Rockies and these places I go back to again and again that bring me just so much joy. Anders Reynolds 11:21 Gosh, I love that story so much. Kevin is such a clear communicator, and you know, I have enjoyed living vicariously through him, following these annual trips of his on Facebook over the years. But you know, Kevin's not the only person we talked to whose tradition centered around Montana. We also talked to Jesse Stevenson, who is the crown of the continent specialist at The Wilderness Society, about the ways Montana's public lands don't just contribute to her sense of tradition, but the ways they sustain her and her community. Speaker 2 12:01 I think to me, traditions really comes down to returning to something, returning to place, returning to a community, returning to a meal, or something that feels familiar and often holds a sense of home. So a tradition that really resonates with me, this is, this is something that I was also thinking about recently. And I was thinking about it while I was hunting a couple weeks back in the Swan Valley, close to where I grew up. And I was thinking, Gosh, a tradition that, you know, I've held close for many years. I was feeling a little bit like, I don't know if I have that many traditions that I that I returned to, return to year after year. And then at some moment when I was sitting there watching a brown creeper run up and down a tree, I realized, oh, this. This is it. This is a tradition of mine, hunting and and returning again, returning to these places that have shaped me and raised me and are such a big part of who I am. And it might not be a big gathering each year or something that looks the same each year, but it's this returning to place. And so I started thinking about the question a little bit more, and started thinking about traditions a little bit more. I realized that I would probably end up in this conversation breaking the rules a little bit, and not just talking about one tradition, but I started thinking about the things that I return to each year and that make me feel grounded, especially in times like these, where the ground under our feet can feel really shaky and the world can feel really loud, and hunting was certainly one of those. Hunting for me is, is a time to slow down, and a time to listen, and a time where I return to these places that I I might spend time throughout the year, I might spend a lot of time throughout the year, but in a different way, in a much slower and more intentional way, and in a way where I'm I'm sitting and I'm listening and I suppose, taking in the landscape around me in a way that I don't necessarily always give myself time or permission to do throughout the rest of the year. And that's something that, until prompted to really sit and think about it, I don't know if, I don't know if I'd really appreciated it fully. So so I think, for me, that that tradition of of going out on the land, and sometimes it's, you know, sometimes it's with friends, sometimes it's with family, oftentimes it's solo, but returning to these places that I know so well, and that sort of make up the mental map of the landscape that I'm familiar with, thinking about certain places that I have my own names for, that they certainly wouldn't find on a map, but that are related to what grows there, or how it looks in a certain light or track. Acts that I've seen there in the past. And I think that is a really, I realize, a really central part of how I experience and interact with landscapes is sort of returning to places, you know, year after year, season after season, and having the honor of witnessing them change, seeing how they stay the same in the same vein I was I was thinking about other traditions that that I have and and I do definitely think of traditions in sort of a cyclical, seasonal, often annual sort of framework. I realized that another tradition of mine, and a way that I interact with the same landscapes year after year, as collecting cottonwood buds, which in Blackfeet my family's language is called a sitsuk Sim, and turning those buds into a salve that's medicinal, that's really good for sore muscles, inflamed joints, and then sharing it with people. And the third tradition that I thought of is a tradition that was passed down by a man named Bud Moore, who a lot of folks listening to this podcast will probably know and recognize. Bud was an author, a forester, a conservationist in northwest Montana, and he was, he was kind of like a second grandpa to me. He was a mentor to my dad and Bud made sourdough pancakes with a sourdough starter that had been in his family for generations every, I think, every other day, but particularly on Sundays. He would make sourdoughs every single Sunday. And he was our neighbor. He's sold my dad the piece of property that I grew up on in the Swan Valley, and often we would join him on Sunday mornings and have sourdough pancakes that were fried in a cast iron and about a half inch of bacon grease, which I'm pretty sure is how bud lived so long, and as I got older, I I was able to get a little bit of Bud's sourdough. And I've kept it going, and I've shared it with folks all over the place. It's everywhere from South America to Italy to Alaska, all over Montana now, and I've tried to keep the tradition alive of making sourdough pancakes every Sunday morning. And I most weeks, I'm able to do it. And as I was thinking about these three traditions, hunting, collecting cottonwood buds and making salve, keeping this 200 year old sourdough starter alive and making pancakes, I