Joe Rogan may have said it best: If there was one human being I had to pick to help me survive a life-or-death emergency situation in the wilderness, without a shadow of a doubt, my choice would be John Barklow.

That's the blurb on the cover of John Barklow's forthcoming survival book "Knowledge From Storms." John spent 20 years as a Navy diver, most of it around special operations -- after 9/11, he was one of twelve instructors sent to Kodiak Island to teach SEALs how to survive winter in the mountains, and he helped build the clothing system special ops still uses today. On this episode of the Backcountry Manifesto, John is swinging by the studio to talk backcountry survival and building the kit that will keep you safe, capable, and comfortable wherever your outdoor adventures take you. 

This is not a Sitka ad. It's a top-to-bottom walk through a brand-agnostic backcountry kit from the dude who actually wrote the manual. What's the one piece of gear a survival instructor won't leave the truck without? Why is your 30-degree sleeping bag not actually a 30-degree bag? What the hell is a "possibles pouch?" Barklow's got answers.

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Is there land at the North Pole, or just ice? Is the water up there frozen solid, or open ocean? In 1879 nobody actually knew, and the best science of the day was hilariously wrong: punch through the ice rim, it said, and you'd find a warm, open sea at the top of the world.

The USS Jeannette sailed north to prove it. Her crew deliberately let the Arctic pack freeze in around the ship, drifted for two years, and watched the ice crush her.

This week on The Backcountry Manifesto, bestselling historian and Outside editor-at-large Hampton Sides is back for part two, this time on In the Kingdom of Ice. We talk about:

If you're into polar survival, forgotten American history, or watching very confident experts get people killed, this episode is for you.

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In February 1779, the most famous explorer alive was hacked to death on a Hawaiian beach while his own men watched helplessly through field glasses from the ships. Weeks earlier, thousands of Hawaiians had greeted him as the god Lono — his arrival matched their prophecy down to the shape of his sails. So what happened? And why had the most rational, even-keeled commander in the Royal Navy spent his final voyage burning villages over a stolen goat?

There are now more scientifically valuable T. rex fossils in private hands than in public museums. This is the finding of a peer-reviewed study published last year by this week's guest, Dr. Thomas Carr, a tyrannosaur paleontologist and Associate Professor of Biology at Carthage College.

Carr designed one of the largest meat-eating-dinosaur exhibits in North America, has named several dinosaur and bird species in his career, and has become one of paleontology's most outspoken critics of the commercial fossil trade. He's the critic who gets called by journalists every time a T. rex goes up for auction.

We get into how a dinosaur actually ends up at auction versus in a museum, why the "public trust" system exists, and the case of Stan the T. rex as a cautionary tale for why the public/private discussion matters.

In 1997, a suspected poacher in the Russian wilderness shot a tiger and failed to kill it, instead wounding the animal -- and making it incredibly dangerous. Over the following days, the tiger terrorized the man it believed was responsible, doing so with an eerie sense of focus and cold calculation. 

After killing him, the tiger turned his attention to the residents of the nearby village of Sobolonye, many of whom depended upon the wilderness to make their livings, and so were forced to venture into the tiger's domain.

But as villagers did their best to avoid the animal -- with varying levels of success -- a heavily armed, special government anti-poaching unit, known as Inspection Tiger, sought the animal out. Led by Yuri Trush, Inspection Tiger began prowling the wilderness bordering Sobolonye, searching for signs of the man-eater, and looking to put an end to its attacks. 

John Vaillant is the author of The Tiger, The Golden Spruce, and Fire Weather, a Pulitzer finalist, and a Baillie Gifford winner.

LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Our episode with John on Fire Weather: https://youtu.be/81kwnFFtqP8

John Vaillant's X: https://x.com/JohnVaillant

Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025

Coyote Peterson runs the largest wildlife channel on YouTube: 21.8 million subscribers, five billion views, an Emmy, and a body of work he describes as a mix of Steve Irwin, Steven Spielberg, and Bear Grylls. But who is he really? This week, Coyote drops by the studio to talk about his life and adventures -- and the occasional misadventure -- as he works to educate his viewers on the wild world that surrounds them. We get the three worst things he's ever felt, a brush with an Australian plant that resulted in six months of nerve damage, a twelve-foot Komodo dragon (that he decided to leave alone), and the Bigfoot episode that got him briefly declared a fraud by the national media.

