Lone Wolf: Walking 1,000 Miles in a Wolf's Footsteps with Adam Weymouth

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Award-winning travel writer Adam Weymouth joins Chris to talk about Lone Wolf, his account of retracing the epic 1,000-mile journey of Slavc — a gray wolf who walked from Slovenia, across the Alps, into Italy in 2011. It's a story about rewilding, politics, folklore, and an unlikely wolf love story.

Key Takeaways

• Europe's carnivores are quietly returning. There are now more wolves in Europe than in the continental US, and more bears in Europe than lions in Africa. Every mainland European country has wolves — and they came back on their own, not through reintroduction.
• Slavc's journey was remarkable for its success, not just its distance. He walked ~1,000 miles (possibly 3,000 with detours), then against staggering odds met a lone female wolf, "Juliet." Their descendants — 42 pups, 17 packs — repopulated the Eastern Italian Alps.
• Wolves are extraordinarily hard to track. Researcher Hubert Potočnik boils his equipment, buries it over winter, and works in two pairs of gloves — because if one wolf sees a packmate trapped, the whole pack becomes uncatchable.
• The wolf is one of the world's longest-running culture wars. Weymouth met farmers whose livelihoods are genuinely threatened; far-right parties have weaponized the issue. After a wolf ate EU Commission President von der Leyen's pony, the wolf's protected status was downgraded.
• Werewolf trials were real. A lesser-known twin to the witch trials, mostly targeting men — scapegoating outsiders and vagrants, often under torture.
• We embraced the dog but never forgave the wolf — despite them being nearly the same animal, separated only ~20,000 years ago. Far more people are killed by domestic dogs than wolves.
• Slow travel builds genuine human connection. Walking and canoeing let Weymouth meet people on equal terms and represent even opposing views fairly — the real purpose of travel writing.
• The book is really about change and fear of it — climate, migration, dying industries — and the wolf as a model of meeting crisis with movement and resilience.

Chapters

• 00:00 A Chance Meeting of Wolves
• 00:43 Intro & Welcome
• 03:27 Meet Adam Weymouth
• 08:18 Walking to Istanbul
• 17:05 The Yukon, Salmon & Indigenous Alaska
• 28:42 Tracking Slavc: Why Wolves Are So Hard to Catch
• 30:38 Retracing the Lone Wolf Walk Across Europe
• 36:27 Farmers, Politics & the Wolf Culture War
• 42:19 Werewolf Trials & Folklore
• 49:57 Slavc & Juliet: A Wolf Love Story
• 1:05  Change, Climate & the Wolf's Return
• 1:07  Quickfire Questions & Closing Traditions

Links & Mentions

• Book: Lone Wolf by Adam Weymouth (also available on audiobook)
• Website: adamweymouth.com — articles and links to buy the books
• Charity shoutout: Io Non Ho Paura del Lupo ("I'm not scared of the wolf") — working with Italian farmers to shift cultural perceptions of the wolf
• Call to adventure: Donkey trekking in the Pyrenees for families

Transcript

[00:00:00] A Chance Meeting of Wolves

[00:00:00] Adam Weymouth: We had a couple of run-ins with bears, but we had a couple of run-ins with sort of very drunk people with guns. It was an amazing trip. It was an amazing insight into an incredibly remote, a part of the world that is still rapidly changing from climate change and overfishing and everything else.

[00:00:17] Adam Weymouth: He bumped into this wolf, this female wolf, who was named Juliet because of being so close to Verona after, after Romeo and Juliet, and we don't quite know where she came from because she didn't have a tracking collar on. But from looking at her genetics, it seems likely that she came from the French Italian border.

[00:00:32] Adam Weymouth: So there were no other wolves for thousands of square miles, and somehow these two wolves found each other. And so how that happens, you know, is that face or chance or whatever it is. 

[00:00:43] Intro & Welcome

[00:00:43] Chris Watson: Welcome to the Adventure Diaries Podcast, where we share tales of adventure, connection, and exploration from the smallest of creators to the larger than life adventurers, we hope their stories inspire you to go create your own extraordinary adventures.[00:01:00]

[00:01:00] Chris Watson: And now your host, Chris Watson. Chris Watson. 

[00:01:05] Chris Watson: Welcome to another episode of The Adventure Diaries. Today we're joined by Adam Weymouth. Adam is an award-winning travel writer, journalist, and one of Britain's leading chronicler of long, slow journeys. And what a story we have for you today. Did you know that there are now more wolves in Europe than there are in the continental United States?

[00:01:29] Chris Watson: There are more bears in Europe than lions in Africa. Europe's large carnivores are quietly returning and in 2011. One of them made a journey that no one thought was possible. A young gray wolf named Slavc walked over a thousand miles from Slovenia across the Alps and into the mountains above Verona in Italy.

[00:01:52] Chris Watson: And a decade later, Adam retraced his path on foot. And the result is Adam's new book, lone [00:02:00] Wolf. And in today's episode, we explore how wolves came back from near extinction and why they've become one of Europe's most politically divisive animals. We unpack the werewolf trials that echo the witch hunts across the continent in the 18th century, and we look at the moment, Slavc met a female wolf named Juliet and what their descendants have done for the rewilding of the Italian 

[00:02:25] Chris Watson: Alps.

[00:02:25] Chris Watson: So please settle in and enjoy this fantastic conversation with Adam Weymouth.

[00:02:35] Chris Watson: Adam Weymouth, welcome to the Adventure Diaries. How are you? 

[00:02:39] Adam Weymouth: I'm very good. I'm really pleased to be here. 

[00:02:41] Chris Watson: Yeah, excellent. I'm very, very excited. The topic Adam conversation flash up for those that are watching this book, uh, Lone Wolf the story of Slavc and, uh, his journey across, uh, I think it was it Walking the Fault Lines of Europe.

[00:02:58] Chris Watson: So that's kinda [00:03:00] what we want to get into, and you're kinda a bit of a pilgrimage, on that, that route. 

[00:03:04] Chris Watson: I'm really excited to, to get in because it's very, it's close to home as well.

[00:03:09] Chris Watson: 'cause we've explored it in Scotland. Absolutely, yeah. Quite a bit. And, and I know you've touched on that as well through your walk across Scotland. Mm-hmm. You've met with people in the Cairngorms and stuff. So we'll come to that. But my rambling aside, I want to bring it right back and give some context about Adam Weymouth.

[00:03:27] Meet Adam Weymouth: Roots in Nature

[00:03:27] Chris Watson: Understand what it was like for little Adam growing up. What was your hopes, dreams and ambitions and your formative experiences as far as nature and the outdoors went. 

[00:03:39] Adam Weymouth: Looking back, it was quite tame, but I, I realized, looking back how lucky I was to just, you know, I, I've got little kids to my own now and we're always thinking about how to sort of give them an appreciation of nature.

[00:03:50] Adam Weymouth: And I think it was the little things. I was lucky enough to go to a school that had a little woodland, which felt enormous in my head. It was probably just, you know, a couple of trees at the bottom of the fields. But I remember playing in [00:04:00] that a lot. I grew up on the edge of the new forest, so quite often we'd go for walks in the forest.

[00:04:04] Adam Weymouth: All, all our family holidays were down in Cornwall. Um, and, and we'd go walking on the cliffs. And at the time I sort of felt like I was getting dragged out a bit. But in my twenties I ended up walking to Istanbul and I realized that there must have been something in there. Only walks that kind of stuck, so, yeah. And, and, and my, and my dad in particular, really likes gardening. He knows all the birds. We did used to do these things on Saturdays where we'd do little nature projects in the garden. We'd kind of bury a jam jar and then go out in the morning and see what bugs we'd caught overnight and things like that.

[00:04:31] Adam Weymouth: So, yeah, I think you can think about giving your kids these sort of big grand, you know? 

[00:04:36] Chris Watson: Yeah. 

[00:04:37] Adam Weymouth: Tailor 'em outta school for a year and cycle around the world kind of things. But actually it was, you know, and I'm more for that, but there was something just about those little glimpses at the bottom of the garden that, that I think was really formative for me.

[00:04:49] Chris Watson: Yeah. As a father. Now Adam, know Adam, are you conscious about instilling those types of experiences in your little one? 

[00:04:57] Adam Weymouth: Yeah, it feels really important, but both are sort [00:05:00] of the nature side and also, you know, we, you know, we, we try and cycle to school as much as we can. We we're fortunate to sort of live just up the road from a beach.

[00:05:08] Adam Weymouth: So we spend, as much of the good weather as we can out on the beach. We've got a little allotment, so just, yeah, little things, but planting potatoes, whatever. But yeah, the, 

[00:05:18] Chris Watson: if 

[00:05:18] Adam Weymouth: you 

[00:05:19] Chris Watson: jam jar idea, I like that. That's something that I've never, 

[00:05:21] Adam Weymouth: yeah, it was a lot of fun. I remember finding some mad little beasties in the 

[00:05:25] Chris Watson: excellent you.

[00:05:26] Chris Watson: Kinda touch there on a bit, your walk to Stan, but we'll come back to that in a minute. But as a, were you creative as a kid to where did the writing and kinda storytelling thing come from? 

[00:05:36] Adam Weymouth: Yeah, very. I mean, I was definitely one of those kids that always wanted to write and I remember writing little books, you know, a, a very young age, kind of seven, eight years old.

[00:05:46] Adam Weymouth: I was, I, I would be scribbling away and again, very sweet watching my daughter who's just kind of clicked with reading in the last six months or so. I was one of those kids that was always, reading on the toilet and reading, walking down the stairs and, and, and yeah, I I, I [00:06:00] felt certain from a very young age that what I was gonna do was right.

[00:06:04] Adam Weymouth: Yeah. 

[00:06:04] Adam Weymouth: And I really drifted away from it as a kind of, in my twenties I got very involved in activism and I, I really kind of drifted away from that, but it was always there and, and it has ended up being what I do 

[00:06:16] Chris Watson: and what, see when you were writing and stuff and, and. Because it's, it's kind of can be quite cathartic.

