Amy & Dave Freeman are modern-day explorers who have spent over two decades on human-powered wilderness expeditions. In 2010, they completed a 12,000-mile journey across North America by canoe, kayak, and dog sled. Five years later, they lived off the grid for an entire year without re-entering society. No stores, no electricity, no roads, just the two of them, a nylon tent, and the frozen lakes and forests of Northern Minnesota.
Amy & Dave Freeman are modern-day explorers who have spent over two decades on human-powered wilderness expeditions. In 2010, they completed a 12,000-mile journey across North America by canoe, kayak, and dog sled. Five years later, they lived off the grid for an entire year without re-entering society. No stores, no electricity, no roads, just the two of them, a nylon tent, and the frozen lakes and forests of Northern Minnesota.
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Dave Freeman:
If you spend three weeks in the wilderness, your body adapts and it becomes normal. After three months, anything else feels abnormal. Was it harder in the winter because it was cold and we had to spend an hour a day cutting firewood to warm our tent and cook our food? Yeah, it was harder. But once it becomes your routine, you don't think of it as something that's hard. It's just life.
Shelby Stanger:
That's Dave Freeman. Over the past 20 years, he and his wife, Amy, have built a life around long human-powered expeditions through the wilderness. In 2010, they set out on a 12,000-mile journey across Canada and down to Florida, traveling by canoe, kayak, and dog sled.
Then in 2015, they spent an entire year living in the wilderness without re-entering society. No stores, no electricity, no roads, just the two of them, a nylon tent, and the frozen lakes and forests of Northern Minnesota. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living. An REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard.
Amy and Dave are lifelong people. In their 20s, they each became wilderness guides in northern Minnesota leading canoe trips through an extensive network of lakes called the Boundary Waters. Dave also started a nonprofit called The Wilderness Classroom, which allowed him to share his outdoor adventures with kids across the country.
Amy and Dave Freeman, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. Excited to have you both on. Just context, how old are you guys about now? Or maybe what decade of life are you in, if you care to share that? And then when did you meet?
Dave Freeman:
Well, we're in our 40s. It's a good decade. I'm a few years older than Amy. We met in a town called Grand Marais, Minnesota, which is right on Lake Superior. And Amy was guiding kayak trips in the summer. She was in grad school. I was running office space upstairs in the building the kayak shop was in, and we just started going paddling after work on Lake Superior and yeah, that's how we met.
Shelby Stanger:
Amy, what's the romantic version of this?
Amy Freeman:
The romantic version? Well, yeah, a little more context. So, Dave had already started the Wilderness classroom, this educational nonprofit where the premise is to go on these human powered adventures and share them with schools.
So it was really before blogging was a thing, Dave was blogging basically for schools, and the technology was such that he was carrying a great big laptop and able to post postage size stamp pictures on the internet for these schools that were following along.
And so hearing that this guy's coming to the shop to rent space upstairs and hearing a bit about his story, I really was intrigued hearing that he was doing these expeditions because it was something that I really wanted to do. And my big thing was wanting to kayak around Lake Superior.
It's one of those things, you'll launch your kayak and okay, I know I'm going out for a couple miles and turning around and coming back, but I always wanted to know what was beyond the next point. And so I said to Dave one time when we were paddling after work, like, "Hey, I'd really like to do this. What does it take to do an expedition?"
Dave Freeman:
She said that she wanted to do it by herself. And then quickly, I was like, "You probably should do it with somebody else." And then shortly after that I was like, "Maybe we should do it together."
So we met and we started dating, and then the next summer, we set off and paddled around Lake Superior. And basically, all of our friends were like, "Well, they're either going to be together forever or they're never going to talk to each other again." Luckily, it was the first.
Shelby Stanger:
Amy and Dave set out to circumnavigate Lake Superior together in 2006. Their trip lasted two months and covered a thousand miles. A few years later, they dreamed up an even wilder plan, a human-powered expedition across South America.
First they would bike over the Andes Mountains, then they would paddle 3,000 miles down the Amazon River all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. Along the way, they would document their journey through photos, videos, and audio recordings, sharing the experience with students across the United States.
Dave Freeman:
So we had many thousands of students following us and making decisions, and we were posting journal entries and scientific data and a podcast and doing all of that. And so then afterwards-
Shelby Stanger:
This is 2010 and you had a podcast in 2010?
