Explore: A Canadian Geographic podcast

This special live episode of Explore features a thought-provoking conversation about the deep importance of our relationship with water between host David McGuffin and acclaimed Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, recorded at the Ottawa Writers Festival in May.

Leanne discusses her latest book, The Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead, a genre-defying work that weaves together traditional storytelling, theory, and land-based knowledge. Through various lenses — skiing, eels, beavers, canoes, shorelines — Simpson reflects on the interconnectedness of people, water, and the natural world, and on how we might reima...

Canada does funny really, really well. So today we're poking that Canadian funny bone in conversation with Luke Gordon Field as he discusses his journey and experiences as Editor in Chief of The Beaverton, a popular Canadian satirical news site. Over 15 years, Field and his team transformed a side project with humble beginnings into an internationally recognized name in satire. Field recounts anecdotes from the early days, including a pivotal moment involving Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield that catapulted the site to fame ("Hadfield comes home to $1.37 million Rogers phone bill"). He talks about the challenges of producing timely satire...

“It's the reason why this Canadian Geographic thing means a lot to me. It’s about people and how they live and how we interact and celebrate how beautiful and natural this life can be.”

We’ve got a new honorary RCGS Fellow on Explore today! George Stroumboulopoulos is one of Canada’s great interviewers and broadcasters. In the span of his 30-plus year career, he has talked with thousands of people from King Charles to Gord Downie, from Maya Angelou to Lady Gaga and so many, many more. For decades he has served as a cultura...

"It was brutal again. There was a very good chance we wouldn't succeed. And if it's a foregone conclusion that you're going to be successful, is it really an adventure?" - Kevin Vallely

RCGS Explorer-in-Residence Ray Zahab and his exploring partner and RCGS Fellow Kevin Vallely have just completed an extraordinary expedition – skiing 500 kilometres across Ellesmere Island, one of the most remote and unforgiving regions in the Canadian High Arctic. This journey, completed in March and April 2025, marks a triumphant return after their 2022 attempt was cut short by extreme weather and treacherous snow conditions (li...

"Buffalo are renewal. We know that — it’s baked into who we are."

This week on Explore, David McGuffin sits down with award-winning filmmaker, scholar, and advocate Tasha Hubbard to discuss her latest documentary, Singing Back the Buffalo.

This powerful film delves into the deep, sacred relationship between buffalo and Indigenous Peoples, highlighting how these iconic animals are more than just symbols of the past — they are key to cultural, spiritual and ecological renewal. Singing Back the Buffalo tells the story of the 2014 Buffalo Treaty, an unprecedented agreement now endors...

In this episode, Explore host David McGuffin is joined by Glynnis Hood, one of the world's leading beaver experts, to mark the 50th anniversary of the beaver as Canada’s national animal. This conversation focuses on this iconic Canadian animals significance in our country’s history. Hood shares her insights into the beaver's resilience, ability to modify landscapes, role as a keystone species, and its substantial impact on its environment. They delve into the beaver's history, from its near extinction to its current resurgence. They highlight the beaver’s role in maintaining biodiversity, regulating water systems, and potentially mitigating climat...

In this special episode of the Explore Podcast, we delve into the current and unique intersection of hockey, politics, and patriotism in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump's tariff war against Canada. Featuring an insightful discussion with Roy McGregor, award-winning Canadian journalist and author, this episode explores the politically charged 2025 4 Nations Face-Off, where Canada's triumph over the U.S. in the final helped revive a nation feeling battered by its southern neighbour. 

The conversation touches on where this hockey moment ranks in Canada's history of international triumphs (up there with the '72 S...

In this milestone 100th episode of the Explore Podcast, host David McGuffin welcomes back world-renowned cave diver and RCGS Explorer-in-Residence Jill Heinerth. This episode dives into Heinerth’s experiences, including her new, award-winning documentary Diving into the Darkness, her extraordinary career in underwater exploration and the risks and rewards of diving. Heinerth discusses her Antarctic expeditions, her struggle with decompression sickness, and the evolution of her exploration philosophy over the years. The conversation also touches on the challenges of making documentaries in the current media environment, the impact of climate change narratives and the importance of valuing and understanding ou...

