The Backcountry Manifesto

Amelia Earhart: What Really Happened? | Laurie Gwen Shapiro, Author of The Aviator and the Showman | Ep. 034

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 [http://lauriegwenshapiro.com/] Amelia Earhart Project Recordings [https://sova.si.edu/record/nasm.2020.0025] The Aviator and the Showman [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593295900]   Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025

Are Survival Shows Real? | Cody Lundin, Dual Survival's Original Host | Ep. 033

Cody Lundin has spent 34 years keeping people alive. Almost none of it looks like what you've seen on TV. He's the founder of Arizona's Aboriginal Living Skills School, an EMT since 1993, the author of 98.6 Degrees: The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive and When All Hell Breaks Loose, and one of the two original hosts of Discovery's Dual Survival. He built (and nearly broke) his career by refusing to fake it for the camera. We flew Cody up to Bozeman, took him duck hunting at the crack of dawn (his very first time), and then sat down for one of the most no-BS survival conversations we've ever recorded. Hayden throws him a series of escalating worst-case scenarios: a desert breakdown, a broken leg in the Colorado high country, a hiker lost at an alpine lake. Cody refuses every easy answer, demanding context and walking through what staying alive actually requires (hint: it's rarely the sexy stuff). Along the way: the physics of freezing to death, why your survival shelter should be invisible, the truth about what survival television did to his profession, and the on-camera stand that cost him his show. Producer Andrew even gets pulled in to defend his off-grid cabin.   LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE The Survival Show [https://thesurvivalshow.com] Keep Your Ass Alive Podcast [https://open.spotify.com/show/75m0Hx0p47OovzZEQhKTMn] Cody's Book 98.6 Degrees: The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive (2003) [https://www.amazon.com/98-6-Degrees-Keeping-Your-Alive/dp/1586852345] Cody's Book When All Hell Breaks Loose (2007) [https://www.amazon.com/When-All-Hell-Breaks-Loose/dp/142360105X]   Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025

The Worst Possible Way to Cross the Atlantic | Steven Callahan, Adrift | Ep. 032

Steven Callahan should have died at sea. In early 1982, roughly a week out of the Canary Islands, something — he's convinced it was a whale — holed his self-built 21-foot sloop Napoleon Solo in the middle of the night. What followed became one of the most famous survival stories ever told: 76 days adrift in a five-and-a-half-foot inflatable raft, alone, crossing nearly the entire Atlantic before a handful of fishermen found him off Marie Galante. In this conversation, Steven walks us through all of it — diving into the flooded, pitch-black cabin to grab his ditch kit, coaxing a single pint of fresh water a day out of a temperamental solar still, spearfishing the dorado that became both his food and his "spiritual companions," and the Day-43 disaster when his spear gun punctured the raft a thousand miles from land. But this is less a blow-by-blow than a master class in the psychology of survival from a philosophy major who treats reality as something to be accepted exactly as it is. We get into the divided self, the brutal "recoil" of giving up, why denial is the number one enemy, and how an ocean nearly killed him and gave him a life.

Mutiny, Cannibalism & How America Really Began | Peter Mancall, Historian | Ep. 031

Your social studies teacher gave you Henry Hudson in about two sentences: a guy, a river, New York. Dr. Peter Mancall — USC historian and author of Fatal Journey and the new continental history Contested Continent — is here to give you the other 99%. We start with Hudson's doomed final voyage: iced into the bottom of Hudson Bay for a brutal winter, a starving crew, a mutiny, and a captain set adrift in a rowboat never to be seen again. Then we zoom all the way out. This is a two-hour tour through the early America that gets left on the cutting-room floor — the fur trade and the "perfect trade good" of alcohol, John Adams' filthiest joke, the cannibalized girl of Jamestown, Columbus's fall from hero to villain, Cahokia's lost pyramid city, the Vikings who quit North America, and the 1680 Pueblo Revolt that scrubbed an empire off the map. It's bloody, it's funny, and it'll permanently change how you hear the word "Thanksgiving." If you love history that refuses to flatten people into heroes or villains, this one's for you.   CREDITS Hosting by Hayden Sammak Production by Andrew O'Neill “Welcome to the Backcountry” theme song by Logan Roth, Will Brown, Arjun Dube and produced at Treacle Mine Studios, Phila, PA Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025

Free Soloing is Actually Really Easy | Lincoln Knowles ft. Cedar Wright & John Long | Ep. 029

Lincoln Knowles is 21 years old, lives out of his Jeep, and has the climbing internet at war with itself. To half the community he's a reckless idiot free soloing a harder route every day until he falls; to the other half he's the funniest, most self-aware thing to happen to the sport in years. The truth — as Hayden finds out — is that the kid is a genuinely elite climber (a sub-10-hour Nose-in-a-Day, on-sight free solos in Yosemite, V11 on the board) who's running the most committed satire in outdoor media. This one goes everywhere: Lincoln's Yosemite "tear" and a storm-soaked bail off the Nose, a surprise call to climbing legend John Long, the Alex Honnold text and the Climbing magazine hit piece, and an extended phone-in from Cedar Wright, who makes the full punk-rock case for why this stuff matters. It's funny, it's genuinely unsettling when the talk turns to mortality, and it's impossible to look away from. Whether you think he's the future of the sport or a tragedy waiting to happen, you'll understand exactly why everyone's arguing about him. In this episode, we talk about: * The Yosemite Tear: El Cap & the Nose-in-a-Day * Phoning John Long About the Nose Record * Bailing Off the Nose in a Snowstorm * Viral Clips & the Parody of Climbing Ego * How Free Soloing Began * College Dropout to Content Hustle * Courting the Haters * Risk, Death, and Mindset * Family Silence & Attempted Interventions * Honnold's Text & the Climbing Magazine Drama * Climbing Idols: Honnold, Croft & Dean Potter * Teaming Up with Cedar Wright * Lifetime Bucket List: Free Rider to Everest * Free Solo vs. Trad: The Pinnacle Debate   LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE https://www.instagram.com/lincolnclimbs/ https://www.youtube.com/@UCynU0ZTas1hr6HMg-XAnTBA  Our episode with Jamie Leibert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FHdEmyKRQw Our episode with John Long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kDnVzaNE7g Climbing Magazine Article: https://www.climbing.com/culture-climbing/lincoln-knowles-going-viral-free-soloing/ Jayme Moye: https://jaymemoye.com/published/ [https://jaymemoye.com/published/]   Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025 #podcast #rockclimbing #freesolo #climbing