realized that perhaps the most central part of those traditions for me is the sharing of them, and it's bringing people together around them, or or hunting in the fall and filling a freezer with meat, and then being able to share that with friends gathered around a table, or collecting cottonwood buds and making salve, and then being able to give that to people every year as gifts, or being able to gather people around a table on a Sunday morning, any time of the year for sourdough pancakes or sourdough waffles, because I love language, and I love words. When I got out of the backcountry and I wasn't hunting, I was like, I need to look up where the word tradition comes from. So I looked up the word tradition, which comes from the root word trader, which means to hand down or to give. And I love that that that part of the word, of course, we think of traditions as handing down of a certain practice or a certain thing, but I love that it also means to give. And I realized that for me, in each of these traditions, giving and sharing of them is actually the piece that that feels core to me, and that really brings me joy, and is the reason that I keep returning to them, even though you know, the act of hunting, the act of collecting cottonwood buds, The act of keeping a sourdough starter alive is often solo. It's actually the community and the bringing together of people and the gathering around these things that that really means the most to me. Bill 19:13 Boy, Jessie always knows how to sort of hit me right in the feels. She's so good at just being so grounded in the space in which she lives, and really appreciate Jesse sharing that story with us. We go from Jesse's grounding in the state of Montana to sort of a grounding in friendship. We caught up with a dear friend of ours, Katie, Courier, and her friends, cat and Theresa, about the traditions they've built together as friends who met on public lands, yeah. Speaker 3 19:41 So when I think of traditions, I think of a regular trip that I take with two of my best friends that we've been doing for over 10 years now, and we have explored so many different places across the country and internationally, spending time out. And just connecting as we grow up together, Speaker 4 20:05 the trip that the three of us have taken for the last 10 years, every year, almost, yeah, we decided that we're going on our 10th trip next year, which is a big deal. For 10 years we've been taking these trips that they're outside, they're challenging physically and mentally, often, but the common thread is that the three of us are together, pushing ourselves, pushing each other, and I think, like Katie said, we've grown up in ways and the conversations that we get to have out in nature, in the woods, without technology, we're not in a bustling city, often we're just sitting in the woods, the three of us giggling in our tent. It's super meaningful to me. I think the connection that we have is really unique in that we don't see each other very often, and when we do, we're doing these big things that push ourselves, and we get to just kind of dive deep really quickly because of the environment that we're in, and it's pretty special. Speaker 5 21:03 I recognize how special our our trips are that, like, I have friends that don't have this, this close friend group that just there's no thought about whether or not there's going to be a trip like the question is, where are we going to go every year? It's not, well, are we going to do something? And so we've already basically, with this tradition that we've set up, we've decided we're going to do a trip every year. And so when we start to do our planning, we, you know, want to explore new places. So we try to go in different places across the country. Now we're starting to go international, and I think that for me, personally, these trips are about our time together and getting back to the basics of camping, being in a tent together, like Theresa said, like we're just so comfortable with each other. I think nothing even needs to be said. We just start laughing and giggling the whole time. And it's it's really unique. And I'm so glad that we continue to do these trips, and I think that we'll do them for the rest of our Anders Reynolds 22:20 lives, speaking of meeting on public lands, we caught up with Lynn Cameron, co chair of the Friends of Shenandoah mountain, and she shared with us a story of a tradition that's grown over the years from personal to familial to communal, and sort of even beyond Speaker 6 22:40 the tradition that really resonates with me is the traditional New Year's day hikes that we've been doing for almost 40 years. Back in the late 80s, we would go out with some friends who were naturalists and fellow hikers, and they were people who taught us everything we know, and we would go out on New Year's Day and identify trees and look at scenic overlooks, and they were just taking us into the deepest part of the George Washington National Forest and teaching us what was there. So we enjoyed that very much. And as years went by, we would do that every year. But then, as we got into advocacy more for wilderness and protection of our public lands, we decided to open up our our hikes, our New Year's day hikes, to other people. In fact, anybody who wanted to come, we would focus on areas that we were trying to protect. One area in particular is at the edge of Ramses draft wilderness, and we would have our New Year's day hike there again and again. We would walk by a beautiful little Braley pond, and then about three