Show notes
> Find galleries, blog posts and many more episodes at www.mountainairpodcast.ukEpisode 2#08 sits down with the charming and disarming J.R. Harris. Since 1966, J. Robert Harris has undertaken more than 50 multi-week trips into the world’s wild places: “all unsupported and most of them alone”. He’s driven to where the US road systems end (or did in the late 60s), 120 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska, and he’s since been above the Arctic Circle 15 times (“there’s a lot I want to see up there”, he says). He’s tracked down caribou migrations in the Yukon, lived amongst Inuit people, and walked some of the finest hiking trails in the Dolomites, on New Zealand’s South Island, in Chilean Patagonia and in the North American Rockies. And, after a lifetime of making dramatic journeys an annual habit, in 2017 he published his first memoir: Way Out There: Adventures of a Wilderness Trekker.Perhaps most impressively of all though is this: he’s just a regular guy from New York. Well, perhaps not so regular. He grew up poor in one of the city’s many low-income housing projects with a lot of family love and support, but no money to make his ambitions happen… and the outdoors wasn’t even a part of his thinking until the Boy Scouts introduced him to landscapes without pigeons, concrete and cockroaches. He got a job, earned himself a scholarship and put himself through university at Queen’s College. After graduation, he founded his own marketing company and settled into a life of work, family, and meticulous planning of audacious adventures all across the planet.Since 1993 he’s been a member of the prestigious Explorer’s Club, and in recent years he’s dedicated himself to giving motivational talks to schools, clubs and social organisations. J.R.’s message is simple: if he can do it, then you can do it.> Find out all about J.R. at https://www.jrinthewilderness.com/Listen, enjoy, tell your friends, subscribe to the podcast if you get and chance, and thank UKHillwalking.com for their kind support of this series![episode recorded on 09/06/22]
