Live It Up with Mountain Life

Sonnie Trotter is a climber and an author. Raised in Ontario, he started climbing as a teenager and never looked back. Over the past 25+ years Sonnie has pioneered some of the hardest routes in Canada and been on big walls all over the world with other icons of the sport. He's climbed competitively, professionally, and has also spent months on the road travelling and climbing with his wife and kids. And throughout it all, he never lost that love and that drive that fueled him as a teenager. HIs new memoir is called Uplifted: Evolution of a Climbing Life, and it is on shelves now. 

Stephan Kesting is on the show today. He’s an adventurer and an author (and a jui jitsu master and a firefighter) who recently paddled a canoe over 1600 km through some of the most bug infested terrain in Northern Canada...alone, on a single, transplanted kidney. And it took him 41 days, which is pretty wild considering a whole lot of the journey was paddling upstream. Stephan talks about the risks of complacency, the will to carry on, and what it's like to really stare down your own mortality. His new book about the journey (and more) is called Perseverance: Life and Death in the Subarctic and it's a doozy!! Learn more about Stephan on his martial arts website too. (Warning: this episode contains a few cuss words.)

Jody MacDonald has sailed around the world twice but says she got seasick almost every day for ten years. She’s also visited over 100 countries and creates incredible, award winning photographs everywhere she goes. To celebrate International Women's Day, host Feet Banks gets the honour of connecting with Jody as she motorcycles through the Himalaya to discuss ditching the office job, leaning into your passion, and the value of insignificance in the face of nature's most vast spaces. Find Jody's work on her Instagram @jodymacdonaldphoto and hit up her website for stunning prints of her work. 

Darren Rayner grew up making fun little movies and shred edits with his buddies and, when he was still in college, co-founded Voleurz, a badass, grassroots Canadian clothing company that also made films and generally helped push mountain culture down a more creative path. As time went by, Darren pivoted a bit and founded Magnafire Media, a Vancouver-based creative studio and production facility that creates videos for brands that want to stand out and get noticed. NOTE: there are a couple of cuss words in this Pod, be warned. As well, a video of the conversation is available on the Mountain Life YouTube.

Happy Holidays! We’re re-gifting this episode. Well, not really. It’s a brand new episode but, for the first time ever, we are having a guest back on the pod for round two.  Frank Wolf is on the show today. It’s the Re-Wolf. Writing his own epitaph on a freezing trip in the Arctic, Frank says, “Frank was a somewhat notable person who wrote some things and made a few strange and mediocre films about esoteric outdoor subjects.”  Which is not wrong, but there's more to this adventurer than that. Host Feet Banks digs in to talk about the new book, not needing toilet paper, canoe-trip tricks, and more. www.fwolf.ca

Alenka Mali is a big mountain snowboarder, climber, BASE jumper, jindleboarder and general mountain sport badass. Last winter, she produced a film called "The Beginning", which examines her unique mountain-based upbringing in Slovenia and Argentina and her quest to do a snowboard BASE jump in the mountains near her home in Squamish, BC. Instagram: @alenkaamali website: alenkamali.com  

On September 8, 2022 everything went sideways for Charlie Adams. He had a little side hustle working as a tree surgeon. He was working on a tree in Tiny Township. It was the last tree of the day. He was 35 feet up when disaster struck. 

“The tree split and broke underneath me,” he recalls. “I rode it to the ground then another piece came down and hit me. So I broke my neck, which wasn’t too serious. I broke my back which was the big accident. I had 13 rib fractures, a fractured scapula and a collapsed lung.”

“My partner  thought I was dead.”

Charlie was paralyzed from his belly button down. Two years on and Adams is trying to get his life back together. He's sitskiing, riding his Bowhead adaptive bicycle and waterskiing whenever possible. His perseverance is truly inspiring.

Most anyone who’s paid attention to any ski or bike mags over the past two decades should know who Blake is. He has more than 300 covers to his credit, a photo of the year award from Powder Magazine and there’s a pretty good chance many of your favourite outdoor images were crafted by his mind, eye, lens and work ethic. He's a genius, a father, a successful commercial photographer, but most of all he’s always thinking, and he values the art above almost anything else. Blakejorgenson.com

Host: Feet Banks

As one of the main characters in Red Bull's documentary The Engine Inside, Jay Bearhead has seen it all; residential schools, drug abuse, alcoholism, homelessness. But it's his rise from those lows that are inspirational. In part it was the bicycle that saved his life. And now he's giving back; he's teaching indigenous youth how to harness the power of two wheels (or two edges) to create a future that is entirely their own, while continuing to learn and teach the indigenous traditions and culture he grew up without. Host: Colin Field