[00:06:22] Chris Watson: I like the idea of it, but I can't I get really frustrated. I love the story. I love storytelling. I, I love understanding like artists, like your selling authors and writers and how can your process and stuff. How has that evolved over the years? 'cause you talked about being involved in climate action and now you're, you're, I know there's themes of that in the book, but you're kinda nature writing and adventure writing to an extent have, have you kinda navigated different, like genres or, or themes over the years as you, has your craft changed 

[00:06:54] Adam Weymouth: and de de.

[00:06:55] Adam Weymouth: Definitely as a kid, I always thought I'd write novels. That's, that's what I loved. I love sort of fantasy stuff [00:07:00] and, and yeah, even kind of going through university, I, I assumed I would write fiction. And then, like I say, the, the climate activism took over, kind of when I moved to Glasgow actually, and, and got involved with a lot of sort of direct action stuff and then moved back to London and I ended up doing this Walk to Istanbul with becoming to talk about, but it was doing that walk that I wrote just a couple of articles and got them published for sort of 50 quid here and there in little magazines, and realized that maybe I could combine these interests that I had.

[00:07:27] Adam Weymouth: I was feeling a little bit disillusioned with the activism in some ways. Personally, I, I just felt that, you know, I was, I was giving a lot and it wasn't nourishing me particularly, which, you know, obviously that's not entirely what it's about, but I felt like I needed, I was missing that creative side as well.

[00:07:43] Adam Weymouth: So, yeah, I mean, I, and now I actually, as all travel writers, I tried to write a novel during lockdown. As every single travel writer. I know it's incredibly hard, you know, um, I not just starting with a blank piece of paper, um, I, I've, it's good to [00:08:00] be able to begin with a set of characters that I've met and a journey that I've done.

[00:08:04] Adam Weymouth: And that to me is now the sitting down and the writing in a room by myself. I, I find quite challenging. The real privilege of my job is actually getting out, going, getting to do these journeys and, and meet the people that I get to meet. 

[00:08:16] Chris Watson: So, coming back to, 

[00:08:18] Walking to Istanbul

[00:08:18] Chris Watson: why did you watch it Istanbul? What gave you that idea?

[00:08:22] Adam Weymouth: Long story. Where did it come from? And like I say, I was always, you know, I was going out on walks as a kid. I got quite interested for some reason that I can't quite. Pin now I ended up doing, when I was at university, my parents lived at one end of the North Downs Way, and I spent a week walking from my parents' house back to university.

[00:08:42] Adam Weymouth: I don't know why that seemed like a good idea, but I did. And then a friend of mine did the Camino to Santiago to Compostela one summer. And he loved it and he told me about it and I ended up doing it the following summer. So I guess it grew from there really. And then, um, I, I did a master's in Glasgow in Human [00:09:00] Ecology.

[00:09:00] Adam Weymouth: And one of the modules was spiritual activism, taught by this amazing activist called Alistair Macintosh. And it was looking at the, kind of the spiritual side of activism. And I got really interested in protest walking. I guess I'd got interested in pilgrimage when I walked to Ello. I hadn't done it for religious reasons, but I was interested in what it was that required people at some point in their lives to go out and do this incredibly simple thing of just putting one foot in front of the other.

[00:09:28] Adam Weymouth: And so through the Masters, I got interested in protest, walking, and the kind of the power behind protest walks. Obviously Gandhi Salt March is the famous one, but the Jiro marches the women walking to Green and common fa lame protests, many different things. And I, I, I spent, I walked with a group across London for a week as a, as a fossil fuels protest.

[00:09:49] Adam Weymouth: So it just sort of grew from there really. I wrote my dissertation about that, and then there just seemed something a bit ludicrous to be sitting in a library writing about walking. And I wondered what it would be like to go on a huge walk. And, and [00:10:00] there wasn't really a protest element to it or particularly a pilgrimage element to it.

[00:10:03] Adam Weymouth: But I, I just wanted to know what it would feel like to go out for the best part of a year and just put myself in that situation. Really Istanbul felt, you know, being the border between Europe and, and Asia felt as good a place as anything to aim for. Yeah. 

[00:10:18] Chris Watson: How, how long did that take you to do that?

[00:10:20] Chris Watson: It was 

[00:10:20] Adam Weymouth: about nine months. 

[00:10:21] Chris Watson: Nine months. And was that after lockdown, or 

[00:10:25] Adam Weymouth: No, that was a while back. It was 2010. Yeah. 

[00:10:29] Chris Watson: What, how, how did, how did you feel? I mean, it, it's difficult 'cause it's been so long ago, but that, I mean, that's a huge undertake, a huge undertaking. You must, yeah. Uh, much a younger man. How much did that shape your view of the world?

[00:10:47] Chris Watson: I mean, because there's so a lot of things you touch on in the book with.

[00:10:53] Chris Watson: Can I ask a quick favor? Please. If you are enjoying the Adventure Diaries Podcast, 

[00:10:57] Chris Watson: could I ask that you take the time to [00:11:00] click that subscribe or follow button and if you're feeling extra 

[00:11:04] Chris Watson: generous. A written review or a star rating on your platform or choice would be greatly appreciated. 

[00:11:11] Adam Weymouth: Now let's get back to the episode.

[00:11:13] Adam Weymouth: Thank you 

[00:11:14] Chris Watson: foreshadowing too much about the collapse of cultural diversity and things like that. What, if you think back to that, what was it, what was it like? What was your impressions of the world like then walking through parts of Europe and into Turkey compared to now? Obviously there's a lot more conflict and stuff in the world and it's tragic.

[00:11:33] Adam Weymouth: Yeah, it's, it's interesting to think what it would be like now. My abiding experience, you know, and, and I approached it with this kind of sort of youthful naivety. I'd never really been to the mountains before and I spent kind of two months trekking through the Alps in, sort of may time. So not, you know, still quite snowy and yeah, a lot of that kind of bravado of youth and you, you kind of get away with things.

[00:11:58] Adam Weymouth: Yeah, I remember [00:12:00] it as this incredible time. My overriding experience was that people were fundamentally good. You know, obviously there were, there were times that were tough. There were times that I was far from home and missing friends, and it was always that kindness of strangers that, that saw me through and that sense that I'd kind of grown up with that, you know, strangers aren't to be trusted and, and yeah.

[00:12:22] Adam Weymouth: You know, hospitality doesn't exist anymore. And everywhere I went from England to France to, to, to Kosovo, to Bulgaria, to Turkey. Everywhere I went, I met people who would offer me a meal or a bed for the night, or, you know, yeah. New pair of socks or, or whatever it was. Yeah. It's, it was really those moments, I think.

[00:12:42] Adam Weymouth: Yeah. 

[00:12:42] Adam Weymouth: And there was something about, yeah, like you say, I, I, I'm very interested in the kind of cultural diversity and, and there was a way of, you know, not follow. It was really just following a string of coincidence. I, I, I would meet someone and they would tell me about a particularly nice path, or [00:13:00] you have to go and see my cousin who lives down here.

[00:13:02] Adam Weymouth: I, I didn't plan my way across Europe at all, and that meant that I just got this amazing cross-section of the continent really. Um, and through places that I'd never thought I would go from places, you know, like Montenegro and North Macedonia and, 

[00:13:17] Chris Watson: yeah. 

[00:13:19] Adam Weymouth: Yeah, it was, it was a real revelation, I think, and I'm very glad that I did it when I did.

[00:13:24] Adam Weymouth: I think I would approach it very differently now, but I'm very glad that I did that as a young man and, and got to see the world in that way. 

[00:13:29] Chris Watson: Was it just a backpack, Adam, to just throw a backpack on to a tent with you? What, what, how did you, how did 

[00:13:34] Adam Weymouth: you I didn't even take a tent to be honest. I was, I was woefully under prepared.

[00:13:38] Adam Weymouth: I had a waterproof that I found at the side of the road on the third day that was just a kind of, you know, sort of fabric thin poncho hair. I had a bivy bag that didn't work very well. So I generally slept in kind of. Barn or caves or church doorways or whatever I could find really, I, I ended up buying a tent sort of as it got into the autumn about sort of six or seven months in.[00:14:00]

[00:14:02] Adam Weymouth: Yeah. Nothing that I did, I would recommend in terms of planning how to do these things, but you work it out as you go. You know, I started out with an absurdly heavy bag, then ended up posting a lot of at home as I, 

[00:14:13] Chris Watson: yeah. 

[00:14:13] Adam Weymouth: As I, you know, I took a plant identification guide with me and a flute that I thought I'd learned to play on the way.

[00:14:18] Adam Weymouth: And, you know, 

[00:14:19] Chris Watson: that 

[00:14:19] Adam Weymouth: just reminds 

[00:14:19] Chris Watson: me of like, enter the wild. 

[00:14:22] Adam Weymouth: Yeah, exactly. Right. And I always think, you know, I, I'm very interested in the Chris McCandless story because I've, I've spent time in Alaska and, and been to Healy and, you know, I understand Alaskans really dislike Chris McCandless, you know, that, that, do they ab they can't stand it.

[00:14:37] Adam Weymouth: Partly because there a lot of state money has to be spent on rescuing people that have gone out to the bus and not been able to get back for the exact same reasons that he can get back. And yeah, I think he rep, he does represent this kind of young man who doesn't, you know, refuses to learn and, dies perhaps for having a lack of humility.

[00:14:57] Adam Weymouth: You know, there's a lot of Alaskans that have done what Chris McCandless did and [00:15:00] they didn't get famous because they didn't die, and they did take local advice and all the rest of it. But then I think that is a bit unfair on Chris McCandless because had he survived, he would now be in his forties and he'd have learned his lesson as I did, as we all do if we get the chance to, right.

[00:15:14] Adam Weymouth: And, but unfortunately he never got to grow up and he never got to learn his lessons. And so, you know, I think we have to make those mistakes perhaps in order to learn from them. 

[00:15:24] Chris Watson: Wa was that the first big major life thing that you'd done then? Ha, had you done any sort of, because I'm assuming that was before Alaska and the Yukon.

[00:15:34] Chris Watson: Yeah, 

[00:15:34] Adam Weymouth: it was. Yeah. Yeah, I'd done kind of backpacking straight off university. I went to South America for six months. 

