455 Moose Mutlow ~ Adventures in Wild Spaces

Transcript

Holly:  Hello adventurers and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 455. This is your host Holly Worton, and I am back with another exciting guest.

Today, I am talking with Moose Mutlow. He is kind of the opposite of me in that he is a Brit who lives in California. And we had a little chat about different countries and weather and things at he beginning. It is nice to talk to someone who has come from the country I live in and is living in my country of origin, it is interesting.

Anyway, Moose is an experienced outdoorsman with a background in search and rescue.

This episode explores why we’re so drawn to visit wild spaces and what these places give to us. We also discuss tips on how to survive and thrive in the wilderness, especially when we’re new to getting out in wild places. Or we are adventuring into wilder placer than what we are used to.

Who is Moose Mutlow? Moose has been active in the outdoors round the world for more than 30 years as an instructor and guide. Currently based in Yosemite National Park he is the senior project director for NatureBridge the largest provider of Environmental Education in the US National Park system. He has a long history of working in Search and Rescue and is a senior trainer for NPS. His best day is when he gets to sit in a boat.

What Are You Going to Learn? We discuss: what are wild spaces and why we seek them out. How we can survive and thrive when we go into wild spaces How to get started exploring wild spaces when you’re new. The fundamental skills you need to know and common mistakes people make in the outdoors

I really hope you enjoy this episode, I am embarking on the coast-to-coast next month and this is very much on my mind. I know that the coast-to-coast isn’t exactly wilderness but it is a bigger adventure than what I’m used to, so I am looking at up-levelling my outdoor skills and thinking about new adventures and big adventures, so I hope you find this interesting and useful. Here you go.

 

HOLLY: Hello Moose, how are you doing today?

MOOSE: Good thank you, it is a pretty nice day out in California, it is the start of a nice blue sky but every morning in California is nice.

HOLLY: Lovely. It is a grey afternoon here in England.

MOOSE: But you get it, because you are originally from California, the idea that when you get rain it is very exciting and if there is a drought here every single inch counts.

HOLLY: It does. I love the fact that you are living in my country of origin and I am living in your country of origin. It is interesting what you say about being so grateful for the rain, because that’s how I feel about sunshine. You know I grew up in California and I just took the sun for granted because it was always there whereas now that I am living in a country that has kind of got a lot of grey days, when the sun comes out it is like woah, the sun is out it is amazing and I appreciate it so much more than I ever did.

MOOSE: Yeah and I think the other thing about the sun, the sun in California you get spoilt because when it rains people choose to not turn up for outdoor things, so if you have a soccer game and nobody is going to turn out when it is raining because it is going to be sunny tomorrow. Whereas in Britain you just soldier on for want of a better word, if it is raining it doesn’t really make much of a difference. I do miss that sturdiness.

HOLLY: Yes, yes, I do like it here. Why do you start off by telling us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

MOOSE: I have spent 30 plus years travelling and working in the outdoors as a guide, as an educational director, I have run schools in the Kalahari and a ski academy in Tahoe and right now I work in environmental education, building a new state-of-the-art 224 bed campus in Yosemite National Park. And because I work in National Parks you get to do other things as well, so I’m also an active search and rescue member and work in training around search and rescue.

HOLLY: Lovely! And so how did you end up in California?

MOOSE: I am working for the largest provider of environmental education in national parks in the United States and I had worked in a campus up on the Olympic Peninsular, which is up in Washington State on the North West corner of the lower 48 US and got transferred there to run a campus in Yosemite.

HOLLY: Lovely, I haven’t been to Yosemite in decades, it is such a gorgeous place.

MOOSE: It’s the same.

HOLLY: I hope so!

MOOSE: Although there are less people, they have come up with some really good ideas about trying to control the flow of people into the valley and it has become a much richer experience because you aren’t sitting in your car for 2-3 hours.

HOLLY: Nice! So we are here today to talk about wild spaces, how do you define wild spaces?

MOOSE: I think a wild space for me is anywhere that I feel free.

HOLLY: And what does that look like? How do you notice that you are in a wild space? What is that freedom feeling like?

MOOSE: The idea that you are exposed to natural forces is a real key one for me, so you feel in the wind or the sun, the depth of shadow and the iciness that comes with that. Or you see animals, you see buffalos, or bear trackers or you something that makes your hair go up on the back of your neck, that becomes a wild space.