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With the Canadian fires spreading wildfire smoke across the country, Pulitzer Prize finalist John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather, swings by the studio to tell the story of the Fort McMurray fire -- a catastrophe many consider to be the most notorious wildfire in Canadian history.

LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

John's X: https://x.com/JohnVaillant

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Captain Mike Perna has spent 25 years doing something most people think only happens in movies: diving for sunken Spanish treasure. Off Florida's Treasure Coast lie the scattered remains of the 1715 Plate Fleet — eleven galleons loaded with New World gold and silver that a hurricane drove onto the reefs in a single night, killing over a thousand people and strewing their cargo across miles of ocean floor.

This past summer, Mike's crew pulled 1,051 silver coins off the seabed and made national news. He flew from Florida to Montana to tell us how it actually works: the "breadcrumb trails" of coins scattered a mile from the wreck, the magnetometers and metal detectors, the short summer dive season, and the "you never really own the treasure, you just hold onto it for a while" philosophy that comes with a quarter-century of doing it. He brought real pieces of eight to pass across the table, walked us through the legendary Mel Fisher and the $400 million Atocha, and got into the thorny ethics of who really gets to keep history.

Whether you're here for shipwrecks, colonial history, or just a great real-life treasure story, this one's got gold, pirates, hurricanes, and a lead box packed with 16,000 pearls.

1715 Fleet Society: https://1715fleetsociety.com

David Good grew up with one foot in suburban Pennsylvania and the other in the Amazon rainforest. His father, anthropologist Ken Good, spent 12 years living with the Yanomami — one of the last relatively isolated peoples on Earth — and married David's mother, Yarima, the daughter of a headman. Then, when David was six, Yarima walked back into the jungle and didn't come out. He wouldn't see her again for 20 years.

This is the story of what happened next: two decades of trying to bury his own identity, and then a bug-fearing 24-year-old's decision to travel days up the Orinoco River to find the mother he thought had abandoned him. What he found reframed his entire life — a family, a new name, a brother he would later grieve in a Yanomami funeral, and a scientific calling studying the Yanomami gut microbiome, which may hold clues to the diseases of the modern world.

David is a microbiome researcher at the University of Guelph, the founder of the Yanomami Foundation, and the subject of the new documentary WAYUMI. This is one of the most singular life stories we've ever had on the show.

Venezuelan Earthquake Relief Fund: https://welove.foundation

Who was responsible for the disappearance of Amelia Earhart? Was it her oft-drunk but undeniably brilliant navigator, Fred Noonan? Her publicist husband, George Putnam, who pushed his wife toward the PR stunt of the century despite her relative mediocrity as a pilot? Or was it Earhart herself, whose sudden fame had begun to cloud the thing a pilot needs most: her judgment?

Journalist Laurie Gwen Shapiro — a contributor to The New York Times and The Atlantic — spent five years going where no Earhart biographer had gone before. What she found isn't the flawless icon, but a real and complicated woman. Today, Laurie gives us a portrait of the person behind the legend and a deep dive into Earhart's final flight and July 1937 disappearance over the Pacific: a stretched budget, a dropped antenna on the Lockheed Electra, an alcoholic navigator hired because he was cheap, and a pilot who was sick, exhausted, and out of fuel as she searched for tiny Howland Island.

We get into the enduring mystery and the theories it spawned — and why the real story of what happened to Amelia Earhart may be sadder, and more human, than any of them.

Shapiro's book, The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage That Made an American Icon, was named a New Yorker Best Book of 2025.

Laurie Gwen Shapiro Website

Amelia Earhart Project Recordings

The Aviator and the Showman

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