[00:15:41] Chris Watson: Okay. 

[00:15:43] Adam Weymouth: But kind of on the backpacker trail really, you know? Yeah. That was the first journey that really felt, I, you know, I, I, obviously, I had amazing times in South America and, and it changed a lot how I thought about the world, but there was something in that journey,[00:16:00]

[00:16:03] Adam Weymouth: I suppose I became interested in the process of being on the journey. Yeah. May, may, maybe that's it. You know, I, I traveled to South America. I was, been to Namibia and, and they were fascinating places and I, I saw fascinating things and met fascinating people, but that war to Istanbul was probably the first time I got really interested in what it actually means to be on a journey and how that's, 

[00:16:23] Chris Watson: yeah.

[00:16:23] Chris Watson: Did that plant the, the seed of doing more long distance stuff than Adam. 'cause Theon, what was that like, a couple thousand miles or something? 

[00:16:31] Chris Watson: That you paddled, uh, through that and from what I, like I said, what we're saying off air. I, I think I've missed the boat with that one. I feel like that's another episode entirely.

[00:16:41] Chris Watson: It's right up my street. I'm sure I, I listened to something not so long ago and I'm sure that you said that you had never canoed or kayaked or something before when you'd done the, or you had been in it for an afternoon and then you decided to 

[00:16:57] Adam Weymouth: Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, because I'd, I'd been out in Alaska for a [00:17:00] few months as a journalist and I'd spent, I got, yeah, with a friend who went out on a canoe for an afternoon.

[00:17:05] The Yukon, Salmon & Indigenous Alaska

[00:17:05] Adam Weymouth: But what led me to write the book, one of the stories that I reported on out in Alaska was about these 28 Yup'ik fishermen who lived on the cus of Quim Delta on the cus of Quim River on the west coast of Alaska. And there was a fishing ban on the king salmon 'cause their numbers had declined so dramatically.

[00:17:21] Adam Weymouth: These 28 Yup'ik fishermen had gone out, deliberately got arrested, press, released their intentions to get arrested, to catch these kings and saying that, catching them as part of their traditional culture, part of their spiritual heritage. And they were defending themselves based on the First Amendment as the right to practice their, their religion.

[00:17:36] Adam Weymouth: And then that grew, they were convicted. And then the ban on Catching Kings came in along the entire length of the Yukon River the following two years when I was back in England. So it just felt to me that it was a much bigger story to be told. So I, I wrote the proposal and, and we sold the idea. At which point I confessed to my editor.

[00:17:55] Adam Weymouth: I knew nothing about canoeing. And we did a little bit of practice before we went as a we. [00:18:00] 'cause my, my wife drove me for the second half. We spent a few days going down the y and down the dot. But you know, they're just trickles compared to the Yukon. Yeah. The Yukon is seven miles across. When you get to the sea, it's, it's just an enormous river.

[00:18:13] Adam Weymouth: But to come back on the long distance thing, well, the first time I was in Alaska working as a journalist, I'd found it really. You catch these little six bush planes into these very remote villages and I'd have maybe 24 hours to go and interview people. And there's a lot of distrust between indigenous people and white people coming into these villages for very good reasons.

[00:18:33] Adam Weymouth: And I found it so hard to make connections with people. And I found it's a very uncomfortable way to work. And so when I was thinking about how to tell this story of the salmon and how the salmon's disappearance is affecting local people, one of the reasons to do it as a canoe trip was because I'd learned when I walked to Stan that actually that is the way to meet.

[00:18:50] Adam Weymouth: You meet people on a completely different terms. When, when you're traveling like that, you know, we would camp on beaches and people would wanna know how the fishing was going up river. And yeah, they'd introduced me to their cousin in the next village [00:19:00] down. And I made these connections to people in a way that I never would've got to know and understand people's lives if we'd done it in a more traditional way.

[00:19:08] Adam Weymouth: So I think there is a reason to research like this beyond it being. Exciting and enjoyable. I think people do open up more as well. 

[00:19:16] Chris Watson: I think the, the slowing down nature of that and knowing that it's such a long journey and, and spending time and I mean actually how, how long, see, when you were in Alaska, did you spend much time in each of the little kinda townships or towns and on the way, or were you, how much of that was little in the water for the duration?

[00:19:33] Chris Watson: Or did you spend time to, to get to know some of the people in those kind of areas? 

[00:19:37] Adam Weymouth: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's, it's really a book about people. Yeah. And, and, and it's using the salmon as that way in to write about how people's lives are changing. 'cause very quickly I realized that as soon as you talk to people about salmon, they wanna talk about why they live where they do and what they hope for their kids and what it means to be indigenous in 21st century America.

[00:19:55] Adam Weymouth: And, and so yeah, there's, there's, there's good [00:20:00] chunks of time between villages, the villages of space, maybe sort of 50 or a hundred miles apart. There's no roads connecting the villages. It's very. But then every village we would stop and we would camp and on the beach and we would meet people and stay in the villages for 1, 2, 3, 4 days until we'd sort of, you know, I mean, that's a 

[00:20:19] Chris Watson: proper, that's a proper world doneness experience.

[00:20:22] Chris Watson: That, I mean, because I watch all the, I've never been to Alaska. I've never been to the Yukon. It's, and I've, I've, uh, I've spoken to a few people that have done expeditions down there and it's so something that absolutely fascinates me. 'cause I know how much time and energy that goes into planning these things as well.

[00:20:37] Chris Watson: Did it, did your trip go to plan when you were doing that? Did it, can you meet your expectations or did you ever, ever get into, bother or trouble with rations or kitter, anything like that? 

[00:20:48] Adam Weymouth: No, we, we, we planned pretty, we, we were, we, yeah, we, we planned, we planned a lot. I did a first aid course before we went.

[00:20:54] Adam Weymouth: We had this, you know, vast medical bag that we sort of used for a couple of listers and [00:21:00] nothing more. Yeah, I think everything did go, we were very cautious. You know, the, the, the, the, the main, there's very few rapids apart from right at the top. The main danger is just because the river's so wide that the waves can really pick up if you've got even a little bit of wind.

[00:21:15] Adam Weymouth: So there quite a lot of days of sitting out bad weather and waiting for the news. Just really don't handle waves at all. Yeah. We had a couple of run-ins with bears I was gonna ask, and we had a couple of run-ins with sort of very drunk people with guns, but, but it was, but it was an amazing, it was an amazing trip.

[00:21:31] Adam Weymouth: It was an amazing insight into yeah. An incredibly remote part of the world. But it, despite its remoteness, a part of the world that is still rapidly changing 

[00:21:42] Chris Watson: Yeah. 

[00:21:42] Adam Weymouth: From climate change and overfishing and 

[00:21:45] Chris Watson: Yeah. 

[00:21:46] Adam Weymouth: Globalization and everything else. 

[00:21:48] Chris Watson: Yeah. I, I had to actually say. A lady on Erin Rainney, who's does a lot of work for National Geo Na, Nat Geo and BBC and, and stuff like that, Willow filmmaker.

[00:21:58] Chris Watson: And we kinda touched on some of [00:22:00] that impacts that, that has had, 'cause her fa, her family are, I dunno how many generations, but they're fisher women in, in men. And that is like on the salmon runs in the impact that it's, that's having in Bristol Bay in Alaska. It's uh, that is fascinating and how much we having to campaign to save certain rights and stuff like that.

[00:22:18] Chris Watson: Mm-hmm. It's crazy. It really is crazy. 

[00:22:20] Adam Weymouth: Yeah. Well I didn't know until I came back from Alaska is that Scotland used to, had the same history right. That every, every village had had wild salmon nets. And uh, there's an amazing photographer called Colin McPherson who's sort of documented their demise over the last couple of decades.

[00:22:34] Adam Weymouth: And it took me going to Alaska to understand that actually much better. And even on the seven, wrote a piece about a guy on the river seven in Bristol that was catching world salmon until two or three years ago. Yeah. So, you know, we've, we've lost it almost in tidy now. And Alaska is, an emblem of what's left.

[00:22:52] Adam Weymouth: But 

[00:22:52] Chris Watson: yeah, 

[00:22:53] Adam Weymouth: everywhere used to have salmon ones like that. 

[00:22:54] Chris Watson: And even the, the apparently wild salmon farming that goes on [00:23:00] industrial and industrial scale and, and what that does to the actual 

[00:23:02] Chris Watson: The native species. And yeah. I mean that's, this is a whole other podcast is kind of decimating that and it's Yeah.

[00:23:11] Adam Weymouth: Yeah. Alaska actually never allowed salmon farming because it is, it is so disastrous to world stocks. Yeah. 

[00:23:17] Chris Watson: Yeah. There certain, there was, I'm, I'm sure there's, on Netflix, there is a documentary that touches on that, where even though that the World Salmon Farm and I think I'm gonna do this terrible justice, but elsewhere in the world, it's what is because of the runs that they go through, like different parts of, I think there's parts, other parts of America that are, was in the east coast or whatever, but it showed like the, the roots that where these can actually tra traverse all the way around to the entire country and actually get into.

[00:23:44] Chris Watson: Into the river systems and stuff with the true weld salmon. And I think that we've done like DNA matching on it and things that have been broken out of, like far salmon farms are still infiltrated the DNA of these apparent weld salmon. And it's just, it's just, yeah. 

[00:23:59] Adam Weymouth: Yeah. [00:24:00] In Scotland now you've got pink salmon, which, which shouldn't be there, which are Pacific species, which have escaped from nets in, in, in Norway, which are now infiltrating Scottish river systems.

[00:24:09] Adam Weymouth: Yeah, 

[00:24:10] Chris Watson: yeah. Anyway, I'm, 

[00:24:11] Adam Weymouth: it's bad business, but Yeah. 

[00:24:12] Chris Watson: Yeah. Anyway, I'm digressing and taking this way, way, way, way off topic. We're here to talk about Slavc and, uh, the lone wealth Germany, another slow and immersive journey across, uh, I mean across Europe. Is it s Slovenia, Austria, and Italy. That's 

[00:24:30] Adam Weymouth: right. Yeah.

