AlwaysGame4Life Podcast
A podcast to bring people together to help bring light,reality and importance of mental health awareness by sharing each others stories, having a few laughs,connecting,living positive, bettering ourselves and each other.
AlwaysGame4Life Podcast
Life's Twists and Turns: A Deep Dive into Abandoned Wonders and Wild Adventures
Ever felt like life is a roller coaster, filled with ups and downs? Ever wished you could keep your cool even during the toughest of times? This episode will take you on a journey of exploration and discovery, as we delve into maintaining a balanced outlook in the face of life's challenges. We'll discuss the importance of physical health and a good night's sleep, share personal experiences of regaining balance during tough days, and the joy of road trips and exploring remote, wild places.
There's an intriguing allure in the mystery of abandoned towns and structures. We'll share nostalgic childhood memories of thrill and adventure as we reminisce our journey into the wilds of remote islands. You'll hear about the wildlife and sea creatures that inhabit these areas, a thrilling experience of finding a hidden carving of an Imperial Japanese flag and even an encounter with the spirit of a dead fisherman. We assure you, the tales we share are both captivating and thought-provoking.
Lastly, we'll throw light on some crazy survival stories from our work and the importance of planning, situational awareness, and preparedness. You'll hear about city kids stranded in the middle of the night with their tent floating in the ocean and a wild experience of a pilot who embarks on a reckless adventure, all serving as a reminder of the unpredictable nature of life. So buckle up, and join us on this adventure-filled episode where we explore life's rollercoaster, the alluring mystery of abandoned historic sites, and the lessons from wild kingdom adventures.
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"Be good to each other and love one another because life is always game for us, so let's be always game for life!"
Always game for life(original) written and performed by Jason Halderson
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Hey and welcome back to another one on the Always being For Life podcast, where we come together, share stories, connect and maybe even have a few lives. It is so good to be back. As always, I hope you are doing amazing out there, wherever you are listening to this podcast in the world. So we are back. I'm here with Rick again.
Speaker 3:Oh my god man. It's been a ride, man.
Speaker 1:No doubt.
Speaker 3:I mean it's only been about what 48 hours since the last one so much can happen, so little time so much can happen in 48 hours 48 hours. The sequel to the sequel of the event that was your Life is now on recording.
Speaker 1:Yes, so what's happening man? What's happening man?
Speaker 3:I don't know, man. I mean, I got my divorce and. I'm trying to find a job and things go one way, then they go another way.
Speaker 1:Oh, I see.
Speaker 3:But in the end they get better.
Speaker 1:So in other words Life is not the wave, the wave. Up, down, up down.
Speaker 3:It was a wave today. I'm sure everyone out there has had this happen. You have a really good day, everything's great. Oh yeah, go to sleep. You wake up and it's like, okay, what happened? Who unplugged me during the night and didn't plug me all the way in? And why is everything out of sync? And you know why is the sky purple and the ground blue, and why do I feel like this? And I actually had such a garbage morning. I just said, you know what I've listened to. Mark, this too shall pass.
Speaker 1:You have the magic for.
Speaker 3:So I curled up on a ball in my bed, put the covers over and just hid there for about half an hour to an hour or something like that, and then I just, you know, um zen, this too shall pass. And I got out of bed and I was like it passed. Oh wow, I'm back to normal. It's the wow factor Yay team, and the rest of my days been great. So you know, what did we learn? What did we learn to everybody? Well, you know, don't feed into the negativity, it will pass.
Speaker 1:You know, amazing. This too shall pass so magic for.
Speaker 3:The magic mark. Magic for.
Speaker 1:The magic mark.
Speaker 3:Come up with your own interpretation, but I tell you man I was kind of touching go there for a while and I was kind of like why am I getting all flipped out?
Speaker 1:Well, you're just on that wave up and down and it just happened to be down and you lost balance trying to go up.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, so one of the things I did was I did my workout. I'd like to do an aerobic thing for like about 30 minutes, just really work it and stretching, and it's not lifting any weights or anything. I just want to stay toned and have good heart health and nothing else.
Speaker 1:It's all good.
Speaker 3:And that made me feel better than I took a really, really hot shower and just let the nozzle on the wall just hit all my sore spots because, for whatever reason, my back was hurting me today. I don't know, I must have had a weird night in position, or something. Yeah, maybe it all kind of came together. I just felt so much better. I do believe there's a couple things that help your brain health, like for not feeling down. One is your gut health and your spinal health. I mean it's all connected.
Speaker 3:right it's all connected and if your gut is healthy because you eat right and you exercise and all that stuff and you keep your body healthy, your mind's healthy too, in the sense that you can bounce back from a day like that. I mean, I'm thinking in the past, when I didn't have these tools and understanding it. That could have laid me out for a whole month or a whole week or who knows. Yeah, so, I'm right on mark.
Speaker 1:Well, you know how I get it? I get it pretty bad sometimes, sure, you wake up with the sore back or sore neck, which ultimately I get my headaches. Yeah. You know, and my headaches are real bad.
Speaker 3:But yeah, no, it was just it. So, yeah, how am I doing? I'm doing good. Now I'm really happy I'm back to my belly.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's all about just regaining that balance right.
Speaker 3:I just hate that feeling of overwhelming chaos. It doesn't happen to me very often anymore, but when it does it's just like oh for the love of you know, like no not happening you know like oh, shoot, shoot, shoot, you know.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you just try to try our hardest to you know, push it where it belongs, yeah, so you know what I'm going to try to do tonight when I go to sleep is maybe just make sure the pillows are in a different place and make the bed differently and, you know, maybe I won't be in that weird position where I must have kinked something or something. You know it happens right. You get tired and you dead asleep, and maybe you thrash around, you don't know.
Speaker 4:And then the next thing you know you're putting your whole alignment out.
Speaker 1:Yeah that's weird. That way, I mean, sometimes I feel like when I sleep sometimes I'm all over the place, and then there's sometimes I feel I sleep, I haven't moved.
Speaker 3:I know what you mean. I've been in the same position since I went to bed, and it's weird because you know you get older and you're always grateful for those nights where it's like, oh, it's like seven, eight o'clock in the morning, after the bath. Yay, I mean, do the night, you know, because it's inevitable, it's going to happen. You got to get up at three o'clock in the morning and it's really sucks because it breaks up your sleep.
Speaker 1:Oh sure.
Speaker 3:I try to do it where, okay, it's sort of happening. Oh okay, I'm on autopilot, I'm still asleep and I'm sort of just praying. I don't bang into anything, it's like can I do this in the dark? And then I hear the water. I'm like, yay, back to sleep, you know. When you hear the water, because it really disrupts your sleep when you go to the bathroom and I don't know sorry old man, here I am, tell you my day.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's just one of those things, right. So but yeah, I don't know. And then you know, we got out and did a little birding the other day and that was nice, we were sunny and we saw some that hairier, oh my god.
Speaker 3:I don't know if that was your energy or our energy or just happened to be that it decided to fly literally like glide over the windshield because we were parked, and land about 30 feet away and look at us like I am so cool and I know it now, if you excuse me, I'm going to fly down the dyke now. It was so cool. It was so cool because they look like an owl. They got that face. You know, that was kind of neat.
Speaker 1:And as difficult as it was, I was able to get out and I think I got a few shots anyway, oh, wow, yeah.
Speaker 3:Oh god, we'll have to share them if they did.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3:And then we went down the road Because it really threw you right past my eye. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We have to send you the shots so the folks can see the one road we were on with all the leaves on it. That was so neat, oh wow. That was so cool. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was almost like tunnel vision. You think you're in a different country. Yeah, yeah, you do.
Speaker 3:You know you think you're in like Lord of the Rings when you see a place like that, where the road goes along and the leaves are everywhere and the trees and the mountain they're all in the photo.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was surreal.
Speaker 3:I just took up my phone but it was kind of like, oh, that's kind of a neat shot, so yeah, so it was kind of cool. I don't know, maybe we'll get out tomorrow, maybe we'll get out the next day. I don't know but it's such a nice way to spend an afternoon, especially when it was warm like that in November, which is kind of weird up here but at our location it's cold, but it was so nice.
Speaker 1:It was. I mean, I enjoyed the vaults here, but it was weird.
Speaker 3:It's weird to have that round remembrance day because usually by now up here in our lovely lower mainland, you're freezing your butt off. Let's be honest, and I was thinking about this. I was talking to a friend about this. He's over in Victoria and he was out birding and we were talking on the phone. He's like I can't believe this. I've seen dragonflies, oh, wow.