Dave Freeman:
No, that was 2007 and 2008.
Shelby Stanger:
That's very early.
Dave Freeman:
Yeah. So we were using video satellite communication to beam into schools. We were posting audio files, which would now be called the podcast. We were doing chats. Before video chat, we would set up during this half an hour or this hour come and join us in the chat room.
And we had a moderated chat room where classrooms could ask us questions as we were typing answers in the rainforest. And so basically, we developed this whole system to bring students virtually to these wild places like the Amazon Rainforest.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay. Do you have any stories about the Amazon? I've paddled three days at the Amazon and never really want to go back. It was beautiful, and I got eaten alive by bugs, and I thought I was going to be wearing a bikini and-
Dave Freeman:
Oh, yeah, I don't know. What's a good story, Amy?
Amy Freeman:
Right. Well, I was just thinking about the clothing. It's like we lived in basically full lawn sleeve shirts, quick dry material because you're just constantly either soaked in sweat or we would jump in the river, jump out of our canoes to go swimming, so those in quick dry pants and rubber boots.
Dave Freeman:
But I love the Amazon. Basically, rather than setting an alarm in the morning, we would just be woken up by howler monkeys that were howling in the trees right before it started getting light. It is just amazing. Everywhere you look, you see new and different things that you've never seen before.
It was common to swim with river dolphins, like Pink River Dolphins or Gray River dolphins. We would set nets to catch fish to eat, and about half the fish we would pull out of these nets were piranhas. And the other half we just ever really knew because there are more species of fish that live in the lakes and rivers in the Amazon than the entire Atlantic Ocean.
It's so bio diverse that everywhere you look, whether it's underwater or in the treetops, you're going to see something new every day. It's just amazing.
Shelby Stanger:
Did you ever get scared like piranhas? What do you do when you catch a piranha?
Amy Freeman:
Well, the key is, with the piranha, while it's alive, you really don't want to handle it because it can squirm around and those teeth are just razor sharp. So you want to bop it on the head, make sure it's dead before you're pulling it out of the net.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay. You guys are the craziest mofos I've ever interviewed in my life. There's just these humble Minnesotans who are just doing it. It's amazing. So the Amazon, you're beating piranhas on the head, but then taking them in, swimming with pink dolphins and gray dolphins. Anything else? I'm sure you saw Capybaras and all sorts of wildlife.
Dave Freeman:
Oh, yeah, all sorts of stuff. Here's a cool example of how we worked with the kids, relates to Anacondas. So when we go into schools and do live programs for the kids or even virtual programs through the wilderness classroom, we have the students lay down on the floor and build the largest anaconda ever found.
So it's like six kids laying on the floor. The kids love anacondas. And so we would get all these emails when we're traveling in Amazon, "Find an Anaconda for us. Find an anaconda for us." So one day we went to check our fishing net, and an anaconda had tried to eat a fish that was stuck in the net, so it was all Tangled up, and so we had to untangle it, and we took a bunch of photos and everything and then we released it.
And so as soon as we posted that on the Wilderness Classroom website, all these kids are like, "You found an anaconda for us. Thank you so much." And so it makes learning a lot more fun and interesting for them.
Shelby Stanger:
When Amy and Dave got back from the Amazon, the two once again returned to Minnesota and picked up their guiding jobs. In addition to leading canoe and kayak trips, they also became skilled mushers or dog sled guides in the winter. Their experience guiding year round set them up well for their next wild idea.
This time, Amy and Dave would attempt a human powered trip across North America. They knew that they wouldn't be able to tackle this massive adventure all in one go so they broke it up, traveling for months at a time. Occasionally, they would come home to Minnesota, swap out gear, and sometimes even lead a trip or two to earn some extra cash.
By the time they finished in 2013, they'd covered 12,000 miles and traveled through some of the most remote wilderness in North America. In 2010, you had this wild idea to travel 12,000 miles across North America together, how many miles a day would you travel?
Dave Freeman:
I would say our average travel was between 10 and 30 miles a day. If we're dog sledding, 10 would be deep snow, we just resupplied, so the sleds are super heavy. If our sleds were lighter and maybe the wind really packed the lake, the dogs could run faster, then maybe we might be able to do 30 miles.
