I'm more faulting and this is the Lost Explorers. I'm Emma Sanson. I was a fashion photographer and then I started doing all these adventures. So these days I live in my van and I traveled around the world and climbing mountains. Five years ago, I was on a plane to New Zealand to do research for a photography tour I was doing there and I watched a movie Everest, and I just felt, Oh my god, I have to do this. I have to climb mountains. I have to climb Everest. And then I came home to my fiancee we were just getting married, and I told him about my new plans and he just said, oh, but someone like you can't do something like that, and that was pretty much the end of it. Then after our wedding, he left me six weeks after the wedding. That was, of course heartbreaking and sad. But on the other hand, I could go climb all the mountains. But the thing is that I don't have any role models in this. You know, I grew up never hearing about any women climbing mountains. All the stories I heard were about the super hardcore men, and they were the ones in the movies and the books on the stage, they were the ones talking about climbing mountains. It was hard for someone like me, just a regular girl, to understand that I actually could be a part of this world. Within two years, Emma climbed Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain and the contiguous United States, and Mount Oberst, the tallest mountain in Europe. So I climbed the highest mountain in Europe. What should I do now? And then I got this crazy idea, what if I climbed the highest mountain in every country in Europe? And then the next week I claimed Mont Blanc. And then I climbed sixty one mountains in one year. And it was impossible to go back to a normal life after doing this project. Yeah, those first couple of days, about the first passage, the trip to Bermuda was a very steep learning curve. There was a lot to figure out. I've never been on a boat by myself, I'd never sailed this boat. But the biggest takeaway from that first passage was that I liked it, that I wasn't terrified of being in the middle of the ocean by myself, and that it was that was cool. Then I kept going. When Tanya Abbey was eighteen years old, she cast off from the South Street Seaport in Manhattan and ended up sailing twenty seven thousand miles around the world all alon. It was pretty constantly aware of the danger or or the risk of not making it. But then again, to put it into context of the rest of life. Life is dangerous. So it was just much more black and white out there. It felt more real and more present. But in the end, you know, my dad had given me a car when I was sixteen on a Jersey turnpike. Probably not such hot chances there either. I've learned that there really is no other place other than the middle of the ocean alone on my tiny little boat that I could feel simultaneously the little ast speck of nothingness at the same time as the master of my universe. So it was awesome and humbling in a really big way at exactly the same time. And that feeling was constant, and it was pretty cool. And I don't know that I could have expressed it like that then, but I could feel it. I think people maybe at home or people that didn't know me, were more doubting because I was a female. So tell you. I know we were talking out this before, but you've never heard of Helen Fair? Right? Is she still alive? Is she American? Yeah? Like I said, because not having heard of her doesn't mean that I'm I kind of live under a rock sometimes too. So Emma, there's this woman named Helen Fair. She is a fellow mountain climber. She's actually, you know, done things like trekking to the magnetic North Pole and walking across this hard desert. Have you ever heard of her? Unfortunately not. That's so cool. No, it sounds super cool. I definitely want to google her a loon everything I can. Helen Fair is not a household name. In fact, even people in her distinct line of adventure sports. I've never even heard of her. But for someone like Emma who ditched her cosmopolitan lifestyle to climb mountains and live in a van, or Tanya, who at an extremely young age decided to sail around the entire globe by herself, Helen should be like Sara Wayne Gretz or their Serena Williams. Her list of accomplishments, many done after the age of fifty, are so extreme, sobol it's hard to imagine one person doing everything she's done, and I was lucky enough to speak with her. Well. My name is Helen Sayet and I come from New Zealand, but I'm also an American citizen living in Washington State. I'm a writer. I also run a small farm, a goat farm. Some of my accomplishments that I've represented three countries in international track and field and represented United States, and I was also United States national lose champion. But my second right, you might say, started when I was fifty years old and I became the first woman to scare alone to the Magnetic North Pole. Then I continued on to other expeditions, walking four thousand miles processor Horror and then from Morocco to the Nile River, and then I walked miles across the Gobi Desert. So those are a few of the things that I've done over the years. Helen was born in November twelfth on acre farm in New Zealand, and my early life was very outdoors. In fact, my parents also liked to climb mountains as a hobby. My first mountain clime was at nine years old in the winter Mount Taranaki in the North Island of New Zealand. My parents were very, very encouraging all the time to me, and whatever I wanted to do, they supported me. So those days, young women didn't do the things that we were able to do these days. One of my childhood mentors was Sir Edmund Hillary, the first person to submit Mount Everest, like very close family friend, and he was an absolutely amazing man and very influential in my young life. If you're unfamiliar, Sir Edmund Hillary is one of the most renowned explorers to ever live. Being a young adventurer mentored by Sir Edmund Hillary would be like getting guitar lessons from Jimi Hendrix. Servant Hillary. We always just called him ed of course, and on my first clime of Mount Taranaki at age nine, he was with my parents accompany me on that climb. He had a lot of wisdom to pass on to a young girl and it was a mentor type relationship. He believed as my parents did. They all believe that women had a right to get out and do what they wanted to do and not be restricted by social norms, so to speak. Very aware that women had a very important part in life and should be encouraged to get out and do especially in the outdoors and in the in the world of physical endeavor. Mount teary Narki, New Zealand is over