Explore: A Canadian Geographic podcast

“We knew we had something that was ours and unique and different, and we figured we better shout it out loud.” - Alan Doyle

For Alan Doyle, travelling the world has only strengthened the pull of home.

Along the way, he takes us back to his childhood in Petty Harbour, where music filled the family home, cutting cod tongues earned him spending money, and singing Anne Murray songs bought him a later bedtime.

Doyle reflects on Great Big Sea’s beginnings in the shadow of the cod moratorium, the band’s unexpected role as ambassadors for Newfoundland, and the resilience behind their enduring anthem, “Ordinary Day.” He also shares what decades of touring have taught him about Canada — and why St. John’s remains his favourite place to be.

Full of humour and affection, this conversation explores how the places we come from shape the stories we tell.

About our guest: Alan Doyle is a singer, songwriter, actor and author from Petty Harbour, N.L. Best known as a founding member of Great Big Sea, his books include Where I Belong, A Newfoundlander in Canada and The Smiling Land.

Check out: Our conversation with The Guess Who’s Randy Bachman and Burton Cummings, featuring more unforgettable stories from a life in Canadian music.

Explore: A Canadian Geographic Podcast is hosted by David McGuffin and produced by Explore Podcast Productions in partnership with Canadian Geographic.

Canadian Geographic:

Editor-in-chief: Alexandra Pope

Digital and travel editor: Madigan Cotterill

Digital marketing manager: Caroline Workman

Enjoying Explore? Follow the podcast and leave a rating or review wherever you listen.

“I knew about bears in this abstract theoretical way, but I didn’t really know what it meant to live closely with them.”

What happens when a mother black bear refuses to leave the hillside beneath your fire tower?

For bestselling author Trina Moyles, the answer became the heart of Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival. While working at a fire tower in northern Alberta, Moyles found herself living in a black bear corridor, where a resident mother and her cubs returned to the nearby slope. She tried noise, rubber bullets and even a helicopter to drive them away, but nothing worked. Eventually, she began to question what she thought she knew about bears.

Moyles joins Explore host David McGuffin to discuss how she learned to share the landscape with the bears and what years of observing them revealed about their behaviour. They explore the challenges of living alongside black bears as towns and cities expand into their habitats, as well as the practical choices that can help prevent conflict.

Black Bear also tells the story of Moyles’s relationship with her late brother, Brendan, who chose a life working in Alberta’s oil fields. She reflects on the distance that grew between them, their efforts to reconnect, and why writing about him became inseparable from writing about the bears.

Black Bear is a 2026 finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

Trina Moyles is a bestselling author, environmental journalist and a frequent contributor to Canadian Geographic magazine. Her first memoir, Lookout, won a National Outdoor Book Award and the inaugural Memoir Award at the Alberta Literary Awards. In 2022, she received the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award. She lives in a cosy Yurt outside Whitehorse.

Explore: A Canadian Geographic Podcast is hosted by David McGuffin and produced by David McGuffin and Graham McGuffin of ExploreProductions.ca in partnership with Canadian Geographic.

Canadian Geographic

• Editor-in-chief: Alexandra Pope
• Digital and travel editor: Madigan Cotterill
• Digital marketing manager: Caroline Workman



For more stories of adventure, science, history and exploration, visit canadiangeographic.ca

Read more from Trina Moyles;

• Excerpt from Black Bear: A story of siblinghood and survival
• Caribou people: The story of conserving the Porcupine caribou herd is a story about working together (Canadian Geographic, 2026)
• Monitoring migration through the Nisutlin River Delta National Wildlife Area (Canadian Geographic, 2026)
• Born for this: Unravelling the disappearance of Dall sheep (Canadian Geographic, 2026)
• The good bear: Co-existence on Yukon’s Klukshu River (Canadian Geographic, 2025)

“One of the main reasons we travel is to be different, hopefully better, versions of ourselves.”

For Eric Weiner, travel has always been a way to pursue the big questions: What makes us happy, creative, wise, and fully alive? 

He has spent much of his career exploring the intersection of place and big ideas. A former NPR foreign correspondent, he reported from more than 30 countries before turning his attention to philosophical travel: journeys in search of happiness, faith, creativity, wisdom and awe.