[00:24:31] Adam Weymouth: And I can tell you've listened to the audio book and not read it. 'cause your pronunciation of Slavc is, is spot 

[00:24:35] Chris Watson: on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I've, I've actually, so I've got, actually got the, the physical bit and I pick it up and then when I'm in the car, I listen to the audio and I go back. 'cause there's a few things in it.

[00:24:44] Chris Watson: I've, I've now got my notes to try and pronunciate them, but I'll, uh, so you might need to, uh, correct me anyway. Where, where's, where did that come from? Where did the idea for that, uh, as a topic, how did that grab your attention? [00:25:00]

[00:25:01] Adam Weymouth: It part partly being out in Alaska, and when I came back from Alaska for the last time, like I said, we, we were, as we were talking before we, before we started this, I lived out on Lock Fine for a while.

[00:25:14] Adam Weymouth: And there was something about the landscape that's, you know, wasn't, it's not dissimilar to Alaska in a kind of, in a sort of microscopic version of but all these. Large carnivores, large mammals that I'd got used to seeing in Alaska from time to time. The bear, the Lynx, the Wolverine, all those animals used to exist on the British Isles.

[00:25:33] Adam Weymouth: And I started wondering what had happened to them. And I did a walk across Scotland a few years ago, which got me interested in wolves. I started at the Allair estate just north of Inverness, where Paul Lister has been trying to reintroduce wolves for a couple of decades now without success so far. And I finished my walk in the south of the Cairngorms, where the last Wolf in Scotland is meant to have been a shot.

[00:25:55] Adam Weymouth: There's a few last Wolf stories in Scotlands, but this is one of them in, in Kelly Cranky Gorge. [00:26:00] And so I, I used that walk, which was a couple of hundred miles down through the Cairngorms, and I used it to talk to sheep farmers and hikers and gamekeepers and all sorts about how people would feel about having the wolf back in Scotland.

[00:26:12] Adam Weymouth: So, and you know, and obviously there, there is a lot of conversation around bringing the wolf back to the British Isles. So, yeah, at it is hard. It was, it was trying to understand what had happened to our carnivores and it was also seeing that when you talk to people about wolves, people get really animated, you know?

[00:26:27] Adam Weymouth: Yeah. It's hard to think of a comparable animal where I feel you could stop anyone on the street and ask them, and everyone would have an opinion about a wolf, and I don't think that's true for a bear or a tiger. It is such a, we all know how we feel about wolves, and that makes them a really interesting animal to write about.

[00:26:43] Chris Watson: Did you have an opinion of wolves before you picked up this journey? 

[00:26:49] Adam Weymouth: I think a, you know, so, so wolves are doing very well in Europe now. Their numbers are really rebounding. They were almost pushed to extinction. They've really come back in the last 50 years or so, [00:27:00] and I think, I probably felt then why can't we have them here?

[00:27:04] Adam Weymouth: You know, why can't we have them in the Highlands or Northumberland, or, or wherever it is? And there is part of me that, that still believes that is possible one day. But I probably tempered my romanticism a bit having been on the journey and met a lot of people that were opposed to the wolf and seeing how the wolf is being politicized.

[00:27:24] Chris Watson: I think what actually really fascinated me about the book, which I di I didn't realize that most, if not all the countries in Europe, w with exception, some of the islands have wolves to varying degrees of lets size and packs and stuff, don't they? Which I, I just absolutely Every single by 

[00:27:42] Adam Weymouth: every single mainland country, Luxembourg, Belgium, Holland, Belgium, 

[00:27:45] Chris Watson: in places.

[00:27:45] Chris Watson: Well, 

[00:27:46] Adam Weymouth: yeah, 

[00:27:46] Chris Watson: I work in Belgium quite a lot, travel through, but, and I just, I just could not believe that there, there's wolves in Belgium. I just, yeah, it's mad 

[00:27:53] Adam Weymouth: and there's no way that they've been reintroduced they everywhere in Europe. Yeah. They have come back by themselves under their own esteem. 

[00:27:59] Chris Watson: [00:28:00] Yeah. And it wasn't a, something, I started adding something about that the more wills in Europe than Iran states.

[00:28:07] Chris Watson: I mean, that's astonishing. That is just, I, I couldn't, I'm sure when I, I first read that and I listened to the other book. I went and Googled it and just, and I, and I was looking at down the rabbit hole with, with stats and stuff. I just, 

[00:28:18] Adam Weymouth: yeah, 

[00:28:18] Chris Watson: because yeah, 

[00:28:19] Adam Weymouth: and more, more bears in Europe than lines in Africa I wrote as well.

[00:28:22] Adam Weymouth: Which, which to me is also astonishing, you know? 'cause we don't think of Europe like that. But actually large carnivals are doing are doing very well in Europe at the moment. 

[00:28:30] Chris Watson: Yeah. And massive amount of packs across Spain as well. Mm-hmm. Which I also found quite astonishing. So bringing that back, so the chap that you kinda worked a little bit with from the science aspect, Schubert I think, is it?

[00:28:41] Chris Watson: Yeah. 

[00:28:42] Tracking Slavc: Why Wolves Are So Hard to Catch

[00:28:45] Chris Watson: This what fascinated me. 'cause wills a difficult I think you covered this in the book very well, the difficulty to track and capture. 'cause they're difficulty to capture and tag, aren't they? And there was something in that about the process that the guys went through to try and, and trap Slavc.

[00:28:59] Chris Watson: And it was, what is [00:29:00] it? Digging holes and making. Of stuff to get rid of the scent and all that. Could you touch on that? I found that absolutely fascinating. 

[00:29:08] Adam Weymouth: Yeah, exactly. 

[00:29:09] Chris Watson: Intelligent animals. 

[00:29:11] Adam Weymouth: Yeah, they're intel. They're incredibly shy. They're incredibly conservative. They're, they're so alert to any kind of change in their territory.

[00:29:19] Adam Weymouth: And so Hubert Nik is this, uh, researcher at the University of Liana who puts GPS tracking colors on wolves as part of his research. And yes, he, I mean, he, he said to me, he works with bears and lynx as well. Wolves are by heart. Father the hardest animal to, to, to trap. If any wolf has seen another member of its pack, be trapped, you will never catch anyone in that pack again.

[00:29:43] Adam Weymouth: And, and yeah, he would have to go through this huge, elaborate process of boiling all his equipment, burying it over winter, doing everything with two pairs of gloves on. It just, it's so, so elaborate. And even then, you know, the chances of catching one, uh, a, a second and then. 

[00:29:58] Chris Watson: Yeah. And [00:30:00] what I, yeah. 'cause I think the words and the way you describe it's beautiful and it, and it talk, you know, like the, you can almost visualize it and embody the wolf kinda walking up to like, you know, it sees like a twig or something just sums off and it just knows about turns and it goes away.

[00:30:14] Chris Watson: And it's just like the way, the way that it's quite evocative and it kinda brings it, my imagination kinda running wild with that. And just thinking if you put with the double gloves and boil this myrtle and these, all these things and trying to Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get rid the cent stuff. 

[00:30:27] Adam Weymouth: Well he talks about finding traps and the wolfs just placed little shit like, yeah.

[00:30:30] Adam Weymouth: Tidily on top of the trap, but not set the trap off it all, you know, 

[00:30:33] Chris Watson: just, it's fascinating. So, so going on, on, on the journey, 

[00:30:38] Retracing the Walk Across Europe

[00:30:38] Chris Watson: how long were you on the journey over, over, over the course of the, 

[00:30:41] Adam Weymouth: so I spread it out a bit. So Slavc walked, he left, he began in the south of Slovenia, which is where his pack was.

[00:30:49] Adam Weymouth: Uh. As drawing a line of best fit. He walked about a thousand miles, although it might have been kind of more like 3000 miles, allowing for all his little diversions and detours and [00:31:00] everything through Austria and, and down into Italy. So the idea was that I was gonna walk more or less the same path that, that, that he walked without sort of, falling off a mountain or, or yeah.

[00:31:11] Adam Weymouth: You know, following the paths. And, and I had two really quite small kids at home when I sat out to do the walk. Uh, so I just, I didn't really wanna be away for too long at a time. So I would do, I did, I ended up doing it in several chunks, so there probably all together, I was walking for maybe four months or something like that, but I stretched it over the kind of best part of a year.

[00:31:31] Chris Watson: And how, how were you actually tracking it? Because obviously getting the GPS signals on that did you have. Did you just have that downloaded onto something that they track? Or how were you actually, 

[00:31:40] Adam Weymouth: no, I use maps mostly. So all, so Hubert had given me all the data points. So 635 data points, um, wow.

[00:31:48] Adam Weymouth: Went every hundred and 90 minutes. So I got, had big stack of maps in my bag and I spent a couple of evenings transferring every single data point onto a map and, uh, follow it that way. 

[00:31:57] Chris Watson: What was it like? 'cause I know well, you touch on it in a [00:32:00] bit. I can, can, I consciously don't wanna give too much away 'cause I do encourage people to even listen to it on Audible or pick up, pick up the book and we'll, we'll do all the usual links and all that stuff at the end of it.

[00:32:09] Chris Watson: But, you know, like following the journey and coming up to those like inflection points and, you know, when it comes against cities and the noise and the, you know, the wave turning back and you've been in areas where it's maybe predated and things like that. So what was it like.

[00:32:25] Chris Watson: I don't wanna sound cliche, but did you feel like the real fit points in that? Did you feel like that a connection to it? What, what was it? I don't wanna get too woo, but what, what did it feel like? 

[00:32:33] Adam Weymouth: No, and I really didn't wanna get too woowoo either, but I sort of undeniably, yeah, like at, at points, he was my closest companion.

[00:32:40] Adam Weymouth: There was sort of days walking through these huge beach forests in Snia or in the Austrian Alps. There were, there were days when I wouldn't see anyone and I was really just making my way based on the decisions that he had made. And he'd been quite, so he, he did the walk in 2011. I, I did it in 2022.

[00:32:57] Adam Weymouth: So by then there were, there were quite a lot of scientific papers about [00:33:00] him, but no one had actually gone out and walked in his footsteps as it was. And there was a moment right at the beginning of the walk when Hubert took me to the den where he was born, which is up on the cast plateau in the south of Sia.