Speaker 3:You know everywhere, and for those that don't understand, usually in the past by October, mid October, they'd be long gone because it got cold. I mean, even the beginning of October would start chilling down a bit and you wouldn't really see that past. Maybe the 20th or something. It's mid November and a couple of years ago we had one in December. I have a photograph of it and a dragonfly in December. Oh, wow. Which is wild for this latitude.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3:So yeah, so there's definitely some changes coming in the weather. I agree it's kind of different out there, but yeah, it's been nice getting out and doing the bird thing.
Speaker 3:It's always great when we go out and we bump into eagles and heriars and raptors because they play on the wind and they just make you wish you could fly with them, even though I'm kind of afraid of heights. It's just one of those weird dichotomies about me Not really into heights, but, damn it, if I could fly I probably would Fair enough. But getting back to what we were talking about earlier, it's funny how, for me, I didn't have these tools growing up where I could channel energy in a different way. So it's really fascinating that you can have an off day in the beginning of the day and something that, prior to working on this, would have taken days, weeks, months to feel better.
Speaker 3:It could be like that for me, I'm sure other people that go through this. Now it can be a matter of hours and just turn it around. That's the power of the wow people, the W-O-W on the W-O-W network, the wow factor. That is the truth, though it's really is a wow thing. I think we're onto something. We're going to make the whole world feel wow, and not that commercial. We're not talking about that stuff.
Speaker 1:We're talking about energy within you, that wow energy, you know, walking on that wave and we all lose balance. And if you lose balance, do what you got to, do what works or helps to regain that balance.
Speaker 3:I think what I'm learning in this journey is it's okay to fall, it's just pick yourself up quickly and get back on it. Don't spend too long letting it pull you down. Push it off and get back up. Sounds easy. I guess it is in some respects, but when you work on it, it gets easy er.
Speaker 1:Not that it's easy it just gets easy er.
Speaker 3:Hopefully you know what I mean. I don't know.
Speaker 1:It's like anything with practice or anything repetitive. The more you do it, the more easier for you. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Now look, I know this daylight savings thing is probably killing everybody, because I can't believe it. You know what time it is. My body's still telling me it's a different time Now. I'm sure people have had endless conversations about this. But I'm sure we don't have to really recycle that. I just want to say leave it forward forever, just put it forward. Don't look back and we'll always, be perpetually moving forward.
Speaker 3:You put it back and it's just er, er, er er. I mean that's might be why this week's been difficult. Everybody I talk to is having trouble this week Everybody I talked to you and I think it has to do with that. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So we got to find a way to help our friends out there in the listening universe Come up with a strategy that works if they're having trouble now. Is it one of these things where you have to mentally say to yourself Irrelevant, that's the time.
Speaker 1:then that's the time, yeah basically, I know it's hard to do though.
Speaker 3:I know because your body gets on that schedule. Yeah, it's time to eat, you know. You know it's time to go for walkies or you know whatever. And and that and combination with the days being a bit shorter now, obviously for light, and they will get shorter for the next while, Until we hit the solstice. There, you know it. I think that's part of it too. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm so definitely all I could say is everybody just hang in there, it's gonna get better. I mean it, this too show pass.
Speaker 1:You bet done, done, done yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I mean it's. Yeah, I think you're right, I think it's definitely as a huge factor, especially this week. I mean I've, you know it's been a wave for me this week too. There you go, but you know I just do things to help regain, like you know today. I took most today just for myself. Yeah, you know, reflect and think that's good, that's all. See again. Like I mentioned before, I know there's a slim line there, like because to to allow yourself to overthink can be dangerous as well.
Speaker 1:But yeah, you know, that's right to allow yourself to think and just reflect, you know, at whatever's going on with you or whatever happened. You know, whatever conversation you've had, you know and you're thinking.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, no, totally.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, this week's kind of been up and down for me, with good news, bad news. Like everybody, you know, it's kind of weird. I get lots of good news, then I get a whole bunch of bad news. Yeah now we got good news again. It's kind of like, okay, this is a ping-pong match that we need to stop and just have it maybe be a little less for a while, but I think it's magnified what we talked about.
Speaker 1:Thank you again, right. Yeah, you can't have the good without the bad, that's true.
Speaker 3:You can't have the bad without the good but but I think, I think it's magnified by the fact that we changed the length of the day from this artificial daylight change and the darkness, which is longer now. Yeah, I Don't know there's something about that. Can put your Least for me. It takes me like two weeks to adjust to that. I don't know about other people, but it can. It can some very rarely in years. It takes a couple days.
Speaker 3:Yeah usually takes me about a good week or two, and then okay, now I'm back in the groove.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, yeah, I guess it varies to person to person, I don't know, I'm sure.
Speaker 3:I just it's like, do we really need to do this anymore? Like I get in the old days when everybody farmed. It was important. But can we not keep it Normal and let the farmers adjust their own schedules? I'm just I mean, I don't know, because I think that's what I understand, that's why they do it right, but just which just seems like it's a lot of Change very quickly that nobody really enjoys, and maybe we can find a better way. Yeah that's all I'm saying.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I've been a really weird wave. You know it's bad and I'm good, yeah, and then all of a sudden, like with me, it's been a huge wave of good which is overwhelming, but like but I would say overdo, but overwhelming, not to the end of details but yeah well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a good word. You know, maybe that's what it is that I'm feeling this week and maybe this is what other people have been feeling up and talking.
Speaker 3:It's kind of an overwhelming yeah, Because if you have that type of change, plus you've got maybe the normal life stuff and then other stuff is thrown in there. It can get a bit. It's just sort of over it, short circuit your body a little bit maybe, yeah, and then you just got to reset and feel better and get back into the groove. And I that's how I'm thinking. For me it's been. You know, yeah, I like that overwhelming. Yes, I think you nailed it. I think that's what it's been this week for me, but Not always in a bad way.
Speaker 3:No just more of a whoa. Could we just maybe have this come at me one at a time and Not three things? That it's on. You know, but I can't control that.
Speaker 1:Well, the thing with me is it's overwhelming. It's positive, but it's overwhelming For the reason of it's huge. The one thing, oh yeah, which I will eventually share, just some again, and you know my place to share. But yeah you know, it's huge.
Speaker 2:All I can say it is yes, yes, I mean, I know it is obviously yeah, but I not my place to Discuss that, unless you want to.
Speaker 1:I will eventually, when I know Things are more written in stone, you know and you know, you know in the planning stage and sort of what's going on. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I can see your point on.
Speaker 1:I'm not the type to just jump unless I know I'm not either. I need that certainty, like okay. Yeah, this is this is a go Okay.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and that goes, that goes for anything. Oh sure, when you need, when you meet new people, you know, you know you kind of feel them out, you want to be friends and you know if it's, if it's someone you want to be in a relationship with you kind of want to you know how's this gonna work right, and then, if it looks like it's good, okay, right on yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you do something silly like me and go to college and take social service worker, child specialist with psychology, and then what happens?
Speaker 3:after you trying to sabotage it what happens after I end up.
Speaker 1:Now, I can't help it. It's just natural I profile people, oh yeah. Yeah, I'm gonna try to mean you make someone.
Speaker 3:I'm just gonna stop you right there and say you know, that's probably not a good idea there, mark. But, we all do it. It's just a question of Maybe you want to do it in such a way. It's a positive thing, because when you, when you, say yeah, yeah, no, not an end of war.
Speaker 1:You know what I mean, right it's always going to go first.
Speaker 3:Whoa, that's really negative.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Wow, what are you doing? You know it's human nature to want to slot things into slot. Oh, very true, you know okay, this person has this, this, this, this, I get that but yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean on an ad word.
Speaker 3:Oh, it is a few words like that left in the language, and that's one of them. Oh we learned something today? Um, yeah, no, it that's interesting. Yeah, I do that too. I heck, I categorize everything. Yeah that's my thing, that's the other one. Oh, you know, like birding I was. It a finch? Is it a sparrow? Oh, what is that you know? And it's just done in microseconds over.
Speaker 3:You know, mr, data accessing, accessing and and you know I do that with a lot of stuff right, like we're driving along and I'll drive people nuts. They don't even see what I'm talking about. Oh, that was socks, bro.
Speaker 1:Well, those are all those locks times, I don't you know.
Speaker 3:They say what.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, he clicks or something. Oh yeah, at least I keep my head in the window. Yeah, yeah when I was a kid, my dad would be literally Looking out the window with the steering wheel one hand, going on. What is that? That's a telephone pole. What is that? No, I look at the road man. Drive my mom nuts.
