Hot Drinks - Stories From The Field

Born in Guelph, Ontario, our guest today, Jesse Pierce, grew up cross country skiing and hiking with her family. She remembers camping in Tobermory near Georgian Bay, Ontario as a teenager and having the tingling feeling that this is what she needed to be doing in the future. So after high school, she went on to earn a degree in Outdoor Recreation at Lakehead University.

After university, she ended up working at Outward Bound Canada year-round for six years from 1998 to 2003 – leading white-water canoeing, backpacking, and back-country ski courses in Northern Ontario, BC and Yukon.

In 2003, Jesse returned to school to become a Naturopathic Doctor. She currently has her own Naturopathic practice in Ottawa, Ontario. The only trip leading she does now is with her family - cross country skiing, mountain biking and canoeing.

Ian Pineau has spent the past 45 years learning about and working in the Outdoor Education field. From a small PEI farm; close to the coast, his first outdoor education experience would be in a fishing boat with his grandfather. Ian’s first paid job in the field came at 18 when he was a facilitator with at-risk youth.

As a student at the University of New Brunswick, he took extracurricular outdoor skills courses, including Hiking; Canoeing; and Winter Camping. These courses set Ian up to help teach the Canoe Camp skills as a senior at university. A chance encounter with a NOLS van hauling sea kayaks at a highway gas station in Yukon eventually led to a 15-year working relationship with NOLS. Ian now teaches in and coordinates the Outdoor Adventure Naturalist program at Algonquin College’s Pembroke Campus in the Ottawa Valley.

In this episode:

•   [2:05] Ian Pineau talks about his experience in a fantastic sea kayak and whitewater course, where he enjoyed every minute with some great folks. Later on, he talks about how one of his friends started a  job where he got three months of duty and three months off, which he spent with his college kids on trips or other personal trips. And he also talked about PFD, which you can find out in the podcast.

•   [20:36] Ian shares an awestruck and hilarious incident in his Baha trip when he found his co-instructor Shawn and two other Canadian instructors were broadcasting CBC radio in Mexico teaching students who are all from the US.

•   [26:00] Moving forward, Ian tells us about his personal trip with his friends from Yukon on the Grand Canyon. He shares how this trip happened after the 9/11 incident and what type of high-level security he had to endure.

•   [32:33] He further shares some great stories about Mexico. He also tells us some amazing things about Chico and his family and what a fantastic time it was for him.

•   [53:30] We end the show with our very own rapid-fire questions, and as always, our guest intrigued us with his answer. 

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.

 Marianne Dawson Alexander started working in outdoor education in 1995 at a YMCA summer camp in Ontario, leading two-week canoe trips in Temagami. From 2000-2005 she worked for Outward Bound Canada in Ontario and on the west coast of Canada, mostly leading hiking and canoeing course with youth at risk. 

She came to NOLS in 2004, taking a River Instructors Course. Before the course, she had canoed and kayaked a lot but had never rafted. She quickly fell in love with rafting and enjoyed transferring those skills back to fine-tuning her white water canoe skills. She loved teaching students, especially young women and men, that you did not have to be huge to get a 2 thousand pound boat to go where you want it to go.

As you will learn, she met her husband, Steve, on her NOLS Instructors Course.  Shortly after the course, he recruited her to work with him at St Lawrence university’s Adirondack semester. At St Lawrence, they fell in love living and teaching in a yurt village in the Adirondacks. The next several years, they would split their time leading outdoor semesters for St. Lawrence and the other half living in the Tetons working NOLS backcountry ski and snowboard courses between heading over to India to work a few rafting and hiking courses.

Marianne is currently living in Ottawa and works as the department head of Student Services and Special Education and a guidance counsellor at Ridgemont High School. In this episode:

[3:34] Marianne Alexander shares her most memorable moment in the southwest, where she got into an encounter with a bear along with her camp. Later on, that same bear injured one of the members of another camp on the other side.

[25:38] Marianne tells us about a time when she, along with Jeff, Mark Holloway, and some of the students, got low on food and survival resources. While paddling the Bonnet Plume River, her instructor team started running out of food; another private canoeing group came to them and offered all their leftover food. On their way back, they faced another challenge. A headwind kicked up, causing them to make extremely slow progress downriver. But eventually, they made it all together with safety.

Jaret Slipp was born in Edmonton, Alberta and raised in Nova Scotia and Ontario. He believes that anyone can be a leader and that as instructors, it’s our role to provide the environment and training to help people discover their full potential. He is currently living on a sailboat in the Caribbean with his wife and two adorable daughters for a couple of years, while his home base is in Whitehorse, Yukon.