He is the New York Times bestselling author of The Geography of Bliss, Man Seeks God, The Geography of Genius, The Socrates Express and Ben & Me. The Geography of Bliss was adapted into a 2023 Peacock television series featuring The Office star Rainn Wilson. Weiner also co-hosts Toronto Pearson Airport’s podcast, Y We Travel, with Canadian journalist Erica Vella.

In this conversation, Weiner and host David McGuffin trace his wanderlust back to the day he ran away from home at five years old. They look back on when it was still possible to be truly “out of pocket,” and consider how smartphones have changed not only travel but our relationship with place.

Weiner explains why his journeys are always purposeful — ways of exploring ideas rather than simply accumulating destinations. He shares lessons from an unexpectedly transcendent pizza in an Arctic Finland gas station, reflects on experiencing awe amid the immense dunes of Oman’s Empty Quarter and makes the case for travelling more slowly, with enough time for serendipity.

The conversation ends at the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, straddling the border between Stanstead, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont. There, Eric watched Shakespeare from a seat in the U.S. while the actors performed onstage in Canada — a powerful reminder that borders can be both artificial and very real.

Explore: A Canadian Geographic Podcast is hosted by David McGuffin.

Produced by David McGuffin and ExploreProductions.ca in partnership with Canadian Geographic.

Canadian Geographic:

• Editor-in-chief: Alexandra Pope
• Digital and travel editor: Madigan Cotterill
• Digital marketing manager: Caroline Workman

For more stories of adventure, science, history, and exploration, visit canadiangeographic.ca

“To be in a relationship with a place is a very complex and beautiful dynamic.”

Bestselling author, explorer and master storyteller James Raffan returns to Explore to discuss his new book, Echo Maker: Craig Macdonald and the Lives That Produced One of Canada’s Most Significant Historical Maps.

The book tells the remarkable story of Craig Macdonald, a quiet and determined ethno-geographer who spent decades travelling through the Temagami region of northern Ontario and learning from Teme-Augama Anishnabai elders. Through hundreds of conversations and journeys by canoe, snowshoe and dogsled, Macdonald documented traditional place names, portages, winter trails and patterns of land use that had never appeared on conventional maps.

The result was the historical Map of Temagami, which showcases the traditional travel routes, campsites, and geographical names of the Indigenous Anishinaabeg before 1900. 

An extraordinary record of Indigenous knowledge, the map has helped preserve language and culture, strengthen connections between generations and support an ongoing land claim.

Raffan and Explore host David McGuffin discuss what drew Macdonald to this work, why he learned the language of Anishinaabemowin, and how a landscape often described as “wilderness” was revealed to be a deeply known and inhabited cultural landscape.

They also discuss James’s new documentary, Signs of Life, about a music-and-storytelling project with Inuit youth in Kugluktuk, Nunavut, and reminisce about an unforgettable #CanGeoPolarPlunge through Arctic sea ice at −38C.

James Raffan is a cultural geographer, bestselling author and Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. He has spent more than 50 years travelling, researching and telling stories across Canada and the circumpolar North.

Purchase the Historical Map of Temagami.



Learn more about James, Echo Maker and his touring one-man musical show, The Accidental Canadian, at jamesraffan.ca.

"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 spent her childhood with her grandparents, who regularly took her hunting and fishing out on the land. When she reached her mid-20s, she translated those skills into guiding adventure canoe trips on rivers in the Canadian Arctic. But just a decade ago, she was shocked to discover that she was one of the few First Nations people in the industry, let alone Indigenous women. The resistance she felt coming into river guiding led her to be the change that was needed.  

She set up Diinji Zhuh, an Indigenous-run canoe-tripping outfitter based in Whitehorse, YT. She is also setting up the first school to train Indigenous river guides. Koe and her teams lead trips across the Arctic. Still, her favourite rivers are in the traditional lands of her people, the Peel Watershed, a system of stunningly beautiful whitewater rivers. I paddled some of those rivers with my son Graham and cousin Terry in 2018 for Canadian Geographic. Koe and I bonded over talk about her favourite rivers in the Peel watershed, her role in the successful fight to protect the watershed from mineral development, mapping by storytelling, her mission to get Indigenous people back out into their ancestral lands, and the warm feeling of excitement she gets paddling through lands that her family have travelled and known for generations. Also, in 2021, Koe was presented with the Canadian River Heritage Award.  