and a half miles up the mountain to the scenic overlook, where we could see across the Shenandoah Valley to the Blue Ridge Parkway. What a gorgeous place. And when we got to the top, I would give a little talk about all the peaks that we could see and the features we're in an area rich with public lands and and then I would talk about efforts to protect those special places. And so people tolerated that very well, and they would come back again and again. And so the threats were different over the years, the actions we could take were different, but I just really felt like we were getting the new we were starting the new year off on the right foot, and it pleased me that so many people wanted to spend their very first day of the year on our public lands and some special places. And I really felt like some of them realized that these special places held. An important were important in their lives, and that when we've needed actions, they I believe they were more likely to take part in protecting them. So I kind of think John Muir had it right, going to the mountains, is going home. And I just wanted everybody to have the feelings that we had about visiting these public places and working to protect them. Now, last year, been going to this same place for about 25 years, and I noticed that we had a big crowd, but that Malcolm, my husband and I were leading from the rear. In other words, we couldn't keep up with the fast hikers, but because we had been to this spot so many times, they all knew where to go anyway, and they probably knew the talk I would give as well. So it's I love this stage in life where you're not so much trying to accomplish yourself as to help other people see what's there and revere it and want to protect it. Our next Bill 26:09 story comes from Andre Sanchez, community engagement and conservation policy manager for Cal wild. And his traditions are rooted in family, in food and the spaces we find to reconnect with each other. Speaker 7 26:23 So a tradition that sticks with me is actually largely tied to, you know, my grandmother on my mother's side, you know, it's largely been the accepted and, you know, very much valued idea that during the fall. During the autumnal time we gather, been a lot of interpretation as to what the gathering and the explicit reason for the gathering is, but at the end of the day, you know, on the core is that we gather as family, and that we break bread, and that we just spend time together overall. You know, I think there's an interesting component that comes into it as well. When you look at historical context of, you know, the seasonality from the summer to the fall time period, and as things get colder, there's just like an innate situation where people just start gathering more, you know, in a close, warm setting, often that ends up being, obviously indoors, and so it's yeah, just very much translates over to the way that we've had a tradition that, again, resonates with me from my grandparents, that we gather, you know, close together indoors. And as I mentioned, we break bread and just spend time together everybody you know being able to offer something that they are proud of, in terms of, particularly like the culinary side of things you know. One family member might make you know their posole. One other family member might make their tamales. One family member might make you know their potato salad or what have you. But at the end of the day, it's all about, you know, just bringing together our our love, our energy, you know, these resources that essentially represent what we're trying to offer to one another, and just that, that love and intention of being together. It's like I made this with intention, with love, and I am here to share that with you. So one additional component of us gathering, you know, beyond just the breaking bread component, is also, you know, since we're all already in town, you know, we all came from our different places, and are just already, you know, close together, we have often just ended up going to, like, a nearby, you know, open space or public land. You know, whether that's going to the snow for the day, or just going for like, a scenic drive in the National Forest, or, you know, going up to, you know, Yosemite Valley and just going for a quick tour and, you know, stroll around the Yosemite Valley, we've often just ended up doing like we're already together. Let's go experience something while we're outdoors. Not only spend the time together with ourselves, but also together with like, you know, the non human community that we know is nearby, and try to just keep that perspective of like, you know, we have time and opportunity to be amongst these Anders Reynolds 29:12 places. Well, Bill, it's been a good episode. Think we should call it a day. Bill 29:16 Not so fast, my friend. Come on you and I have some traditions. We're going to ignore all of our traditions after we've heard these amazing, heartwarming stories of tradition, and we're going to ignore what we share. You're Anders Reynolds 29:29 going to give people a peek behind the curtain. You just know that once they see, they can't unsee. Bill 29:35 Oh, that's true. That's true. I think a tradition, when we thought about traditions versus sort of the usual, you know, leaning into the mythology of of the holiday. We thought about traditions for this time of year. We we said to all of our guests, you know, traditions can be any time of year. We just want to talk about traditions that mean something, and one that means an awful lot to me is