eight thousand feet tall, and as Helen mentioned, her introduction to mountain climbing was scaling it with her parents and Ed when she was nine. This was in the winter, and of course halfway up that mountain, my legs had turned to lead. I was just so tired, and I can remember even now just putting one ft in front of the other was just an effort. But my father said, you know, you don't climb a mountain in one long step, and one step at a time. Will do it finally? Or take all those steps, you'll find yourself on the summit. My mother kept saying, just keep vision your lies in yourself standing on that summer and that will draw you up there like a magnet. And Ed kept saying, come on, you can be an example too. Little girls of your age, they can get out and do these things. Remember what you're doing. You can do it because you're a girl. That makes it special. Let's see you do it. Let's see you take those steps. And and he kept encouraging me all the way up as well, so all the encouragement that I had basically lifted me to the submit of that mountain. As she grew older, Helen became a professional athlete, running track and field and international competition. In her twenties, she met her husband, Bill There, an American helicopter pilot who was also a certified badass, and in the nineties seventies she did what many people in their mid thirties do. She decided to become a world class loser. And I gave myself two years to when you unite States national championship, and I maybe the national team also that year, and then I quit because I was in Innsbruck with the national team and I just saw those mountains around Ensbrook and I just I just knew that my time on the loose track. I've got what I wanted, the national championship, I'm on the national team. I need to get back into the mountains. I went to Mexico and climbed the Three, the Three volcano, and I climbed Mount Denali and three times. And then I went to to Europe. I climbed a Len Picklen and the Communism and some of these higher mountains around the world. So it was a happy decision. Well, I've climbed many high mountains around the world, and I enjoyed the experience, met a lot of people. I had also lost a lot of friends due to various mountaineering accidents, and I decided one day perhaps I should ease off on these big mountains. And then I began studying the magnetic North and South Poles, the check at North Poles at the very top of the world, and I was I'd always been fascinated by polar bears, and I thought, now if I could learn to live among them, I might be able to make it safely to the to the pole. And so after some inquiry, I found that, oh, no woman had ever done this before, and I thought, well, that would be an interesting step to take in my life. Then I went north to live with the end of it, because I knew that living around pole bears, if I had a lot to learn, and so I relied on them to teach these people the masters of Arctic survival. They taught me how to deal with polar bear, what to do when I would meet one. They taught me about the where the systems of the Arctic. What is it like to walk across as the agic ocean because you're not walking on land. You're walking across the layer of ice covering an ocean, very different experience than being on land. I'd have to pull my own spread with all my gear, and so that was all part of my training. I brought an Inuit dog, a polar bear dog from the Inuit. I called him Charlie, and he was at my side to help protect me from polar bears. So, along with her dog Charlie, who factors into a few of her adventures, she took what she learned from the Inuits, body slid and headed on skis to the magnetic North Pole. And her initial assumption was definitely right. She ran into a lot of polar bears. Well, I actually encountered Steven on seven different occasions. And people say, oh, you're so brave, and suppose no, bravery has nothing to do with it, and you still have to day that's all it is true. If you're not scared, there's definitely something wrong with you. I discovered it. How do you handle it? Fear, that's the important thing. It's not you're not staying there brave and saying I'm standing up to this bear, I will conquer it. No you're not going to do that. That's a good way to get yourself killed. Instead, you have to handle that here. You've got to have the confidence in your training. You've got to clear thinking and do exactly what you're supposed to do. So in Keiths you ever find yourself in a similar position. Here's Helen's guy to facing down a polar bear in the Arctic wilderness. It might come in hand you one day, and I've been taught that, you know, make yourself as big as parce, will stand alongside your cant or your sled or something, making yourself more of a formidable target. Keep eye contact, don't look away because they look at that as a start of flight. Can certainly never run because you'll never win the race. And the polar bear will see that as as it's quality fleeing and they will be very happy to give chase and put my dog Charlie. He was step at front and we're just growling and a snarling. That helped keep the bears back. He was a huge detriment, but it also had a flare gun would buy these flays out the land in the row in front of the bear and the bears that they ever seen anything like this before, and so they and that accord smelling smoke would come up from the from the flares on the ice, forming this curtain of acrid smelling smoke across across their path. And they didn't like that. So what was Charlie, my polar their dog, and my flare gun and the knowledge that I had gained from the Innuit was the way that I was able to survive these polar bear encounters. My goodness, security was almost a month long. I was scared to death every waking moment. I was scared half to death. And after reaching the pole, on their way back to base camp, Helen and Charlie got caught in a windstorm that almost killed them. Charlie and I were sheltering behind and the sled death keeping down low because the winds were tremendously strong, and chunked of ice are flying through the air and it was really bad. And then I found that during the storm, the wind adapt to drik a vacuum and it just suck a lot of my gear and my food and supplies out of my sled and it distantly disappeared. But I found with my food, I would have five walnuts each of the next seven days, and most of my field had blown away, so I could I could only melt a little bit of ice each day for water, and fortunately only half of Charlie's food had blown away, so he was okay. Well. I was determined that I was not going to give up. At that point, I'd been thrown through so