And the same if we're traveling by, say, kayak or canoe, maybe we have a really strong headwind and we're paddling into the waves, maybe we only go 10 miles, we have a tailwind or it's a beautiful flat, calm day, and we paddle from dawn to dusk, then maybe we do 30 miles.
Shelby Stanger:
What did you eat every day and where did you sleep?
Amy Freeman:
Well, we were very used to eating oatmeal. We had a pretty simple menu. It was rotating between two different breakfasts, oatmeal or granola with a good amount of peanut butter and other stuff added in. And dinner was rice and beans or spaghetti, something simple and easy to pack. And lunch was something we wouldn't have to cook.
And so that'd be a handful of trail mix and some cheese and tortillas or something like that. And as far as where we slept, it was mostly pitching a tent every night unless we happened to be in a community.
And in that case, since we were doing these wilderness classroom assemblies, oftentimes we'd be in communication with the principal of a school or the teacher. And so they would host us. Sometimes that meant staying at somebody's house, but other times it was at the school.
Dave Freeman:
And that reminded me of a story when we were dog sledding. It was really cold. It was 40, 45 below zero, and we popped out onto this giant frozen lake called Great Bear Lake. It's like the size of Lake Erie. It's a huge lake, and there's only one community of about 500 people on it.
And we were dog sledding across the last five miles, and there's a winter road so people could drive their trucks on it. And a truck came by, said hello, and they asked us where we were going to stay, and we were like, "Well, maybe is there a place to camp on the outside of town where we could stake out our dogs?"
And they're like, "Well, we're about to leave town to drive over the ice road to a volleyball tournament, why don't you stay at our house?" And so we followed them through town behind their pickup truck with our sled dogs down the icy roads, pull up in front of their house.
They're like, "Stake the dogs here. There's frozen fish for them in the shed. Help yourself to anything in the fridge. We'll be back in four days." And that was it. They were like, "Just stay at our house." So we met so many amazing people along the journey, but when we were dog sledding, it was especially just the most amazing people you could ever meet.
Shelby Stanger:
Were there any other highlights, just incredible wildlife you saw or something beautiful or something really funny that happened?
Amy Freeman:
Yeah. Well, the first thing that comes to mind for me is during the kayaking portion. As we were approaching Juneau, Alaska, we saw humpback whales a ways away off in the distance. We could see their tails like, there's activity over there and spouts of water.
And we paused in our kayaks, and Dave was carrying a big camera in a Pelican case in the kayak basically on his lap. So he was getting situated, removed his spray skirt in order to be able to get the camera out and got that all situated. And before we knew it, there were two humpback whales approaching us.
We were preparing to just shoot some photos with the zoom lens of these humpback whales way in the distance. But here they were coming towards us. And in fact, it made us nervous at first. We were just like, whoa, these are very large animals, and did they see us? What are they doing?
And we realized they came up to us and then paused just 25 feet away or something like that. So one of them was right on the surface. So it's kind of like the back of the whale and hearing its breathing and just the fishy smell from what was coming out of the blowhole. It was just so wild.
And it was a moment for, I think both of us where time just stood still. I bet the whole encounter lasted like 30 seconds, but it was astounding to be in the presence of a creature that large and intelligent, and they're just coming to see what's going on. What are these funny shaped things out in the water?
Shelby Stanger:
Amy and Dave Freeman are hardcore adventures, and at the same time, they're incredibly common kind. If you met them on the street, you would never know how wild their life had been. After spending months canoeing around Lake Superior and then six months paddling down the Amazon River, the two decided to take on a 12,000-mile trip across North America.
In the spring of 2010, Amy and Dave packed up their gear, traveled to Bellingham, Washington and started paddling north to Alaska. Eventually, they would make their way all the way across Canada and even paddle down the Eastern US to Key West Florida. It was a grueling physical journey and a massive emotional commitment.
I mean, three years is a long time to devote to anything. But surprisingly, there was only one moment when Amy and Dave considered calling it quits. Was there any time you just wanted to quit?
Amy Freeman:
I had a time. I bet Dave doesn't, but there was a point in time when we... Well, so when you travel that far following waterways, you do have to go up stream at times. There's no way to do it so that everything is downstream and you're just going with the flow.
And so it was when we were in northern Canada where I just wanted to throw in the towel because we had just been trudging up a river. It was a river with some rapids in it. And so it's like, well, when there aren't rapids, you can paddle, but it's hard work. You're going against the current.