HOLLY: And why do you think you have felt called to visit wild spaces or spend time in them?

MOOSE: Because it was hard to track those spaces well when I was growing up. Where I grew up right next to a place called Sutton Park, which I think is one of the largest municipal parks in the UK and it is seven miles around and it has woodland and it is crossed by roads and it has lakes with dams. And it was a wild space as a kid growing up but it still had people in it. And once I started travelling and sensing landscape that you could look out on and there were less signs of towns, or less signs of people, that really appealed to me and I wanted to get deeper into that isolation.

HOLLY: Do you remember what was the first wild space you went to?

MOOSE: The ocean. I think it was Bill Bryson the writer who said that the only way Brits get to escape is by standing at the seaside and looking out. The idea that at that point you have this unencumbered view. And as a kid our family would holiday out on the Welsh coast. I loved coming over the dunes and then out onto that beach and seeing what was the Irish sea but to me was this enormous space and the percussion of the waves and action of the estuary and all of those pieces were really exciting and that stirred the wild in me. And then North West of Scotland being out in the lochs and the sea kayaks, the wildness is the uncontrolled beast, you are smaller in that landscape.

HOLLY: And the views are so expensive.

MOOSE: Once you leave on a little boat. When I was at college I ended up on a, I knew somebody in the navy and they had a boat and I ended up crewing on their boat in the South West of England coming out into the English Channel and once you get a few miles out you stop seeing any land, you don’t see that break on the horizon and you are isolated in that little world of the boat, there is something marvellous in that moment.

HOLLY: I love that and it has been ages since I have experienced that as well, I haven’t spent much time on the water or in the water since I moved here actually, that might need to change.

MOOSE: I did a trip in 2000 which was over 500km up in the arctic circle where you can fly in on an aeroplane, you touch down on an upland lake and the plane leaves and there is silence, except for you and your expedition mates and you spend weeks coming out at that location, you are just out in these mountains, out in this forest, it is again you are in this little boat, you are on the water and you are moving but you are in this small world, you are traversing this small world and that is fantastically focussing and liberating at the same time.

HOLLY: I remember watching a few months ago, these YouTube videos that were on these old DVDs from this guy, I think his name was Bob xx, an American who back in the 60s who built a log cabin house by himself up in Alaska and these videos of him going about his daily life, fishing and growing potatoes and I just love the wildness of it because he was in the middle of nowhere. There was a hydroplane that would come in and bring him supplies every few minutes but aside from that it was just him on his own doing his thing and I loved it.

MOOSE: I think it is an extraordinary person who can deal with that level of isolation and be healthy. At that point the landscape can consume you because you almost stop being human, the societal pieces and the communications pieces start to fall away and you commune with nature but you are missing a vital piece of being human at that moment. Humans are designed to be social creatures. And in my experience having somebody else with you in that moment enriches the experience, a shared experience is a deeper experience.

HOLLY: Yeah, I don’t think I would like to do what he did but I would love to have a place like that where I could go for a month at a time or something and just be alone in the wild. So when you go out in the wild, and you are in all these wild spaces, what do you do? What type of activities do you engage in?

MOOSE: I am a really big canoeist, I love canoeing and I like canoe expeditions, because you can have fresh tomatoes in the second week, because you have a cooler. I like traversing and using water, because there is a bit more sitting around and spinning and looking. I guided for more than 10 years with Outward Bound, running expeditions for younger people and it destroyed my body, the backpacking. It was pre the super lightweight backpacking, we carried ridiculously heavy loads for long periods of time and it burnt any enthusiasm I had for that as a pass-time. So it is always about boats for me, or it has to have a purpose like fishing or mountain biking, long haul mountain biking is another thing I really enjoy and in the States there is a lot of opportunity to do wilderness-based trips, you can do long ridged traverses that get you 100s and 100s of kilometres away from where you started.

HOLLY: I think that is one thing about not just North America but the entire continent in the Americas, you have got so much open space in large quantities. I don’t know huge expanses of open space as compared as you said to the NW of Scotland.

MOOSE: And you have got access, comparing land ownership in Europe, particularly in Britain, where you have got large amounts of land is held by private interests and you may have traverse rights to go on an old trail but you can’t really utilise that space. So much in the US is federally owned and as a result you have access. I can leave my house right now and hit national forest in a matter of metres and at that point I am free to traverse and pedal and roam as much as I want, with very few limitations. There are a few areas, significantly less of the landscape that has permitting requirements. There are wide open areas, you can do just about anything you want which a lot of people do, to the detriment of the landscape.

