I’m thrilled to have Ray Zahab back on Explore. Many of you know Ray as an extreme adventurer, Royal Canadian Geographical Society Explorer-in-Residence and friend of this podcast.Ray joins me to talk about his gruelling solo run across one of the hottest places on earth, Death Valley, California during a record breaking heatwave this summer. The last time we talked, in spring 2023, he was heading off to Death Valley. He had just completed chemotherapy for a rare form of blood cancer, during...

More than military conquest: Manitoba's historic Dawson Trail with Pierrette Sherwood and Mimi Lamontagne We do love history here on the Explore podcast, and one of the reasons is that the more you poke around, the more you dig, and the wider you cast your research net, the richer the story that gets revealed. Our guests today are the perfect example of that. Pierrette Sherwood is the founder, artistic and creative director of Manitoba’s Dawson Trail Commemorative Project...

There are few greater champions of our trees and forests than Diana Beresford-Kroeger.From her base in her forest reserve in Eastern Ontario, the Irish-born Beresford-Kroeger has led a decades-long campaign to save our planet’s forests and trees, while working in the fields of medical biochemistry, botany and medicine. She is a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, winner of the RCGS Louie Kamoookak medal and the author of multiple award-winning books including To Speak for the...

It is definitely hurricane season, so what better time than now to sit down for a conversation with one of the world's leading storm chasers, Jaclyn Whittal.You probably know Whittal as the long-time co-host of Storm Chasers, where you’ll regularly find her reporting from Oklahoma's Tornado Alley, at the leading edge of some of the biggest hurricanes on record, or facing down fires in the interior of B.C. As a Fellow of the RCGS, Whittal also spends time working in the Arctic and running...

We're thrilled to welcome Julian Brave Noisecat to Explore to talk about his award winning documentary Sugarcane, the powerful and very personal story of the multi-generational trauma caused to his family and members of the Williams Lake First Nations by the physical and sexual abuse endured for almost a century at St. Joseph's Mission Residential School in British Columbia. The documentary won the Director's Award at the Sundance Film Festival and is showing in cinemas across North America...

“This might be why people go down rivers!”We're back in the Arctic for the last of our 2024 Summer Canoe Series. This time, it's with Dave Greene, who, along with paddling partner Chris Giard, led an RCGS-flagged Akilineq Canoe Expedition from Yellowknife, N.W.T., to Baker Lake, NU, in 2023. During this time, they covered 1400 kilometres, including Canada's newest national park, Thaidene Nëné. A good chunk of their trip also involved paddling upstream (see episode title). Greene has some...

Musician Sam Polley’s first canoe trip was with his dad, Blue Rodeo’s Jim Cuddy, his mom and siblings. He doesn’t remember much about it, but he clearly got hooked. All these years later, he’s still an avid canoe tripper with a love of the lakes and rivers in northern Ontario. Sam is best known for his rockabilly band Sam Polley and The Old Tomorrows (https://www.theoldtomorrows.com/) and playing with The Jim Cuddy Band, fronted by his father. When Sam isn’t touring or in the studio or...

"In my mind, when I want to relax, I take myself back to the Wind River."Tetlit Gwich'in means people of the headwaters, and Bobbi Rose Koe is on a mission to live up to her people's name. Born and raised in the Tetlit Gwich'in community of Fort McPherson, on the Peel River north of the Arctic Circle in the Northwest Territories, Koe was lucky to spend her childhood with her grandparents, who regularly took her hunting and fishing out on the land. When she reached her mid-20s, she translated...

Canadian Geographic’s Explore Podcast Canoe series is back for its third year, and we’re thrilled to start with Canadian canoeing legend Mike Ranta.Ranta was not only the first person to canoe solo across Canada in a single paddling season but he's also done it twice! His adventure began with his dog Spitzi and a portage over the Rocky Mountains. In this fun and engaging episode, Ranta takes us on a journey from his earliest paddling experiences as a child in and around Ontario’s Quetico...

"Shackleton died on that ship. And he's the only one who died on that ship. Of all his expeditions under his direct command, nobody else died except him, on his own ship. And that's the ship that we found. And it tells that story about his leadership."- David Mearns, world-renowned shipwreck hunter and search director for the RCGS Shackleton-Quest Expedition.Welcome to the second part of our series on the RCGS Shackleton-Quest Expedition. Today, we're delving into the intriguing details of...

"That's it!" exclaimed John Geiger as he caught the first glimpse of Quest, the last ship of legendary polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton. Now resting 390 metres below the surface off the coast of Labrador, Quest was Shackleton’s last ship and the vessel he died on. Geiger, CEO of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, is our guest on this episode of Explore, in which he tells the riveting story of the epic hunt for Quest and Shackleton's legacy. On June 9, in the rolling seas off...

"They can't fight if they don't eat."That was the motto of the Farmerettes, the thousands of young women who took the place of male farmers and farmhands who had gone off to fight in the Second World War. While much has been written about the crucial role women played in factories during the war: building tanks, planes, munitions, and weapons of all kinds, etc., the story of Canadian farms, the breadbaskets of the war effort, remains largely untold. In this episode of Explore, we’ll rectify...

