The Herd of Turtles

Join Sarah and Brent as they share some of the moments, lessons and takeaways from the first 25 episodes that have affected them. We've gotten a lot of great feedback since the show has started and we appreciate each and every listener.
We are busy lining up more great guests for the next 25 shows! Be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss an episode!
Each episode can be found at The Herd of Turtles.
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Garrett Morrow is a long distance hiker who has hiked some of the most challenging long distance trails in the country. What would drive someone to give up the luxuries of modern life and voluntarily face both physical and mental challenges out in the wilderness? Garrett gives us the skinny on what drives him to push himself during his long distance hikes. He specifically shares his experiences from hiking the majority of the Appalachian Trail, or what is commonly referred to as The AT.
Long distance hiking is a unique activity in today's world of being constantly connected and being pulled in a million different directions. When hiking for hundreds (or thousands) of miles you get some hard lessons in how to remain present and enjoy the process and not just the end result.
Garrett shares some of the lessons he's learned while hiking, how his passion was planted and how he is able to structure his life so that he can regularly take off for a month or more at a time. In addition we learn:

• the meaning behind and the importance of having a "Trail Name"
• what Trail Magic is and how it can help raise the spirits of AT hikers
• about budgeting for long distance hikes
• and some of the hardest sections of the AT.

Garrett can be found on Instagram at fairweather_hikes
Appalachian Trail
Sugarloaf Mountain Ski Resort
Saddleback Mountain Ski Resort
Coal Mining Tour Lackawanna Country PA
Saunter Packs

In this episode Brent speaks with intrepid traveler and entrepreneur Nate Ritter, co-founder of Room Steals.

Room Steals is an online company that helps save time and frustration by being sure that you have found the absolute best prices on hotel rooms. Room Steals is able to offer wholesale pricing on rooms, even if you are only booking 1 room for one night. The business model of the service it to give the best prices of the rooms available, and if you can save money using Room Steals prices then you are offered the opportunity to sign up for the service with an annual membership.

Nate and his team have offered listeners of The Herd of Turtles Podcast a 20% discount code off of the first year of membership to Room Steals. To redeem this 20% discount, enter the code turtlespodcast at checkout.

During their conversation, Nate tells Brent how the Room Steals business idea came about: Nate and his wife love to travel. So much so that they saved for 2 years to try living abroad in France. While that didn't go according to plan, Nate learned a tremendous amount not only about travel, but also about dealing with bureaucracies, and language missteps. It also reinforced their commitment to traveling.

This desire to travel has lead them to homeschool their kids, to allow them the freedom to travel and share new experiences with their kids. Brent and Nate talk about their common homeschooling experiences and some of the great things that can come out of it, as well as some of the societal challenges of being a homeschooling family.

Upon returning to the US, Nate and his wife had been using travel hacks to score severely discounted travel. It was during this time that Nate began working with some hotel booking companies and learned about the ins and outs of how hotels price their rooms. A seed was planted that eventually turned into Room Steals.

Nate shares his experiences of working in start up companies. Working in startups is different from working in a mature, larger company for a few reasons that Nate explains. Nate shares what makes this interesting for him and the satisfaction he gets out of faster pace of startup.

Nate also has the interesting claim to fame as one of the first people to popularize the use of hashtags on Twitter. Nate shares the story of how he began to use hashtags as a citizen journalist during the San Diego fires of 2007.

You can find Nate online several ways:

Twitter: Nate Ritter

Email

Blog

Scott's Cheap Flights

Room Steals

Qualcomm

This episode's guest is the award winning, multi-talented artist Tom Ferrero. Tom has twice won the prestigious Saul Bell Design Award for his works of art.
Tom shares his educational journey as an artist. His love of art was nurtured early on in high school where he took every art class he could take. One of the last courses he took was in jewelry making where it married his favorite aspects of art into a cohesive idea.

After Tom's undergraduate studies at Rochester Institute of Technology he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study abroad in New Zealand. Upon returning for that tranformative year, he went to graduate school in Indiana.

While there, in addition to his art workload, he took teaching classes that would help set up up well for his future work as a high school art teacher but not before he spent several years teaching art at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada more commonly referred to as NSCAD.

We dive into the creative process, how to harness the inner critic for good, the importance of having multiple streams of income, the process of art contents and the beauty of both winters and summers in Maine.

You can view some of Tom's art and also contact him through his web site: Tom Ferrero Studio and on Instagram.

Patrick Scanlan is the Program Director of the Backcountry Program at Carrabassett Valley Academy (CVA) in the western mountains of Maine. The Backcountry program is a unique program that exposes kids to incredible places while teaching them how to not just be active in the backcountry, but to do it safely. They take incredible trips all over the world to rugged wildernesses to test themselves in environments that most people would shy away from. Kids learn a blend of mountaineering, mountain safety skills as well as challenging themselves by skiing breathtaking lines.
To find out more and to check out CVA.: https://www.gocva.com/athletics/backcountry

Brent and Patrick also cover:

• State of mountain guiding in the United States. Increase of clientele during pandemic. Increase in general of people wanting to get out and explore. AMGA/IFMGA Certification versus un-certified guides. Un-regulated guide services. The US ethics versus other mountainous countries. https://amga.com/ ; https://ifmga.info/
• The climate crisis effect on the outdoor industry, glaciers, and mountain hazards and the organizations that are helping to find solutions: https://protectourwinters.org/ ; https://communitysnowobs.org/ ; https://app.mountainhub.com/explore
• Diversity in the outdoor space. A critical part of solving social and political division as well as addressing the climate crisis on a national and international scale. https://www.kismetrockfoundation.org/ ; https://outdoorafro.com/ ; https://www.mountainproject.com/ ; https://americanalpineclub.org/other-grants

Patrick also supports and promotes the following organizations:

• CVA
• EMS Climbing School https://www.emsoutdoors.com/
• SOLO Wilderness Medicine https://soloschools.com/
• White Mountain Avalanche Center https://mountwashingtonavalanchecenter.org/
• Support from https://www.blizzard-tecnica.com/us/en ; https://folkrm.com/ ; https://coros.com/