HOLLY: So why do you think people seek out wild spaces?

MOOSE: A lot of people use it to recharge and to I use the word be themselves, it is the place where they maybe express themselves the most is in climbing, skiing or completing a particular circular route, it is a place they can test themselves. I seek out those spaces to stop being on a computer. To remove the digital overlord that just crowds out natural sounds and natural scapes. And I think there is a whole range of very personal reasons why people seek the solace of those spaces and it sit he full gambit: it is recharge, it is rediscovery, it is challenge and trying something new as well. You hear people say: I conquered that, which I am a little alarmed at, because you can’t really beat it, at best you come to a stalemate and survive.

HOLLY: Also that reflects kind of a colonial attitude: I am going to go and do this wild space and I am going to conquer it and I am going to dominate it. It is a bit problematic!

MOOSE: And I think the concept of wilderness is arguably a Western construct because in the Wilderness Act in the US talks about landscape untrammelled by man and this idea that it was untouched by human activity and actually most wilderness is being created by removing indigenous culture from the landscape and emptying it of people who have lived there for millennia and denying that history. Then it becomes the idea of overcoming and owning, whereas most indigenous cultures, they didn’t necessarily live in harmony, but they learned to live within the system and there was a mutual benefit for sound practice. Whereas now, and whilst there is less of it and more pressure on it, and now we have competing interest in how to manage it or how to utilise it. And I hear wilderness managers talk about: this is the way that you manage wilderness, that has no recognition of indigenous practice. In the Western US there was a tremendous amount of use of fire on the landscape to regenerate and control and the same in Australia, where the longterm inhabitants of Australia used fire on that landscape to shape it in a way that has been denied for the last 150 years and that loss of traditional practice has cost us tremendously.

HOLLY: And so how do you think the landscape has suffered as a result?

MOOSE: Well in the US we have fires of the most incredible intensity because you have got 100 plus years of pure buildup that hasn’t had any level of practice to reduce that under-growth. So you get crown fires that come through those lights fuels and come to the top and burn with massive intensity and destroy everything. In Australia you have got fire cycles of Eucalyptus that with regular fires would have had lower intensity burns and now have this calamitous fires, which is linked to climate change as well, but the scale of the impacts would be less if we use more prescribed fire. Another really good one is remove all of predators. If you look at red deer populations in Scotland are massively overburdening the landscape and arguably restricting the rebirth of Caledonian forest, because they just graze everything back. In the eastern US, white-tailed [deer] are by far the most dominant species in the woodlands and so they have over-grazed and actually changed the way the forest looks because of their plague-like numbers. Once you bring predators back in everything flips. So you have got Yellowstone where wolves came back in, Elk herds crashed and suddenly you have riverside Elders sprouting along the sides of the river where they used to be grazed down. I have forgotten the question I am sorry!

HOLLY: I was asking you how do you think the landscape has changed or suffered as a result of not having the indigenous practice of burning, controlled burns and things like that – as you have said it goes beyond that. So how can people survive and thrive when they go into wild spaces? What do people need to know?

MOOSE: Well a) you need to go out there with a little bit of knowledge. So I think to decide to go out for a day hike around your local park and start to understand where north, south, east or west are is a great place to start. So build really fundamental skills that are non-digital. And then find a mentor, find someone to help you develop good practice in the outdoors and that is everything from understanding how to x when you go out on a hike, through to actually you don’t need to take four books with you on your first overnight, it is a lot of weight that isn’t necessary and arguably if you have had a good day, a book is the last thing you will need, you are probably going to need another hour of sleep.

HOLLY: Yeah you will be exhausted.

MOOSE: It is that idea of having a simple adventure at first and then becoming increasingly more complex in the way you interact out there. To go up on the Northwest of Scotland for instance, to be up at Cape Wrath and to be able to wander around that area, be ready for some wet, challenging, maritime weather. And to do any of those peaks up there you need to have your wits about you, not because they are particularly tall or technical but because they are really exposed and that comes with some level of initial positive experience that builds and allows you to confidently develop your skills.

HOLLY: And to let you develop kind of the gear that you need, the kit, the clothing, so that you can feel comfortable in that weather and to learn how you can function in that weather and to build the mindset that you can go out in that kind of weather and be okay.