Notorious for their seafaring ways and conquering territories far and wide, the Vikings burst onto the world scene around 800 AD. For hundreds of years, they raided, conquered, settled, and farmed in lands across Europe, Russia, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and across the North Atlantic to Iceland, Greenland, and then to what they called “Vinland,” our present-day Newfoundland. They did all this in longboats, effectively 60-foot open row boats with sails and virtually no navigation...

"You can’t look at a canoe or kayak without grounding yourself in the knowledge that this is a water-craft of Indigenous origin. For us, it’s about honouring the stories, honouring the communities."As The Canadian Canoe Museum (https://canoemuseum.ca/)moves into its stunning new home on the Otonabee River in Peterborough, Ont. on May 11, Carolyn Hyslop and Jeremy Ward, the museum's executive director and curator, drop by Explore to talk canoes.For Hyslop and Ward, every canoe and kayak is...

"Canada's claim to the Arctic derives from the Franklin expedition and the search that evolved out of it."We’ve touched on the Franklin expedition in several other Explore podcast episodes, so we're excited to be taking the first proper deep dive into the story now with Ken McGoogan, an author who has been passionately writing about this topic for decades. We also discuss Ken’s latest book, Searching for Franklin: New Answers to the Great Arctic Mystery, which examines Franklin’s legacy from...

"Polar Exploration is not for the faint of heart."We're absolutely thrilled to welcome RCGS Fellow Susan R. Eaton to this episode of Explore. Eaton is a well-known polar explorer, geoscientist, educator, and the founder and leader of Sea Women Expeditions (https://www.instagram.com/seawomenexpeditions/?hl=en). In 2015, she was named one of Canada’s greatest 100 modern-day explorers by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and a year later, she was selected by Canadian Geographic as one of...

"I took one step further and we were looking into the eyes of four lionesses and two cubs. The fourth lioness with the cubs exited down the ravine like a shot. The other three lionesses jumped up at us. We ran backwards, yelling at the top of our lungs. The lions came up after us. Their teeth were pulled back in a grimace. The noise was beyond belief."I'm thrilled to have one of Canada's leading naturalists, Brian Keating, join us today. As you can tell from that quote, Brian has had some...

I am thrilled to have Laval St. Germain as our guest for this episode of Explore. An avid adventurer, Laval has rowed solo across the North Atlantic Ocean and is the only Canadian to have summited Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen. He has also climbed the tallest peaks on all seven continents, including Antarctica and many more of the world's most remote and challenging mountains — not to mention that he is also a commercial pilot, flying in the Canadian Arctic and was one of our RCGS...

Over the past two years, Canadian Geographic has been running “Passing the Mic,” a podcast training program in remote Nunavut communities. This week, we are pleased to showcase the third episode of this year’s series, which features stories produced by the students at the Netsilik School in Taloyoak, Nunavut. The aim of this program is to give Inuit youth the tools to share their stories with the world in their own voices, using their words. I think you’ll agree that these stories provide a...

In this episode, we're back in Taloyoak, Nunavut, mainland Canada’s most northerly community, to talk with Joyce Ashevak, Martha Neeveacheak and Roger Oleekatalik. They are three of the students who took part in Canadian Geographic’s Passing the Mic program, which aims to give Inuit youth the tools to share their own stories with the world.Joyce and Martha are both throat singers, a unique and incredibly powerful Inuit vocal art form. And Roger is one of the leading young hunters in this...

We are thrilled to be taking you back to Taloyoak, Nunavut, the northernmost community in mainland Canada. In this exciting episode, we sit down with Lenny Panigayak, Taloyoak’s mayor and viral TikTok star (@aqigiaq (https://www.tiktok.com/@aqigiaq?lang=en)), who shares moments from his life and Inuit culture with his tens of thousands of followers. The Explore Podcast team met Mayor Lenny when we went to Taloyoak to spend a week teaching podcasting to the amazing students at the Netsilik...

The pack-ice 'round us cracks and groans;The old St. Roch, she creaks and moans. - Stan Rogers In 1940, the wooden-hulled St. Roch became the second ship to successfully sail the Northwest Passage and the first to do it from west to east, captained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's Henry Larsen. Our guest on this episode, Ken Burton, recreated that voyage 60 years later on another RCMP ship, the St. Roch II. A new RCGS Fellow, veteran sailor and polar explorer, Burton shares the...

For this holiday episode of Explore, we’re dipping into our Royal Canadian Geographical Society files for the reading of a story written by RCGS founding President and Arctic explorer Charles Camsell, recalling a memorable Christmas he had on the trail to the Klondike in the late 19th century.In the early 1900s, travelling by canoe and horseback, Charles Camsell mapped hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of Canada’s north for the Geological Survey of Canada. Born at Fort Liard in the...

“The question would be, “Why not?” We love a good journey here on Explore, and Dianne Whelan went on a doozy of one with lots of great stories to share.Whelan became the first person to travel the entire Trans Canada Trail across Canada, the longest hiking trail in the world stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arctic Ocean to the Pacific. She travelled by bike, foot and canoe through all seasons. Throughout her journey, she focused on reconciliation, honouring First Nations, Inuit, and...