Speaker 3:Oh my goodness, I used to it. I mean, I thought all the kids were raised like that. Realize what I was with other families, you know, and when you go on school trips or whatever it's like, oh yeah, I guess that's a unique thing to my family. Okay, oh yeah. But when I drive, as you know, whatever flies in front of me better be right along the road or across the road, because I'm not looking anything else but the road.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 3:I'm not, I'm not gonna be not. This is a different area. He did that and no one lived here. You can get away if there's nobody on the roads. Back then, but now I mean, if you did that, he'd be wiping.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, now we're just seconds Overwhelmed the traffic yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, when we were kids, my dad was a teacher, right. So when we had long weekends, like the May long weekend, he'd get off teaching at I don't know 330 or whatever, and we'd hop in the car and we drive up to the Okanagan and we get there, you know, just after dinner. Oh you can't do that today. It's a parking lot out there. We'll get there, you know, boy, halfway through the holidays, to turn around, come back. You could do that back then. There's nobody here, man.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, that's great, and you can always get a campsite, no problem, you don't have to reserve them, they just be available. You just show up and, okay, we'll take that one. You know, now it's like oh no, they're all reserved sir. Yeah, it's weird, they're reserved, or excuse me, you're just going for more money.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, to pay for more dollars.
Speaker 3:But that's a different web sort of webinar conversation. We'll leave that for someone else to go on about. But, yeah, you know that's something we'll have to do, though is we'll have to take this on the road and we'll have to get you Out of the lower mainland and go somewhere Fun and new to see some birds. One of the trips I can think of would be just going up the Coca-Cola and going on the other side of the mountains and experiencing the dry belt. It's so different.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Everything's gorgeous, like in the spring. We do that. It was a traditional trip we do, and it's so much fun.
Speaker 1:Oh, I'm sure towards my sisters would be.
Speaker 3:Oh, that area is amazing I've been in that part of the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean this is just like going to Merritt and going to Kamloops and doing that dry zone. Oh my God, beautiful, absolutely beautiful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no.
Speaker 3:So it's beautiful country, excuse me, I'm talking Kootenays. Oh yeah, oh, that's nice country too. Yeah, we're really lucky in this province. We have so many unique, beautiful places that we can go travel to, where you can drive to them. You don't even really need to fly them. I mean, if you got the money I guess you could, but I mean really you can get away with just hop a car and drive, I mean yeah, yeah. It's not that far away, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I really enjoy road trips. I always have.
Speaker 3:Oh, I was addicted to them when I was a kid.
Speaker 1:I'm one of these guys, I go stop. I look at this. What's this?
Speaker 3:Talk about addiction, you know. Oh, there's a such and such in Cranbrook. Okay, let's go, and we get in the car and we go, we do a road trip to Cranbrook on the spot because there's a bird there we want to see, you know there's some rare bird up in Prince George.
Speaker 3:Well, let's go all day long and then all day long we get there, we see it. Okay, now we'll make it into a fun weekend thing or whatever. And oh yeah, we do that all the time Back, when gas was so cheap, you could do. Okay, I'm getting on that subject.
Speaker 1:It is what it is when you can do things.
Speaker 3:Now I'm glad I did it when I did it and I really don't do it anymore because I just who could afford it? Yeah, unfortunately like. I used to go over to the island all the time when I was a young person. I had tons of friends over there. We go birding, we travel around and, yeah, I was a foot passenger, and I'm not kidding. I could do the whole trip for the whole weekend for about 20 to 40 bucks.
Speaker 3:Oh well yeah, we want to go to the pub. Okay, 40 bucks, but you know, I mean like under 50 bucks. I'm not making that up. That's what he's been. Can you do that now? No, no, not jazz Wow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, whole another time.
Speaker 3:You know, and we went all the time to chase birds over there and it was so much fun. So you know I love road trips. I love that stuff.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 3:You know there's a little bit of the adventure In you and me and other people that do that. So there's that, it's the camaraderie of the fun. And then you add the thrill of the chase, because you don't know if, when you get there, what you're going to see is still there. So there's always that aspect. So it's kind of that ooh, hidden element of surprise, you know. So it is kind of a fun thing and it can be very addictive. Oh, no doubt.
Speaker 3:But, at some point I well, when I got married, I had to sort of stop that Because, you know, my ex was like look, you know you can't be doing that all the time, I won't see you. And it's like oh, that's true, and she wasn't into doing it.
Speaker 3:She did a few and she enjoyed it, but it wasn't her saying so. You know, you had compromise, you know, and so I kind of got out of it, and I'm kind of glad I did, because I've seen tons of cool stuff, but I kind of want to learn about the stuff that's here, naturally not the unusual stuff.
Speaker 3:Like that's important to know what's native to the area. Right, and maybe do protection for some of them and I don't mean like stop all this or that, I just mean have corridors, they can live in areas, they can get by. You know, maybe, maybe if they're all migrating along this mountain range, that's the mountain range. You don't put big towers on. That kills half of them. Maybe put it on the one that doesn't have as much. This is the type of stuff you can do.
Speaker 3:It has a huge impact in the positive way, the wow fact. You know I used to do that with environmental consulting stuff, and hopefully that will continue on. I don't know if they'd even do that type of work anymore if they were else with you, but it was really interesting. Yeah, and you get to go to crazy places. I bet yeah, you know places you never go to and you see this incredible wilderness and beauty and oh yeah, mm-hmm.
Speaker 3:And then you really see what the planet's all about, because when you live in the developed area like the lower mainland, let's say you've got little paths of it here and there, but it's not quite the same thing as going up to the mountaintop, but all you see is wilderness. You know, that's kind of a trippy feeling. You know you're kind of like oh yeah, hmm.
Speaker 3:If I had to get out of here in emergency. This is involving a major expedition just to get out of here, yeah, so you know, that's kind of a different feeling. It's kind of humbling in a good way, because you know, you kind of go okay, yeah, now I know where I should be. I think I'm here, but I'm really down here. So that's pause of energy with the wild factor in a different way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, See what I do with road trips is a little different, probably maybe more or just as dangerous, depends what you're doing, I suppose Well you know I might be just saying is I love exploration. And I love to find and discover like a band of people or like abandoned places or like ghost towns, and I film them. I walk and film them. That could be dangerous.
Speaker 3:That could be cool. That could be cool, very freaky though. But can be a jazz, I mean do you go at night or during the day? Well, depending, I guess and do you use night vision and Meant, you know sort of oh yeah, I got stuff that maybe you could find something a little bit freaky walking.
Speaker 1:I got some here.
Speaker 3:Yeah, be careful what you wish for.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I got some gear and oh yeah.
Speaker 3:You know yeah oh, that's cool, that's cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm into that kind of thing too.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, that that is neat. I used to love it when we went to places where you would find, like an abandoned farm house or something, no, no, where, and you know you'd walk around. Hasn't changed in decades. Yeah and it was always kind of that feeling this is really interesting. I wonder who lived here and yeah, yeah, there's a story there.
Speaker 1:I mean, I get so intrigued with ghost towns because, you know, when I walked through them, I just I can't Help to think of the history. Yeah there's people thriving here, sure people in and out of these places, and you know Conversations were here and Julia's and you know amazing energy. Yeah, oh yeah, for sure it's just really intriguing, and especially like the older that you find, because some can be quite old they're just more, more and more intriguing because you you kind of get an idea of how they lived.
Speaker 1:You're like, wow, you know, they lived here in a place like this and they lived like this, you know, and you just kind of explore and discover these things, mm-hmm.
Speaker 3:I love it. Yeah, when we were kids in Arizona, when we went down there for a long period of time back in the 70s what's a lot of time we went to an area when the first nation people lived in the hillside and you can still see where they excavated out the places they live right and they had these ladders, I guess they were really well protected from everything. Mm-hmm, that was amazing, I mean to me as a little kid. I'm thinking how did you Carve it out of the rock To begin with?
Speaker 3:you know we're not talking like drill bits and stuff. I mean they had to use really, like you think about it, very simple tools, I'm sure. And how many years did it take? Because it wasn't just one, it was like several right and and what drove you to do that? And, and you know, was it sustainable? Like, like what happened and what, what were the stories, like I would.
Speaker 3:I mean, you can't know, but no, really know like what was the circumstances, why they did it, was it successful, how long they live there, you know, yeah, just I don't, you mean like that that's even older because I'm that's probably going back. Well, they probably live. I can't remember like 10,000 years ago. Yeah, oh yeah, I don't know if the, the tribe, that that tribe was actually stayed there when there was contact. I have to look that up, but I mean I know they were there way, way, way back. It was just fascinating.
Speaker 3:Oh, for sure and the rocks there. You know they're these gorgeous colors of reds and oranges. Yeah, so it just. It just gives it that total Like sci-fi movie. Feel like you know, you feel like any second that's gonna be planted the apes, and you know that music and you know all that stuff is gonna start happening because you're looking at something.