[00:33:12] Adam Weymouth: So it's, it's all limestone. So there's a lot of holes and, and fishes and. So it's a really good place for, for animals to kind of borrow in. And this den was several meters below the surface, slithered down into it. And, and standing there knowing that I was gonna be following Slavc and that he was out there on the other sides of the sea in, in Italy, was this incredibly intimate feeling that I wasn't really expecting.

[00:33:34] Adam Weymouth: But I, I really hadn't ever felt closer to a wild animal. And it made me understand why people like Hubert, the biologists do the sort of work that they do. 'cause there is this chance to kind of step outside a little bit from being human, kind of crossover that threshold a little bit. And there are a few points in the book where I do write from the Wolf's perspective because I kind of felt like I'd earned that Right.

[00:33:55] Adam Weymouth: To sort of give it a go,

[00:33:56] Chris Watson: yeah. I mean, and. It's just so fascinat. There's [00:34:00] so many layers to it. I think, the journey, see, you're coming back actually to the journey and like the, you talk a lot about dispersal in it and the different packs in different areas, and there's some stats about it.

[00:34:10] Chris Watson: The longest it's ever been recorded, I think in Mongolia it's like thousand, was it thousands of miles? But what was Slavc because obviously the range, it's a thousand miles, but there's a lot of maybe retracing steps and stuff like that. What, what did the data tell, you know, Hubert and everyone else compared to what we knew about Wills?

[00:34:29] Chris Watson: Was this an unusual journey for s to go that far? Because I know they were going up into, I think he went up to like 8,000 feet or something like that in one of the, the mountains at some point. But was it surprising to everyone that the kinda data and the journey that, that was fed back? 

[00:34:45] Adam Weymouth: Yeah, it's.

[00:34:46] Adam Weymouth: Like, like we were saying, there was, there's an incredibly shy animal. They're very hard to study really until the seventies and until we started using kind of telemetric equipment and, and GPS, we knew so little about wolves in the wild. So [00:35:00] even, 40 years after that, when we started bringing these new sort of ways of doing field research, we still don't know a huge amount about wolves.

[00:35:08] Adam Weymouth: And, and being able to see a wolf move through this very human dominated environment, it was almost the first time anyone had gotta see that in Europe. So, yeah, it, it, it was, it was an amazing insight. And yes, wolves do travel these great distances. It's by no means the furthest that a wolf has ever traveled.

[00:35:28] Adam Weymouth: Yeah. There was recently a wolf that, that traveled from Switzerland to Hungary, which is about twice as far as Slavc walked. Wow. But the wolf ended up being shot in Hungary. And so also what made Slavc's's journey remarkable was not how far he traveled, but also. How successful he ended up being. 'cause there is no, there was no certainty at the end of these journeys, you know?

[00:35:48] Chris Watson: Yeah. I 

[00:35:49] Adam Weymouth: think this and, and this was, this was it. It's one reason why I wanted to call the book Lone Wolf. You know, I, I had a bit of a tendency to think of myself as a bit of a lone wolf in my twenties heading off to Istanbul and 

[00:35:57] Chris Watson: mm-hmm. 

[00:35:58] Adam Weymouth: You know, we think of a lone wolf as this sort of [00:36:00] Clint Eastwood character.

[00:36:02] Adam Weymouth: And what I realized on this journey is, you know, a lone wolf doesn't intend to stay as a lone wolf. A lone wolf is looking for the same three things that everyone's looking for. They're looking for enough lands to live on, enough food to eat in a community, and, you know, and not, yeah. So, so that sort of romantic idea is, yeah, it's, it holds a popular culture, but it's not a wolves worth to.

[00:36:23] Chris Watson: So, so that's a perfect segue into what I wanted to ask around, like, the 

[00:36:27] Farmers, Politics & the Wolf Culture War

[00:36:33] Chris Watson: communities and the cultural impact and the people that you met across the way. There was a number of people I can't remember all the names, but Ivan I think was mm-hmm. Was one of them. You come up, you came up against really opposing views, just generally as a person, Adam, how, how does it come naturally for you to sit down and engage with someone that has completely opposing views?

[00:36:52] Chris Watson: Like, like quite, because these people, it's their livelihoods and you're there to kinda document their story, and I can imagine it must been, it must be [00:37:00] quite difficult and 'cause you were welcomed into to someone's house and fed and all, all the, the hospitality that goes with it. But I'm just wondering that, you know, how difficult is that when you're, I mean, you're not necessarily there as an ambassador for the world to, to be fair, but, you know, you're, you're coming up against people that are very much opposed and want to quite frankly, see these animals gone and not introduced.

[00:37:22] Adam Weymouth: Yeah, I, yeah, I, I, I wasn't there as an ambassador for a wolf, but I think I was often seen as that, you know, because people couldn't talk to the wolf directly. I was often seen as the next best thing I think over I, I mean, as, as, as we talked about, I think approaching it on foot. And if I turned up in a higher car with a Dictaphone and said, you know, I've got an hour said, that would've been very different.

[00:37:44] Adam Weymouth: And I, and I was really there to be impartial. I spent a couple of days with this amazing guy called Stanley Burant in the north of Slovenia, who was a horse breeder. And he'd lost his best breeding mare to a bear actually, rather than a wolf. But at the same set, same point. And, you know, [00:38:00] and for him, despite the fact that the e will pay compensation for losing animals for him, there was no way that this animal that he'd selected for over generations and generations could be replaced with a few thousand euroes.

[00:38:11] Adam Weymouth: And I told him, you know, that I was there to be impartial. And he said to me, well, don't you think writing this book's gonna make more people? Like wolves, which I think yeah, is probably undeniable, but I, I, I was not there to be a hundred percent for the wolf, and I really felt for these farmers, you know, they're really up against it.

[00:38:29] Adam Weymouth: And we're not talking massive agribusiness here, we're talking small scale farmers who've been doing the same thing for generations, you know, and they're suffering a myriad of problems at the moment. The year, the year that I did the walk, it was the driest summer. In 500 years, drought is becoming a huge problem.

[00:38:43] Adam Weymouth: Russia just invaded Ukraine, which meant that the price of animal feed and energy had skyrocketed, and I'm sure it's skyrocketing again. Right now, young people don't wanna farm anymore, which means everyone I was meeting was kind of 60, 70 years plus, and now they're being told that it's a great idea to have some carnivals back as well.

[00:38:59] Adam Weymouth: Yeah, 

[00:38:59] Adam Weymouth: I, [00:39:00] I understand their problem. I actually got an email from Stan a couple of weeks. Because I sent the book's just come out in Slovenian, so I was able to send him a copy and he said to me, you know, I still think you're a romantic. I, I still don't, I still don't agree with you, but I really liked the book and I'm very grateful that you've given us a voice.

[00:39:19] Adam Weymouth: You know, I'm very grateful that you have fairly represented our side of the story and honestly, that means more to me than getting a good review in a newspaper or whatever. That that really to me is the point of what this work's about. 

[00:39:32] Chris Watson: Yeah. It's fantastic and it's, it's, and that's why I asked that question 'cause I, I kinda knew a little bit about that.

[00:39:38] Chris Watson: 'cause it, it's the fact that you can have opposing views or, or someone can be quite polarizing, maybe looking inwards at that, but still respect everything and actually take the time to read it and, and engage with it is, is wonderful. But see, rolling back a little bit. See the different countries like Austria, Lavenia, and Italy, what are their, from a.

[00:39:58] Chris Watson: Law per [00:40:00] from a law angle, are they protected or are wills protected in, in these areas by law? 

[00:40:05] Adam Weymouth: Well, so one of the things that's allowed the wolf to come back over the last 30 years or so, has been the formation of the European Union. And that has allowed these kind of much more joined up conservation measures.

[00:40:16] Adam Weymouth: And so rather than individual countries determining how to manage their populations, since the habitats directive in 1992, the Wolf has been managed continent wides and that has been instrumental in, in allowing wolves to come back. And that was pretty much in place until this summer. So when I did the walk, I found that, particularly in Austria and the far, because the far right is doing particularly well in Austria, but I found the same narrative in, in every country that I went through, that parties on the kind of populist and far right were campaigning to be allowed.

[00:40:48] Adam Weymouth: We, we were telling farmers, you know, don't protect your flocks. 'cause there are good ways to live alongside wolves. There are ways to coexist, but they were saying, don't do that. Allow the disasters to happen and that will allow us to go to [00:41:00] Brussels and campaign for the change in the law, or will allow us to kind of campaign to leave the EU entirely.

[00:41:04] Adam Weymouth: Yeah. And even that, even then, that seemed kind of fanciful. And then in 2023, a wolf made the terrible mistake of eating Ursula von der Leyen's pony, the president of the EU Commission. 

[00:41:16] Chris Watson: Wow. 

[00:41:17] Adam Weymouth: Which then led Ursula von der Leyen to commission this continent-wide study into the, the state of the wolf in Europe. And on the back of that, the wolves protected status has now been downgraded, so it's now m much more it's, it's complicated, but individual countries now have much more of a say over how their individual populations are managed.

[00:41:41] Chris Watson: It's sort, 

[00:41:42] Adam Weymouth: it's been a lot more coals this summer and despite the fact that wolves are doing very well across Europe, there are still a lot of areas in Europe where they are still, their populations are still very low, but Scandinavia, they're still very vulnerable. And so, yeah. It feels like another chapter too, in what I often think of as one of the [00:42:00] world's longest culture war.

[00:42:01] Chris Watson: Yeah. I was, it just seems it is. They've always got a target in their back. It doesn't matter, you know, it's like one step forward, two steps back with their, their story. Mm-hmm. And that just, that meant kinda jumping around a little bit. You cover something that's absolutely fascinating in this about the kinda folklore and the, the kinda the 

[00:42:19] Werewolf Trials & Folklore

[00:42:19] Chris Watson: were will trials, which I hadn't never heard of before.

[00:42:22] Chris Watson: Yeah, me 

[00:42:22] Adam Weymouth: neither. 