much. What was was broken eyes, storms, colar bears, cold and wind, and just everything that the art could throw at me, and I was determined, I'm not going to get up. I'm going to see the seven days through. Somehow, it got pretty desperate at times, but I kept pretty remember the lesson I learned our Mount Taranaki when I was nine years old, just get one foot in front of the other and you'll finally get there. And that's what I did. Going through all those trials and tribulations made that journey even more precious to me because of what I had to go through, and and also at that time, I was really a pioneer of sorts because women were not out doing this sort of thing at that time. Helen and Charlie made it back to safety, obviously, but her experience with the polar bears gave her the idea to study other Arctic wildlife. Several years later, Helen, her husband Bill, and her dog Charlie headed to the Canadian Yukon, where they set out to live less than a hundred feet from an active wolfstead. Well, wolves taught us a lot of lessons, and we really taught them nothing. Of course, the human beings it act more like wolves, we'd be a lot better off. They are not the fierce, mean killing machines. They're not like that at all. They do hunt animals, of course, their predators, and they're part of an important part of the environment to keep the herds about, good deer and so forth in in reasonably controlled numbers. So they have a very important part of the environment. We decided that to go to Canadian Yukon. After a full summer of reconnaissance, we found a den that was very remote. Now we didn't know if this would work, but Charlie was part wolf and it had been raised among juvenile wolves in the Arctic. Now, my husband and I we thought, well, it could be that Charlie might be a link between we as humans, as human companions, and the wolves. It took us quite a while to approach the den and to find a place where they were comfortable with us, about a hundred feet from the den, which was remarkably close, but we were able to camp there and we were able to study them up close. And so that was the most fulfilling experience of my entire life, just watching these animals and on a daily basis, they're very close to that family. They take care of each other. The whole family raises the cup, and the life around the den is very relaxed, very friendly, very family oriented. One wolf came back and had been bored by moves in a hunt, and he was pretty badly injured. He laid down at the den entrance. Some of the other wolves came to nurse and the liquors wounds take care. Other wolves went away and hunted and brought food back to him, and he did recover completely due to their care. They didn't neglect him, not for one minute, day and night. Amazing, really strong family structure that's built on respect, discipline, and love. And it was just so inspiring to us to see this upfloat every day and just just watch, just watch these animals and in a way that we should act. So we need to take a quick break, but when we get back, we hear about Helen ditching her Arctic adventures for something a little bit warmer, much much warmer. This includes a band of rebels that put her in her husband in a firing squad, killer bees in the Amazon, and food poisoning and death Valley. Trust me, you're gonna want to stick around. My husband and I were the first band, first woman to cross us to her from Morocco to the Nile. Our route took us right basically through the center of the Sahara, through the minefield and the tans A off desert and these sorts of places. It took us just over seven months. We called it the Journey from Hell. Three weeks into it, in Algeria, we were captured and by rebels. We were stood out side by cider execution. We've we've managed to get out of that just by the skin of our teeth, you might say. And here's another applicable life lesson from hell. How to escape an execution by a band of rebels in the Sahara desert. We're about to be shot, my husband said. I asked permission from our captors if he could put his hand in his pocket and take out the taps instead. Helen gave this to me as a gift and it would need a lot to me to hold it as I died, and as I heard that, I thought, what in the world is he talking about? And so anyway, abul the GPS out and then he came to punction a message on the keypad, and then he said, I just sent a message to base camp as they go to have a helicopter and the team will be out here within minutes because it's the base camp is not far away. Well, I was. I was just amazed. I thought, they're never going to believe this, because she can't send a message on the GPS. Anyway, these people believed it because they were not very well educayed. They were they were desert revels and they didn't know and they brought the story. Well, they loaded everything back up on that track and they took off as fast as they could go, leaving us standing there. It's just amazed that we had survived it. And I said to my husband name Bill, I said, what in the world they just think of that wild stories? Did? I have a pretty no idea. It just popped into my mind and that's what I said, and it worked. So of that's how we got out of that one. That was a sheer miracle. That is one of the most amazing stories I've ever heard in my entire life. I think, I think, I think somebody above us was taken good care of us. Her experience walking the Gobi Desert, on the other hand, was a little less stressful, I mean relatively. The Gobi Desert nomad we were never robbed. They're very honest and very good people. We had a great time walking dred miles across the Gobie. We did have one problem in the middle of it where one of our camels, who was carrying the water that day, rolled and split the water containers. And we were nine days from resupply, and we figured we only had about five days of water on half ration. And we were having to walk this desert in the summer because in the winter they go be as a very cold I can get down to mind forty degrees very calls a whole different journey. We struggled on, and we reached the eighth day where we were so a desperate for water and so dehydrated that we really felt that there probably would not be another day for us. Because we were in the process of just basically dying of food and and it's a terrible way to be. It's it's a terrible it's a terrible thing. One thing that really saved us was on that last day, we came across a stretch of water, probably about twenty ft across by another twenty feet though it was left over from a there might have been a spring under there, but it was. It was filthy water, um and quite salty. But we had a