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The Backcountry Manifesto: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Outdoor Visions Media
Welcome to The Backcountry Manifesto Podcast, the adventure podcast for everyone. Join your buddy out west, Hayden Sammak, as he talks to friends old and new about wild places, exploration, and backcountry adventure. From talking space exploration with astronaut Loral O’Hara, to bullshitting about rock climbing with Rick Accomazzo and John Long, TBM has something for everyone, no matter what you’re into. If it has anything to do with outdoor adventure in wild places, you’ll find us talking about it here. Welcome to the backcountry – welcome to The Backcountry Manifesto!
Latest Episodes
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- 6 days ago1h 49m
The Story of Canada's Most Notorious Wildfire | John Vaillant, Author of Fire Weather | Ep. 037
With the Canadian fires spreading wildfire smoke across the country, Pulitzer Prize finalist John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather, swings by the studio to tell the story of the Fort McMurray fire -- a catastrophe many consider to be the most notorious wildfire in Canadian history. LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE Fire Weather: https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Weather-Front-Lines-Burning/dp/0525434240 The Tiger: https://www.amazon.com/Tiger-Vengeance-Survival-Vintage-Departures/dp/0307389049 John's X: https://x.com/JohnVaillant John's Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/johnvaillant.bsky.social Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025 #podcast #wildfire #forestfire #climatechange #firestorm
- 1 weeks ago2h 19m
Real Treasure Hunting: Pirates, Hurricanes & Spanish Gold | Captain Mike Perna | Ep. 036
Captain Mike Perna has spent 25 years doing something most people think only happens in movies: diving for sunken Spanish treasure. Off Florida's Treasure Coast lie the scattered remains of the 1715 Plate Fleet — eleven galleons loaded with New World gold and silver that a hurricane drove onto the reefs in a single night, killing over a thousand people and strewing their cargo across miles of ocean floor. This past summer, Mike's crew pulled 1,051 silver coins off the seabed and made national news. He flew from Florida to Montana to tell us how it actually works: the "breadcrumb trails" of coins scattered a mile from the wreck, the magnetometers and metal detectors, the short summer dive season, and the "you never really own the treasure, you just hold onto it for a while" philosophy that comes with a quarter-century of doing it. He brought real pieces of eight to pass across the table, walked us through the legendary Mel Fisher and the $400 million Atocha, and got into the thorny ethics of who really gets to keep history. Whether you're here for shipwrecks, colonial history, or just a great real-life treasure story, this one's got gold, pirates, hurricanes, and a lead box packed with 16,000 pearls. 1715 Fleet Society: https://1715fleetsociety.com
- 2 weeks ago2h 44m
His Mother Vanished. 20 Years Later He Found Her in the Amazon. | David Good | Ep. 035
David Good grew up with one foot in suburban Pennsylvania and the other in the Amazon rainforest. His father, anthropologist Ken Good, spent 12 years living with the Yanomami — one of the last relatively isolated peoples on Earth — and married David's mother, Yarima, the daughter of a headman. Then, when David was six, Yarima walked back into the jungle and didn't come out. He wouldn't see her again for 20 years. This is the story of what happened next: two decades of trying to bury his own identity, and then a bug-fearing 24-year-old's decision to travel days up the Orinoco River to find the mother he thought had abandoned him. What he found reframed his entire life — a family, a new name, a brother he would later grieve in a Yanomami funeral, and a scientific calling studying the Yanomami gut microbiome, which may hold clues to the diseases of the modern world. David is a microbiome researcher at the University of Guelph, the founder of the Yanomami Foundation, and the subject of the new documentary WAYUMI. This is one of the most singular life stories we've ever had on the show. Venezuelan Earthquake Relief Fund: https://welove.foundation WAYUMI Official Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3aWDwQNTqk Yanomami Foundation: https://www.yanomamifoundation.org/ David's book, The Way Around: https://www.amazon.com/Way-Around-Finding-Mother-Yanomami/dp/0062382128 David's book, GOOD: https://nbmpub.com/products/good David's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidalexandergood
