Hi! I’m a writer and photographer (and a budding filmmaker), an outdoor adventurer and expedition guide, and an elected Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and 2021 recipient of the RCGS Sir Christopher Ondaatje Medal for Exploration. (Thanks to Dan Milnor for the photo above – at Cuverville Island, Antarctica).

And I’m a PhD scientist, too. Although I no longer work as an exploration geologist, my sciences background is a huge part of who I am and of nearly everything I do.

 

Like most everyone on the planet, my plans for 2020-2021 were pretty much derailed by COVID-19. But I sure have made up for it since!

I did manage to get out on the water in late 2020 to participate in the big Coastal Cleanup that took place along British Columbia’s wild and rugged northern shores. You can find out more about that in this article I wrote for Canadian Geographic, or check out the photos and video that I have posted here on my blog. And – with ultramarathons and other races being cancelled due to the pandemic – I did achieve my big goal for 2021 of running the 47 km Juan de Fuca Trail in a day, on September 7th, working to stay as fit and strong as I can no matter what!

Since then, I have been working as an expedition guide and lecturer, on expedition cruise ships (mainly for Lindblad/National Geographic and for Silversea) in Patagonia, Polynesia, the Pacific Northwest (BC and Alaska), and Antarctica. This is a really good fit for me, both as an adventurer and as a scientist. I love working in these amazing places, and I seem to have found a really appropriate niche for where my skills lie – explaining geology and history and other “technical” subjects to people in a way that is not only easy to understand, but that fires people up and makes them enthusiastic about learning more!

My current projects and endeavours include:

The Secret Coast Expedition project: This is the project that I was in the midst of when COVID hit. The expedition, co-sponsored by the RCGS and the Spanish Embassy in Canada, was a one-month wilderness journey down the wild and mostly unpopulated west coast of Vancouver Island. It was not only an exploration of this remote, surf-swept coast, but also of a nearly forgotten period of our history: the earliest contacts between the indigenous Nuu-chah-nulth people and the earliest explorers to arrive here – the first of whom were the Spanish. My first round of presentations about this project in November, 2019, were to packed houses! COVID unfortunately disrupted the continuation of the tour… but I will be back working on the book project this summer! More info here: www.secret-coast.com

My project The Food Garden is temporarily on hold. This project is about creating a series of books aimed at regular urban people who want to produce their own food. I have always had worries about food security, and what the future for the human race is given how we are treating our planet.

COVID put a bunch of my other projects on hold, but made me think “Well, I grow a lot of my own food and feel reasonably secure about providing for Dave and me. But maybe it’s time to share some of that knowledge.” So I embarked on a series of books – I will probably come back to them in a year or two, but for now, I am focussing on other projects.

If you want to check out where I got to, here you go: The Food Garden website. I think that being able to produce at least some of your own food is a super important ability to have, and I will come back around to this project to share my knowledge here.