[00:42:23] Chris Watson: And so the 18th century people were getting tortured and someone actually get ex people were getting executed mm-hmm. And people confessing to be, uh 

[00:42:33] Adam Weymouth: mm-hmm. 

[00:42:34] Chris Watson: Werewolves and had to mm-hmm. Under 

[00:42:37] torture 

[00:42:37] Adam Weymouth: often, but Yeah. 

[00:42:38] Chris Watson: Under torture, but yeah. Yes. I was transforming into a werewolf. Mm-hmm.

[00:42:42] Chris Watson: And I had to wash myself in rine to come back to being a, a vagrant or a beggar or whatever, whatever it was. I mean, that just it, it reads up fiction, but it's, but it's not, it's quite jarring. I mean, how did you feel when you were getting told that and not, not knowing that? 'cause when I read it, I was like, I [00:43:00] thought this was a work of fiction, but to think that actually happened.

[00:43:03] Chris Watson: Yeah. 

[00:43:04] Adam Weymouth: Astonished. We're more familiar with the witch trials now, aren't we? You know, like in Scotland. Yeah. For example, many thousands of women were put to death. 

[00:43:13] Chris Watson: Yeah. 

[00:43:13] Adam Weymouth: And there has been a lot more. Understanding of that, I think recently in the last few years of sort of what that was in practice, which, which was the misogyny of that.

[00:43:22] Adam Weymouth: But I had no idea until I did this walk that there was this kind of twin to the witch trials, which were, which were the werewolf trials, which were smaller in number and, and mostly it was men that was accused whereas the witch trials was, was large majority of women, and this is why I love doing journeys like this, because you get these just astonishing coincidences that you can't plan.

[00:43:40] Adam Weymouth: And it just so happened that Slavc's's roots went within about three miles of one of the very last places in Austria where someone was executed for being a werewolf. And yeah, it was this kind of, you know, and it's easy to see sort of modern comparisons, but it was the kind of scapegoating of the outsider.

[00:43:57] Adam Weymouth: It was often a kind of beggar or vagrant that would [00:44:00] turn up in a town, a cup and a sheep might be killed the same night and people would put two and two together and use it as a way of kind of collectively venting their fury on something that they couldn't. 

[00:44:13] Chris Watson: Yeah. And like you say, I mean that long slow, immersive journey, you know, there's so many layers to the onion, like picking off it, like coming across stories like that was there ever a point in your journey where you thought, you know, you might have been thinking, is this the right thing?

[00:44:30] Chris Watson: Is this the right journey? Is this the right story that I'm chasing and then getting validation and going, Christ, this there's more to this than, you know, there's more than the one book in this potentially. 

[00:44:40] Adam Weymouth: Yeah. Well, I mean, every day that there's, I think that's just part of the, part of the thing of writing a book.

[00:44:47] Adam Weymouth: You're always second guessing, you know, and walking or canoeing. You do have a lot of time to think as well, and sometimes that's great, that allows you to, that allows you to work through ideas, but it also allows you to spend many hours thinking about what, [00:45:00] what am I doing? I'm, I'm, I've been walking down a road for four hours following a wolf, and I'm gonna write a book about this at some point, apparently.

[00:45:06] Chris Watson: Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, kind I, coming back to that again, some of the things that really stuck with me as well is like the kinda Wolf Science Center and some of the stories about women breastfeeding wolf pups, apparently. Mm-hmm. And things like that. And then 

[00:45:20] Adam Weymouth: mm-hmm. 

[00:45:20] Chris Watson: There's linkage with like the aboriginals as well and our, our original dogs being breastfed and things.

[00:45:26] Chris Watson: It's like my mind was absolutely blown, like just wide open reading some of that stuff. 

[00:45:32] Adam Weymouth: Yeah. There's, so, I mean there's just, there's one of the amazing things about w there are so many places you can go with it, you know, and, and again, yeah, the domestication of the world is something that I'd never thought about or looked into, but I came to understand that it is this whole field of science really.

[00:45:46] Chris Watson: Yeah. 

[00:45:46] Adam Weymouth: The domestication of wild animals and how it came to happen and, and where it happened, and how it happened and why it happened and, yeah. 

[00:45:53] Chris Watson: Yeah. You touch on like, 

[00:45:56] Adam Weymouth: sorry, can I just, can I just, just add something there and that, that was, to me, [00:46:00] that was one of the most. Interesting things is I would meet all these farmers that detest wolves and then we'd have a couple of dogs in the house, you know?

[00:46:08] Chris Watson: Yeah. 

[00:46:08] Adam Weymouth: And they are, to all intents and purposes, the same animal that Exactly, yeah. That, that they, they separated maybe 20,000 years ago, which is a, a blip and evolutionary time. They have a couple of different characteristics, but they're, they're very close to each other. And one of these researchers who, who looks into domestication said to me, either you hate your brother or you love your brother.

[00:46:29] Adam Weymouth: There's nothing in between. And, and that did feel. Something to, in that relationship that we have with the dog and the wolf. 

[00:46:35] Chris Watson: Yeah, I, because I, that's what was going, come on. Because there's topics and I think you touch on like someone at some somewhere had tied up their dogs so that the wolves could have their way with the dog, essentially.

[00:46:46] Chris Watson: And that, and that's I think where like some of the kinda breeding comes from, like from wolf dogs and stuff. But yeah, you can't have it, you can't have it both ways. And actually j jumping I ahead and 

[00:46:57] Adam Weymouth: Yeah, but you, but you kind of can, you'd meet, you'd meet, [00:47:00] I'd meet farmers that, you know, did tested wolves, but also you kind of felt if they believe in reincarnation, they'd really like to come back as one.

[00:47:06] Adam Weymouth: You know, they'd, they'd, they'd love to come back as an alpha wolf. 

[00:47:10] Chris Watson: Yeah. I the whole domestication I think is, is, is so fascinating as well, you know, if you know how they've been domesticated and the, and the kinda stories and the folklore, are one thing. I think what, where my mind went to some of that is.

[00:47:25] Chris Watson: Dogs are, they're domesticated, but they don't really have that predatory. A lot of dogs don't have that predatory instinct to, to what point does that gene pool get diluted to the point where they're losing that predation instinct as well. I think there's so many layers to, to that story as well.

[00:47:43] Chris Watson: And does that impact their disperse, does that limit their growth and spread across Europe potentially if they're breeding with other little wild dogs or, or whatever, you know, you're getting these hybrid dogs or whatever, or hybrid wells. Did, does that have an impact on their longevity, [00:48:00] their reach, their gene pool?

[00:48:02] Adam Weymouth: Yeah, it's, it's a potential problem for sure. Same has happened and continues to happen with the Wildcat in Scotland's, right? Mm-hmm. And one of the main dangers, the wildcat in Scotland are feral house cats and, and this dilution of the gene pool. And there are various different stances on that. Some people feel like it's tricky because our ways of of sequencing the genome are getting more and more sophisticated.

[00:48:25] Adam Weymouth: Wolves and dogs have shared the planet for 20,000 years. It's hard to go back in time to find a wolf that probably hasn't had a fling with a dog at some point in someone's great, great grandmother. So what is, yeah, what, what do we need in order to, how wild does something need to be? Does it need to have a certain genetic sequence?

[00:48:42] Adam Weymouth: Does it need to behave like a wild wol? Um, definitely where wolves are still, you know, as I said, they're doing well in Europe. There's still a fraction of their former range. And as they're pushing up and spreading out, the chances are higher of meeting dogs than the, than than other wolves had house not finally bumped into a wolf.[00:49:00]

[00:49:00] Adam Weymouth: You might well have ended up hybridizing with a Yeah. With a dog. But yet you be, you know, in, in terms of what you're saying about breeding out the predatory instincts it clearly wolves are wild animals. Far more people get killed by, by domestic dogs than wolves every year. Yeah. Was that far More Sheep get killed by dogs off the leash than, you know.

[00:49:18] Adam Weymouth: I I, I think it's 50,000 sheep were killed by dogs off the leash need. I need to check the numbers in, in the UK in, in the last five years or something. So, they, and yes, occasionally people do get killed by wolves as well. There, there were six instances of fatalities from wolves in Europe in the 20th century.

[00:49:37] Adam Weymouth: But, you know, but we have accepted dogs into all our homes. So the reason that I find it interesting why we've retained this idea about the wolf, whereas we've just accepted the dog without any question. 

[00:49:49] Chris Watson: Yeah. Coming back to what you said there about, you know, looking the dogs, having a fling. I think one of the, the, 

[00:49:57] Slavc & Juliet: A Wolf Love Story

[00:49:57] Chris Watson: there's a kinda love story to this as well, isn't there?

[00:49:59] Chris Watson: [00:50:00] Like mm-hmm. The, the meeting of Juliet and, and you know, they went on to ha to have little baby wolves, pups, whatever you want to call them. Mm-hmm. You know, that, that's a beautiful moment in it as well. So these, you know, the, these wolves that are, have never, have, never crossed paths and well, until they cross paths such a wide range, potentially solitary lives for years on end, and then, and then the chances then bumping into each other.

[00:50:27] Chris Watson: That's just, is it coincidence or is that a, I, 

[00:50:32] Adam Weymouth: well, I don't know. And, and but it, this was probably what drew me to this story more than anything else. Because this, yeah. At the, at the end of this four month journey that Slavc had done, he bumped into this wolf, this female wolf who was named Juliet because of being so close to Verona after, after Romeo, Juliet.

[00:50:50] Adam Weymouth: We don't quite know where she came from because she didn't have a tracking collar on. But from looking at her genetics, it seems likely that she came from the French Italian border. So there were no other [00:51:00] wolves for thousands of square miles, and somehow these two wolves found each other. And so how that happens, you know, is that face or chance or whatever it is.

[00:51:10] Adam Weymouth: Uh, you know, I I would say to Hubert, well, you know, clearly this is a love story and, and you say things to that like, scientists makes scientists quite uncomfortable, but I can't really see it in any other way. Yeah. You know, and yeah, they, they've gone on to have 42 pups at best count. There's now 17 packs 

[00:51:28] Chris Watson: crazy 

[00:51:28] Adam Weymouth: back in this region, which have come from their descendants and then other wolves coming in on the grapevine, presumably.

