Alastair Humphreys + Beau Miles

Trailmark 01 · 5 February 2024

Alastair
Humphreys

Trailmark's first guest, on whether curiosity can survive without an airport.

Trailmark audio

Episode 01 · 40:12

Alastair Humphreys was the first conversation Trailmark ever recorded, in February 2024. A day earlier he had been, by coincidence, guest number one thousand on somebody else's podcast, and he was gracious enough to treat guest number one like the numbers ran the other way. He spent four years cycling around the world. Years later he spent a year inside the twenty kilometres around his home, a patch of suburban farmland he expected to exhaust quickly, and it kept producing things he had missed. There was a town five miles from his front door he had never once been to. Ridiculous, he decided. Go have a look.

Part of the reason was environmental. An outdoor career had begun to work against the places he claimed to care about: flights made the remote trips possible, and the books and talks encouraged other people to want the same trips. Staying local was partly a correction and partly an experiment: could curiosity survive without an airport?

The harder problem was the audience. In Iceland he once paddled into a gorge he had already judged too dangerous, because it would look so good on YouTube, flipped instantly, and came as close to drowning as he has ever come. He dragged himself to the bank and sprinted upriver, blowing the whistle on his life jacket to stop his friend from following. Then he discovered he had forgotten to press record. Out of the missed footage came the rule he still runs trips by: would he do this thing if nobody ever found out? He was not pretending that sales, applause and rankings felt irrelevant. He was trying to keep them from deciding which risks were worth taking.

Near the end he turned the tables and told me the way I travel, a tent on the back of the bike, pedalling away from the front door, was in his experience the best form of adventuring there is. He has crossed continents. I have crossed parts of Ontario. Coming from the first guest this show ever had, I have chosen to believe him.

Trailmark 12 · 2 October 2024

Beau
Miles

He makes films entirely for other people, and misses the part where he simply gets to be.

Trailmark film

Episode 12 · 1:07:53

Listen on Trailmark

Beau Miles took my call on his phone from the cabin at the top of his five acres, apologizing for being late because his computer up there had no Chrome and the wireless was not going to download it in time. Problem solving on the fly, as he put it. It took us eight months to land the conversation, and it was Alastair who had put us in contact in the first place, which is why these two share a page. Beau grew up on a small farm in rural Australia, where being outside was ordinary life rather than an identity; you slept inside and ate inside, and the rest happened out there. Guiding turned that life into paid work, after a ten-day hike at fifteen where he watched the guides and thought, I want to be them. The pay was peanuts, but he was already spending peanuts. By his math, a good deal.

The trip is now the short part. Beau spends two or three hundred days a year making things after the fact, and the films and books pay for the next piece of work, but the work also keeps him at a desk reconstructing an experience he would rather still be having. He misses the movement, the problem solving, the temporary stupidity of living by the body. He was also about to fly to Portugal to shoot a television pilot for a brand, and he called himself a bit of a fraud for it, a backyard adventurer commuting to the far side of the planet. He does not think he has the right answers at the moment, and he said so, which is not a thing people with platforms usually say. He also told me he despises the phrase trip of a lifetime. He hopes he never goes on one, because it would mean never going on a better one.

We disagreed about the audience. I took Rick Rubin's side, that the work has to be made for yourself first, with nobody else's reaction in the room. Beau flatly refused the premise. He makes films entirely for other people; given the free choice he would run, ride, fish, or take his daughter out and film none of it, and simply be. His father has painted landscapes his whole life, always for himself and always to sell, and Beau holds that both can be true at once. He was blunt about money and reach because both keep the work alive, and blunter still about how the machinery works: Jimmy Chin will come on this podcast, he told me, when the audience is big enough, and that is the cruelty of creativity, rightly or wrongly.

At the end he told me I would make a bloody fine teacher, and offered to have his people ring Jimmy Chin on my behalf. For the record, he added, I don't have any people. That would be me cold calling too, mate.