MOOSE: Yeah and you don’t have to have the greatest piece of gear. I really enjoy it when people are talking about the latest piece of gear that they have got that has got some micro-breathable fabric, that’s great but it costs you I don’t know how many dollars or pounds or euros to buy that. I did most of my trips as a kid in a really simple, 100% waterproof, cagoule, because it was really effective in those downpours – simple gear you don’t have to have complexity in the gear. Where the complexity should be is starting to develop deeper and deeper skills.

HOLLY: So what are some of the fundamental skills that people need to have, because I am thinking some people who are used to going outdoors but not into wilderness might not know what they don’t know.

MOOSE: Navigation, know where you are and where you want to go is a great one beyond Google map. Nowadays with satellite navigation you press a button and you don’t have to pay attention to your route because this voice in the background is going to say, turn left now. And navigation is about having your eyes open and 360 scans to know distant ridges or which drainage you are going to head down or where you are going to camp that night, is to be on top of that. So I encourage people to understand navigation, because if you know where you are, you have good a good guess, you can get yourself out of just about anything because you have a fixed point and from that you can figure out what your escape route is. The other piece of gear I always like to say is have a friend, do an adventure with someone so you have two opinions on anything and you can start to come up with an idea. And then it is really just picking accessible adventure. I love the idea, is it Wainwright that did all the books in the Lake District and I think he lived in Penrith and he caught a bus to every one of his trails, he didn’t have a car, he went by bus and that is the beauty of Europe you can hit just about everywhere with public transport, it becomes so much more affordable. And then it becomes less cumbersome because you are carrying one bag, you are not adding bits into the back of the car: I might need this, or I might need this. You are actually right from the start starting out with the essential gear that you want to carry, because that is all you can take.

HOLLY: When you have to carry all of your gear on your back that’s when you start realising what is a luxury and what is a necessity.

MOOSE: When I was 18 or 19 I went to Australia, or maybe 20/21, I had packed a backpack and I had read somewhere that pack a backpack if you are doing a long trip and then take 30% of the stuff out of it and that’s what I did and I didn’t regret it, I started off with a lighter load.

HOLLY: Yeah I am doing the coast-to-coast next month with a couple of friends and I am going through that process now of looking at my packing list and I have gotten so used to camping out of my car for the last few months and not backpacking that I am having to really rethink everything that I bring, because it is going to go on my back.

MOOSE: Less is more at the moment because you have more energy and your are more comfortable and you are less distracted because you don’t know which t-shirt you are going to have to wear that evening. That’s the difference between being on a big raft expedition where you are pushing 1200 pounds of gear down the Grand Canyon for three weeks, you can take everything and people take fancy dress, because you are not really carrying it, you are just pushing it down the river. I did a back country patrol with a law enforcement ranger seven or eight years ago and I got introduced to lightweight packing for the first time. And I did nearly a week out in the back country with less than 30 pounds on my back and that was illuminating after rejecting backpacking so viciously after taking kids through rhododendron nightmares in North Carolina for a decade. That opened my eyes as to why people might choose to do it. I have a cooking stove that weighs less than a beer can empty. It is aluminium alcohol based stove and it is amazing, that’s a really good advancement over what we used to carry, we used to carry the Whisperlite and then two or three cylinders and a wind guard, it is so much simpler.

HOLLY: Yes, it is, it is. So what are the tips you have for people who might want to get started on this, is there anything else people need to know before they get started?

MOOSE: I think there is really good training out there. There is a lot of parts of society and underserved communities that are denied opportunities because don’t see a person that they identify with who is there to help through their first experience and there are increasingly programs out there that serve very specific communities, whether it is LGBTQ or Asian community or BAME, whichever, there are more programs that really seek to help their own community and I think that you should always be able to look around with the access to information that we have online, there is somebody out there you can probably give you a hand. The other part of that is us as practitioners need to reach out our hands when we see people who are enthused and conversations that are making a difference and contribute, whether it is our time or money to help foster a more inclusive outdoor community.

HOLLY: Absolutely and thankfully there is now so much information now on YouTube so that you can watch someone else doing the hike, or you can watch someone else packing their bag, or watch someone else getting ready for their adventure and that can teach you a lot as well.