Speaker 1:It's well, it's not a probably why they film out in places like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's just something about it. Right, Perfect the rock. Yeah, I feel like you're on Mars.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, yeah, but that is neat, you know yeah, like one of my favorite places I've gone to is Goldbridge gold. Oh my goodness, yeah, I've been there. Yeah, beautiful.
Speaker 3:That is a gorgeous place. I saw grizzly bear there.
Speaker 1:That's one, and I feel so lucky to, because I got to go there and and walk through all the houses that are still standing needs and I Got to film and take pictures of the original, the original mine and, yeah, I got lucky because I believe I got the last Video footage and pictures of the original mine, because they took it down right after that. Oh, wow. Yeah, so I just made it on time to you know, experience it and see it, and I like wow right right. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I know, oh, it's gotta be at least 20 years ago now. We were up in like Barkerville, which is that abandoned town up in northern BC. Mm-hmm and it's kind of the same vibe you know you go there and you're like, oh wow, people lived here.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I don't think anyone lives there anymore. Maybe now things have changed, but I don't remember anyone lives there. When I was there it was like a bandit, yeah. Oh yeah it was kind of same idea. It was kind of cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's really intriguing. I mean, I remember not in Goldbridge. There I'm walking through the houses Excuse me, someone were like totally empty. One that I walked through was still furnished and everything. There was stuff in there. And I remember walking in the door and and to my left there was a bedroom. And I turn and I see, you know that what's left of the bed? You know basically the, what do you call it? The? Springs yeah and sitting on there is an open Bible. Whatever's left of it, you know wow, that's pretty one.
Speaker 3:Whatever's left of the Bible.
Speaker 1:I got it all filmed. I got it all in video. Yeah, walking through there.
Speaker 3:Growing up, there used to be a community on Sea Island and my family knew A lot of the people there and then they got kicked out because they were gonna do a runway expansion, which is now the third runway. So for many, many years we used to go in there because it became a band and it all grew in.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, I remember as a little kid these beautiful manicured places and then suddenly it became this wild place with houses, sort of like what you're talking about right and Great for birds. We still kinds of howls in there and and and other types of birds in there, and so I I used to go there all the time, was so close where I live and I knew where all the lousy hanging out, so we'd walk around in this go over trees, be good, and this grow over trees, be good, and you could go in these houses. People of course took all the metals out of them and stuff.
Speaker 3:They're kind of torn up a bit, but it's still like you could go through these and you know people live there and it would. It's too bad it doesn't still exist, because it would have been a great place to do movies because you had that Haunted Cuz.
Speaker 3:It got all overgrown and you know the road is still there but it's kind of covered in. You know, brambles and trees are growing out of it. It was so cool. I'm so sorry it's gone now but they they took it all out for the runway, but it there's a little bit of it left near mcdonald beach you can go to in seaman.
Speaker 3:But it's the same idea. Yeah, I used to love doing that, like I. It would be hard sometimes because they dug out it was all ditches, right, so they would dig out the ability to get to the houses easily, but there would be ways you could get over to them. And I've ever gone in there and it was the same idea. You kind of go in there and like this is kind of creepy, like yes, some ghost gonna come over here, and it was. It had that vibe, you know. You know it was kind of wild, but I Just remember that vibe and I could see how that would be kind of addictive.
Speaker 3:You know what was going on here now, you know, and who lived here, you know, all those questions come up right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I found amazing things up there and I got all the footage.
Speaker 3:Oh, sure, eventually for sure. That's neat. Yeah, yeah, that is so cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I had some great adventures up there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know, when I, when I did the Nice to do bush work, or when I would chase birds or, you know, go birding and new places to see all the stuff around the province, I I just went everywhere and Literally I went to every corner of the province and I've done pretty much been through every town in this province. I mean, it's like it's only made one highway, having to actually driven which the cast you are.
Speaker 3:No well, because it you you really do need like to bring extra tires and Jerry cans and be prepared to have your truck get destroyed If you do it, because it's just a logging road that runs along the off the coast Up towards at Lennon that oh okay, I think north of Rupert, something like that. So I never did get to do that one. I may get to do it one these days.
Speaker 1:I've heard about it. Never say never.
Speaker 3:But but you know, you go through these little towns and you would come across weird things like that Out in the middle, nowhere, and stuff. Oh yeah states that were kind of abandoned and things. It is kind of wild. Mm-hmm, it is kind of wild, you know yeah so I can see the allure of that.
Speaker 1:Oh, for sure.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I Can remember, especially when we used to go down south, like we go to Washington every year, to Wenatchee and that, and there there were these Abandoned farms and stuff in those days and and you would go there and be great for birds. Great for birds because no one lives there, right, so all the birds move in. So you know, oh, they'd be a longer down this there or you know, you'd see whatever, right, like I remember we do that and and it would always make it kind of Feel for the, the pioneers, because it felt because that part of Washington I don't know if it's like that anymore, but always felt very, very Rural, like you could jump back in time and you're back when they first settled the place. Oh well, I like that.
Speaker 3:We used to go bird you know, and you get a real vibe for what it must have been all like at one time. I'm right, it's very desert and things really don't change there that much, right, so it takes a long time and just absolutely beautiful, I mean really nice part of the world, and it was that kind of thing.
Speaker 3:I just remember that there's one place we got that long in your down was always by this abandoned barn and there was this grove of Trees and and they'd overgrown and there but there was like a tunnel in the middle of me could walk in there. That's what the owls are doing. They were flying in there and they'd fly out. Oh man. It was just really cool, and this is all I level. You could walk along and see this.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm, oh yeah, yeah, what about that place? You Actually recently shared photos of a triangle Island or something that's so crazy.
Speaker 3:That is. That is the most remote place you can go to the Miss province that I've ever been and I trust me, have been. A lot of crazy places and that was the wildest one you had to. We had to go by helicopter. We left from Holberg from helicopter. That's the north end of the island. You fly out over Cape Scott and you just keep going To the end. So there's a bunch of islands. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 3:There's Lance, beresford and Cox Islands or the Scott Islands, and then the last one at the very end is triangle Island. Wow, and it's teeny, teeny tiny. It's basically the top of a mountain peak that juts out of the water.
Speaker 1:It's kind of what it looked like in picture.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah so you know what is it like a mile by a mile, If that. And then there's a sea stack there that's attached to it that the waves go under and through. It's hollowed out, but it's thick enough you can walk on top of it.
Speaker 3:Oh, okay collapse on you. I mean A lot of birds next time. And yeah, that that island. There was a book about the place and you know I had a month. I was, we were working on birds, so we had downtime at night. I read the book and back in like 2005 they put two families to settle and farm on there. They didn't have a clue about farming in these days and one of the the main purpose of this was they had a lighthouse keeper there, so they wanted to farm there, to be self-sufficient and look after a lighthouse.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Well, the two families had a big fight Within the first couple of months of living there and they ended up not talking to each other for like 10 years. They were on the island, I mean there's, they're talking like a mile by a mile, you know, and, and what was you know? You love remnants of buildings. So we were in a cabin on the beach that had been put up that year, because the previous one got blown up by the wind, the wind Out there is some of the highest winds ever recorded in Canada. I mean, they, they go beyond on the west coast.
Speaker 3:That way man it's like hurricane force stuff. Who experienced it? It's crazy. And so they had a brand new cabin on the beach. Then in the old days they lived on top of the island and, if you can find archived photographs, they had cables holding everything down. These giant cables drilled into the earth would hold the house down and they would have livestock blown off and and you would find their bones on the beach still. You would still find so crazy remote. Okay, and the lighthouse, for whatever reason they pulled it down. My understanding was that it was just a bit too high to be useful and it would always be shrouded in cloud so that the light would not really shine out and be a beacon for ships. And I believe the light part of the lighthouse is now. Yeah, it's at souk, it's in souk as a you drive by it when you go On the main dragon souk. It's a. It's sort of like a museum and they have okay.
Speaker 3:Cuz. I remember stopping in asking and I found out that's what it was. So but it it was, it was crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it sounds, the weather was crazy.
Speaker 3:The place was crazy, the waves were like Wow. Okay, so you know I we should probably put some photos up, but yeah.
Speaker 3:You. So I, when I wasn't doing net runs, I we were doing songbird banding for SFU, so I was, I was voted the net boy, so I had to do all the extraction. Oh yeah, so you have a stopwatch, you have to go. I think it was like every 15 to 20 minutes you do a net run and you take all the birds out there. They're in there so they don't want them in there too long and we would measure them and look at the fat content on their their bellies to see how they're doing, and then you put a little leg band on them. Hopefully someone else will find that and you can find out about them. Nowadays they put little satellite trackers on them. Technology's so much better now, right, but that's what we did in the 90s.