discelinization unit with us and the best five hundred dollars would ever spend in our lives, and we filtered that water. And that's really what saved us through the night too. When resupply came in, Helen and her husband Bill decided to take a different mode of transportation for their next adventure, a kayak down the Amazon River. Helen was the first non indigenous woman to paddle the entire length of the Amazon River, and in classic Helen Fair fashion, it was even harder than it sounds. It came to one place where there was some illegal goal miners on the bank day saw us and start shooting at us, and we were both in our own inflatable kayak. Well to be shot at in an inflatable kayak is not a good experience, so we pale. No Olympic kayaker could have kept up with us, and we shot around that next bin with the speed of an arrow. So as soon as we could, we beached our kayak and went up into the jungle and head head there for the next twenty four hours to make sure we weren't being followed. And then there was another time when we were swarmed by a swarm of bees. There's only one way to get rid of those, because we were covered in bees. The only one way to do it is that's to dive into the water. But the problem is we were in an area of fairly still water, and this is where Pirana liked to learn over the years, we've learned that you worry about the problem of the moment and worry about the problem of the future another time. And so we just dived into the water and poultry. We didn't have any problems with piranhas, but we're able to scrape those bees office in the water um. And then of course we went into this and athletic reaction that we had the correct antidote for that. We know to give each other a shot and just kind of sit awhile for that to take effect, because we were very badly done, very very badly's done. We're very lucky to get out of that because the endoplegic reaction when it's set in it was quite severe. But we did have the right TOPPN with us to counteractive. Despite all this, or maybe because of it, Helen has not given up her adventures, even as she approaches her mid eighties, though a few years ago, Bill, her husband and partner in so many of her travels, passed away before they could undertake their next passion project, walking two d plus miles across Death Valley National Park. We had used Death Valley for many years training for our desert tracks, and one day he said, you know, why don't you and I just go without any resupply. Walked the full week, but because nobody has done it. But he passed away due to an accident, and so I decided, well, I will do it solo, and I'll make the journey in his memory. And I thought, you know death Belly, Yeah, I know, I know it's the desert, and to be no water, i'd have to pull everything in a cart. And I thought, you know, this is probably going to be the famous journey I've ever taken on my life. It's only a two five miles or so, and this is not going to be a big deal. Well, I should have remembered over the years that nothing comes easy on these journeys. And halfway into it, I hit that I my day food had mold gone moldy. I didn't realize that aid it got through poisoning. And one of the rangers came along and saw me staggering, and they wanted to take me to the hospital, and I said, no, I'm not going to go to the hospital because I might never come back and finish this journey. And I am going to finish it because I'm doing this in my husband's memory and he would want me to finish this, and I'm doing it. So I went on the same thing, one step at a time, and I thought I could remember distinctly thinking, is there any way I can ever take on the long journey like this and not have something serious happened to where I have to go into the one step at a time concept. So that journey that taught me that no, don't sit out on any say they expect everything to go right, because something is going to go wrong someway. So we've heard some of Helen's stories over the past half hour, and it's really easy to marvel in her accomplishments. Even being able to talk with her is a true honor for me. But one thing she hasn't covered is the why. Obviously, something has driven her to boldly go where in many cases no woman had actually gone before, though in her mind that was never the impetus for her adventures. Just to be the first woman. I've never got up by my soapbox and speech to the world that women can do this. Well, that what I've done really is I've had a lot of ambition, a lot of I'm a goal stepper and a planner. I like to go out and meet challenges. I really feed a challenge, and so I go out there to do what I want to do as a as a person, whether I'm a man or a woman or whatever I'm I just want to do it being a woman. When I do these things, if they can motivate other women, other young girls, then I've achieved something in life. Rather than saying, well, I'm going out to prove that a woman can do this, I don't need to do that. I just go out do what I want to do and meet those challenges and take on those goals and and ruin my way through. That's really what it's all about. Since I've spoken to over a million kids in school, my message are always motivational, set goals, plans to success, Believe in yourself. You can go out there, you can do anything. I have a good friend she got breast cancer. She's recovering. There are times when she felt very discouraged. But I've said to her, one step at a time, one stage at a time. When you do something, you do it that day, you mark that day off. You don't have to do that again. You've done it. It's applied to everything. Rather than stop in thinking looe as me, I can't do that. Once you do that, you're done. Always taking that step forward. Don't look back, always look forward. Some of the things that you've done in the past might have seemed rather dumb, stupid, and even wrong, but don't look back. Learn from those experiences and take that experience and go forward. Don't look back, keep looking forward. We want to thank Helen Fair for joining us and sharing her stories and some of her inspiring words. If you want to hear more from Helen, which I don't know why you wouldn't. She's written several books about her journeys, including an upcoming release about her Truck through Death Valley. We have a link to our website in our description, I think you know what to do. This show was produced by myself and me a fast edited and mixed by the other worldly Dean White and Abbey Austria. Special thanks to all of my bosses, Jim Demigo, Megan Kirsh, Brett Kushner and Emily Felt. That's it for us. Put your trade tables up, leave your shoes on, and we'll see you next week. Five