MOOSE: And I think if you see it on an educational level where you are gaining information and you are gaining a bit of perspective but it is also important once you head out to own your own adventure. And not have somebody else’s experience thereby govern the way you should be looking at it or the way you should be getting something out of it. All of these adventures should be done on your terms because at that point, when you aren’t comparing yourself to some speed hike that is running up and down the Appalachian trail or some latest wacky way of crossing the South Pole and you are just having your own adventure, the pressure is off and you own it and it is yours and you don’t need to put it on Instagram and you don’t need to blast about it and spray about it, it is just yours, that’s where all the reward comes from.

HOLLY: Yeah, absolutely and finding your own way to do things and I think the more you get out there into wild spaces and the more you have your own adventures the more you will learn about what your own way is to do it. Learn from other people but adjust it for your style.

MOOSE: Around the paddling community there is definitely the group that is right on the edge that is running incredibly technical water with massive consequences if you get it wrong and I am not that part off the community. I am much more the, I am going to enjoy this in the moment, the people I am paddling with, some moderate water, and I will get the same level of release and satisfaction and enjoyment and excitement that people who are really pushing it on the edge because they are doing on their terms and I am doing it on my terms.

HOLLY: Yeah it is interesting because I have done most of my adventures on my own: I always go camping on my own, I always go hiking on my own, I do a lot of stuff on my own and this is the first time that I will be doing a long backpacking trip with other people, so I am really curious to see how it goes, because I am not used to managing the experience with other people.

MOOSE: But I also think that is exciting.

HOLLY: It is.

MOOSE: The idea of embracing a shared experience and being able to look back on it beyond your journal. I have friends, we have done multiple climbing trips and bike trips and when you get together you tell the stories about those events. And that shared piece is the piece that deepens friendship and moves it to an intuitive level where you start to fully understand people. Shared experience, whether it is an adventure, or through daily life, when you truly share an experience that’s where friendship crosses a boundary. I think in a virtual world where people believe they have friends in their virtual worlds, across Instagram or Facebook, or whatever social media they are using, they aren’t actually sharing an experience they are sharing a screen and it is not the three-dimensional visceral experience of laughing in the face of a storm because it is so bad. And you are like…and you are knocking snow off the tent for the eighth time and you are going to be doing it all night and there is the manic laughter that comes of that shared experience, we are going to get through it! That’s such a powerful thing for when you are faced with other challenges in your everyday life. I talk to people who I have shared expeditions with almost every day, I haven’t seen them in two-and-half-years because of Covid, but I still feel deeply connected because we broke a bone on day three of an expedition and two of us contemplated walking 150 miles out because there wasn’t enough room in the other boat through grisly country with a gun that had the wrong shot, we bought goose shot and not slugs in bear country so it would have just annoyed the bear. And so you are sitting there. Those are the experiences that you look back on, I remember Tim repairing the boat and I remember Stephen saying they have got problems, when they broke a second time, and I remember all these pieces because those are all the fabric of relationships that make us strong. We are part of a tapestry we are not a single thread.

HOLLY: Yeah and I am really looking forward to his because I am a very solitary person sometimes and my husband and I are both trail-runners, we often go out running together but I would love to have this kind of adventure with him as well because I know that would be a really great shared experience.

MOOSE: You don’t have to be in the same space with someone for the entire hike, you can be 20 minutes apart and have agreements about where you are going to meet up. You can still find solitude in a group. The group Outward Bound I used to work with they had an activity where they put kids and students out for three days on their own and we would monitor them at their solo sites, it was this period of recharge and reflection after the very physical standard course which is three weeks long. And kids would always be surprised that when they came back, the stories that they had to tell, or what they had reflected on and they would sleep for a day-and-a-half because they were exhausted. And then they would spend half-a-day maybe really reflecting but it was powerful where the strength of it was reporting it back to the group.

HOLLY: I love that. So Moose you have written two books, can you tell us about them?

MOOSE: So part of my duties in Yosemite, I work in search and rescue, I am a lead trainer for Yosemite search and rescue which is one of the busiest search and rescues in the world. And I just wrote a book about highs and lows about working in search and rescue, not sort of high profile rescue, the run of the mill ones, the pulling people off an island when they have had an accident in a boat, or actually diving on a bear carcass trying to recover a x collar. So I wrote a book called Searching, it is out on Amazon and that’s a reflection on a life of working in search and rescues, the highs and lows and laughter and tears. And the other collateral duty I have is running the family liaison program which is part of they command where you are interfaced with families during searches and recoveries and you work with them as you go on this journey of trying to find a missing love one and hopefully reuniting them if they are alive or if the person dies actually working through that initial notification and reuniting them with the body of the loved one. And that, I have written a book on that, called When Accidents Happen, and that’s aimed at practitioners who work in search and rescue to develop the skills and the toolbox to be effective in that really highly charged emotional atmosphere.

