Ian MacKay | Humanitarian | Critical Care Nurse

I sat down with Celeste this spring, and then the world moved in all different directions, and I’m just getting this out now. My apologies, but it’s worth the wait, and I’m happy to report that I’m back for another batch of podcasting… hoping for a weekly installment. But we’ll see.

Celeste lives in Squamish, BC, where we recorded this, and I came into this conversation a bit hot on her Sailing ski trip in Norway because I had just watched ‘Wavy 2’ on YouTube. 

It’s a ski documentary backed by her sponsor Black Crows, where she and Niko Schirmer sail to the northern Norwegian island of Svalbard and ski under arctic conditions.

You’ll want to see it… maybe watch it now so we don’t give away spoilers.

Celeste is an easy conversation, she has a lot of honesty, depth and an understanding of the world that I love, and we talk about her work doing her master’s in energy renewables, climate change, getting injured, how she pitches projects that get her fired up amongst other things.

She’s a four-season athlete, a scientist and good on bikes and skis, and I’m sure anything she puts her mind to.

Enjoy.

Juliette Pelchat is a force on a snowboard, but it was her work with RWK // Real Wild Kittens that touched me the most! A Girl Shred Movement to promote female involvement in male dominant sports.

Watching her and her sister empower girls on skateboards and in life makes me excited for the future.

I was very excited to see that she won the Sarah Burke scholarship this year. I know that Sarah would be proud … 

She’s got a lot of insight and drive far behind her eighteen years and I think we can thank her parents for giving us Juliette. She’s incorporated a company, has her eyes set on the olympics, being a pilot, blowing up the backcountry and continuing to connect with every generation of snowboarding. 

I look forward to following the sisters as they continue to challenge and propel eachother forward.

With dozens of overseas deployments in the wake of natural disasters, wars, and both underserviced and politically charged areas of the world. 

One of the biggest takeaways from this interview comes from looking at people at a human or individual level, beyond their conditioning or current events. Empathy and compassion are two things we should embrace locally and globally.

I gained a lot of perspective about life and death beyond my very privileged existence, and I love how curious Ian is about people and learning. Plus, we talk about the multi-billion dollar industries that are fueling and creating a lot of these gaps in human rights. 

We don’t solve the world's problems, but we talk about some of them, which is a beginning.

I hope this episode encourages you to broaden your worldview.

Claire and I were born in the same year, the year of the horse, and according to the Chinese zodiac, it symbolizes Power, beauty, and freedom—all qualities I see in Claire. I’ve been looking at Claire for two decades. We used to work on the same block in Whistler, and I’ve always thought of her as a gentle being. And I always thought she was gentle until she straddles a bike… but upon interviewing her, I realized that her true strength and longevity come from her smooth style. Claire is calculated and artful in how she lives, bikes and speaks. 

She had a great amount of loss in her teenage years and channelled all of that into being a racer, biker, mentor and friend. I know adversity is what shapes us… but many of her stories break my heart a little. And I know that is life, and nobody exits with a fully intact heart. 

This is an hour of real talk with Claire Buchar, and I feel we’re just scratching the surface. A second part is probably growing somewhere.

Enjoy.

By the time you listen to this, Chris Christie will be three weeks out from retirement as a career firefighter in West Vancouver. He’s 53 years old, has the fitness level of a man half his age, and is a talent behind the lens, and I’m excited to see what comes next as the pension kicks in.

From the outside looking in, he’s managed to almost seemingly merge an early life as an athlete into a first responder and then adventure photographer rooted in expeditions. These three things have allowed him to have longevity in his trajectory. 

Being a first responder, you are witnessing society more deeply and helping people at the very lowest moments of their lives. I enjoyed hearing his empathetic approach to helping people in terrible situations and improving them slightly.  

He’s very honest and humble, and one line he said that affected me was… “You cannot change the course of life.” This conversation has inspired me to have more conversations with our aging population.