[00:51:34] Chris Watson: Yeah. 

[00:51:35] Adam Weymouth: So yeah, those, these two epic journeys have really repopulated the entirety of the Eastern Italian Alps. 

[00:51:41] Chris Watson: Yeah. This 

[00:51:42] Adam Weymouth: incredible legacy. 

[00:51:44] Chris Watson: Just I just think the fact that you've found the story, that you've managed to do this journey for yourself as well, but bring this to life and the way that these two met in this as well.

[00:51:55] Chris Watson: And it's just, yeah, there's just, there is, there is something about woo woo about it. I'll just say it. [00:52:00] It's just, it is wonderful. I, 'cause I love that you see the, the articulation of like, the meat and then in the, in the snow and the footprints and stuff like that as well. It's just, it's just, you can just vi I can just visualize that in my head and I wasn't there.

[00:52:12] Chris Watson: Mm-hmm. You know what I mean? And I, I wasn't on the journey. It's just, it's beau it's beautifully, you got a very good, uh, way with words. 

[00:52:19] Adam Weymouth: Thank you. 

[00:52:20] Chris Watson: Yeah. It's, uh, it's conscious. Not trying to throw too many platitudes and, and all that kinda stuff, but it is, feel free. It's a, it's a wonderful, it's a wonderful journey, but it's sad as well because, you know, the end of their life essentially to, they weren't together that, that long, had a lot of pups, but they, what they have done for the, the packs in that.

[00:52:43] Adam Weymouth: Yeah, they, but they, well, they both died in 2022, but they were both 12 when they died, which is, that's good for a house dog. Really? 

[00:52:49] Chris Watson: Yeah. 

[00:52:50] Adam Weymouth: That's, it's a very old age for two wolves in the wild to, to to, to reach 12. Yeah. 

[00:52:55] Chris Watson: Have you, from that, the journey, what your own journey, [00:53:00] when did your own journey end?

[00:53:01] Chris Watson: When, when you were Rera retracing that did, did it finish in Liya as well? 

[00:53:07] Adam Weymouth: Yeah, and then I spent about a year going back and forward to Liya. So the final kind of third of the book is set in Lucinia and it's about how people's, again, people's lives are changing, uh, for better and worse now that the wolf has returned.

[00:53:22] Adam Weymouth: Yeah. But it continues. The, the, the book's also just come out in Italian and I was back in Linia a couple of months ago and that was lovely. There was a lot of people. Are in that final section of the book, Luca and Paolo, two of the park rangers, Mattia, one of the shepherds, Massimo and, uh, Manela, who's restaurant I stayed in a lot.

[00:53:40] Adam Weymouth: Um, all, all came, all came to the launch, which meant a lot. That the 

[00:53:45] Chris Watson: Yeah, 

[00:53:46] Adam Weymouth: it feels, yeah, that the kind of, the conversation continues. 

[00:53:49] Chris Watson: And how, how did you know the book, the book had been a product of the journey is one thing, and, and it is amazing to see that it has been well received, but from your, your own perspective, [00:54:00] Adam, what did you learn considering you've done long journeys before?

[00:54:04] Chris Watson: How different was this and, and was it the right, you know, was it the right thing to do? Did that answer your questions? Is there anything unanswered? 

[00:54:13] Adam Weymouth: How do I carry on doing this as a dad? 

[00:54:16] Chris Watson: Yeah, 

[00:54:16] Adam Weymouth: that's probably the question that I, that I stick with at the moment. There was something about being on this trip compared to previous ones where I, I felt a bit that I was only half there.

[00:54:27] Adam Weymouth: You know, there's always part of you that's not with your pack, I guess suddenly, you know, and I'd find myself sort of making sure I could pitch a tent. I had enough reception to call home and read a bedtime story or, there, there's something about being immersed in the journey. And I think that's when the magic happens.

[00:54:42] Adam Weymouth: And there was, I felt on this trip that I was not as entirely there as I was when I went down the Yukon without a care in the world for five months or, you know, walked across Europe or so. So we're wondering about, you know, chatting with my wife about maybe trying to do a journey as a family next, because that seems to be the way [00:55:00] to recapture that feeling of actually.

[00:55:03] Adam Weymouth: Being present, you know, and, and then wanting to try and introduce them to, yeah. To that way of experiencing the world as well. 

[00:55:08] Chris Watson: Yeah. Excellent. Well, I won't ask you what, what that next journey might be 'cause I don't want to 

[00:55:14] Adam Weymouth: work in focus Yeah. 

[00:55:15] Chris Watson: Make you uncomfortable. But has it met your expectations? 

[00:55:22] Adam Weymouth: What this doing?

[00:55:23] Adam Weymouth: This Yeah. This journey? 

[00:55:24] Chris Watson: Yeah. 

[00:55:25] Adam Weymouth: Yeah. I think so. I, I think, yeah, absolutely. I, I really didn't know what it felt like. It felt like a good idea, but you never really know until you sit down to, until you walk it, and then you sit down and write it. 

[00:55:37] Chris Watson: Yeah. 

[00:55:38] Adam Weymouth: What's gonna come out. And I feel like I learned so much from doing it.

[00:55:42] Chris Watson: Yeah. 

[00:55:42] Adam Weymouth: And they, yeah. Again, I come back to the people and, and getting that, that privilege of getting invited into all these different people's lives and, and them telling me how they see the world and trying to have empathy for that and trying to understand that. 

[00:55:59] Chris Watson: [00:56:00] There's a lot of good people out there, even though that these are difficult and challenging and complex topics to navigate.

[00:56:06] Chris Watson: People wanted to take care of you. They wanted to feed you, they wanted to bring you in. And we should never lose sight of that, that the world can be a bit of a messed up place a lot of the time. There's a lot of, there is a lot of bad things that go on and are happening right now. A lot of conflict and stuff, but people are people and you know, the overriding my experience, the overrides, everything is people want to be, they want to be nice and they, and they're curious.

[00:56:30] Chris Watson: And if you show that as a reflection back then it goes, it goes a long way. And no doubt, that's probably been why you've, you've come across some of these layers and these parts of these stories as, and, and you've been on that journey. And, and that's what I love when I'm reading and listening to that, like that cultural, the human side of it, even though though that that's not what the book's about, it's about the impact that has on them and what that has on you and those little snippets of stories and stuff, and.

[00:56:57] Chris Watson: Maybe let's throw away lines. It just shows that [00:57:00] that's there's really, there's a real human connection there as well, no matter where you're from, race, creed, color, whatever, culture 'cause I know you touch a little bit on like potential, you know, it seems like we're in a collapse, a cultural collapse and you know, the same for biodiversity, but there's still some good people out there doing some good things.

[00:57:19] Adam Weymouth: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I really think, tra travel writing kind of fell out of fashion a bit over the last sort of couple of decades and I really think it's still has a purpose. And I think that is its purpose. 

[00:57:31] Chris Watson: Yeah. 

[00:57:34] Adam Weymouth: To document how different people see the world and, and to kind of reach across the fence and, and try and create that understanding for the reader, you know?

[00:57:42] Adam Weymouth: And, and I think we sort of need it now more than ever. Really. Yeah. 

[00:57:45] Chris Watson: I, I, and it changes and it shifts in people's perspectives. And that's what I love to hear and see because, you know, sometimes people on the show, like, even like, like yourself talking about a journey that might have happened 10 years ago and then a journey that's happened more recently.

[00:57:56] Chris Watson: And it's just seeing how things and 'cause we as humans are evolving and [00:58:00] changing all the time. And our, you talked about your previous, involvement with climate action and, you know, maybe, taking slightly different paths and stuff and, and, and yeah. It's just, it's just wonderful to see the heartfelt nature of some of those stories that come through.

[00:58:13] Chris Watson: And, and it's, I mean, I've got the book sitting here as I've shown a couple of times, and you've been nominated for the Bailey Gifford prize. What's, and you won the. Was the word for the Yukon as well. You won the Stanford's Travel Writer of the Year. Didn't 

[00:58:28] Adam Weymouth: Yeah. And 

[00:58:28] Chris Watson: the 

[00:58:29] Adam Weymouth: Sunday 

[00:58:29] Chris Watson: time. Young Writer of the year as well.

[00:58:30] Chris Watson: Yeah. So when this has been shortlisted for the Bailey Gifford, when is that award? 

[00:58:37] Adam Weymouth: That's been, that's been and gone actually. 

[00:58:38] Chris Watson: Oh, has it? 

[00:58:39] Adam Weymouth: So, yeah. So I didn't win that, hadn't gone, won that. But I'm also up for the Sher Travel Prize, which is announced in a couple of weeks. 

[00:58:47] Chris Watson: Yeah. 

[00:58:47] Adam Weymouth: Which is a great shortlist.

[00:58:48] Adam Weymouth: Yeah. Some brilliant travel books on that. 

[00:58:50] Chris Watson: Well, I wish you, I wish you all the, all the best with it. It's, thank you. Yeah. It's a fantastic, uh, yeah. There's so many, like I said, there's so many things that I, I could, uh, pick, pick your [00:59:00] brains about. But is there anything that, in terms of the, I want people to read the book and listen to the book, but is there anything stand out from that journey that we might have not covered, Adam, that you wanted to raise 

[00:59:13] Adam Weymouth: One of, I mean, so, so much really in the end, it, it came down to me.

[00:59:20] Adam Weymouth: To be a story of change. And everyone that I was seeing in the Alps was afraid of change. It felt to me, you know, WW whether that's young people not wanting to farm, whether that's migrants moving into their villages, whether that's, a lot of the spruce forests are dying because of the spruce bark beetle, which means that a lot of the logging industry is collapsing.

[00:59:42] Adam Weymouth: And that seemed a kind of explanation to me of sort of why these far-right politicians are doing very well at the moment. They're kind of promising that, you know, things don't have to change things can go back to how they were. And then I was walking through the Dolomites and I was there two days after the collapse of the Marmolada year, which people will remember.

