On their motivations

Karsten: We’ve never done this for recognition; it’s always been motivated from deep inside. It was to try to achieve conservation outcomes. Some were achieved and some weren’t. Looking back, you just realize that it’s good to have a destination in your head, a goal, but it isn’t necessarily about whether you arrive there or not. It’s the journey. And we can really look back at every moment of those journeys and see how enriching they were — how they were a celebration of life, of the moment.

Leanne: When Karsten did the Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) hike — that was 1998/1999 — at that time, I was doing lots of mountain stuff but I kind of saw the mountains like a bit of a gym. But then, going with him on the second half of the hike, I really started to see them differently, as these incredible ecosystems. Being Caribou built on that experience. After Being Caribou, we had our son, and we wanted to expose him to that journeying way of life and being out on the land. So one thing has really quite organically led to another. But that initial Y2Y hike was really foundational, and that was born out of Karsten’s curiosity. 

On journeying together

Karsten: A lot of people, [after seeing one of our films or presentations], will come up to me and say, “I don’t know how you did that, be with your wife all the time, every moment of every day.” I’ll turn around and say, “I don’t know how you do it!” Often, normal life is like, you see each other for a crazy half hour in the morning. You go off for eight or nine hours a day, then have kids coming and going in the evening, and maybe sort of truly see each other for half an hour when you go to bed. That‘s crazier in my mind. I’m just so thankful that we have had the opportunity to do trips and projects like this together, and also not to have to explain the inexplicable … 

Leanne: …the inexplicable parts to each other. To have that base of experience that we can both draw on is pretty amazing. I read about an adventurer recently who does tonnes and tonnes of trips and he literally doesn’t even tell his wife about them. I just can’t even imagine. It’s fine, if it needs to be separate, but it’s such a huge well that we draw from together. In terms of the actual storytelling, because Karsten has been writing and I’ve been filmmaking, that’s always been a fun dynamic because they’re both so different. I would often be jealous of Karsten at the time — say, on the caribou trip — because he just had to be there and experience it, whereas if I didn’t capture it, it didn’t happen. But then once we got finished, in a way it was nice because I just had what I had to work with. Whereas Karsten could have mined…

Karsten: …a sort of infinite amount of material.

Leanne: Yes. But that’s been a fun back and forth that we have.

On their wildest adventure

Karsten: I don’t know if it was the wildest, but the one that affected us the most deeply was the Being Caribou expedition. For five months, we didn’t encounter anybody except the pilot who would land on a lake in a floatplane and drop off food every three weeks. What really made that trip stand apart was it forced us — because we literally were trying to be caribou — to give up our human agendas. It was completely determined by the animals: the route, the direction, the pace, everything. We had to learn a different way of being, literally, in our own heads and to be okay with a pretty high level of uncertainty, and adapt accordingly to what was going on. Truly being in the moment. That was almost painful in the beginning. But once we were able to do it, it’s really freeing, and that opened up pieces of us that otherwise wouldn’t have opened. It was hard to come back… That was a difficult transition — I would argue it’s still going on. You almost felt like you’d turned your back on something pretty special or moved on from it in ways maybe you weren’t meant to. So: it may not have been the wildest. It was the most powerful for sure.

Leanne: The caribou really were our guides on that trip — and they were amazing guides. They took us to all the best places: whether it was around a horrible tussocky area or to the best place during the worst bugs or the best place to cross a river. Their presence was just so comforting in that big, vast landscape. There was this…. who knows what was going on with the herd itself and that herd-level consciousness and us and everything. We were dreaming where we would see caribou next. And then the next day: there they were. There are all these amazing things that human beings can do when your whole existence depends on being able to be and hunt caribou. It felt like we were waking up this old way of being human on that trip.