Jul 15, 2021
Today, I speak with NOLS
Instructor Mark Hamlin, from small-town Indiana and living in
Lander, WY, full time for the past decade. He completed a NOLS
student course in 1987, mountaineering in the North Cascades of
Washington state and led his first backcountry trip at the age of
18 in 1988.
Mark took his NOLS Mountain Instructor Course in 1990 and led his
first course in the Absorkas mountain range of Wyoming in 1991.
Over the years, he has worked predominantly whitewater canoeing,
backpacking, and sea kayaking course compiling over 250 weeks in
the field.
Mark's most recent NOLS course was a San Juan river canoeing Alumni
trip in May 2021. Currently, he is a stay-at-home Dad and part-time
tortillero/owner at Tortillas del Chico Blanco, Lander's first and
only home-based tortilleria.
In this Episode:
- [1:53] At the start of the episode, Mark talks about his Love-struck-story and shares that it was his semester course in Baha in 1995 where Erica was falling out of love for what she thought NOLS was about. Soon they managed to land at a beach where they met this Canadian blonde man who instantly became the love of Erica. The course was woken up at night to a note with a poem and a written paragraph by Erica telling that she is leaving the course and running away with the Canadian guy. The story gets interesting when Mark shares how the team searched for 5 hours for Erica and, in the end, found her in a sea cave. But that's not in it; she ran many more times.
- [22:30] Mark shares a hilarious story about the first time he was called "a bald man." This course was the most aggressive one he had as it consisted of Mark and Jesse, who were both verbally and physically abusive to the students and had swords and blades in their luggage disguised as sugar canes. The story takes a scary turn but being called bald was a first.
- [39:20] Talking about having behaviorally challenged people on the course, Mark emphasizes a story where the heavy rain and creepy weather wore down people. A moment came by where a student faced chronic tendonitis flare-up in the elbow and needed to be evacuated. Still, as soon the others saw that the elbow student could be taken off the course, everyone demanded to quit NOLS and leave the whole event in the middle. Mark wasn't thrilled with this, but things later unfolded for what they really were.