Explore: A Canadian Geographic podcast

The former Mayor of Cambridge Bay and Canadian politician speaks about her experience being taken away from her home at four years old and the impact of Residential Schools on the Inuit

We're thrilled that Gary and Joanie McGuffin are joining us for this last episode of our 2023 Summer Canoe series. Be sure to check out the previous two, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and RCGS Explorer-in-Residence Adam Shoalts. Arguably no couple has paddled more of Canada's waterways than Gary and Joanie have together, and it all started just over 40 years ago when, as newlyweds, they turned their honeymoon into a canoe trip from the Atlantic Ocean, across Canada and up into the Arctic Ocean. That trip inspired the best-selling memoir Where Rivers Run, which was followed by many more paddling adventures and best-sellers. Their documentary, Painted Land: In Search of the Group of Seven, about their efforts to track down, by canoe, the exact sites of famous Group of Seven paintings in Northern Ontario, won a Canadian Screen Award. They are the founders of the Lake Superior Watershed Conservancy and their current project is a Smithsonian exhibit, traveling through Canada and the U.S., called Stories of the Boreal Forest. Gary and Joanie have a lot of great stories from their many paddling adventures and there are a lot of great nuggets of advice in here for young explorers, including how to get started and how to canoe long distances as a couple, and then with a child, and then with a dog. It’s a fun and inspiring conversation. Enjoy!

Take a step inside Mount Meager to learn all about this volcano that last erupted 2400 years ago, plus testing space probes that could be used in the search for life on one of Saturn's moons

Set off on some incredible adventures with George Kourounis as we explore icebergs in the North Atlantic, Africa's most active volcano and more

“If you want to understand what it means to be fully human, go to Africa.” Mario Rigby’s claim to fame is an impressive one. The RCGS Fellow was the first person to walk from Cape Town to Cairo solo. A Toronto based eco-adventurer, focused on sustainable travel and transport, Rigby covered 12,000 kilometres over two-and-a-half years and had a lifetime’s worth of adventures along the way. He was robbed of most of his money on just his second day out; he was attacked by wild dogs, pinned down under gunfire in a war zone, turned away at borders and detained by police multiple times. But mostly what he remembers is the incredible warmth and hospitality of the people he met along the way — that sense of community, ubuntu, that transcends African borders. It was a journey that he says fundamentally transformed him as a person and how he interacts with the world. He has since focused on being a positive and vocal advocate for diversity in the outdoors, encouraging people of colour to get out and explore nature. As part of that, he cycled across Canada. This fall, he’s spending a month travelling across the islands of the Bahamas using only human power: walking, swimming and paddling. He’s about to start a new adventure TV series with a focus on eco travel, working with the late Anthony Bourdain’s producers. And he’s working on a memoir about his African walkabout. That is the focus of this conversation. As well as amazing travel stories, there are a lot of great tips for young explorers in here, from what to wear on your feet to how to introduce yourself to new communities, learning to accept help and funding expeditions.

As Canada’s first Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children, Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with former Residential Schools, Kimberly Murray discusses her new role and how she endeavours to support communities searching for their missing children and seeking justice for the children, families and communities

Best-selling author and American journalist, John U. Bacon discusses the 1972 Summit Series and how Team Canada radically changed the game

Senator Mobina Jaffer discusses the lead-up to the expulsion, the difficulties and benefits of starting a new life in Canada and the important lessons to be learned by Canadians in how we treat refugees today

Award-winning Canadian wildlife photographer, Michelle Valberg joins the podcast to discuss her new appointment to the Order of Canada, philanthropic work and early days as a photographer

Award-winning journalist and best-selling author, Roy MacGregor discusses the history of the canoe and how it continues to capture the imaginations of people across Canada and beyond

Canoeing legend Wally Schaber talks about his lifelong love of the Dumoine River, the last of the wild rivers in the Ottawa river watershed

As NASA and the world’s space agencies prepare to return to the moon, geologist Dr. Gordon "Oz" Osinsky helps train potential lunar explorers in remote northern Labrador on what they could find there

Connie Walker discusses her late father’s experience of abuse as a First Nations child at St Michael's Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan

During the pandemic, it’s safe to say most of us spent some time self-isolating, but not quite in the way our guest today did. Polar explorer and RCGS Fellow Sunniva Sorby spent over a year and a half, including two long winters, in an uninsulated 1930 trapper’s hut on the Arctic island of Svalbard, which is halfway to the North Pole from northern Norway. Along with her Norwegian colleague, Hilde Falun Strom, they set a record with their all-women project, called Hearts in the Ice, for their time spent in their isolated outpost while doing scientific research for NASA, the Norwegian Polar Institute and the British Columbia Technical Institute, among others. Their work focused on bringing attention to the massive impact climate change is having on our polar regions. And now they are about to do another Hearts in the Ice project, this time at Cambridge Bay in Canada’s High Arctic. Born in Norway and raised in Canada, Sunniva Sorby has spent decades carrying out expeditions in the Arctic and especially the Antarctic. She was part of the first ever all-woman team to reach the South Pole. You can learn more about the Hearts in the Ice project at www.heartsintheice.com/