But to get through the rapids, it was either a matter of portaging, so carrying everything on land or in places where it's like, okay, well it's not too tricky here, we'll just float the canoe. So we're walking in shallow water that's icy cold, and it was just sort of miserable.
But work through it in my own head about like, okay, well if I were to quit now, what would happen? I am not just going to... I can't call in a helicopter or something. I suppose I could, but that would be really dumb to do for a non-emergency. So the only way to get out of this situation is to progress.
But I think it does make us very attuned to each other and how each other's feeling. You have to be very conscientious of your travel partner and whether it's like, oh, they're having a bad day, or they're physically exhausted, or that sort of thing, we were always checking in with each other.
And in fact, we continued to say that our relationship is the strongest when we're out traveling in wild places for that very reason.
Shelby Stanger:
What does Dave say that helps you keep going? Or do you guys stop and have a meal? Did you go into that town and have a hot shower?
Dave Freeman:
Well, I think in that particular case, this wasn't a day or two. I think it was probably three or four weeks to get from one town to the next. I would say within 24 hours of when Amy was sort of hitting rock bottom, we reached a really cool spot where there was a beautiful rapids carved out of limestone and a waterfall dumping over.
And there was this rock point that sort of stuck out into the river above this miniature canyon with the waterfall. And I was just like, you know what? Let's just take a day off. And so we spent a day there just resting and reading and just watching the water. And I think that was sort of a reset.
Not that it was easy after that, but I think that was what gave Amy the mental space to be like, all right, I just had a rough moment, but we're not going to give up. There's a lot of fun and adventure ahead of us.
Shelby Stanger:
Even the most extreme adventures need to take breaks when things get tough, and Amy is not the type to give up easily. In fact, before they were finished with their trip across Canada, Amy and Dave had already started dreaming up their next wild idea.
They would spend 12 straight months paddling, skiing and camping in a remote protected wilderness in northern Minnesota called the Boundary Waters. The region covers more than a million acres of lakes, forests and winding ported shrills, no motors, no roads, just the two of them living in rhythm with the wild.
So you lived for a full year in the wild in the Boundary Waters. Can you tell us what did that look like? What did you eat? What was your nine to five? Did you stay in the same place every day?
Amy Freeman:
Yeah. Well, we really wanted to see as much as possible of the whole wilderness area. So we did have a rough plan of traveling to different areas, and so we were on the move for it. Generally, we carried about two weeks worth of food with us at any given point.
And in order to do that, we had an expedition manager in Ely who was coordinating resupplies. So people would paddle a canoe to meet up with us and hand us a new pack of food and we would hand them a pack that contained our trash and anything else we wanted to send back out of the wilderness, including audio files for a podcast we were doing for the local radio station in Grand Marais.
Shelby Stanger:
And you're mostly sleeping in a tent?
Dave Freeman:
Yeah, we only slept in a tent. There are no buildings, no roads, there's nothing in the wilderness. So we were in a tent every night unless we slept outside. But generally we slept in a tent. And so we camped in basically a hundred different camp sites over the course of the year and we used a couple different tents.
So we had a normal summer tent that you would use if you were going to go backpacking in July or something like that. And then sort of in the fall, winter and early spring, we used a teepee tent made by seek outside and we had a small wood stove. So there's a chimney going out of the wood stove, out a fireproof hole at the top of the tent.
So we could heat the tent, and we cooked our food on this little wood stove. So that was how we kept ourselves warm and dried out our clothes and cooked our food and everything for about eight of the 12 months.
Shelby Stanger:
What are you guys wearing when it's freezing cold outside?
Dave Freeman:
Lots of clothes.
Amy Freeman:
Lots of layers, yeah. Wool, some sort of good thick insulation like down jacket if needed.
Shelby Stanger:
How do you guys deal with bugs?
Dave Freeman:
Yeah, it's a mixture of repellent, wearing long sleeves and long pants. We have these, they're called the original bug shirt. It's basically like a shirt, but it has a built-in hood with a mosquito net built in, and so that really helps when the bugs are bad.
And if they're really, really bad, you can bring your arms inside and your bowl and spoon inside, and you can eat inside of your head net. But you don't have to do that very often, and you don't have to do it here in the Boundary Waters, but we've been in some places in the high arctic where they're so bad that you don't want to open up so you can stick your spoon in.