Jaret has worked in outdoor Ed for about 20 years. For NOLS, he has taught canoeing, backpacking, sea kayaking, caving, climbing, and mountaineering. He was a fixture at the NOLS Yukon Branch for many years, starting there as an intern and eventually becoming the Branch Director.

In this episode:

•   [5:24] In the beginning, Jaret talks about his bizarre experience in Australia, where what seems to him a log turns out to be a crocodile on which he clumsily stepped on. Later the same day, while everyone was catching some sleep, a student started screaming. Jared began running, to save his students from the crocodile; the whole incident turns hilarious when it was revealed the student has just had a nightmare.

•   [12:07] While leading a NOLS course in Baffin Island when he was about to celebrate his birthday, a woman cruised into their camp on an ATV. She invited all the students to watch and help her dad skin a polar bear, which was a very disturbing thing but ended up being a life-changing experience.

•   [20:00] Moving forward, Jaret talks about a student on a Rio Grand NOLS canoeing course. In an incident, a student managed to get all his ADHD medication wet. The student’s behaviour drastically changed for the better once he was no longer able to take his medication. The student who looked lost and always in his world became a role model and a great leader for the rest of the trip. 

•   [25:51] Jaret tells the most adventurous story of his life where he and one of his favourite canoe partners faced an enthralling problem. While they were in June Lake, they had to wait for days. Eventually, the floatplane came to rescue them, but when everything started aligning in the right way, they hit a brick wall, making it all more dramatic, which you don’t want to miss.

Our guest, Erica Lorenzen Lengacher grew up in the Seattle area and has been a bit of a nomad since her high school years. Along with her husband, 8-year-old daughter, she is now happily settled in Whitefish, Montana. 

She took a NOLS semester in the Rockies in 1993 (during a year off from college) and was immediately smitten with all that NOLS had to offer. Erica took a Mountain Instructors Course the following year and started working for the School in Alaska in the summer of 1994. During her NOLS years, she mainly worked backpacking, canyon, winter, and mountaineering courses, with a few oddball horse packing, sea kayaking, and NOLS Pro courses. Since leaving NOLS, she received a bachelor’s degree in nursing and a Master’s in public health. Her post NOLS career has ranged from public health consulting, to teaching high school science, too, most recently working as a critical care ICU nurse. She’s also just finishing a stint with the CDC Foundation doing COVID infection prevention and containment in long-term care and other congregate settings.

All told, she worked in outdoor education for about 15 years, primarily with NOLS. Still, she had a few seasons with Alpine Ascents and continued taking high school students into the mountains when she worked as an educator at the Watershed School in Boulder and the Bush School in Seattle.

In this episode:

•   (1:10) Erica talks about her 2002 Denali expedition, which seems to be a legendary alumni NOLS course. She tells us how she developed the necessary hard skills and excellent connections with the students despite being super young as an instructor. The trip was super smooth with beautiful weather, but as they moved up to 17,000 feet, things started going south ways as they are met with a deadly storm.
•   (52:55) Moving forward, Erica shares the experience of coming back home after facing such a challenging incident. She tells us how she had taken some of the radio types of equipment from her partner at the time on the trip, and there are still some recorded memories lying for her somewhere.
•   (55:18) Lorenzen tells us how she walks away from the terrible past, from the beginning by waking up on the right side of the bed to trusting her instinct when faced with uncertainty. She teaches us how releasing your negative energy through relaxing and moving forward can reinforce positive thinking.
•   (57:02) Later in the podcast, she tells us about her summer trip to Alaska rivers and how she has been called to be the ultimate course leader. She tells us about a series of events following the journey that she overcame one after another like a true hero.
•   (1:11:00) In the end, Erica shares her guiding experience apart from the NOLS course and how relaxing and fun it is to lay your hair down. She explains how she builds up more confidence and enhances her skills as a guide and how she got time to appreciate new places and explore the wilderness in the true sense.

Today, our guest is a former NOLS Instructor and Chair of the NOLS Board of Trustees, but he is best known as the co-founder and first CEO of Netflix, Marc Randolph. His incredibly successful career as an entrepreneur span more than four decades. He's founded or co-founded half a dozen other successful startups, including, most recently, Looker Data Sciences, which was sold to Google in 2019 for $2.6B. He is currently mentoring a handful of other early-stage companies, has advised hundreds of other entrepreneurs, is an active seed investor in startups all over the world. In 2019 he wrote the internationally bestselling memoir That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea, and now is the host of the new podcast called, That Will Never Work, where he dispenses advice, encouragement and tough love to struggling entrepreneurs.  