He also talks a lot about vortexes. 

I hope you enjoy going into the mind of a mountaineering action photographer that thrives in moments of adversity during expeditions. 

Enjoy!

I learn a lot in this episode. I learn about myself, life, farming, Kitt (of course), routes I never even knew I wanted to tour, and the time I want to take for myself, and how not to skirt responsibilities but ultimately lean into them. 

Kitt describes herself as an observer of life, which I can relate to... However, she takes a lot of action, and I think I’m more prone to being passive. Or lately, I have felt that way.

So, in addition to learning about myself, I was moved and inspired to take more action as I observe (and document) the world around me. 

Kitt Redhead became an ACMG ski guide as a young mother. And then, as a single mother, she flipped homes in her off-seasons in different parts of BC.  Currently, she is in the midst of creating a regenerative farm in Pemberton Meadows while raising her children alongside her husband Seth Wescott.

Meet Adam Campbell. Many of you will know him as an ultra-athlete, a man who has known great tragedy or simply a partner in the mountains. Tragedy was how I first learned of this man, but upon a few google searches, I uncovered his third culture upbringing in Africa. He was raised in Lagos, Nigeria, for much of his formative life, and I love hearing about what it was like growing up in Africa in the 80s… how he found his stride in running as a late teen and then how he has always followed a path towards great things.

He’s a lawyer, a writer and a very honest and vulnerable human being.

We don’t touch down on the origin of the interview and focus on his origin story. 

An avalanche took his wife Laura’s life in January 2020. And, I thought it would have been too traumatic for me, honestly, to have unpacked in this episode. If you are interested in learning more about his journey through grief and healing you can listen to some other podcasts or the Sheraps film ‘to the hills and back’.

I loved this episode and how Adam has ultimately shaped his life and learned the hard lessons along the way. May we all have the courage to speak our truth.

Darcy is actually my hero but I kept it kind of cool when I was interviewing her. She’s an award-winning filmmaker, retired professional athlete, friend, wife and mother. She has captured and shared so many diverse topics (long before they caught the main streams) in her documentaries, commercial work and works of fiction. 

I found the entire conversation to be illuminating and yet the most profound thing she said to me is that her inner child is intact. She spends her life and time creating and being a role model for women and men alike. 

Darcy is doing the good work through her production house centred around representing women in a heavily dominated male industry. I look forward to watching more of her films and watching her trajectory continue to propel her forward into both fiction and documentary. I believe both are very large contributors to our progressive development as a society. 

If you are not familiar with Darcy’s body of work you should either stop what you are doing and watch her films or bookmark them for later. www.darcyturenne.com

She is an optimist… and a BRIGHT LIGHT.

2022 was fast/slow and it has been 364 days since I put a new podcast out for the Lawless Podcast. And, this one is as good as it gets. Andréane Lanthier Nadeau or ALN for short is as much a force on her bike as she is armed with her knitting needles. She’s a transplant from Quebec and calls Squamish home. 

She’s a member of the Rocky Mountain Race Face Enduro team and finished the world enduro series seated in eighth place. Of course, we talk about the love of mountain biking, and racing and how she found herself on this path and then we dive deep into real-life matters… knitting, drive, mentoring, motivation, death, trauma, counselling and the future. Embracing and creating change and as ALN says ‘the less change the older you grow’. Stepping into change and challenging yourself is the way forward for me and 2023.

Thank you ALN for being my first podcast! You are so open, honest and thought-provoking.

Mat the Alien had a life changing mountain bike crash in October of 2020 and he’s been on a wild road to recovery and adapting. We talk about becoming Mat the Alien, how he’s making more music than ever as well as how life looks a lot different when you are a six foot five man who finds himself in a wheelchair. Together with Mat and a bunch of his friends we are going to put together a REALLY GOOD FUNDRAISER to raise some funds to get Mat out of his Toyota Corolla and into a modified van so he can claim back his freedom.