I'm more faulting and this is the Lost Explorers. I'm Emma Sanson. I was a fashion photographer and then I started doing all these adventures. So these days I live in my van and I traveled around the world and climbing mountains. Five years ago, I was on a plane to New Zealand to do research for a photography tour I was doing there and I watched a movie Everest, and I just felt, Oh my god, I have to do this. I have to climb mountains. I have to climb Everest. And then I came home to my fiancee we were just getting married, and I told him about my new plans and he just said, oh, but someone like you can't do something like that, and that was pretty much the end of it. Then after our wedding, he left me six weeks after the wedding. That was, of course heartbreaking and sad. But on the other hand, I could go climb all the mountains. But the thing is that I don't have any role models in this. You know, I grew up never hearing about any women climbing mountains. All the stories I heard were about the super hardcore men, and they were the ones in the movies and the books on the stage, they were the ones talking about climbing mountains. It was hard for someone like me, just a regular girl, to understand that I actually could be a part of this world. Within two years, Emma climbed Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain and the contiguous United States, and Mount Oberst, the tallest mountain in Europe. So I climbed the highest mountain in Europe. What should I do now? And then I got this crazy idea, what if I climbed the highest mountain in every country in Europe? And then the next week I claimed Mont Blanc. And then I climbed sixty one mountains in one year. And it was impossible to go back to a normal life after doing this project. Yeah, those first couple of days, about the first passage, the trip to Bermuda was a very steep learning curve. There was a lot to figure out. I've never been on a boat by myself, I'd never sailed this boat. But the biggest takeaway from that first passage was that I liked it, that I wasn't terrified of being in the middle of the ocean by myself, and that it was that was cool. Then I kept going. When Tanya Abbey was eighteen years old, she cast off from the South Street Seaport in Manhattan and ended up sailing twenty seven thousand miles around the world all alon. It was pretty constantly aware of the danger or or the risk of not making it. But then again, to put it into context of the rest of life. Life is dangerous. So it was just much more black and white out there. It felt more real and more present. But in the end, you know, my dad had given me a car when I was sixteen on a Jersey turnpike. Probably not such hot chances there either. I've learned that there really is no other place other than the middle of the ocean alone on my tiny little boat that I could feel simultaneously the little ast speck of nothingness at the same time as the master of my universe. So it was awesome and humbling in a really big way at exactly the same time. And that feeling was constant, and it was pretty cool. And I don't know that I could have expressed it like that then, but I could feel it. I think people maybe at home or people that didn't know me, were more doubting because I was a female. So tell you. I know we were talking out this before, but you've never heard of Helen Fair? Right? Is she still alive? Is she American? Yeah? Like I said, because not having heard of her doesn't mean that I'm I kind of live under a rock sometimes too. So Emma, there's this woman named Helen Fair. She is a fellow mountain climber. She's actually, you know, done things like trekking to the magnetic North Pole and walking across this hard desert. Have you ever heard of her? Unfortunately not. That's so cool. No, it sounds super cool. I definitely want to google her a loon everything I can. Helen Fair is not a household name. In fact, even people in her distinct line of adventure sports. I've never even heard of her. But for someone like Emma who ditched her cosmopolitan lifestyle to climb mountains and live in a van, or Tanya, who at an extremely young age decided to sail around the entire globe by herself, Helen should be like Sara Wayne Gretz or their Serena Williams. Her list of accomplishments, many done after the age of fifty, are so extreme, sobol it's hard to imagine one person doing everything she's done, and I was lucky enough to speak with her. Well. My name is Helen Sayet and I come from New Zealand, but I'm also an American citizen living in Washington State. I'm a writer. I also run a small farm, a goat farm. Some of my accomplishments that I've represented three countries in international track and field and represented United States, and I was also United States national lose champion. But my second right, you might say, started when I was fifty years old and I became the first woman to scare alone to the Magnetic North Pole. Then I continued on to other expeditions, walking four thousand miles processor Horror and then from Morocco to the Nile River, and then I walked miles across the Gobi Desert. So those are a few of the things that I've done over the years. Helen was born in November twelfth on acre farm in New Zealand, and my early life was very outdoors. In fact, my parents also liked to climb mountains as a hobby. My first mountain clime was at nine years old in the winter Mount Taranaki in the North Island of New Zealand. My parents were very, very encouraging all the time to me, and whatever I wanted to do, they supported me. So those days, young women didn't do the things that we were able to do these days. One of my childhood mentors was Sir Edmund Hillary, the first person to submit Mount Everest, like very close family friend, and he was an absolutely amazing man and very influential in my young life. If you're unfamiliar, Sir Edmund Hillary is one of the most renowned explorers to ever live. Being a young adventurer mentored by Sir Edmund Hillary would be like getting guitar lessons from Jimi Hendrix. Servant Hillary. We always just called him ed of course, and on my first clime of Mount Taranaki at age nine, he was with my parents accompany me on that climb. He had a lot of wisdom to pass on to a young girl and it was a mentor type relationship. He believed as my parents did. They all believe that women had a right to get out and do what they wanted to do and not be restricted by social norms, so to speak. Very aware that women had a very important part in life and should be encouraged to get out and do especially in the outdoors and in the in the world of physical endeavor. Mount teary Narki, New Zealand is