This episode is about the incredible journey of a group of new Canadians. Former child soldiers who fought in Sudan during Africa's bloodiest civil war were shipped off to Cuba and finally found refuge in Canada — many of them in Brooks, Alta. Our guest is Canadian anthropologist and author Carol Berger, who spent 20 years gathering the stories of former child soldiers in South Sudan, East Africa, Canada and beyond, for her new book The Child Soldiers of Africa's Red Army. Two million people died in Sudan’s Civil War from 1983 to 2005, a conflict that eventually led to the creation of a new nation, South Sudan. The tens of thousands of child soldiers made to fight in that war came to be known as the “Lost Boys.” As we discuss in this conversation, they were never really “lost,” but rather stolen by the same leaders who are now heading up the government of South Sudan, and who continue to press children into the conflicts that have flared up since. As well as being an anthropologist and author, during the 1980s and 1990s, Carol Berger was a foreign correspondent based first in Khartoum, Sudan, and then later in Cairo, reporting for the BBC, The Guardian and The Economist. Born and raised in cattle country in southern Alberta, she now lives in the Egyptian capital.

I'm thrilled to have Christian Stenner, one of Canada’s leading cave explorers and a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, as our guest on this episode of Explore. It's the International Year of Caves and Karst, which is why we wanted to have Christian on the podcast now. But given the mind boggling stories he has, the tight squeezes he's been through, he's definitely welcome anytime. As one of Canada’s top cavers, Christian has been part of many of the most important cave expeditions in this country, and beyond, over the past decade. These include the exploration of Bisaro Anima in British Columbia, where he and his team proved it was the deepest cave anywhere in Canada or the U.S. He has also led expeditions in the Castleguard cave, Canada’s longest, and inside active volcanoes in the U.S. Pacific Northwest like Mount St. Helens and Mount Rainier. And those experiences led to him becoming one of the first grantees of the Society’s Trebek Initiative in 2021. He’ll be using those resources to explore Canada’s only known active volcano, Mount Meager.

We’re thrilled to have Ray Zahab back on the podcast. He was our very first guest back in 2019. Give that one a listen if you want a great overview of his amazing career as an extreme athlete and expedition leader travelling to some of the hottest, coldest, most remote parts of our planet. His latest expedition, a traverse of Ellesmere Island on foot and by ski in the depths of the Arctic winter, fits right into that mould. What I love about this conversation is not just hearing what he saw and about the immense challenges he faced along with his partner Kevin Vallely and their team, but also his decision-making process in calling a temporary halt to that expedition in the face of far worse-than-expected winter conditions. And, how that decision making process has changed in his 20-plus years taking on these extreme kinds of journeys.

When Moose Jaw, Sask. comedy duo “Leroy and Leroy” began posting their short video hot-takes on Instagram and TikTok in 2021, their hope was to get up to 10,000 followers. Just over a year later, their quirky videos highlighting the odd sites and signs found along Canada’s roadways now have hundreds of thousands of followers and over 12 million views on TikTok alone. In the process they’ve helped bring some much needed comic relief to the world, while road-tripping back and forth across Canada, signing off with their signature catch phrase: “There’s Always Something to Do!” In this interview, David and “Leroy in front of the camera” talk about the duo’s origins, the creation of that catchphrase, the legend of Brandon (Leroy and Leroy’s Pete Best), the moment they knew they’d taken off, Leroy’s fashion sense and where they’re headed next (look out mid-west America!).

It’s always fun when one of our RCGS Explorers-in-Residence comes on the podcast; they’re always up to the most fascinating things. That’s especially true of Jill Heinerth. An internationally acclaimed cave diver, bestselling author, and award-winning documentary filmmaker, Jill has been spending the pandemic exploring Canada’s longest underwater cave system, underneath the Ottawa River, just northwest of the nation’s capital and down the road from her house. What she found there is remarkable: “The most dense biomass I've ever seen in a freshwater cave.” Heinerth takes us into those caves to reveal the remarkable life inside. And she previews her forthcoming RCGS-flagged expedition diving around the coast of Newfoundland, which includes the incredible story of Lanier Phillips, an African-American sailor in the Second World War who survived the sinking of his ship off the coast of Newfoundland, got ashore and expected to be lynched by the locals, but instead was rescued and nursed back to health, sparking lifelong friendships and a remarkable life in the civil rights movement.

Severn Cullis-Suzuki, the new Executive Director of the David Suzuki Foundation, has been an environmental activist for almost as long as she can remember. That isn’t surprising when you consider that her father is David Suzuki, Canada’s leading environmentalist and longtime host of CBC’s much-loved show The Nature of Things. Cullis-Suzuki’s moment in the environmental spotlight came early. It was 30 years ago this year when, at the age of 12, she gave world leaders a dressing down about the state of the environment in a speech at the Earth Summit, the first ever UN Climate Change Conference in Rio. We talk about that viral moment in a pre-social media age, and how its echoes are found in the words and actions of today’s young environmental activists, like Greta Thunberg. We also discuss what it’s like to fill her father’s very big shoes at the foundation that carries his name. And, as the RCGS marks the UN Decade of Indigenous Languages, we get into her immersion in Haida culture on Haida Gwaii, off the northern coast of British Columbia, and why she believes the link between Indigenous languages and the land is key to turning around the state of the environment.