Speaker 3:So, anyway, if I wasn't doing that, I was scoping the ocean, because the continental shelf Falls away into the abyss. There You're right on the kids, a giant mountain that comes up out of the deep and it's right on the edge of the continent, and from there deep water I Mean like deep blue water. You don't see it unless you go out in the ocean not coastal, I mean offshore and so, as a result, when the wind blew, all the sea birds would come in. The albatrosses, the sheer waters, yeagers, all the ocean birds were just like right there. So I Took advantage of it. So I would just be scoping in my scope constantly, constantly. If I wasn't doing that run, that's what I would be doing and and so I would see some crazy stuff.
Speaker 3:And I just remember watching a freighter going along with in one of the storms and it goes up, I mean forever to go up, right that down, down, down, down, down, invisible, invisible, invisible, invisible. And you look at your watch going Did it sink? I mean it's been like a minute and whoop, it pops up way over here, you know you're like how big is this wave?
Speaker 3:Is this wave like two miles long or something? Probably was North Pacific. They get big water and I mean big water and and so it was really neat for that. But on the last day we had to pack it up because we were the last crew on the island. They had a bunch of crews that you're doing what we were doing, so we had, when they were packing up the cab, and Mark and I, another mark, we we got a chance to go up to the top of the island. You have to go by ropes and do a little rock climbing and then you get to the top.
Speaker 3:Oh, okay and it's very steep and we got to go to the lighthouse stand.
Speaker 3:Oh, okay because they that's left. And then the where the houses were. They pulled those down, but the basements are still there, oh wow. And where they were they Planted fruit trees are still there. The fruit trees only grow up to. About. Well, between where your waist and your kneecap are there a hundred year old trees, because no trees on this island, it no trees grow there, but all the song rivers land in them because they're the only trees on the island. Yeah, so it was kind of wild seeing that. And then we went down into the basement of the lighthouse.
Speaker 1:Oh man.
Speaker 3:And that was so wild. I was glad that mark had a light. So we went down into the basement and there's some wooden beams and things there and and that people had signed their, carved their name in there and there was all sorts of decades there. But the wildest one that we found was on there. It had an imperial Japanese flag. It was in Japanese and it was 1942.
Speaker 3:Good gracious, and I wish I could have gotten a photograph of what it said because it had something to do with long live the Empire or something, and you know those submarines were out there at that time and you know they probably just there's no one around man. They landed there just to see what was there and they probably hiked the island, I mean wow, oh it was so wild.
Speaker 3:It was so wild, I couldn't believe it. I was just like, wow, a little bit of everything here, you know. But that was one of the craziest places I ever worked. I remember the storms were so strong there. The rain not like here, you know just falls straight down, right. It kind of blows sideways, blows up, before it eventually kind of drops, maybe horizontally down. But I've never seen rain that goes upward. Until you go to a place like that.
Speaker 1:Oh geez.
Speaker 3:And then you know we had the tsunamis that came in from the earthquake in Japan. That was wild. Been there about two weeks, you don't see anybody.
Speaker 3:The people you're with are all you're gonna see for the entire time you go to a place like that, there is no one else. You'll see the odd fishing boat offshore go by, that's it. So it was a little weird when a helicopter just came out of nowhere and landed on the beat. I'm doing my net run and this helicopter just lands, boom, three guys jump out. They're parked people and they're like yeah, your boss called us. Oh, okay, cause we only turned our radio on it for one hour at seven o'clock at night to see the battery.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, you got, there was an earthquake, a big one, in Japan. There's tsunamis coming. They've seen them, they apparently they detected them. So it's gonna affect you guys. So we were just told to get out here to warn you. So you're not on the beach, you need to hike up to the top of the mountain and we gotta go. You know, I'm looking at Mark and Mike and going. Maybe they could have taken us with them. Yeah, I'm gonna say it's supposed to be dangerous.
Speaker 1:Good luck. What, the, what the what the F man what?
Speaker 3:the F. So you know, I've never been in a situation before. So it's like, okay, so we took all our food, everything we could carry, we just crammed the backpacks with that and you know, some blankets and shit, and then we just hiked up the ropes as far as to the top we go. So we're not quite at the top, but there was a ledge and it's like, well, surely this will be safe, right?
Speaker 3:So we're sitting there and sure enough the first wave came, and it went right up to the top of Puffin Rock, which we're looking up at.
Speaker 1:Oh, good God.
Speaker 3:And I'm looking at them going. We are F'd and I'm just waiting for it to maybe come and hit me and pull. I mean, you're out in the ocean, no one's going to find your body out there, you're gone. But what happened was unbelievable. So the way the island is situated is, there's a South beach that kind of faces a little bit to the East, a little bit West, but it's to the South. Waves came in from the Northeast, the opposite side, so it wrapped around the island, came around Puffin Rock and because it's so steep it ran out of energy, so it was really high. It just got lower and lower and lower and then it got so low it came in and, unbelievably, it came right up to the door of the cabin and stopped and didn't break like a wave.
Speaker 3:You see on the beach Right, nope, it just went boom. And then the water just stayed there and then kind of went back a bit and it's like, oh, I guess the next one's coming. And then, yeah, it happened all over again the same thing and it did that several times and it was just like a relief. But then it's kind of like what am I seeing here? And I wish we had video cameras, because this is insane.
Speaker 3:So this went on for a while and then nothing happened for a really long time, cause we wrote in this for a long time Like no one's going down below until it looks like it's safe. So it was in the afternoon, much later in the day and I remember we're kind of going. It's been like two and a half hours since one of these things happened. Like do we go down now?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, no doubt.
Speaker 3:And it was kind of decided on yeah, let's just go down Deck, was it?
Speaker 1:The decision was made.
Speaker 3:Deck was it bigger chance right. Nothing else happened, so we figured that the waves had passed us by this point. Yeah, cause there is a moment when they pass you. Okay, we all kind of knew a little bit of a geography and we're all nerds with that sort of thing, so we knew, okay, well, they're gonna pass, and when they pass that should be the end of it. So that's what we figured, and we were right.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Okay, so I had to go do the transit. The transit was a walk where you just see what birds are around and you write it down and you come back. The transit takes you all along the beach to Puffin Rock, which sticks out on the west side, and then you go over a little point called Kyber Pass kind of fun name takes you down to this huge beach. It's the biggest beach on the island. It's the one on the north, sort of west side of the island. Okay, it's very exposed, Okay, and I had been doing this now for a couple of weeks, so you always see the same debris on the beach.
Speaker 3:There's very large logs that don't move and there's things that you find out there that they're always there every time you go. Okay. So I get up to Kyber Pass and I look out and the beach is stripped clean. All the dune grass that had shit in it and had been there forever is gone. It's like someone came along with a giant vacuum and just cleaned it. And then I looked up on the hill which has got a.
Speaker 3:It's a rise but it's a very gentle rise compared to the rest of the island. That bloody wave went almost up to the top of the island. It could have actually come up and over. It was that high, but it didn't quite have enough oomph to do it. Oh man. So it stopped short, thank God, and then it went back down.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And it stripped it of everything. It was unreal. It was unreal. I was like wow, I've just experienced some serious power in nature like they talk about. Like thank God we're not on this side of the island, we would have been swept off.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, that sounds real.
Speaker 3:You know. So, yeah, I've been to some crazy places, done some crazy stuff, had some wild adventures in my life. I was all like my sister says I'm a pirate from another life. I agree, because I used to love this stuff. I still like doing it. It's got a little older and wiser and maybe you know, realize that's kind of dangerous. Maybe we shouldn't be doing that, but when you're young you don't know. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And yeah, crazy stuff, man, Like what a crazy place. But I wanted to mention we had something kind of paranormal happen to us on that island and this isn't just like cabin fever. You know, we're working, so we're busy, you know, and so we were having, we were sitting down to eat and so we had a stove. Like you put wood stove in there. That's what we had. So the wood stove was the most important thing. We always burned wood, everything.
Speaker 3:You want to make a coffee make burn, so we'd have that going all the time and this was October, so it made sense and so we're sitting down to eat. And it's not a huge cabin but the front of it had these huge windows and there's a little deck in front and you would just look out over the bay and then out in the open ocean. It was actually gorgeous. I think I have some poems of that. And anyway, he got three grown men sitting there looking out the window and then this person-like thing walks right across in front of the window and looks right at us and keeps going.
Speaker 1:Interesting All of us ran up the hills on the island.