When he's not surfing, mountain biking, or skiing, Mark often speaks at industry events and actively participates in programs targeting young entrepreneurs. He also sits on the board of an environmental organization 1% of the planet.

In this Episode:

•   [04:00] Mr. Randolph talks about his first camping trip where he was 15 years old, and he made a mess with his macaroni noodles on the campsite, which was left unnoticed. After hiking to the next camp, Mark and his tent-mates were told that they had to hike back to the last camp and clean up the mess they made. This event taught him the lesson of how everything has consequences and everyone is destined to take responsibility.
•   [07:20] Mark further shares his backpacking trip where it started raining, and his sleeping back was drenched in the rain. He beautifully continues this story and tells how this event alone taught him a lot about personal development. Since that day, Mark says that he has never left his car without a sleeping back properly covered and a raincoat even if it is sunny outside.
•   [14:30] at the age of 17, Mark talks about a classic situation where he learned that no one should judge things based on their abilities and qualities – if you are in a group, your strength should be based on the group or your team. Leading this moral, Mark beautifully recalls how they were descending a mountain through a tightrope, and it looked pretty easy to Mark, but this trip turned out to be many hours long when the team wasn't on the same level as Mark of how easy It was.
•   [33:50] He shares his climbing experience, which was led through a very narrow ridge. They ended up losing their rope and had another one stuck above them. So they had to spend the night on a ledge where people could only sit and not lie down. The rest of the story holds more mystery and adventurous spirits, and for that, you have to watch the podcast.
•   [50:07] Marks further shares how his transition was from the field to the entrepreneurship life and how everything fell right into place for him.
•   Later in the podcast, Mark plays a fun round of rapid-fire questions and interesting answers added to his wholesome personality.

Originally from Southern California, John Abel has worked in outdoor education from 1984 to 2019. He has worked in many different roles such as administrative, instructional, consultative – but the bulk of and the best of his work was as a field instructor for NOLS. John has been a NOLS instructor since 1991, mainly working hiking, climbing, and mountaineering courses. He has a Master's in Leadership and Organizational Development from the Leadership Institute of Seattle. Since 2010, he has worked primarily for NOLS Professional Training,  facilitating various leadership training programs for NOLS organizational clients. 

Presently, he's changing careers, moving from outdoor ed into financial planning. His goal is to provide financial planning in an empowering and client-centric way.

In this episode:

• (02:23) John starts the interview by telling us the story behind "I can't see." As bizarre as it sounds, the story is stated back to NOLS fall semester in 1994, where his group faced a drastic turn in the weather that left everyone in three to four feet of snow. The story gets interesting when John shares how a group of students informed him that one of the students couldn't see, which led to more mysterious and thrilling events moving on. 

• (18:11) John gives his side of the story on the best Halloween ever. If you guys haven't listened to Andy Blair's side of the story, go ahead and listen to that first. In the beginning, Abel tells us how an instructor's robbed wallet turned the instructors being suspicious towards the whole group and all the students being resentful and upset over having a ruined experience. The course instructors planned a fun and memorable Halloween that involved witches, ziplines, and fire to cheer them up.

• (27:50) He further shares one of his best days in outdoor education. John tells us how he was working in a climbing course in the late summers in the Wind River mountain range when he was tagged with a young student who wasn't too comfortable in outside activities. He talks about how a disagreement between the two lets them feel the breath of death on the back of their necks.

• (41:10) Later on, John shares one of the worse days of his life that he titled "Groover explosion."  He tells us about groovers, as they are attached to the toilet seats where all the human wastage is stored, but once they were full – he was left with no choice but to carry the box to an area where all the waste was supposed to be dumped. The story gets hilarious when John tells us how a hectic yet straightforward task left him covered in poop and made it the worse memory of his life.

• (53:55) Johns tells us yet another funny story about the toilet seat prank. He talks about how one of the instructors keeps bragging about the fact that no one ever gets away with a prank on him, which made John come up with a brilliant idea to slip a broken toilet seak into his bag pack for his next trip. He soon introduced the idea with his colleagues that later turn into a 42 vs 1, the person who had no clue that he would get the prank of his life.