HOLLY: So you have got years of experience in search and rescue, what would you say are the common mistakes that people make?

MOOSE: Overestimating what they can do and underestimation what they need.

HOLLY: Wow.

MOOSE: I think our culture can be very quick to judge people when they have an accident and not draw the lessons from it and I think back to when I was a kid, how much risk I undertook and if I had an accident I think I would have been one of those people, he had inadequate footwear, or he shouldn’t have done that. And they are right but we don’t want to be in an atmosphere where you are just belittling people, we have something in the US, in the National Parks, called preventive search and rescue and it is proactive messaging on really popular trails about have you got enough water to descend into the Grand Canyon and come back up again. Because most of the injuries they have in the Grand Canyon are heat-related, it is either dehydration or over-hydration, those are the two things that happen on that trail. For us, we have people coming from sea level, the Bay Area, coming up and trying to do this climb called the Half Dome and they go rifling up and they are tired, they are not used to altitude, they get a bit light-headed and then they fall and twist their ankle. That’s kind of what happens. So you intercept them at the trail with notices and with staff to say, hey have you got more than a small bottle of water? Do you realise that we have thunder storms that generally roll in in the afternoon? And give them a little bit more information so they are informed enough to make good decisions. We don’t leave them stewing out there when they are having a problem, lend a hand.

HOLLY: Yeah, educate.

MOOSE: I grew up, when I was kid I was in the cub scouts and we used to go off and do these funny camping trips and our parents were essentially in charge of us and some of them had come through the services or some of them had some background in bicycle trips or what have you but they didn’t know a lot but what they did have was a lot of common sense and they imparted a tremendous amount of common sense by having conversations and demonstrating a degree of judgement. And again going back to the digital content, digital content stands out in the outdoors a lot of the time with people doing the most dangerous things so they could be seen to do that. Whereas, I wish we would get excited about people doing sensible stuff. The idea of people jumping off of docks in rock faces, it is really fun doing really big drops but when you have an accident the percussive force is so violent and it shatters a femur that’s a life changing injury.  We don’t have enough pictures of when it goes wrong and goes: this person isn’t able to walk anymore they can’t have the life they used to live. We are insulated from consequence because that isn’t interesting and that should be something that informs us in our decision making.

HOLLY: Absolutely, if you are not aware of the potential consequences then how can you make the decision to go ahead and do it?

MOOSE: And a lot of time when I see accidents, one of the things working with Swift Water Rescue, I tend to say a lot about swift water recovery because that is what I have done the most of over the years, pulling people’s bodies out because they have lost their lives. Typically because they haven’t really thought through what they are doing, whether they are impaired with alcohol, or whether it is their first time around a snow melt river, or they are just excited to have a photograph taken next to an edge, they haven’t thought through the consequence of being less than a metre from the edge as opposed to two metres from the edge. And it is hard, it is hard to teach people that without somebody gently putting a hand on their shoulder and encouraging them to think through what they are doing. Some people are conditioned to learn in sort of violent failure, but most of us are not, most of us can process information really well.   

HOLLY: Yeah we just need to know and have access to it, know what that possibilities are and what the possible consequences are, you don’t know what you don’t know sometimes.

MOOSE: Right, I think being in a position where, really expedition leaders have an intuitive response to challenging situations because they have many, many years and days in the field that allow them to make an intuitive response that they can’t articulate but it is the right thing to do. Now we have people doing really extreme sports or amazing trips with very little apprenticeship so when stuff goes wrong they have a lot less background information that allows that intuitive response to happen. And that is where, if you are with somebody else, somebody doubled the amount of experience you have got in a way and it isn’t necessarily training courses, it is just being out there.   

HOLLY: And having experiences.