In this episode of Explore, we dive deep with Canadian whale biologist Shane Gero, who shares his journey from a landlocked childhood in Ottawa to becoming a leading researcher in whale communication and conservation. Gero discusses how his early fascination with whales began, his fieldwork in Dominica and the intricate social structures of sperm whales. The conversation then delves into Project CETI, which aims to decode the complex language of sperm whales using machine learning while exploring the cultural identity expressed through the whales’ unique codas (a series of clicks). In this conversation, Gero emphasizes the complex cognition of th...

Few people have been to the summit of Mt. Logan, and even fewer people have been to the summit and stayed for more than 24 hours. But for the sake of science, RCGS Fellow and world-leading ice core scientist Alison Criscitiello and her team took 10 days to summit Canada’s highest peak, where they camped for 16 days. 

In her new documentary, For Winter, Criscitiello takes viewers on a gruelling journey to the top of Mt. Logan, where she and her team of six researchers extract the longest ice core ever drilled at a high altitude: 327 met...

Welcome back Explore listeners! We are thrilled to have award-winning photographer and explorer Jillian Brown as our first guest of 2025. Based in Squamish, B.C., Brown has an epic list of adventures. She was the first Canadian to paddle across the continental US, from Oregon to Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico. Brown was also part of the first crew to paddle down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in a sea kayak, which is not made for whitewater, as she explains. 

As a survivor of trauma and abuse, Brown is a strong a...

Oscar nominated! 

Congratulations to Canadian Geographic Contributing Editor Julian Brave NoiseCat for his and Emily Kassie's Best Documentary Academy Award nomination for their film Sugarcane. Please enjoy this encore presentation of NoiseCat's interview with Explore, which was originally posted in September, 2024.

We're thrilled to welcome Julian Brave NoiseCat to Explore to talk about his award winning documentary Sugarcane, the powerful and very personal story of the multi-generational trauma caused to his family and members of the Williams Lake First Nations by the physical and sexual abuse endured for almost a...

"So, does Christmas eliminate distance?"

Happy holidays from Explore! For this Yuletide episode, we’re dipping into our Canadian Geographic files for the reading of a story written by RCGS founding President and Arctic explorer Charles Camsell who recalls a memorable Christmas he had on the trail to the Klondike in 1897.

In the early 1900s, travelling by canoe and horseback, Camsell mapped hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of Canada’s north for the Geological Survey of Canada. 

Born at Fort Liard, N.W.T., i...

Laval St. Germain’s journey to Afghanistan’s highest mountain

Today’s conversation with extreme athlete and adventurer Laval St. Germain is fascinating as we journey through Afghanistan to its highest peak, Mt. Noshaq, which stands at 7,492 metres. On the way, St. Germain reveals the current state of a country that was a central focus for Canadians and the world for almost two decades, post-9/11, during the War on Terror. 

Afghanistan was home to Canada's longest war, and you hear little about it today, not since the US and NATO pu...

I’m thrilled to have Ray Zahab back on Explore. Many of you know Ray as an extreme adventurer, Royal Canadian Geographical Society Explorer-in-Residence and friend of this podcast.

Ray joins me to talk about his gruelling solo run across one of the hottest places on earth, Death Valley, California during a record breaking heatwave this summer. The last time we talked, in spring 2023, he was heading off to Death Valley. He had just completed chemotherapy for a rare form of blood cancer, during which he somehow managed to fit in a trek across Ba...

More than military conquest: Manitoba's historic Dawson Trail with Pierrette Sherwood and Mimi Lamontagne 

We do love history here on the Explore podcast, and one of the reasons is that the more you poke around, the more you dig, and the wider you cast your research net, the richer the story that gets revealed. Our guests today are the perfect example of that. 