- 3 weeks ago2h 21m
Amelia Earhart Wasn't Who You Think She Was | Laurie Gwen Shapiro, Author of The Aviator and the Showman | Ep. 034
Everyone thinks they know the Amelia Earhart story.. until you actually check the archive. Laurie Gwen Shapiro is a journalist for the New York Times and The Atlantic, and she just spent five years going where no Earhart biographer had gone before. What she found isn't the flawless children's-book icon. Earhart was a woman who became famous in 1928 mostly for sitting in the back of a plane. She was cast for her look, not her flying, by a publicist named George Putnam who would later marry her. It's a marriage built on ghostwritten books, sabotaged rivals, and a courtship Shapiro calls "love bombing." It's the real, unglamorous math behind the 1937 disappearance: a stretched budget, a dropped antenna, an alcoholic navigator hired because he was cheap, and a woman who was sick, exhausted, and out of fuel. Shapiro's new book is The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon — a New Yorker Best Book of 2025. We sat down with her in our Bozeman studio to talk about the archive, the marriage, and why the real Amelia Earhart is more interesting than the myth. Laurie Gwen Shapiro Website Amelia Earhart Project Recordings
- Jun 25, 20262h 5m
Are Survival Shows Real? | Cody Lundin, Dual Survival's Original Host | Ep. 033
Cody Lundin has spent 34 years keeping people alive. Almost none of it looks like what you've seen on TV. He's the founder of Arizona's Aboriginal Living Skills School, an EMT since 1993, the author of 98.6 Degrees: The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive and When All Hell Breaks Loose, and one of the two original hosts of Discovery's Dual Survival. He built (and nearly broke) his career by refusing to fake it for the camera. We flew Cody up to Bozeman, took him duck hunting at the crack of dawn (his very first time), and then sat down for one of the most no-BS survival conversations we've ever recorded. Hayden throws him a series of escalating worst-case scenarios: a desert breakdown, a broken leg in the Colorado high country, a hiker lost at an alpine lake. Cody refuses every easy answer, demanding context and walking through what staying alive actually requires (hint: it's rarely the sexy stuff). Along the way: the physics of freezing to death, why your survival shelter should be invisible, the truth about what survival television did to his profession, and the on-camera stand that cost him his show. Producer Andrew even gets pulled in to defend his off-grid cabin. LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE The Survival Show Keep Your Ass Alive Podcast Cody's Book 98.6 Degrees: The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive (2003) Cody's Book When All Hell Breaks Loose (2007) Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025
- Jun 18, 20261h 56m
The Worst Possible Way to Cross the Atlantic | Steven Callahan, Adrift | Ep. 032
Steven Callahan should have died at sea. In early 1982, roughly a week out of the Canary Islands, something — he's convinced it was a whale — holed his self-built 21-foot sloop Napoleon Solo in the middle of the night. What followed became one of the most famous survival stories ever told: 76 days adrift in a five-and-a-half-foot inflatable raft, alone, crossing nearly the entire Atlantic before a handful of fishermen found him off Marie Galante. In this conversation, Steven walks us through all of it — diving into the flooded, pitch-black cabin to grab his ditch kit, coaxing a single pint of fresh water a day out of a temperamental solar still, spearfishing the dorado that became both his food and his "spiritual companions," and the Day-43 disaster when his spear gun punctured the raft a thousand miles from land. But this is less a blow-by-blow than a master class in the psychology of survival from a philosophy major who treats reality as something to be accepted exactly as it is. We get into the divided self, the brutal "recoil" of giving up, why denial is the number one enemy, and how an ocean nearly killed him and gave him a life.