Speaker 3:No one's supposed to be here. There ain't nothing there. There's nobody there. There's no footprints.
Speaker 1:So I was the first on last year ever seen it. You guys went out, they're just gone.
Speaker 3:So well, yeah, and I said to them what did you guys see? Because I saw an older gentleman in a fishing outfit with a long beard and then went yep, oh, wow, ha, ha ha. Found out at the end of our stay that in like the 1890s, a fisherman got shipwrecked and drowned in that sea cave area of the Puff and Rock.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow, and we weren't the first people to see that. Okay, okay.
Speaker 3:That was pretty trippy.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Because I'm telling you that thing would follow me around. When I was by myself walking it always kind of in my peripheral would see someone walking with me or behind me. It was a little weird, fair enough yeah, when you're sensitive to that shit you notice it most people don't.
Speaker 3:When I found that rare flycatcher it was a great crystal flycatcher. It was the first one for the province. Actually, I was actually not looking up at that point. I was walking on these seaweed rocks and I was just getting. This was like my first day on the island. I'm getting my sea legs right, because I didn't want to fall and.
Speaker 3:I got bad ankles right, so I'm just trying to get in my legs and it really felt like someone tapped me on the shoulder and in my head. I swear to God I heard look up. So I looked up and there's this bird sitting there looking at me and there's a cliff right and it's like sitting on one of these little willowy branchy things and it was like whoa, you know, and this is just no optics at this point, just no optics.
Speaker 3:I was looking at going. I was looking at going Tropicindbird because that's a bird from the south that shows up as bright, yellow and they come in.
Speaker 3:October and then I realized, nope, it's a Myarchus flycatcher and you can see it has an orange and it flies, and you can see it's got beautiful orange wings, orange tail. It's bright yellow on the breast. It's got this gray head, green back and there's a little bit of this vest, of this meat on the head and yellow. And this is where you study. Enough drawings In those days. No internet, just books, and not many photo books at that. So you would look at drawings and I went, oh my God, it's a great Christof flycatcher. I'd never seen one in my life. I just knew that had to be what it was. I was right and it was kind of like after I had this exciting moment, I'm kind of thinking like, hey, wait a minute. I heard a voice say look up, like there's no one with me or what's going on.
Speaker 1:It's funny how afterwards it dawns on me.
Speaker 3:It's kind of like oh OK, so that dead fisherman's spirit was telling me something. Ok, this is getting a little too twilight-zony, like what the hell's going on here. But that's what that place was like. Wow, I would go back in a heartbeat if I could. But they don't do that project anymore. But I would love to go back, even by boat, just to go around the island and see it.
Speaker 1:Oh, I'd love to.
Speaker 3:It is a trip and a half. Like I have lived on the West Coast a lot, I've been out in windstorms, I have been out in places that get this type of thing, and that experience was one of the craziest I've ever had. Like the gussa wind would brutal. You couldn't open the door, you couldn't open the door. The door opened outward, you couldn't open it. And if you did open it, you might not be able to close it because the wind would just like you felt. You felt like the whole thing was going to blow away. So it was a brand new cabin. I want to mention this because people are going to laugh their buns off. So, ok, so it's a brand new cabin, right? Ok, well, we'll put it all together. But you know the roof? Well, we'll just put the odd bolt in there just to hold it down, right.
Speaker 1:Brilliant.
Speaker 3:So we got this huge first windstorm right. We only been there like maybe a couple of days and the roof was like going vvvvkabang, vvvvkabang.
Speaker 3:And we're getting vortexes in the cabin Like oh. And we're madly putting bolts in and another person's putting the nut on and the third person's just cranking it with, you know, trying to get it down, and we had to put a whole bunch of these in. So we went in layers it was like every four just to get it so it's solid, and then every other one, and then finally we had it all bolted down. The roof stopped doing that. Can you imagine? He spent millions of dollars on this.
Speaker 3:They had to ship it out there and hold our doors to get it built. And nah, we'll just yeah, we won't worry about that roof, Even though there's a problem here with winds, and that We'll just put a few bolts in it and just hold it together. I caramba.
Speaker 1:Just lifts off Like it could have yeah.
Speaker 3:And if it had, we were completely pooped. Oh man. There'd be no way to get out of that wind, not a chance. That was. The only thing that could show. The wind was when you were in the cabin. Oh, you know, it was just a surreal experience. No no.
Speaker 3:I tried to go swimming there. Oh jeez, really, and then I realized that the killer whales out. There are the nomadic type and they're looking at me like, oh, that looks rather tasty. You could just tell they were coming in to check me out. Like bad idea, bad idea Get out of the water.
Speaker 3:You've seen enough of those footages. You don't want to be. You know they don't want to have. You know they don't want to accidentally bite something they're not interested in either. So I got out of the water. I'm like, yeah, I'm not going to go swimming. I love swimming, right.
Speaker 1:Oh OK.
Speaker 3:But yeah, oh man, what a trippy place.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh. Yeah, it sounded just wild, Holy.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm forgetting things here. I remember we were on Puff and Rock and a storm came in and the tide came in with it and we got caught, oh, and the only way to get down was when the wave pulled back. You had to run and they had. These rocks stood out, these flat rocks that have been molded that way from eons of wave action, and they rose up just enough above the water that if you jumped on it you wouldn't be pulled out to sea. And I had to do that four times to get to the beach. Oh jeez.
Speaker 3:So by the time I got back, I was soaking wet.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I'm hiding on Puff and Rock down below where the sea cave is and man, the sound of that water running through there's like a freight train. It was unbelievable. It would roll around and you'd hear this, eh, and then you'd see the water kind of splash over. And then I actually crawled up and looked and it scared the shit out of me. It was like these massive waves coming down on you. But just the shape of the rock where we were was this lip that it would bounce it and then it wouldn't come over. Right right.
Speaker 3:Because it could have pulled us off, and that was a bit of a miscommunication on the part of my boss at the time. He didn't realize what the tide was doing Because I kept going maybe we should be leaving. Oh, it'll be OK, it's like oops. So luckily we dried out our clothes and everything. But I remember having to run for it and it was. You know, don't look back. Just there's your objective. Don't worry about the sound of the freight train that's coming behind you. Don't worry about the fact that it's breaking above you and that the water will then hit and blow you Just get on that rock and hang on to everything.
Speaker 3:you got the first one. I almost got swept off because that was the one that had the most water affecting it. The next one was a little bit less. And it just got progressively a little bit less. A little bit less. A little bit less by that point. You're soaking wet. It's almost November. Yeah, it's cold.
Speaker 1:Oh, man yeah, no Just crazy shit.
Speaker 3:But you know that's field work. That's what it used to be like. It was a real cowboy sort of yeah, we're going to get her done. You know kind of thing right. And you know I'm still here, Lucky. Yeah. Lots of close calls.
Speaker 1:I can only imagine.
Speaker 3:I told everybody about the tent.
Speaker 1:No, I don't think so. I'm not that aware of it.
Speaker 3:Do we have time?
Speaker 1:I think so Sure we do.
Speaker 3:I don't know if I told you guys this story, but everything I'm going to tell you is absolutely true. I think, personally, this would make one of those amazing shorts in the theater. When you go see a movie you know these have a little short movie before the theater. There's no dialogue, it's just two people talking and trying to survive.
Speaker 3:So it was our first day on the job and the way the job worked was we got flown out to locations at the end of the day, camped and then we had to be at the mouth of these inlets. This is all Klaakwatsound. Okay For first light. So you had to be up at three o'clock because that's when the Merlits came in and you wanted to be there when the twilight happened, but I don't know. Four o'clock or whatever, and try to see how many there were. The old days are trying to gauge how many were going into the forest because there are a seabird that nested an old growth tree branches.
Speaker 3:Okay, first day, two city kids, mitch and I, and I'd worked out there before Mitch hadn't. This was his first field job, so I was kind of like the guy in charge, though honestly, the way we worked it didn't really matter. So we go out there and we get dropped. We're going to get dropped off and we got out too late. The pilot was a bit late and we got out there right at sunset. The sun was actually down.
Speaker 3:He came back when the light was kind of crappy. So I'm not sure if it was deliberate, I'm not sure if it was an accident, but I'll let you tell you what happened. So he goes. Well, that area looks pretty flat and there's a bit of grass, so I think it'd be okay there and it's like okay, well, drop us here. Now a little backstory. I'd worked out there a couple of summers in a row. I knew how wet it got. So everything we had was given to us by the company we're working for. And so we went to the hardware store and we bought waterproofing and we waterproofed the crap out of that tent and our equipment. So that tent was as waterproof as you could get. It also had a very high zipper. It didn't have a low zipper on the ground, it had one of these high ones.