Pierrette Sherwood is the founder, artistic and creative director of Manitoba’s Dawson Trail Commemorative Project, and Mimi Lamontagne is the project researcher. If any of you...

There are few greater champions of our trees and forests than Diana Beresford-Kroeger.

From her base in her forest reserve in Eastern Ontario, the Irish-born Beresford-Kroeger has led a decades-long campaign to save our planet’s forests and trees, while working in the fields of medical biochemistry, botany and medicine. She is a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, winner of the RCGS Louie Kamoookak medal and the author of multiple award-winning books including To Speak for the Trees and the documentary Call of the Forest: The Forgotten Wisdom of Trees. Her latest bo...

It is definitely hurricane season, so what better time than now to sit down for a conversation with one of the world's leading storm chasers, Jaclyn Whittal.

You probably know Whittal as the long-time co-host of Storm Chasers, where you’ll regularly find her reporting from Oklahoma's Tornado Alley, at the leading edge of some of the biggest hurricanes on record, or facing down fires in the interior of B.C. As a Fellow of the RCGS, Whittal also spends time working in the Arctic and running across deserts like the Atacama and Death Valley at the ho...

We're thrilled to welcome Julian Brave Noisecat to Explore to talk about his award winning documentary Sugarcane, the powerful and very personal story of the multi-generational trauma caused to his family and members of the Williams Lake First Nations by the physical and sexual abuse endured for almost a century at St. Joseph's Mission Residential School in British Columbia. The documentary won the Director's Award at the Sundance Film Festival and is showing in cinemas across North America and around the world.

Julian will be familiar to many of you for his work as...

“This might be why people go down rivers!”



We're back in the Arctic for the last of our 2024 Summer Canoe Series. This time, it's with Dave Greene, who, along with paddling partner Chris Giard, led an RCGS-flagged Akilineq Canoe Expedition from Yellowknife, N.W.T., to Baker Lake, NU, in 2023. During this time, they covered 1400 kilometres, including Canada's newest national park, Thaidene Nëné. A good chunk of their trip also involved paddling upstream (see episode title). Greene has some incredible stories to share from this trip, including close calls with wildlife and a lot of great...

Musician Sam Polley’s first canoe trip was with his dad, Blue Rodeo’s Jim Cuddy, his mom and siblings. He doesn’t remember much about it, but he clearly got hooked. All these years later, he’s still an avid canoe tripper with a love of the lakes and rivers in northern Ontario. Sam is best known for his rockabilly band Sam Polley and The Old Tomorrows and playing with The Jim Cuddy Band, fronted by his father. When Sam isn’t touring or in the studio or writing songs, he likes to feed his muse by taking off on cano...

"In my mind, when I want to relax, I take myself back to the Wind River."

Tetlit Gwich'in means people of the headwaters, and Bobbi Rose Koe is on a mission to live up to her people's name. 

Born and raised in the Tetlit Gwich'in community of Fort McPherson, on the Peel River north of the Arctic Circle in the Northwest Territories, Koe was lucky to spend her childhood with her grandparents, who regularly took her hunting and fishing out on the land. When she reached her mid-20s, sh...

Canadian Geographic’s Explore Podcast Canoe series is back for its third year, and we’re thrilled to start with Canadian canoeing legend Mike Ranta.

Ranta was not only the first person to canoe solo across Canada in a single paddling season but he's also done it twice! His adventure began with his dog Spitzi and a portage over the Rocky Mountains. In this fun and engaging episode, Ranta takes us on a journey from his earliest paddling experiences as a child in and around Ontario’s Quetico Provincial Park, one of the world’s premier...

"Shackleton died on that ship. And he's the only one who died on that ship. Of all his expeditions under his direct command, nobody else died except him, on his own ship. And that's the ship that we found. And it tells that story about his leadership."

- David Mearns, world-renowned shipwreck hunter and search director for the RCGS Shackleton-Quest Expedition.