Shelby Stanger:
I'm just wondering if there's one piece of gear that you guys absolutely love, like money, no objects.
Dave Freeman:
I think, well, one thing that comes to mind is I really have a hard time going on a camping trip now without bringing in one of the collapsible camp chairs that they fold up so small with the aluminum poles and maybe they weigh a pound or something like that.
I love those things and I take them on every camping trip and say, five or six years ago or before I tried using them, I was like, I don't need that, but I love those things.
Amy Freeman:
Well, it's so funny, you get used to sitting in a tent with your legs crossed in front of you, but being able to sit in a chair with your legs below you or your feet down below your knees, that makes a big difference and back support.
Dave Freeman:
We're getting older probably.
Shelby Stanger:
It is pretty hilarious that Amy and Dave's idea of luxury is sitting in a camp chair. You can tell just how long they've lived away from civilization. Even though they've spent plenty of time in the wild, going off the grid for 12 uninterrupted months was something entirely different, and it changed them in ways they didn't expect. How did you guys change in the wilderness for a year? How did it affect you?
Amy Freeman:
Well, I'm thinking of just how you observed that we're both pretty calm and that is part of a change that occurred as a result of spending all this time out there that it takes a lot to fluster either one of us.
And I think it just has to do with understanding what's important in life. And I am not going to get too freaked out if I can't order my favorite coffee at the coffee shop or I'm running two minutes late for work or something like that.
Dave Freeman:
I think there were a couple of things. I think being out, especially for a year without going into a building or anything like that, I was struck by how we were still adapting. Our sights and smells and senses were continuing to adapt even after that long.
I think I was also really struck by how quickly we reverted when we left the wilderness. I remember, so we paddled out of the wilderness and we paddled to this little resort just outside of the wilderness area, and they let us stay in one of their cabins that night because we were decompressing.
There were hundreds of people that came to sort of welcome us out of the wilderness. It was pretty intense. And so we had this little cabin that we were staying in, and I remember Amy couldn't sleep because she thought our canoe was going to blow away, and we wouldn't hear it because we couldn't hear the wind. We couldn't hear any natural sounds because we were in a building.
It was almost like when you first go outside, you hear the wind, you hear the rain, you hear a wolf howl, and all these things are foreign, and when we came out of the wilderness, the lack of natural sounds, hearing the buzz of an electrical thing, like a refrigerator in the background, those things are just glaring.
Amy Freeman:
It took a long time to fall asleep at night. That was probably the hardest adjustment for me. It's just because of these artificial sounds and not just the natural lullaby of water lapping on shore or the wind and the leaves.
Dave Freeman:
One other thing that I think happened to both of us, we really learned that what we need is very simple and it easily fits into a canoe or a kayak or a dog sled. We need a basic shelter. We need some food. We need some clothes. We need fresh water, which here in Northern Minnesota, we can just dip our cup in the lake and drink it. We need companionship. We need a sense of purpose.
That's what we need and that's what makes us feel alive. Houses and cars and closets full of clothes and all that stuff is just extra, and sometimes it gets in the way and makes it harder for us to see this beautiful simplicity that's out there.
Shelby Stanger:
Part of what inspired Amy and Dave to spend a year in the boundary waters was the growing threat of copper mining near the edge of this protected wilderness. The proposed mines could have devastating consequences for the region's fragile ecosystem.
To help raise awareness, they partnered with an organization called Save the Boundary Waters. You can learn more at savetheboundarywaters.org. To learn more about Amy and Dave's experiences in the wild, check out their books. A few years ago, they published their story in a memoir called A Year in the Wilderness.
This past year, they came out with another book about their journey across Canada called North American Odyssey, 12,000 Miles Across the Continent by Kayak Canoe and Dogsled. You can buy their books online or at your favorite bookstore.
To keep in touch with Amy and Dave directly, follow them on Instagram at Freemanexplore. That's F-R-E-E-M-A-N E-X-P-L-O-R-E. They also mentioned a few helpful resources in the episode that we'll link to in the show notes. Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network.
It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Piers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber.
And Hannah Boyd. Our executive producers are Paolo Motila and Joe Crosby. \As always, we love it when you follow the show. We take time to rate it and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.