Speaker 3:Oh okay, okay, and that was critical later on. So one end of happening was we didn't stake the tent in and got dark. Eh, go to sleep, guys, but really so I don't know, I can't remember him where exact time, but it would have been around 11 o'clock at night, which is pitch black. There's no lights, no people, no nothing out there. Man, it's absolutely zippola, okay. And I had a nightmare that I was drowning, that I was being engulfed in water and I couldn't breathe. And I woke up and I was like what the heck was that about it? And I go to roll over and it's like what the hell, man? There's no ground underneath us. What the hell? Oh, fuck, there's water.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3:Uh-oh, and this is where you learn something about yourself, your friends, your coworkers. Well, Mitch became a very good friend, but at this point, you know, he was just a friend I knew and we're same age and they won an opportunity.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know he's into that sort of stuff, so I didn't know him as well that I was going to know him, but we'd gone. Birdie, we're friends. You know there's two things that need to happen in a situation like this you stay extremely calm and you take control. If you freak out, if you lose it, if you get scared, if anything happens that's not what I just said you will die. That's the end of it. Okay, I know that sounds kind of weird, but that's the only way I can put it that makes sense. So, okay, so I go. Hey, Mitch, he goes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, what's up, man, we're floating in the ocean. He goes. What I said well, did you feel the tent going up and down? Feel the ground? Man? Oh man, what the hell? I said well, okay, man, A bunch of stuff's going to happen. Okay, yeah, yeah, right on. I said well, let's just do it. He goes yeah yeah, right on.
Speaker 3:You know, he just like let's do it. They pause. That's the other thing. So we had a tote that we put all our stuff in to keep it dry. So we stripped, we basically got into underwear I think we still had underwear on, if I remember, yeah and we put everything in the tote and it was a fairly big one, so no problem and we put our sleeping bags and another one and our optics and all our equipment that we had. Everything went in these. I think it was two totes, yeah, and so all it was left was the tent and we kept the headlight. We had a headlight on you know so we kept that.
Speaker 3:I wear glasses. I'm blinds of bad if I drop it. So this is going to be an adventure for me, because if I took them off, I'd be out of focus and I can't see what I'm doing in the dark. That's a bad thing. Plus, there's waves. So, anyhoo, I opened the tent, and we had to do this very carefully because if the water had come in, and sucked in.
Speaker 3:They fucked me. So it goes. Okay, I'm going to go first man, all right, he rolls in. I pulled the tent up and he's going holy shit, I'm dog palling. I go hang on a second and I just remember him going and you see this headlamp go down, down, down, down, down, down, down down, this little tiny light, and then up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up up, and he comes up and he goes holy shit, I'm like, okay, that's all I need to know. I said I got an idea and I'm looking out and I'm going hey, we're lucky here. There's no cloud, no moon, but there's no cloud. I can see the stars.
Speaker 3:Amateur astronomer, this is going to work out. I'll tell you why. All the valleys run east to west, west to east. You know, they're horizontal and on north-south. We just have to find the north star. I showed it to him. Okay, we're swimming for that. And then I got in the water and I had to hold my glasses with one hand and dog paddle with the other because I did not want to lose them. And then he took the tent and I took the totes and then we switched off and we did this for hours, and I mean hours, and we were quite a ways out. I guess it was a pretty big tide and it sucked us right out.
Speaker 3:So I remember you could sort of make out landforms, because you could see where the stars were, and then you could sort of make out oh yeah, okay, that's where the there's a point of land there and those are mountains there, and you could sort of get a rough idea of shapes and stuff right. So it finally gets that time of the morning where you get a bit of light. It kind of helps, that kind of hurts, because you think you've done a lot in the dark and then you realize, oh no, you got a long way to go, young man. So we just kept going and we would side stroke, back, stroke, dog paddle, rest, you know, and we kept totally calm.
Speaker 3:And finally we got to a point where it wasn't bigger waves was, you know, the waves were not too bad, and then you could sort of see oh yeah, we're getting to a point where I think we can make that and you have to always deposit. We're gonna do it, we're gonna do it. There's none of this. I think I can't know you are. So the dialogue was like you know water coming up and down and you know you're in waves, you're swimming, and you're kind of just communicating the best. You can't really hear. You got half of you's in water, half of you is in water.
Speaker 3:And then finally we got to a point where I kind of dragged a little behind, cuz I was dragging the tent. I didn't want the tent sink, because then we would have had to explain where the tent went. I wanted to get back with everything and we did, and so he, he got up a little bit ahead and then he goes hang on a second and he goes down on the water and he kind of went back up again. I think I think I hit the bottom and I said, well, it better not be a basking shark man like Tell me, it's the ground, it's gotta be the ground man. And so he went down, he goes. Oh yeah, I know, come on, come on it, you'll be okay.
Speaker 3:So at this point you're exhausted, you've been swimming for hours like hours and you can't feel your arms, your legs like. This is the part I want to say that hypothermia was hot oh my gosh. So I would hit that and I just bounce up and take a breath and this point's like can't swim anymore, my arms are gone and I had the tent such a way that it was kind of wrapped and tie okay, yeah and if I had to drag it at this point, it's like, well, I don't walk, I don't care anymore.
Speaker 3:so Finally, it got to the point where it's up to my neck okay. I could sort of walk.
Speaker 1:Remember, I'm barefoot so I could slice up my foot because I took my shoes off.
Speaker 3:Anyway, we eventually got it where you know. The water went down and down and it was kind of just up to our waist and at that point I didn't care. Now I'm going to make it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm drowning now, yeah.
Speaker 3:I just like want to find somewhere I can rest because I'm exhausted. I made a really smart call the night before. I said to him why don't we bring soup and why don't we bring in our thermos coffee for the morning? Then we got something hot to drink, something give us energy, and then when we get picked up, you know we'll eat when we get back, but we'll have something in our stomachs. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we did that the night before and we had brand new thermos. Right, I saved our bit there. But so we, we, we trudged and trudged and trudged and we get to sort of the beginning of the inlet and then it's like, oh my God, look at all the forest and Look at all the trees down and you know how the hell we getting out of here. And then it sound like you know what, who cares? There was this huge log of the size of a bus. It was a huge, huge log. Remember, we're in water, so you know it goes up quite a ways up.
Speaker 3:But we still had to lift ourselves up. I don't know how we did it, considering our arms were working. We get up on top of this thing. It's like oh my God, and we start having food. It took a both of us to open everything with using our hands together to do all this. We couldn't feel anything. Our hands were almost numb.
Speaker 3:But, somehow we managed to get his knife out and we managed together to carve a line. Let's see what the tide's doing. It kept coming in. It kept covering it up, covering it up. We're at the top of the log. There was a thin strip left. We're actually dangling our limbs in the water and I at this point I'm like I don't care drinking coffee. It was like ice melting. You could feel your body coming back to life, you know. And it turns out we had a phenomenal view of the inlet and a perfect sky to do the job, so we did the survey.
Speaker 3:Oh my God, let's do the survey, the sun came out and you know, like now it's like daylight and it's sun's out and it's sort of getting warmer. Come back to life. And I said to me let's just do it. He goes yeah, yeah, let's do it, yeah. So we got our equipment out, we did the survey. We're both exhausted. We did it and it's like okay, great, got some data, let's get out of here and bushwhack our way to. There's got to be a road somewhere around here. And that's what we did.
Speaker 3:We bushwhacked through half flooded areas and mucky areas and we got our asses out Because we found a channel that was sort of like a river that came in there and then we walked that there was a bridge and I'm like, okay, we're done, there's a road, yeah. So we got up to the road and we were there for a little while and we kind of started drying out a little bit and I said to him I said I don't know what went on here, I don't know if this is an accident or if this is a joke like a hazing. I said some of these pilots are cowboys because I dealt with them before and they may think two city kids, let's, let's buck with them. So here's what's going to happen. We're not going to say a word, we're not going to say anything to anybody. We just keep this to ourselves because they gossip and this will go around like wildfire and that's our first day. We don't need this Sounds good.
Speaker 3:So I said he's going to ask us why we're wet. Because yeah, and we're soaking wet, man, we can't hide that. I said I'll just tell him it rained. Doesn't matter if it's a clear sky out here, it always rains out here. You'll have to believe it. And that's exactly what he did? He shows up and he has a stupid look on his face and this is why I think he did deliberately. I'll never know, but we really wet and it's like, yeah, it rained and we got in the back to say a word.
