Ep. 833: Retracing the Lewis & Clark Expedition Along the Missouri River in a Dugout Canoe - Revisited - Thomas Elpel
Adventure Sports Podcast
Curt Linville
4.6 • 580 Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2022
⏱️ 70 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Originally aired - December 16, 2019
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
Check out the Bourbon Pursuit podcast anywhere you get podcasts.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey folks, welcome to the Adventure Sports podcast. |
| 0:24.1 | My name is Mason. |
| 0:25.6 | And before we talk about today's episode, I wanted to let you know, I just got back from an amazing trip on a river. |
| 0:33.4 | And I know we've had a lot of river and water-based content and episodes lately. |
| 0:38.8 | And I think that's just, you know, the time of year. |
| 0:40.6 | Sometimes it's just coincidental. |
| 0:42.1 | We kind of go through ebbs and flows on the show. |
| 0:44.1 | Sometimes we get a lot of mountaineers or backpackers or, gosh, whatever, you know, flight-based adventures. |
| 0:50.8 | But right now there's just a lot of water. |
| 0:54.1 | One, I'm super interested in. |
| 0:55.8 | I've been doing a river-based trip pretty much every eight weeks for the last year. |
| 1:01.3 | Sometimes we do bike, biking and river-based, but a little bit about this weekend. |
| 1:08.4 | My friends and I, if you don't know, about a year and a half ago, committed to doing a |
| 1:12.7 | trip together every eight weeks, no matter what, every eight weeks, not exactly eight weeks. |
| 1:18.5 | Sometimes it's 10, sometimes it's, you know, seven, six or seven, but we try to average it out |
| 1:23.2 | to every eight weeks we have an adventure to look forward to. And these adventures are close to home around 24 hours. |
| 1:31.0 | We tried to max it at 24 hours for a while, but honestly, they're creeping up to more |
| 1:35.8 | like 48-hour trips, two nights camping, because what happens is we'll leave on a Friday night |
| 1:41.1 | to go camp somewhere, wake up Saturday, do the adventure, camp Saturday, |
| 1:47.3 | maybe finish the adventure or head home early on Sunday. They have been actually creeping a little |
| 1:52.2 | longer than that lately to where it's like I'm gone Friday night to Sunday night pretty late, |
| 1:56.2 | but trying to dial it back so that my family isn't without me super long. But doing it every eight weeks is awesome because you can fit so much adventure into a weekend quite a lot. |
... |
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