a tradition that you and I. Celebrated. Well, I think you've been coming for nine years, but it was the 10th year of a gathering of I always refer to us as a bunch of wilderness nerds gathering on the prairie in southwest Montana to I don't know what would you call it. Is it a is it a therapy session? Anders Reynolds 30:19 There's definitely a therapy component, but there's, you know, sometimes some hard drinking, there's some exploration, there's some deep discussion about what wilderness even is. In this modern world, I think one of the famous phrases from our tradition is, is relevancy even relevant anymore, and that's when I know it's time to down my drink and climb into my tent for the night. Bill 30:45 Oh, yeah, for sure, I'll never forget that conversation. I think that conversation still goes on to this day. But to give a little more color to folks this, this started 10 years ago when I realized that two of my friends in the wilderness world lived, you know, 2000 plus miles away. And and Laura, my wife and our executive producer, said, You know, you guys ought to really try to get away and connect. And you were added a year after that. And we've added some other friends who kind of coalesced around a group of us that do this every year, always celebrating public lands on public lands on the Beaverhead, Deer Lodge, National Forest, but exploring, you know, other public lands, wildlife refuges, other national forests over in Idaho, we, I will say we spend way, way too much time in an automobile, that's for sure. Anders Reynolds 31:37 Yeah, if you can imagine maybe five or six men shoved into one pickup truck like all jostling against each other as they travel further and further out from their base camp in order to find like the new wilderness area that they haven't been to yet. But you know what? It it's worth it. I'm not just saying this, but these trips are they're restorative. For me. It's a great group of friends. It's a great group of wilderness thinkers. I feel like I can be myself. And by be myself, I mean, you know, when we're in these wild places, when we're in the tendoy Mountains, when we're in the gravellies, wherever we go. You know, there's something sort of joyful but frightening, and getting close to wilderness, you know, it that week always leaves me feeling a little feral and too phenomenologically attentive, or something, but and it's nice to have the anchor there, to have my friends there, and to know I can just be myself. And I gotta say, the best compliment I can offer is that everybody there is smarter than me. I love bringing up something and having everybody be like, Oh no, it's not that way at all. It's this way, and me thinking, Ah, damn it, they're right. I'm wrong. Bill 33:03 Well, I think, I think the way the conversations go to me is we hear a range of perspectives. And there are, you know, in your case, Anders coming from Washington, DC, and working on Capitol Hill, on public lands issues every day. You know, 52 weeks out of the year to one of our group is retired, but worked on a very place based program on the Idaho, Montana border. You know, there's just a range of perspectives, and so I don't know if there's always a right or wrong. I'm with you that I always leave feeling feral, maybe because we don't get to shower for four or five days, but also because I always want to make sure we're getting it right, and the conversations over the 10 years as part of this tradition have evolved. You mean, I was a pretty strident wilderness is an amazing tool. Why do we need another tool? Sort of guy to obviously, I have a much more widened worldview on how we think about wild places and when wilderness is the right tool, those sort of things. And I also love the traditions within our traditions, and they're they're funny and quirky, they're irritating. Sometimes we'll talk about the irritating in a second. But when we go to this place, this place is called horse prairie, we pass a certain Butte, and I always feel at home when we pass red Butte like I know we're home, even though it's not home, but it is our home every July, and there's a certain comfort in going home. Anders Reynolds 34:30 Yeah, it's interesting you say that that you feel like you go home. I think for me, the power is actually in being able to embrace wildness, embrace a place that's outside of my self. You know, we we pay a price when we reject wildness or solitude or the primal. You know, deny that truth, and you're going to pay a cost. And one thing I love about public lands. One thing I love about this week in particular is it's this great pathway to safely prioritizing those virtues and communal way. You know how you do it internally is much trickier Good luck. But like at least, we spend that week around people who sort of understand that that wildness is a truth, and it's something that ought to be embraced, plus you're just such like a rich target for ridicule. It's just, it's, it's not even hard, really. Bill 35:32 I just, I suffer so much, folks, you have no idea how much I suffer for those three or four days I set myself up. Oh, too many times I tend to appoint myself the driver, because I have the bigger truck and well, let's just say that Anders and our friend Sam have found ways to find scabs that need to be picked, and they will pick and pick and pick at those scabs. It generally involves singing. This past year, it involved whistling to where the point where I thought I was going to bend my steering wheel I was so aggravated. Anders Reynolds 36:06 Oh, I'm Bill, and I