MOOSE: I remember being on big boats and sailing and being the real junior part of the team and doing a little bit of floor decking and basically being…because experienced sailors are doing all the work without really telling you what to do and you learn a lot by watching or asking questions. That was a really valuable experience to be racing offshore because you are essentially like a sponge, you start to absorb stuff by watching and understanding how ropes are working and when they need to run, and I feel really privileged to have had that, I was privileged to have had that. We need to pass that privilege on. So when you see someone struggling in the outdoors you can greet them with a smile and say, may I help you? And just engage them in a conversation and hear where they are coming from and what they are doing and be supportive. It is not a place to be on your own in learning. There are more than enough resources out there to accelerate what you are taking in but to deepen it.

HOLLY: Yeah absolutely and that is part of the reason I write the books that I do, because every time I walk a trail I write a book about it and part of the reason that I do that is to share all of my mistakes so that hopefully other people can avoid them.

MOOSE: Brits love mistakes. We like the idea of failed expeditions, they become our heroes. Actually our heroes should be where the successes are, I think the whole argument of Shackleton and Scott is a really good example, I grew up with Scott seeing him as the hero and actually Shackleton was a far greater leader in so many ways because all his crew survived and he made so many critical decisions and he overcame incredible odds. You always question who your heroes are, you should be questioning them because it may be what you are being told but it is actually not true because it fills a narrative at that time. And I am much more romanced by the smaller scale adventures. There is a writer called Robin Davidson who went across the interior of Australia in the 70s maybe with camels, she didn’t know anything about camels. And it is the most amazing story and if it was done now it would be a movie within six months…

HOLLY: It is a movie actually based on the book!

MOOSE: Ah okay. I remember Tracks when it came out it is a super slim volume and it is a very simple story. And it was lost in the sands in a way because you had to know it was out there. I am much more romanced by those stories than I am about people climbing all the 8000m peaks or being guided up them. There is a peak in Yosemite called Half Dome and it has a ladder up it basically. I have lived in Yosemite for 20 years and I have proudly said I have never stood on top. But if you look to the South there are other peaks that are out there and I have climbed those and they are higher and they are more technical, I am more intrigued by those.

HOLLY: Yeah it is about finding your thing in the outdoors in the wilderness.

MOOSE: Yeah, I grew up in Birmingham and my dad says there are more miles of canal in Birmingham than in Venice, he is very proud of that. I love canals and I went to Britain a couple of years ago, for the first time in 25 years with my wife and we walked along the canals and I loved it, it was so much fun and I remember being on the canals in a boat and walking the canals and it is this amazing river way that has this industrial history but it has this wildness about it too.

HOLLY: It is like this whole sub-world.

MOOSE: Oh it is this amazing thing. It is under the city in places. I think Britain is blessed because you can have an adventure just about anywhere, particularly on a Sunday morning. When the cities are asleep there is an amazing wildness out there of quieter landscape. I think kids growing up if they can find that backyard adventure, their eyes will open to a distant horizon and they will walk towards it, if they are given the right level of support and encouragement. That’s what we need, we need to have that optimism for the far horizon because that will help fund solutions to the environmental problems we face. We live in a pessimistic world because we are faced by challenge and actually exposure to the natural world shows you how resilient things can be and there is a lesson there for all young people.

HOLLY: Absolutely and I think exposure to the natural world also gives you respect for it.

MOOSE: If you have the chance to, I had a kid up in Seattle, we went up this big mountain and he was sitting and he had his hand out, the view was totally closed in and you couldn’t see anything, it was pretty miserable and wet and we were going to come off the summit pretty quick and he had his hand out and he kept putting his hand up and seemingly grabbing at something and I asked him what he was doing and he said that he wanted to go home and tell his parents that he had touched a cloud. That simplicity is beautiful. It doesn’t necessarily completely flip someone’s life, but it can be a golden thread that they refer back to later or it can be a piece that illuminates them later in life, that they remember that feeling, they remember that experience. And so the more that you can have people connect to their immediate environment and understand how they can have a positive effective rather than a negative effective it’s a good thing.

HOLLY: Absolutely. Moose thank you so much for joining us today. Where can people find you online and connect with you and learn more about what you do?

MOOSE: I am on moosemutlow.com, on Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/moosemutlow/ and you can find me on Amazon, https://www.amazon.com/Moose-Mutlow/e/B08GV7XZYR. On my website I have got interviews and things I have written and training I am running.

HOLLY: Well thank you.

MOOSE: Thank you very much, I have enjoyed the chat and have a great time on the Coast to Coast.

HOLLY: Oh thank you, I can’t wait.