Welcome to the second part of our series on the RCGS Shackleton-Quest Expedition. Today, we're delving into the intriguing details of the successful hunt for Quest, the last...

"That's it!" exclaimed John Geiger as he caught the first glimpse of Quest, the last ship of legendary polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton. Now resting 390 metres below the surface off the coast of Labrador, Quest was Shackleton’s last ship and the vessel he died on. 

Geiger, CEO of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, is our guest on this episode of Explore, in which he tells the riveting story of the epic hunt for Quest and Shackleton's legacy. 

On June 9, in the rolling seas off Labrador, the RCGS-led Shackleton Ques...

"They can't fight if they don't eat."

That was the motto of the Farmerettes, the thousands of young women who took the place of male farmers and farmhands who had gone off to fight in the Second World War. While much has been written about the crucial role women played in factories during the war: building tanks, planes, munitions, and weapons of all kinds, etc., the story of Canadian farms, the breadbaskets of the war effort, remains largely untold. 

In this episode of Explore, we’ll rectify that by div...

Notorious for their seafaring ways and conquering territories far and wide, the Vikings burst onto the world scene around 800 AD. For hundreds of years, they raided, conquered, settled, and farmed in lands across Europe, Russia, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and across the North Atlantic to Iceland, Greenland, and then to what they called “Vinland,” our present-day Newfoundland. They did all this in longboats, effectively 60-foot open row boats with sails and virtually no navigation tools. 

Whatever their legacy of terror (our guest today has some thoughts on that), they were remarkable explorers who left...

"You can’t look at a canoe or kayak without grounding yourself in the knowledge that this is a water-craft of Indigenous origin. For us, it’s about honouring the stories, honouring the communities."

As The Canadian Canoe Museum moves into its stunning new home on the Otonabee River in Peterborough, Ont. on May 11, Carolyn Hyslop and Jeremy Ward, the museum's executive director and curator, drop by Explore to talk canoes.

For Hyslop and Ward, every canoe and kayak is special, each has a story worth telling, and a heritage...

"Canada's claim to the Arctic derives from the Franklin expedition and the search that evolved out of it."

We’ve touched on the Franklin expedition in several other Explore podcast episodes, so we're excited to be taking the first proper deep dive into the story now with Ken McGoogan, an author who has been passionately writing about this topic for decades. We also discuss Ken’s latest book, Searching for Franklin: New Answers to the Great Arctic Mystery, which examines Franklin’s legacy from a contemporary perspective. 

In the 1800s, Sir...

"Polar Exploration is not for the faint of heart."

We're absolutely thrilled to welcome RCGS Fellow Susan R. Eaton to this episode of Explore.

Eaton is a well-known polar explorer, geoscientist, educator, and the founder and leader of Sea Women Expeditions. In 2015, she was named one of Canada’s greatest 100 modern-day explorers by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and a year later, she was selected by Canadian Geographic as one of Canada's greatest modern women explorers. She was also inducted into the Women Divers Hall of Fame in 2020. For th...

"I took one step further and we were looking into the eyes of four lionesses and two cubs. The fourth lioness with the cubs exited down the ravine like a shot. The other three lionesses jumped up at us. We ran backwards, yelling at the top of our lungs. The lions came up after us. Their teeth were pulled back in a grimace. The noise was beyond belief."

I'm thrilled to have one of Canada's leading naturalists, Brian Keating, join us today. As you can tell from that quote, Brian has had some amazing...

I am thrilled to have Laval St. Germain as our guest for this episode of Explore. An avid adventurer, Laval has rowed solo across the North Atlantic Ocean and is the only Canadian to have summited Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen. He has also climbed the tallest peaks on all seven continents, including Antarctica and many more of the world's most remote and challenging mountains — not to mention that he is also a commercial pilot, flying in the Canadian Arctic and was one of our RCGS Polar Plungers in Calgary.

As everyone who follows me...