Enjoy!

Raised on Newfoundland’s west coast, Jenn Thornhill Verma grew up immersed in the life and lore of fishing communities and the rhythms of the North Atlantic. She is the author of the bestselling book Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboys, a contributor to Canadian Geographic, and a fellow with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network, where she recently reported a series for the Globe and Mail on the endangered North Atlantic right whale.

In this episode of Explore, Thornhill Verma and podcast host David McGuffin discuss the legacy of the cod fishery collapse in the early 1990's, the politics of fisheries management, and the urgent effort to protect one of the world’s most endangered whales: the North Atlantic right whale. With fewer than 400 individuals remaining, these whales face a variety of threats, including ship strikes, entanglement in fishing gear, and, of course, the climate crisis.

• Visit Thornhill Verma’s favourite place in Canada: Nain, Labrador
• Watch the documentary, Angry Inuk (National Film Board of Canada)
• Browse Thornhill Verma's art (Art - Jenn Thornhill Verma)
• Discover more about whales in Explore episode 99 with Canadian sperm whale researcher Shane Gero – a fascinating conversation about the attempts to decode the sperm whale's click language using AI
• Read Punctuation's mark: Can we save the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale? by Alanna Mitchell with photography by Nick Hawkins

Raised on Newfoundland’s west coast, Jenn Thornhill Verma grew up immersed in the life and lore of fishing communities and the rhythms of the North Atlantic. She is the author of the bestselling book Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboys, a contributor to Canadian Geographic, and a fellow with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network, where she recently reported a series for the Globe and Mail on the endangered North Atlantic right whale.

In this episode of Explore, Thornhill Verma and podcast host David McGuffin discuss the legacy of the cod fishery collapse in the early 1990's, the politics of fisheries management, and the urgent effort to protect one of the world’s most endangered whales: the North Atlantic right whale. With fewer than 400 individuals remaining, these whales face a variety of threats, including ship strikes, entanglement in fishing gear, and, of course, the climate crisis.

• Visit Thornhill Verma’s favourite place in Canada: Nain, Labrador
• Watch the documentary, Angry Inuk (National Film Board of Canada)
• Browse Thornhill Verma's art (Art - Jenn Thornhill Verma)
• Discover more about whales in Explore episode 99 with Canadian sperm whale researcher Shane Gero – a fascinating conversation about the attempts to decode the sperm whale's click language using AI
• Read Punctuation's mark: Can we save the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale? by Alanna Mitchell with photography by Nick Hawkins

What does a ship that sank a century ago off the Florida Keys have to do with the birth of the Royal Canadian Navy?

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

Before there was a Royal Canadian Navy, there was the HMCS Canada, a steel-hulled vessel that trained Canada's first naval officers, escorted First World War convoys, survived the Halifax Explosion, and helped lay the foundations of a young nation's naval service. Yet despite its remarkable legacy, most Canadians have never heard of it.

In this episode of Explore, host David McGuffin sits down with naval historian, underwater archaeologist and former Royal Canadian Navy officer Joseph Frey to tell the extraordinary story of Canada's forgotten first warship: the HMSC Canada. 

From its launch in 1904 to its wartime service and eventual sinking off the Florida Keys in 1926, Frey traces the unlikely journey of a vessel that helped shape Canadian history.

The conversation also follows a modern RCGS Flagged expedition, led by Frey, to the wreck nearly a century after the ship's loss. Using advanced diving techniques and 3D photogrammetry, Frey and his team documented the wreck, answered long-standing questions about how it sank, and helped restore HMCS Canada's place in Canada's historical memory.

Along the way, Frey reflects on his role in the discovery of HMS Erebus, the enduring appeal of underwater exploration, and why forgotten stories like HMCS Canada still matter today.

Whether you're listening in a car, a canoe, a sailboat, a dock, or somewhere along Canada's coastline, this is a story of exploration, naval history, and the remarkable rediscovery of a ship that helped build a nation.