over eight thousand feet tall, and as Helen mentioned, her introduction to mountain climbing was scaling it with her parents and Ed when she was nine. This was in the winter, and of course halfway up that mountain, my legs had turned to lead. I was just so tired, and I can remember even now just putting one ft in front of the other was just an effort. But my father said, you know, you don't climb a mountain in one long step, and one step at a time. Will do it finally? Or take all those steps, you'll find yourself on the summit. My mother kept saying, just keep vision your lies in yourself standing on that summer and that will draw you up there like a magnet. And Ed kept saying, come on, you can be an example too. Little girls of your age, they can get out and do these things. Remember what you're doing. You can do it because you're a girl. That makes it special. Let's see you do it. Let's see you take those steps. And and he kept encouraging me all the way up as well, so all the encouragement that I had basically lifted me to the submit of that mountain. As she grew older, Helen became a professional athlete, running track and field and international competition. In her twenties, she met her husband, Bill There, an American helicopter pilot who was also a certified badass, and in the nineties seventies she did what many people in their mid thirties do. She decided to become a world class loser. And I gave myself two years to when you unite States national championship, and I maybe the national team also that year, and then I quit because I was in Innsbruck with the national team and I just saw those mountains around Ensbrook and I just I just knew that my time on the loose track. I've got what I wanted, the national championship, I'm on the national team. I need to get back into the mountains. I went to Mexico and climbed the Three, the Three volcano, and I climbed Mount Denali and three times. And then I went to to Europe. I climbed a Len Picklen and the Communism and some of these higher mountains around the world. So it was a happy decision. Well, I've climbed many high mountains around the world, and I enjoyed the experience, met a lot of people. I had also lost a lot of friends due to various mountaineering accidents, and I decided one day perhaps I should ease off on these big mountains. And then I began studying the magnetic North and South Poles, the check at North Poles at the very top of the world, and I was I'd always been fascinated by polar bears, and I thought, now if I could learn to live among them, I might be able to make it safely to the to the pole. And so after some inquiry, I found that, oh, no woman had ever done this before, and I thought, well, that would be an interesting step to take in my life. Then I went north to live with the end of it, because I knew that living around pole bears, if I had a lot to learn, and so I relied on them to teach these people the masters of Arctic survival. They taught me how to deal with polar bear, what to do when I would meet one. They taught me about the where the systems of the Arctic. What is it like to walk across as the agic ocean because you're not walking on land. You're walking across the layer of ice covering an ocean, very different experience than being on land. I'd have to pull my own spread with all my gear, and so that was all part of my training. I brought an Inuit dog, a polar bear dog from the Inuit. I called him Charlie, and he was at my side to help protect me from polar bears. So, along with her dog Charlie, who factors into a few of her adventures, she took what she learned from the Inuits, body slid and headed on skis to the magnetic North Pole. And her initial assumption was definitely right. She ran into a lot of polar bears. Well, I actually encountered Steven on seven different occasions. And people say, oh, you're so brave, and suppose no, bravery has nothing to do with it, and you still have to day that's all it is true. If you're not scared, there's definitely something wrong with you. I discovered it. How do you handle it? Fear, that's the important thing. It's not you're not staying there brave and saying I'm standing up to this bear, I will conquer it. No you're not going to do that. That's a good way to get yourself killed. Instead, you have to handle that here. You've got to have the confidence in your training. You've got to clear thinking and do exactly what you're supposed to do. So in Keiths you ever find yourself in a similar position. Here's Helen's guy to facing down a polar bear in the Arctic wilderness. It might come in hand you one day, and I've been taught that, you know, make yourself as big as parce, will stand alongside your cant or your sled or something, making yourself more of a formidable target. Keep eye contact, don't look away because they look at that as a start of flight. Can certainly never run because you'll never win the race. And the polar bear will see that as as it's quality fleeing and they will be very happy to give chase and put my dog Charlie. He was step at front and we're just growling and a snarling. That helped keep the bears back. He was a huge detriment, but it also had a flare gun would buy these flays out the land in the row in front of the bear and the bears that they ever seen anything like this before, and so they and that accord smelling smoke would come up from the from the flares on the ice, forming this curtain of acrid smelling smoke across across their path. And they didn't like that. So what was Charlie, my polar their dog, and my flare gun and the knowledge that I had gained from the Innuit was the way that I was able to survive these polar bear encounters. My goodness, security was almost a month long. I was scared to death every waking moment. I was scared half to death. And after reaching the pole, on their way back to base camp, Helen and Charlie got caught in a windstorm that almost killed them. Charlie and I were sheltering behind and the sled death keeping down low because the winds were tremendously strong, and chunked of ice are flying through the air and it was really bad. And then I found that during the storm, the wind adapt to drik a vacuum and it just suck a lot of my gear and my food and supplies out of my sled and it distantly disappeared. But I found with my food, I would have five walnuts each of the next seven days, and most of my field had blown away, so I could I could only melt a little bit of ice each day for water, and fortunately only half of Charlie's food had blown away, so he was okay. Well. I was determined that I was not going to give up. At that point, I'd been thrown through so