• (01:02:29) We throw quick, intriguing rapid-fire questions at John to dig deeper into his favourite locations to lead trips and his go-to gear to take along. He entertains us more with his hilarious talk at the end of the show.

This week on the pod I speak with Andy Blair is a simple man with a craving to be outside. He completed his NOLS Instructors Course in 1992 and his Wilderness Medicine Instructor Training Course in 2001. He has acquired over 250 weeks in the field and taught over 50 Wilderness Medicine courses. His fieldwork includes mountaineering, rock climbing, backcountry skiing, winter camping, canyoneering, whitewater canoeing, outdoor educator, and instructor courses. He maintains a National Registry EMT certification.

For the last nine years, Andy has been the Assistant Director at the NOLS Rocky Mountain Branch in Lander, WY. His belief in the transformative student experience at NOLS drives his administrative work. Andy remains committed to doing whatever is necessary to provide NOLS students with this powerful experience. He is known to state repetitively that "being a field instructor is the best job I have ever had… by far. The places you get to go, the things you get to do, and the people you get to do them with have been some of the most rewarding experiences I have had."

In this episode:

•   [11:57] Andy tells about his first camping trip in Kenya where he and his friend were travelling in a van and got mugged by a monkey who turned out to be a ‘carrot thief.’ He also recalls that while they were in Samburu National Park, one of their co-instructors stayed in the camp to keep the place secured, but a troop of baboons came through and stole one of their drug kits – all this followed by some more hilarious stories about monkeys.

•   [18:48] Andy goes down memory lane and talks about the first hiking day in Kenya where he travelled with a Senior NOLS Kenyan instructor. He shares that elephants are one of the dangerous animals, even more than lions and hyenas in East Africa. Right after saying this, he shares a gruesome experience where one of the people started screaming in the bushes – 3 elephants staring at him through the bamboo. He describes the incident briefly and shares how the senior instructor started yelling, "Drop your bags and run," while he was frozen in place, the rest is the mystery hidden in our podcast. 

•   [28:13] Later in the podcast, Andy talks about his encounter with lions which is the most exciting part of the podcast. He came across a lioness in Lake Nakuru National Park where a person was missing last week. While he was setting the tents, he saws six sets of eyes looking at him. He lit up his headlamp and saw a lioness broadside like 30 feet away from him – what happened next/ well, it is more interesting to hear him tell the story.

•   [38:54] as we go along the podcast, Andy takes a dive in and talks about her sailing trips and how he faced terrifying weather and storms – which is the highlight of the whole podcast.

Please subscribe to Hot Drinks wherever you get your podcasts. Why don’t you follow the show on twitter or Instagram we are @morehotdrinks. As I mentioned at the beginning 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 [email protected].

Jaret Slipp was born in Edmonton, Alberta and raised in Nova Scotia and Ontario. He believes that anyone can be a leader and that as instructors, it’s our role to provide the environment and training to help people discover their full potential. He is currently living on a sailboat in the Caribbean with his wife and two adorable daughters for a couple of years, while his home base is in Whitehorse, Yukon.

Jaret has worked in outdoor Ed for about 20 years. For NOLS, he has taught canoeing, backpacking, sea kayaking, caving, climbing, and mountaineering. He was a fixture at the NOLS Yukon Branch for many years, starting there as an intern and eventually becoming the Branch Director.

In this episode:

•   [5:24] In the beginning, Jaret talks about his bizarre experience in Australia, where what seems to him a log turns out to be a crocodile on which he clumsily stepped on. Later the same day, while everyone was catching some sleep, a student started screaming. Jared began running, to save his students from the crocodile; the whole incident turns hilarious when it was revealed the student has just had a nightmare.

•   [12:07] While leading a NOLS course in Baffin Island when he was about to celebrate his birthday, a woman cruised into their camp on an ATV. She invited all the students to watch and help her dad skin a polar bear, which was a very disturbing thing but ended up being a life-changing experience.

•   [20:00] Moving forward, Jaret talks about a student on a Rio Grand NOLS canoeing course. In an incident, a student managed to get all his ADHD medication wet. The student’s behaviour drastically changed for the better once he was no longer able to take his medication. The student who looked lost and always in his world became a role model and a great leader for the rest of the trip. 

•   [25:51] Jaret tells the most adventurous story of his life where he and one of his favourite canoe partners faced an enthralling problem. While they were in June Lake, they had to wait for days. Eventually, the floatplane came to rescue them, but when everything started aligning in the right way, they hit a brick wall, making it all more dramatic, which you don’t want to miss.