Nov 5, 2021
Hey everyone, welcome to the Hot Drinks podcast. I am your host Shawn Stratton. Each week I sit down with an outdoor educator to hear some of their best stories leading students on wilderness expeditions around the world.
Dave was born in Simsbury, CT, and grew up in Maine. He graduated from the University of Maine BS in Wildlife Biology and started working in outdoor education in 1979. He hasn’t stopped working in the field since. Dave currently lives in Las Vegas, NV.
Along with working for NOLS, Dave have at taught at many colleges and outdoor centers including the Roaring Brook Nature Center, University of Maine, Whitman College and Westminster College. He has also worked for Acadia Mountain Guides, Green Mountain Guides, Alaska Wildland Adventures, and his own company “LittlePo Adventures” which he started with his wife in the last few years.
These days his focus is on teaching natural history, photography, while continuing to write for several different publications.
Accompicshed photoraper.
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I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Shari
Please subscribe to Hot Drinks wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to follow the show on twitter or Instagram we are @morehotdrinks. we also have a Facebook group called Hot Drinks Podcast, where I am most active with updates about discussions about the pod. To get in touch by email, the address is hotdrinks@livemoregroup.com.
This episode was produced and edited by Dustin Mijares (MEHARES)and our theme music created by Darin Welch.
In this episode:
(2:20) Dave starts the podcast by sharing a story from a mountaineering Alaska course in the summer of 2001. He begins by telling us how the course's main focus was to travel over the McLaren glacier, and things got more accessible when they found the river was frozen. But later on, after some lousy weather hit them, they ran out of food when their plane, which was carrying their resupply, couldn't land. Then, it took a drastic turn when things started going sideways.
(26:50) Later on, Anderson tells us about his trip to China. He talks about how he found out about some amazing peaks to climb while reading an American Alpine Journal and took a leap of faith into trying them out, which was located in Sichuan, China. He tells how the drivers who took him and his wife and other clients nudge them for more money in the middle of nowhere. After dealing with that, he was greeted by hundreds of monks, that took them in and greeted them warmly. The whole experience still warms his heart, even now.
(34:40) Dave shares his trip to India, where he ran into many travellers discovering places where not many have gone to. It turns out the track to reach those places usually closes in winters, so the locals wait till the river freeze to cross it, which takes them several days to reach their destination. The story gets more interesting when Dave reaches Zenskar in northern India.