Joseph Frey is Vice-President of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, a Fellow of The Explorers Club, a naval historian, an underwater archaeologist, and a retired Royal Canadian Navy officer. He was a member of the 2014 Victoria Strait Expedition that discovered HMS Erebus, one of Sir John Franklin's lost ships, and has spent decades researching and documenting Canada's maritime history both above and below the waterline.

Recommended episodes

• Michael Palin — Erebus: One Ship, Two Epic Voyages
• Jill Heinerth — Bell Island's U-Boat Wrecks
• Under the Ice — Andrew Bramburger and Andrew Budziak

Credits:

Closing music is Heart of Oak, the official march of the Royal Canadian Navy played by the RCN's Stadacona Band. Halifax, NS.

Explore: A Canadian Geographic Podcast is hosted by David McGuffin.

Produced by David McGuffin and ExploreProductions.ca in partnership with Canadian Geographic.

Canadian Geographic:

• Editor-in-chief: Alexandra Pope
• Digital and travel editor: Madigan Cotterill
• Digital marketing manager: Caroline Workman

For more stories of adventure, science, history, and exploration, visit canadiangeographic.ca

What do endless prairie highways, a runaway tour bus, a hockey stick used as cruise control, and one of the greatest Canadian rock bands of all time have in common?

Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman have the stories.

From overpacked motel rooms on the road, to their tour bus almost going off a cliff in B.C., to witnessing polar bear attacks in Churchill, to revealing the real inspiration behind hits like American Woman and Undun, Bachman and Cummings share unforgettable stories from more than six decades of music, friendship, and life on the road.

Along the way, they explain why the wide-open spaces of the Canadian prairies continue to inspire them, how growing up in Winnipeg helped nurture one of Canada's greatest songwriting partnerships, and why, after touring the world, they still feel most at home where "you can see forever." 

Whether you're listening from a canoe, a campsite, or somewhere along a Canadian highway, this is a conversation about music, memory, friendship, and the prairie landscapes that helped shape one of Canada's greatest rock bands.

Credits

Explore: A Canadian Geographic Podcast is hosted by David McGuffin.

Produced by David McGuffin and ExploreProductions.ca in partnership with Canadian Geographic.

Canadian Geographic:

Editor-in-chief: Alexandra Pope

Digital and travel editor: Madigan Cotterill

Digital marketing manager: Caroline Workman

For more stories of adventure, science, history, and exploration, visit canadiangeographic.ca

In this episode of Explore, host David McGuffin sits down with lawyer, conservationist, former senior aide to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and one of Canada's most accomplished Arctic paddlers, Ted Johnson.

For more than two decades, Johnson and a remarkable group of friends, including diplomats, journalists, cabinet ministers, and occasionally Pierre Trudeau himself, set out each summer to canoe some of the most remote rivers in northern Canada. 

From the Hood and Coppermine rivers to little-known rivers on Banks Island and Ellesmere Island, Johnson shares stories of first descents, close calls, vast caribou migrations, and landscapes few Canadians will ever see. Along the way, he reflects on a changing Arctic, the evolution of wilderness travel, and what it was like to paddle and camp alongside one of Canada's most transformational Prime Ministers. 

This captivating episode explores a remarkable era of northern exploration and the enduring pull of Canada's wild rivers.

Ted Johnson is a lawyer, conservationist, pilot, and former senior advisor to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. An Officer of the Order of Canada and Fellow of both the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and the Royal Geographical Society, he has spent decades exploring Canada's North by canoe, helping document and promote some of the country's most remote wilderness rivers.

To learn more about the paddling adventures of Johnson and his friends, Sing Louder, Paddle Harder, edited by his colleague Robert Fowler, contains hundreds of images and stories from across the Arctic. 

Credits

Explore: A Canadian Geographic Podcast is hosted by David McGuffin.

Produced by David McGuffin and ExploreProductions.ca in partnership with Canadian Geographic.

Editor-in-chief: Alexandra Pope

Digital and travel editor: Madigan Cotterill

Digital marketing manager: Caroline Workman



For more stories of adventure, science, history, and exploration, visit CanadianGeographic.ca

Follow Explore wherever you get your podcasts and leave a rating or review if you enjoy the show.