Over the past two years, Canadian Geographic has been running “Passing the Mic,” a podcast training program in remote Nunavut communities. This week, we are pleased to showcase the third episode of this year’s series, which features stories produced by the students at the Netsilik School in Taloyoak, Nunavut. 

The aim of this program is to give Inuit youth the tools to share their stories with the world in their own voices, using their words. I think you’ll agree that these stories provide a wonderful window into a unique and welcoming Inuit community...

In this episode, we're back in Taloyoak, Nunavut, mainland Canada’s most northerly community, to talk with Joyce Ashevak, Martha Neeveacheak and Roger Oleekatalik. They are three of the students who took part in Canadian Geographic’s Passing the Mic program, which aims to give Inuit youth the tools to share their own stories with the world.

Joyce and Martha are both throat singers, a unique and incredibly powerful Inuit vocal art form. And Roger is one of the leading young hunters in this community, which sits on a peninsula jutting out into the Arct...

We are thrilled to be taking you back to Taloyoak, Nunavut, the northernmost community in mainland Canada. In this exciting episode, we sit down with Lenny Panigayak, Taloyoak’s mayor and viral TikTok star (@aqigiaq), who shares moments from his life and Inuit culture with his tens of thousands of followers.

The Explore Podcast team met Mayor Lenny when we went to Taloyoak to spend a week teaching podcasting to the amazing students at the Netsilik School in a program called “Passing the Mic,” which is supported by Polar Knowledge Canada.

T...

The pack-ice 'round us cracks and groans;

The old St. Roch, she creaks and moans.

 - Stan Rogers 

In 1940, the wooden-hulled St. Roch became the second ship to successfully sail the Northwest Passage and the first to do it from west to east, captained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's Henry Larsen. Our guest on this episode, Ken Burton, recreated that voyage 60 years later on another RCMP ship, the St. Roch II. A new RCGS Fellow, veteran sailor and polar explorer, Burton shares the incredible story of Larsen and the St...

For this holiday episode of Explore, we’re dipping into our Royal Canadian Geographical Society files for the reading of a story written by RCGS founding President and Arctic explorer Charles Camsell, recalling a memorable Christmas he had on the trail to the Klondike in the late 19th century.

In the early 1900s, travelling by canoe and horseback, Charles Camsell mapped hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of Canada’s north for the Geological Survey of Canada. 

Born at Fort Liard in the Northwest Territories in 1876, his father Julian was a...

“The question would be, “Why not?” 

We love a good journey here on Explore, and Dianne Whelan went on a doozy of one with lots of great stories to share.

Whelan became the first person to travel the entire Trans Canada Trail across Canada, the longest hiking trail in the world stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arctic Ocean to the Pacific. She travelled by bike, foot and canoe through all seasons. Throughout her journey, she focused on reconciliation, honouring First Nations, Inuit, and Métis People who have bee...

Today’s guest is Jimmy Ullikatalik, the manager of the Taloyoak Hunters and Trappers Association and project manager for the Aviqtuuq Inuit Protected and Conserved Area (IPCA), a proposed 90,000 square kilometres of marine, terrestrial and fresh-water ecosystems in Nunavut. Jimmy also represented Nunavut at COP26, the UN Climate Change conference in Glasgow.

In October, I was lucky enough to make my second trip to Nunavut, to the hamlet of Taloyoak. It is the most northerly community in mainland Canada. It is home to about 1,000 people, mostly Inuit, on the Aviqtuuq or Boothia peninsula, which ju...

Best-selling author Karen Pinchin is our guest on this episode of Explore. Her new book, Kings of their Own Ocean, is the phenomenal tale of an incredible fish, the bluefin tuna, which has gone from being the cornerstone of the Roman Empire to the much sought-after catch brought to near extinction in the past century in our own boom-bust, globalized economy. Ultimately, this is a heartening wildlife story, filled with an incredible cast of characters, a globetrotting look into the history of bluefin tuna and how regular people, along with industry, scientists and governments, banded together and brought this...