much. What was was broken eyes, storms, colar bears, cold and wind, and just everything that the art could throw at me, and I was determined, I'm not going to get up. I'm going to see the seven days through. Somehow, it got pretty desperate at times, but I kept pretty remember the lesson I learned our Mount Taranaki when I was nine years old, just get one foot in front of the other and you'll finally get there. And that's what I did. Going through all those trials and tribulations made that journey even more precious to me because of what I had to go through, and and also at that time, I was really a pioneer of sorts because women were not out doing this sort of thing at that time. Helen and Charlie made it back to safety, obviously, but her experience with the polar bears gave her the idea to study other Arctic wildlife. Several years later, Helen, her husband Bill, and her dog Charlie headed to the Canadian Yukon, where they set out to live less than a hundred feet from an active wolfstead. Well, wolves taught us a lot of lessons, and we really taught them nothing. Of course, the human beings it act more like wolves, we'd be a lot better off. They are not the fierce, mean killing machines. They're not like that at all. They do hunt animals, of course, their predators, and they're part of an important part of the environment to keep the herds about, good deer and so forth in in reasonably controlled numbers. So they have a very important part of the environment. We decided that to go to Canadian Yukon. After a full summer of reconnaissance, we found a den that was very remote. Now we didn't know if this would work, but Charlie was part wolf and it had been raised among juvenile wolves in the Arctic. Now, my husband and I we thought, well, it could be that Charlie might be a link between we as humans, as human companions, and the wolves. It took us quite a while to approach the den and to find a place where they were comfortable with us, about a hundred feet from the den, which was remarkably close, but we were able to camp there and we were able to study them up close. And so that was the most fulfilling experience of my entire life, just watching these animals and on a daily basis, they're very close to that family. They take care of each other. The whole family raises the cup, and the life around the den is very relaxed, very friendly, very family oriented. One wolf came back and had been bored by moves in a hunt, and he was pretty badly injured. He laid down at the den entrance. Some of the other wolves came to nurse and the liquors wounds take care. Other wolves went away and hunted and brought food back to him, and he did recover completely due to their care. They didn't neglect him, not for one minute, day and night. Amazing, really strong family structure that's built on respect, discipline, and love. And it was just so inspiring to us to see this upfloat every day and just just watch, just watch these animals and in a way that we should act. So we need to take a quick break, but when we get back, we hear about Helen ditching her Arctic adventures for something a little bit warmer, much much warmer. This includes a band of rebels that put her in her husband in a firing squad, killer bees in the Amazon, and food poisoning and death Valley. Trust me, you're gonna want to stick around. My husband and I were the first band, first woman to cross us to her from Morocco to the Nile. Our route took us right basically through the center of the Sahara, through the minefield and the tans A off desert and these sorts of places. It took us just over seven months. We called it the Journey from Hell. Three weeks into it, in Algeria, we were captured and by rebels. We were stood out side by cider execution. We've we've managed to get out of that just by the skin of our teeth, you might say. And here's another applicable life lesson from hell. How to escape an execution by a band of rebels in the Sahara desert. We're about to be shot, my husband said. I asked permission from our captors if he could put his hand in his pocket and take out the taps instead. Helen gave this to me as a gift and it would need a lot to me to hold it as I died, and as I heard that, I thought, what in the world is he talking about? And so anyway, abul the GPS out and then he came to punction a message on the keypad, and then he said, I just sent a message to base camp as they go to have a helicopter and the team will be out here within minutes because it's the base camp is not far away. Well, I was. I was just amazed. I thought, they're never going to believe this, because she can't send a message on the GPS. Anyway, these people believed it because they were not very well educayed. They were they were desert revels and they didn't know and they brought the story. Well, they loaded everything back up on that track and they took off as fast as they could go, leaving us standing there. It's just amazed that we had survived it. And I said to my husband name Bill, I said, what in the world they just think of that wild stories? Did? I have a pretty no idea. It just popped into my mind and that's what I said, and it worked. So of that's how we got out of that one. That was a sheer miracle. That is one of the most amazing stories I've ever heard in my entire life. I think, I think, I think somebody above us was taken good care of us. Her experience walking the Gobi Desert, on the other hand, was a little less stressful, I mean relatively. The Gobi Desert nomad we were never robbed. They're very honest and very good people. We had a great time walking dred miles across the Gobie. We did have one problem in the middle of it where one of our camels, who was carrying the water that day, rolled and split the water containers. And we were nine days from resupply, and we figured we only had about five days of water on half ration. And we were having to walk this desert in the summer because in the winter they go be as a very cold I can get down to mind forty degrees very calls a whole different journey. We struggled on, and we reached the eighth day where we were so a desperate for water and so dehydrated that we really felt that there probably would not be another day for us. Because we were in the process of just basically dying of food and and it's a terrible way to be. It's it's a terrible it's a terrible thing. One thing that really saved us was on that last day, we came across a stretch of water, probably about twenty ft across by another twenty feet though it was left over from a there might have been a spring under there, but it was. It was filthy water, um and quite salty. But we had a