Speaker 3:And we get to the hotel we're staying in and it looked like we were a bunch of gypsies. Man, we had everything drying in the sun and anyway. So from that moment on I always was grateful that I had looked at the map and I kind of knew roughly where I was going. Like me kind of needed to know we can't go blind. But they didn't give me any time. We arrived there that day and then we're suddenly out the door. I was kind of rushing so we took the time after that to really know where our spots were, all the safety precautions. But the thing about that particular pilot he was a total nut. He actually did crazy stuff and he could have killed us many times over. He'd stall the thing, he'd make it free fall, he'd do things, and you know he would just do it. He for a joke.
Speaker 3:Just a sick joke, right, and you'd be screaming I'm going what the hell's wrong with you. I remember one time I got off he did that and I got off the chopper and I said you know, if you ever do anything like that again, I'm going to you know, and you know I was really angry. And so what ended up happening to him? A year later, mitch and I and our crew are leaving at Tafino airport, getting on a helicopter to go to one of the watersheds, and a chopper came in and we weren't really paying attention and we had two pilots that previous summer okay, one guy we loved and the other guy we hated, and it was the guy we loved it.
Speaker 3:Suddenly he goes, it's the burner boys and we turn around like and you know hugs, now we're talking away and of course, the other people kind of like who is this guy? And and he goes. I can't, I don't remember his name, I'm not going to say it on here but anyway, you know such and such.
Speaker 3:I know you would have problems with him last year. You guys are really troopers. You never really said anything. I said, oh, we said to each other, I bet it goes well. I got news for you After you guys finished your project, which would have been both the end of July okay, so it would have been about a month later. He pulled, I guess, the same stuff he'd been pulling on you, or he stalled the helicopter and made it free for all and didn't say anything and you know, I thought it was a big joke and and Mitch goes yeah, that actually happened.
Speaker 3:and yeah, yeah, it was horrible. Well, he did it to the vice president of the company and soon as he landed he got fired.
Speaker 4:And he got his license taken away and you should have seen the two of us.
Speaker 3:Man, yes, hi five. And yeah, baby, yeah, whoa, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Cliffs all happy to. He didn't like him and he goes. Well, I got a retirement party coming up. Are you guys going to be able to come? And I told us that we couldn't go and we always felt really bad we couldn't go. But it was like, oh man, he got his come up.
Speaker 4:I can tell you some other crazy stuff, but I don't want anyone listening that might be able to figure out who he was.
Speaker 3:Leave it where it is in the long back channel of history but, that's a good, a crazy shit I used to deal with with work. You would get personalities. You'd get some nice people, some crazy people, sort of half in, half out people and adventures and stuff and just crazy stuff, man you know, Wild. I'm amazed I'm still here. But you know what it does is. It allows you To think differently because you're not in that nine to five thing. You know you're more of a free spirit. You got time to absorb things right.
Speaker 3:And it allows you to really understand what we're talking about. Today I look at that stuff and how it prepared me and now I can understand the positive energy, the wow, the wave energy, all that stuff we talk about. It's a real thing, you see it in nature, you feel it in nature and to finally, at my age, figure it out is really cool. So I had a really weird day and it ends on a great note. Man, I mean, I'm sorry, I mean to horrible.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, I just love the story.
Speaker 3:I have other ones. We could probably do that as an occasional segment. Ricks, rick, experiences brought to you by the wow factor at the WOW network, so yeah, yeah, maybe will be something like that. Oh my god, but that, yeah, I never forget that looking up at this huge wave crashing on this rock that normally you look up at and you think, well, nothing would be that high and you're going. Oh no, I really thought it was going to take the cabin.
Speaker 3:I thought that whole thing of water was just going to come in and take our cabin with the radio and then whoa, what do we do? We just sit here for a month until finally. I guess we better go check on I'm now. No doubt would have been a little bit of Lord the flies and hunger games all once there, man, there's only three people and there's only enough supplies for so long, you know.
Speaker 3:Crazy man crazy so yeah, there you go guys. So yeah, when you're really down about your job, when you're having a weird day with a co-worker, just remember Ricky baby and Mitchie boy swimming for their lives in the dark.
Speaker 3:And Joe, you heard it here, you know and think to yourself well geez, you know, bob may be a bit of an ass, but he's not like that. You know, he's not throwing me out the ocean and having to swim for it. And it's all perspectives, people, it's all you know, degrees of whatever. And yeah, man, that really happened. No, that really happened.
Speaker 3:I haven't even warmed it or changed it or any of that man. That's just straight up. But that wouldn't that be a great short movie. You know, chopper takes off and you know the dialogue be something like well, I guess we better get some sleep and then boom, and then it just goes exactly I told you, and then the action would be the camera would be in the in the water with two guys going for it, and it would have that sound of the water when you go under the wave, up in the way.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I can see the camera work going under a lot of dialogue.
Speaker 3:Man, this is just a story about survival and it would be one of those like anybody hears this, let's do it, and you know it would be so cool to do that because it's a success story. You got to wonder the odd time it doesn't work out. What was the element that made it not work out? I think we figured out. I want to say this at the end here, before we go why we're here is because the tide was coming in, right?
Speaker 1:That makes sense.
Speaker 3:That made the difference and the other thing was there's a failsafe point, there's a death point, there's a point of no return. When we got out the maps and we kind of figured out where we were by what we saw from the mountains around us, we were just at the beginning of that zone. We figured that it had it gone on another half hour. Not a chance, given how exhausted we were and everything.
Speaker 3:I think the difference was I woke up at the right time I was going to say we had the tide going in, even though you're working your ass off and you're totally dying from cold. That little extra push just gave us enough of a nudge that we got there. It's just a whole bunch of things came together. People that have known me, just go. You got some weird guardian angel energy man, because I shouldn't be here. I could have gone a long time ago.
Speaker 1:That's another episode as the wow factor turns in the game of life on always, game for life, anyway yeah, no, it's been, it's been awesome and thanks again. Yeah, any time, I love the stories.
Speaker 3:We'll talk about animal encounters next time on. You know, always game for life, so yeah, oh man crazy stories. Too many Cougars. That's all I'm going to tell you. That's that's going to be the only.
Speaker 1:Oh boy.
Speaker 3:Vancouver Island. Too many F and Cougars because you're up at 3 30 in the morning and, oh my God, we'll leave it for next time.
Speaker 1:Yes, I've talked too much. It's all good. It's all good. I love the stories and I hope everyone else does. Man.
Speaker 3:I hope you guys are great.
Speaker 1:They're at the stairs home, but yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, we can do an episode for that too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My sister wants me to write a book. I don't think a book will cover it, or maybe a movie.
Speaker 1:Well, this is why I am writing a screenplay based on my life. Same idea, right I?
Speaker 3:don't know how you can capture the fear but also the joy at the same time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:I think you have to have the right camera person.
Speaker 1:You do you do Because a lot of it has to do with camera work. You know, Certain movements of the camera gives it certain emotions.
Speaker 3:That's right you know, yeah, absolutely. Like I'm just remembering how cold I was and it's weird and warm and toasty here, but talking about it. I started getting that numbing cold. Isn't that bizarre? Your brain works.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, like smells and stuff, yeah, it's. Oh yeah, no when animals.
Speaker 3:Don't attack, but think about it. That'll be next time on the Wow Factor Network. You know the W-O-W. Oh man, oh my.
Speaker 1:God, oh, so yes, it has been a spice. Once again, thank you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, man, that was great, Great stories. And next week on the Wild Kingdom, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyway, and as always you know, we thank you for all the support and the love.
Speaker 3:That's wonderful.
Speaker 1:Thank you, we appreciate it.
Speaker 3:I hope you guys enjoy my stories. I love telling them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, man, for sure, for sure. And yeah, don't forget once again, as we always say you know, share those pictures and Get the word out. Follow that Facebook and Instagram and all those.
Speaker 3:Embrace the Wow Social Network, share the Wow. Yes, be in the Now with the Wow man.
Speaker 1:They're all in the description below.
Speaker 3:That's right. You don't need drugs for Wow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all done now All natural baby.
Speaker 3:Unless you need that, then okay, I'm not judging.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't know it helps.
Speaker 3:It helps, but if you can do it on your own. It's almost a pure form of Wow. Oh yes, it's the vintage. Wow, it's the Wow for the Wine Seller. Yeah, Certain, ooh, good year.
Speaker 1:It's a good year, yep.
Speaker 3:Okay, man wrapping up, All right that was great.
Speaker 1:Oh man, holy cow, all right. Well, as I always say, you know, let's love one another and be good to each other, because life is always game for us, so let's be always game for life. You betcha and love ya. Stay safe, Stay blessed.
Speaker 3:Peace, love all that good stuff people. Love is game for life.
