Ep. 597: Retracing the Lewis & Clark Expedition Along the Missouri River in a Dugout Canoe - Thomas Elpel
Adventure Sports Podcast
Curt Linville
4.6 • 580 Ratings
🗓️ 16 December 2019
⏱️ 68 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Thomas recently became an empty nester and decided a grand adventure was what he needed. He got together with Churchill Clark, the great-great-great-great grandson of Captain William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition to build a dugout canoe named Bella from a 20 foot Douglas Fir.
He traced his path along the Missouri River all the way to the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, a 5-month expedition along the same route Lewis and Clark took when returning to the East Coast.
This epic tale includes everything from puppies, bow fishing, and flooded rivers, to quaint towns, and peaceful moments of solitude.
A book about the experience will be released in March of 2020. You can preorder it here:
http://www.hopspress.com/Books/Missouri_River.htm
Here’s a short documentary about the experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-JgWTDUta0
Video about building the canoe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CipwviRWeCU
His YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/thomasjelpel
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Transcript
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| 0:20.3 | Something else I like to take with me |
| 0:21.8 | anywhere is a couple packs of CS Instant Coffee. If I can't drag along all my coffee equipment, I do |
| 0:28.2 | have that option to have incredible coffee in the backcountry or anywhere I go. Go to c.s. Instant.comfee |
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| 0:40.2 | incredible instant copy yeah so i worked with uh churchill clark last year on that project |
| 0:47.7 | uh so he's the uh great great great great grandson of captain william clark of the lewis and |
| 0:53.7 | clark expedition and so we spent um about three months uh great, great, great grandson of Captain William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. |
| 0:55.2 | And so we spent about three months carving a canoe out of a big Douglas fur log. |
| 1:03.8 | This is the Adventure Sports Podcast. |
| 1:06.6 | Trying to help you find adventure every day in any stage of life. |
| 1:10.0 | You're going to hear from explorers, adventures, business owners, |
| 1:14.5 | and anyone living their life a little more out of the box than usual. |
| 1:33.4 | You ever just hear a story on this show and think to yourself, wow, I could really see myself doing that. |
| 1:40.0 | You know, not all the stories I feel that way about. I think they're interesting, but I don't necessarily want to do them myself. Well, this one with Thomas Elpel, I definitely thought, well, I'm pretty jealous of this |
| 1:46.4 | experience. And honestly, Thomas's entire lifestyle, I'll go ahead and drop his YouTube channel. |
| 1:52.7 | He has a really awesome YouTube channel with all sorts of wilderness, survival skills, |
| 1:57.4 | and just primitive living skill videos that are just really entertaining to watch. |
... |
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