The Backcountry Manifesto

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
Keep Your Ass Alive Podcast
Cody's Book 98.6 Degrees: The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive (2003)
Cody's Book When All Hell Breaks Loose (2007)

 

Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025

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.

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

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/

 

Copyright Outdoor Visions Media LLC, 2025
#podcast #rockclimbing #freesolo #climbing

Adam Weaver holds the world record for the farthest anyone has ever traveled from a cave entrance — miles of crawling and climbing into a place no helicopter or rescue team can reach. He edits NSS News, America's only national caving magazine, and was recently tapped by ABC News to break down the Laos cave rescue for the public.

In one of the most genuinely unsettling episodes we've recorded (Andrew does NOT like caves), Adam gets into the gear, the 9-inch passages, and the very real ways a cave can kill you — plus the full story of a teenager trapped a mile deep, 24,000-year-old mummified animals, and a quarter-mile traverse with no floor.

 

In this episode, we talk about:

Becoming a Caver: Beyond "Spelunking"

The Record: The Farthest You Can Get From Rescue

Cave Conservation & the Technical Side of Caving

Mummified Animals & 1890s Newspapers

The Real Hazards: Lost, Stuck, and Hypothermic

A Teenager Trapped a Mile Underground

Surface Chaos, Three Agencies & "Lavender Larry"

The "Atom Smasher" & Making a Cave Passable
What Lies Beneath: A Quarter Mile With No Floor

Living Underground: Multi-Day Cave Camps

Who Owns a Cave? Permits & Land Access

Nutty Putty & How Dangerous Caving Really Is

Naming Discoveries: "To Boldly Go"

How You Actually Map a Cave (and the LiDAR Future)

Black Hills Institute: Dinosaurs & a New Plesiosaur

Where to Start Caving & Farewell

 

CONNECT! 

Catch up with Hayden on IG, TikTok, and more: https://linktr.ee/Hayden_Sammak

Follow TBM on Youtube, IG, and everywhere else: https://linktr.ee/BackcountryManifesto

 

CREDITS

Intro and Animations by Barry Thompson

Photograph Contributions for Animation by Carver Weeks

Additional Graphics by Andrew O’Neill 

Production Assistance by John Stock 

“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

#podcast #cave #rescue #cavediving #laos