- Jun 11, 20262h 1m
Mutiny, Cannibalism & How America Really Began | Peter Mancall, Historian | Ep. 031
Your social studies teacher gave you Henry Hudson in about two sentences: a guy, a river, New York. Dr. Peter Mancall — USC historian and author of Fatal Journey and the new continental history Contested Continent — is here to give you the other 99%. We start with Hudson's doomed final voyage: iced into the bottom of Hudson Bay for a brutal winter, a starving crew, a mutiny, and a captain set adrift in a rowboat never to be seen again. Then we zoom all the way out. This is a two-hour tour through the early America that gets left on the cutting-room floor — the fur trade and the "perfect trade good" of alcohol, John Adams' filthiest joke, the cannibalized girl of Jamestown, Columbus's fall from hero to villain, Cahokia's lost pyramid city, the Vikings who quit North America, and the 1680 Pueblo Revolt that scrubbed an empire off the map. It's bloody, it's funny, and it'll permanently change how you hear the word "Thanksgiving." If you love history that refuses to flatten people into heroes or villains, this one's for you. CREDITS Hosting by Hayden Sammak Production by Andrew O'Neill “Welcome to the Backcountry” theme song by Logan Roth, Will Brown, Arjun Dube and produced at Treacle Mine Studios, Phila, PA Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025
- Jun 4, 20261h 48m
Free Soloing is Actually Really Easy | Lincoln Knowles ft. Cedar Wright & John Long | Ep. 029
Lincoln Knowles is 21 years old, lives out of his Jeep, and has the climbing internet at war with itself. To half the community he's a reckless idiot free soloing a harder route every day until he falls; to the other half he's the funniest, most self-aware thing to happen to the sport in years. The truth — as Hayden finds out — is that the kid is a genuinely elite climber (a sub-10-hour Nose-in-a-Day, on-sight free solos in Yosemite, V11 on the board) who's running the most committed satire in outdoor media. This one goes everywhere: Lincoln's Yosemite "tear" and a storm-soaked bail off the Nose, a surprise call to climbing legend John Long, the Alex Honnold text and the Climbing magazine hit piece, and an extended phone-in from Cedar Wright, who makes the full punk-rock case for why this stuff matters. It's funny, it's genuinely unsettling when the talk turns to mortality, and it's impossible to look away from. Whether you think he's the future of the sport or a tragedy waiting to happen, you'll understand exactly why everyone's arguing about him. In this episode, we talk about: The Yosemite Tear: El Cap & the Nose-in-a-Day Phoning John Long About the Nose Record Bailing Off the Nose in a Snowstorm Viral Clips & the Parody of Climbing Ego How Free Soloing Began College Dropout to Content Hustle Courting the Haters Risk, Death, and Mindset Family Silence & Attempted Interventions Honnold's Text & the Climbing Magazine Drama Climbing Idols: Honnold, Croft & Dean Potter Teaming Up with Cedar Wright Lifetime Bucket List: Free Rider to Everest Free Solo vs. Trad: The Pinnacle Debate LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE https://www.instagram.com/lincolnclimbs/ https://www.youtube.com/@UCynU0ZTas1hr6HMg-XAnTBA Our episode with Jamie Leibert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FHdEmyKRQw Our episode with John Long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kDnVzaNE7g Climbing Magazine Article: https://www.climbing.com/culture-climbing/lincoln-knowles-going-viral-free-soloing/ Jayme Moye: https://jaymemoye.com/published/ Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025 #podcast #rockclimbing #freesolo #climbing
About The Backcountry Manifesto
Welcome to The Backcountry Manifesto Podcast, the adventure podcast for everyone. Join your buddy out west, Hayden Sammak, as he talks to friends old and new about wild places, exploration, and backcountry adventure. From talking space exploration with astronaut Loral O’Hara, to bullshitting about rock climbing with Rick Accomazzo and John Long, TBM has something for everyone, no matter what you’re into. If it has anything to do with outdoor adventure in wild places, you’ll find us talking about it here. Welcome to the backcountry – welcome to The Backcountry Manifesto!
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