Outdoor Adventure and the Art of Self Reliance, with Nick Offerman
Ruggedness, dependability, and handiness define a lot of outdoor archetypes, from the ski patroller to the river guide to the park ranger. So why would you find all three in a famous actor? Maybe because the actor in question—Nick Offerman—is an avid outdoorsman in his own right. Surely you know Nick from one of his many memorable roles, like Ron Swanson on Parks And Recreation and General Sidney in the latest Mission Impossible. And, when he’s not acting or performing on comedy tours, you can find Nick paddling the Los Angeles River or scrambling up peaks in the nearest National Park. Relying on himself in a pinch informs everything Nick does, from acting to woodworking. And his new book, Little Woodchucks: Offerman Woodshop’s Guide to Tools and Tomfoolery, is Nick’s gospel of do-it-yourselfedness, a starting point to building a tough and resourceful identity. Because eventually, we’re all gonna have to fix a flat tire or build a little shelter in the woods.
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What the Ocean Teaches You About Perseverance, with Chad Nelsen
Many outdoorsy folks will happily slog for hours toward outdoor fun, despite the fact that any number of adventure derailing smackdowns await us. Gear malfunctions, crummy weather, and bloodied limbs don’t stop us from heading into the unknown. No one puts this optimistic persistence to better use than lifelong surfer and CEO of the Surfrider Foundation, Chad Nelsen. Chad grew up in smog-choked Laguna Beach in the 1970s, when pipes spilled raw sewage into the ocean regularly. He was inspired to pursue environmental science and a PhD combining his love of surfing with sustainability, thus dedicating his life to protecting and preserving the world’s oceans, waves, and beaches. Despite bureaucracy, apathy, and disengagement, Chad pursues environmentalism like a surfer paddling into pounding beach break, confident that the wave of his life is just outside the shore pound.
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The Unexpected Benefits of Chopping Wood, with Nicole Coenen
Wood chopping is objectively awful for all the obvious reasons: blisters, back aches, over-the-counter painkiller expenses. But that’s not what you remember months later, when the fruits of your labor warm you and your loved ones on a cold winter night. See, wood chopping is really an investment—both in terms of that crackling fire, but also your emotional well being. That is something Nicole Coenen knows all about. The internet’s self proclaimed “lesbian lumberjill” grew up an uncomfortable tomboy in the suburbs of Ontario, and she found both her refuge and her calling in the woods. She’s amassed a huge following from the forest that surrounds her adopted home of British Columbia, and her videos are more than just wholesome, self-effacing clips of her wood chopping skills. They’ve a living journal of a woman who was saved by trees.
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What You Learn Running Toward, Rather Than Away, From a Tornado, With Pecos Hank
Spend time outdoors, and you’ll eventually spend time in brutal, even scary weather. Dangerous winds, flash flood-inducing rain, and vision-erasing whiteouts are sometimes the cost of entry. By the same token, you’re as likely to remember the upsides to those experience—the belly laughter of relief, the rainbows after the rain, the waist deep powder—as the scary parts. Hank Schyma, aka Pecos Hank, built a career out of those upsides by becoming one of the internet’s most beloved storm chasers. For decades, he’s captured astonishing photos and video of tornadoes, gathering new data on how they work and discovering new phenomena. On his wildly popular Youtube channel, his new photo memoir Storm, and in this conversation, we get to see and hear it all—from a significantly safer distance.
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Running as Art, With Olympian and Filmmaker Alexi Pappas
Extreme adaptability and versatility can be found throughout the animal kingdom, but may have found their peak expression in Alexi Pappas. As a runner, Pappas was a two-time All-American for Dartmouth who set a national record running for Greece at the 2016 Olympics. As a performer, she was a member of Dartmouth’s gut-busting Dog Day improv group before going on to write, direct, and star in several feature films, including Tracktown, Olympic Dreams, and Not An Artist. The further into her career Pappas gets, the more running influences her art, and her art influences her running—all of which she talks about in a way that makes you understand how she’s risen so high in two fundamentally different worlds.
Outside’s longstanding literary storytelling tradition comes to life in audio with features that will both entertain and inform listeners. We launched in March 2016 with our first series, Science of Survival, and have since expanded our show and now offer a range of story formats, including reports from our correspondents in the field and interviews with the biggest figures in sports, adventure, and the outdoors.
México