discelinization unit with us and the best five hundred dollars would ever spend in our lives, and we filtered that water. And that's really what saved us through the night too. When resupply came in, Helen and her husband Bill decided to take a different mode of transportation for their next adventure, a kayak down the Amazon River. Helen was the first non indigenous woman to paddle the entire length of the Amazon River, and in classic Helen Fair fashion, it was even harder than it sounds. It came to one place where there was some illegal goal miners on the bank day saw us and start shooting at us, and we were both in our own inflatable kayak. Well to be shot at in an inflatable kayak is not a good experience, so we pale. No Olympic kayaker could have kept up with us, and we shot around that next bin with the speed of an arrow. So as soon as we could, we beached our kayak and went up into the jungle and head head there for the next twenty four hours to make sure we weren't being followed. And then there was another time when we were swarmed by a swarm of bees. There's only one way to get rid of those, because we were covered in bees. The only one way to do it is that's to dive into the water. But the problem is we were in an area of fairly still water, and this is where Pirana liked to learn over the years, we've learned that you worry about the problem of the moment and worry about the problem of the future another time. And so we just dived into the water and poultry. We didn't have any problems with piranhas, but we're able to scrape those bees office in the water um. And then of course we went into this and athletic reaction that we had the correct antidote for that. We know to give each other a shot and just kind of sit awhile for that to take effect, because we were very badly done, very very badly's done. We're very lucky to get out of that because the endoplegic reaction when it's set in it was quite severe. But we did have the right TOPPN with us to counteractive. Despite all this, or maybe because of it, Helen has not given up her adventures, even as she approaches her mid eighties, though a few years ago, Bill, her husband and partner in so many of her travels, passed away before they could undertake their next passion project, walking two d plus miles across Death Valley National Park. We had used Death Valley for many years training for our desert tracks, and one day he said, you know, why don't you and I just go without any resupply. Walked the full week, but because nobody has done it. But he passed away due to an accident, and so I decided, well, I will do it solo, and I'll make the journey in his memory. And I thought, you know death Belly, Yeah, I know, I know it's the desert, and to be no water, i'd have to pull everything in a cart. And I thought, you know, this is probably going to be the famous journey I've ever taken on my life. It's only a two five miles or so, and this is not going to be a big deal. Well, I should have remembered over the years that nothing comes easy on these journeys. And halfway into it, I hit that I my day food had mold gone moldy. I didn't realize that aid it got through poisoning. And one of the rangers came along and saw me staggering, and they wanted to take me to the hospital, and I said, no, I'm not going to go to the hospital because I might never come back and finish this journey. And I am going to finish it because I'm doing this in my husband's memory and he would want me to finish this, and I'm doing it. So I went on the same thing, one step at a time, and I thought I could remember distinctly thinking, is there any way I can ever take on the long journey like this and not have something serious happened to where I have to go into the one step at a time concept. So that journey that taught me that no, don't sit out on any say they expect everything to go right, because something is going to go wrong someway. So we've heard some of Helen's stories over the past half hour, and it's really easy to marvel in her accomplishments. Even being able to talk with her is a true honor for me. But one thing she hasn't covered is the why. Obviously, something has driven her to boldly go where in many cases no woman had actually gone before, though in her mind that was never the impetus for her adventures. Just to be the first woman. I've never got up by my soapbox and speech to the world that women can do this. Well, that what I've done really is I've had a lot of ambition, a lot of I'm a goal stepper and a planner. I like to go out and meet challenges. I really feed a challenge, and so I go out there to do what I want to do as a as a person, whether I'm a man or a woman or whatever I'm I just want to do it being a woman. When I do these things, if they can motivate other women, other young girls, then I've achieved something in life. Rather than saying, well, I'm going out to prove that a woman can do this, I don't need to do that. I just go out do what I want to do and meet those challenges and take on those goals and and ruin my way through. That's really what it's all about. Since I've spoken to over a million kids in school, my message are always motivational, set goals, plans to success, Believe in yourself. You can go out there, you can do anything. I have a good friend she got breast cancer. She's recovering. There are times when she felt very discouraged. But I've said to her, one step at a time, one stage at a time. When you do something, you do it that day, you mark that day off. You don't have to do that again. You've done it. It's applied to everything. Rather than stop in thinking looe as me, I can't do that. Once you do that, you're done. Always taking that step forward. Don't look back, always look forward. Some of the things that you've done in the past might have seemed rather dumb, stupid, and even wrong, but don't look back. Learn from those experiences and take that experience and go forward. Don't look back, keep looking forward. We want to thank Helen Fair for joining us and sharing her stories and some of her inspiring words. If you want to hear more from Helen, which I don't know why you wouldn't. She's written several books about her journeys, including an upcoming release about her Truck through Death Valley. We have a link to our website in our description, I think you know what to do. This show was produced by myself and me a fast edited and mixed by the other worldly Dean White and Abbey Austria. Special thanks to all of my bosses, Jim Demigo, Megan Kirsh, Brett Kushner and Emily Felt. That's it for us. Put your trade tables up, leave your shoes on, and we'll see you next week. Five