hate joy. I'm Bill. Bill 36:11 I don't hate joy, but I do hate annoyance. That is for sure. You know, I think, when I think about all of these traditions, including ours of gathering at Horse prairie every year. And I think about what makes me grateful for that is as we as we said at the start of our story, sometimes the tradition is just therapy. It's just being with people that have a common grounding in our case, wild lands or our friendship, and through these other stories, you've heard all these different themes. But I'm also grateful that within our our tradition of gathering is we've also dreamed and honestly this podcast, this idea for the wild idea was born out of the tradition we just talked about, and that is something I'm very grateful for. Anders Reynolds 37:06 I always knew you dreamed about me, Bill, that's a great final line. I would love for that to be the last word, but I really think we should let our friends that we talked to in this episode have the last word. We want to we want to leave everybody with just a little more gratitude. And we hope all you listening understand that we're very, very grateful that you've been going on this journey with us. So thank you. Speaker 1 37:33 The thing I'm most grateful for about my trips is probably clean water. You know, it's being out and being able to watch Fish and Wildlife move through the water and see the beautiful rocks, and it's just a sparkly place. Speaker 2 37:50 I think the gratitude that I have for these traditions, for any tradition, is is really that that returning to and I think, an invitation to be intentional in a world that is so chaotic and messy and loud and full of so many distractions and so many things that demand and can take up our Time, and that gentle invitation to return to a tradition year after year, week after week, season after season, whatever it may be is is just such a nice reminder to, I think, just to go a little bit more gently and to walk with intention through Speaker 3 38:36 our lives. The thing that this tradition makes me most grateful for is the lifelong friendships that it has fostered between the three of us and our ability to reconnect regularly. We live basically from the east coast all the way up into Alaska, and so we are so spread out geographically, but we find ways to reconnect almost annually, and it's in a way that, you know, we really get to spend quality time with each other and push our limits, physically and mentally in the outdoors, and I wouldn't want to be in the woods with anybody else you know, more than these two. I mean, I think we've been in some challenging situations together, and we just constantly see ourselves work through them and work together and take on the load for each other when we need to so, Speaker 4 39:42 yeah, the thing I'm most grateful for about these trips is just such a unique way to be with two people that I admire and look up to in so many ways, and that push me and challenge me and like I'm just so lucky that I get to travel with them and. In situations where I feel I feel safe to be authentic. I feel safe to be in the woods with three women. We're strong together and just the way that we get to work through situations and challenges and conversations and yeah, have have hard talks in the woods. I feel like it's really unique, and I'm super grateful for that. Speaker 5 40:22 I have two amazing girlfriends who I get to go on adventures with in, usually the back country, which is amazing and and they're reliable, like we always make a trip happen. And I don't know, I think all of us are super badass, and we plan really fun, adventurous trips, but we're also, like, really flexible, and we go with the flow, like weather events, climate change, you know, wildfires, we've learned to make Plan A, B, C to z through these experiences. And yeah, I'm really thankful that we've, like Katie said earlier, we've grown up together. And I can't I just can't believe that it's been 10 years now, Speaker 6 41:21 my tradition makes me grateful for the opportunity to share what means so much to me in our public lands with with friends, and to constantly be making new friends who can enjoy that experience as well Speaker 7 41:36 being able to just share the space With the individuals that are part of my life, to be able to reflect and realize, you know, how fortunate I am to have, you know the amazing human beings that are part of my journey. And also, you know the ones that are no longer physically present with me anymore, but also reminding myself that at one point they were there, and that they're there, you know, essentially in spirit now, and that we're carrying forward, you know, the tradition and passing it along to the next generation as well, and trying to instill that. So it's also an opportunity to have gratitude towards, you know, teaching others that we get to be grateful and that we get to experience these traditions. Speaker 2 42:27 The wild idea is a production of wild idea media and hosted by Bill Hodge and Anders Reynolds, production and editing by Bren Russell at podlad Digital, support by Holly wilkeshevsky at daypack digital, our theme music Spring Hill Jack is from railroad Earth and was composed by John skihan. Our executive producer and ring leader is Laura Hodge. You can find the wild idea wherever you listen to or download your favorite podcast. If you have a minute, please take a minute to give us a rating, and if you really like us, we hope you'll subscribe. Learn more about us at the wild idea.com. Transcribed by https://otter.ai