[00:59:59] Adam Weymouth: [01:00:00] It was, it was I think it was 11 people were killed. It's, it's the high, the highest peak in the Dolomites. There were many people climbing on the glacier. It wasn't meant to collapse for kind of a hundred years. I was walking, you know, on, on the opposite side of the valley. Two days after it happened, there was still a helicopter searching and you could see the scar that had left.

[01:00:19] Adam Weymouth: And I've been, you know, I've been working in climate change for 20 years, probably as an activist and a writer. And it was the first time that I'd felt what climate change meant so acutely. And I realized I'm scared of change as much as anyone else. You know, we're all scared of change. And then that, that sort of brings me back to the wolf, I think.

[01:00:38] Adam Weymouth: And, the, the wolf was almost pushed to extinction. And I think there's something very inspiring in the Wolf's story that despite facing this sort of crisis where its species, the wolf has continued to thrive, it has this incredibly capacity to heal and, and it's come through movement, it's come through setting out and trying its luck somewhere else.

[01:00:59] Adam Weymouth: [01:01:00] And I think there's a lot to learn in that about meeting crises with movement and 

[01:01:07] Chris Watson: yeah, I agree. I think the biggest challenge that we've got is politicians and legislation, unfortunately, and it can be so fickle. Yeah. You Do you think we'll love our sea wheels in the uk? 

[01:01:23] Adam Weymouth: I do. Yeah, I do. Because if you'd asked me 10 years ago if you thought we'd ever see beavers in the uk, I thought, I would've thought you were mad.

[01:01:31] Adam Weymouth: I think we were a long way from it, and I think we're not ready for it yet. You know, because we're in Irelands, we didn't use to be in Ireland. We used to be connected by Landbridge to Europe, and if we still were, we'd have walls back here and we wouldn't be having this conversation. They would, they would be here and we'd be working out to live with them just like they are in Belgium.

[01:01:50] Adam Weymouth: But as it is, we have to make this decision and then it becomes, it becomes a political decision. Right. The, the, the closest parallel, I think is what has happened with the bear in Italy. So [01:02:00] the, unlike wolves, because bears don't disperse in the same way. About 20 years ago, a few bears were moved from Slovenia to Italy.

[01:02:08] Adam Weymouth: And then two years ago, Andrea Pappy, a hill runner, 26-year-old man, was killed by a bear in the north of Italy. So of course that had becomes an individual's fault and that becomes a political question. And it's led to referenda on the status of the future of the bear in Italy and man's laughter charges and, and many different things.

[01:02:26] Adam Weymouth: And having seen how politicized the wolf has become in Europe, all I can see at the moment is if the wolf was to return here would be, it would be this political wedge that would divide people that live in the countryside and people that live in the cities. And that's not good for people living on the land.

[01:02:43] Adam Weymouth: And it's also not good for the wolf 'cause it would mean that the wolf would be poisoned and shot and Yeah. So I, I don't think we are there yet by any means, and I don't think it should happen until we are there. But I think we have a moral responsibility to, to [01:03:00] contemplate it. We, we push 'em to extinction here and we like to think that we know better.

[01:03:05] Chris Watson: Yeah. Um, I agree. I agree. You made me think of something there when you was just, when you said about the island, there was something that I'd, I'd seen and I'd researched a well ago about Vancouver Island and Canada and, and the rules there. I think they've evolved to almost have like, not webbed pause, but they've got it.

[01:03:22] Chris Watson: It is 

[01:03:22] Adam Weymouth: webbed. Yeah. 

[01:03:23] Chris Watson: They do have web po. 

[01:03:24] Adam Weymouth: Yeah, yeah, 

[01:03:24] Chris Watson: yeah, yeah. Adapted to that and which makes me think, did they swim across or were, were they, have they been stranded there over time and then, you know, they've just evolved because they've predated fish or whatever. But, 'cause you think the distance, I think between Vancouver and Island and Canada, it's not that far.

[01:03:43] Chris Watson: There's not that much farther than channel. 

[01:03:45] Adam Weymouth: Yeah. The, the fur, the furthest they've been, I, I dunno how, I dunno how it evolved, but you're, you're right. They, they have web pools. They predominantly hunt fish. Yeah. It's this coastal subspecies and they've been recorded swimming up to seven miles. 

[01:03:58] Chris Watson: Wow.

[01:03:59] Adam Weymouth: Between islands. 

[01:03:59] Chris Watson: [01:04:00] That's crazy. 

[01:04:01] Adam Weymouth: Yeah. And, and I, I, I have met people that think they could make it 

[01:04:05] Chris Watson: Yeah. 

[01:04:06] Adam Weymouth: To literally where I'm sitting basically just on, on, on the southeast coast of Kent. 

[01:04:09] Chris Watson: Yeah. 

[01:04:10] Adam Weymouth: They would, they would, they would turn up here. I know. And I would probably get the blame. 

[01:04:15] Chris Watson: That is something that I, I know, I, I know it's a difficult line to trade that you not want to be seen as, because people will just look for a villain.

[01:04:23] Chris Watson: You know, the, the wolf is a villain in many cases. Mm-hmm. And if, if they are here and, and someone gets hurt or we will lose livestock, then someone's got to be the fall guy. It's the way politics works, unfortunately. 

[01:04:37] Chris Watson: But we digress anyway. I, I think been on for over a an hour. It's been, it's kind of flown by.

[01:04:43] Chris Watson: I do. Yeah. I love the book. Then in the audio book, it's not many times that I'll actually read a book and listen to the audio book. So I've thoroughly enjoyed both 'cause it is good to just dip in and out and. Weirdly, I didn't listen to the audio book, but different, the way I read the book. I jumped around with in in [01:05:00] that to different chapters and but anyway, just my curiosity.

[01:05:04] Chris Watson: But yeah, I would encourage people to read or listen to the book. It's fantastic. 

[01:05:08] Adam Weymouth: Thanks Chris. 

[01:05:09] Chris Watson: So with that said, I think what I'd like to do is move into the 

[01:05:12] Change, Climate & the Wolf's Return

[01:05:20] Chris Watson: closing traditions, Adam, so mm-hmm. Three on, uh, on the show, one pay forward, an opportunity to raise awareness for a charity or project or whatever.

[01:05:21] Chris Watson: And then a call to adventure. And then I've got finally some 10 questions to round out in a little bit of a fun note. So, to start with, uh, paid forward, what would you say is a paid forward recommendation? 

[01:05:33] Adam Weymouth: So, I am gonna recommend a charity that I was just with last week in the south of Italy, they called your non depo, which means I'm not scared of the wolf in Italian.

[01:05:43] Adam Weymouth: And they're doing great work working with farmers, essentially trying to change the cultural perceptions of the wolf in Italy. So, raising money for farmers to keep guardian dogs in order to protect their flocks. Educating the public, the wolf is not something to be scared of, that it [01:06:00] can bring a lot of benefits to places.

[01:06:01] Adam Weymouth: So yeah, in light of this conversation, I think they're doing really good work to. Have those conversations. 

[01:06:07] Chris Watson: Fantastic. I might need to get you to send me the details on that to make sure that 

[01:06:11] Adam Weymouth: Sure. Yeah, 

[01:06:12] Chris Watson: yeah. It's, it's captured that properly. Excellent. And then, uh, a call to adventure. So something to a recommendation, an activity or a place or something adventurous to get people inspired to get 'em outdoors.

[01:06:24] Chris Watson: What would you see? 

[01:06:25] Adam Weymouth: So, one thing, speaking a bit about having young kids and, and finding things to do with young kids. We spent an amazing couple of weeks last summer, walking with donkeys in the Pyrenees. There, there's a wonderful woman down there called Trek, donkey Trek. That rents out donkeys to families to go hiking.

[01:06:42] Adam Weymouth: We were, were in Spain and then crossed into Pandora and the kids absolutely loved it. And it was the, it was the first time that we've all been sort of on a journey together and we were all just doing exactly what we wanted to be doing. And it was a lovely, you know, kids amazing. It's hard, it's hard enough to get the kids for, like, take them for a walk on a Sunday and to get 'em outta the car park, you know, but suddenly [01:07:00] having the donkeys to, you know, look after and, and rise.

[01:07:03] Adam Weymouth: It was, uh, it's brilliant. Yeah. 

[01:07:06] Chris Watson: Fantastic. 

[01:07:07] Adam Weymouth: Families with families with young kids. I would really recommend it. 

[01:07:10] Chris Watson: Yeah. Excellent. And also go back to what you said at the start, it's so simple. Just planting the jars in the garden, put some holes in it maybe, and see what creepy crawley's come in in the morning.

[01:07:21] Chris Watson: Mm-hmm. I'm gonna do that with my daughter. She's 11 now. She's kinda starting to grow outta some of that stuff 'cause she's got different activities at the moment. But yeah, I, I like that. Yeah. Excellent. Thank you very much. So finally, to close out 

[01:07:34] Quickfire Questions & Closing

[01:07:34] Chris Watson: 10 quick fire questions. You can pass if you want, but try not to 'cause it's not fun.

[01:07:39] Chris Watson: Okay? 

[01:07:40] Adam Weymouth: Okay. 

[01:07:41] Chris Watson: Just answer whatever comes to your head. So, question one of 10, Adam, you can have a dinner party with two guests, dead or alive. Who would they be? 

[01:07:52] Adam Weymouth: Oh, um, Angela Carter and Cormac McCarthy. 

[01:07:56] Chris Watson: Oh, okay. Excellent. Number two, do you have a hidden [01:08:00] talent? 

[01:08:02] Adam Weymouth: I can juggle? 

[01:08:03] Chris Watson: Wow. Number three. Uh, what place or locations surprised you most on your journey following Slavc?

[01:08:13] Adam Weymouth: Ooh. Um, I think the carnival that I came across in cno, this incredible sort of week long carnival with these 21 masked figures that enact this play over the course of a week in this tiny mountain village. 

[01:08:27] Chris Watson: See, that's why people should go on long, slow, immersive journeys. These are things you just wouldn't know about unless.

[01:08:33] Chris Watson: Unless you read the book or, or you do this yourself. Number four, what is your favorite guilty pleasure, snack or meal to take on a journey? 

[01:08:42] Adam Weymouth: Ooh.

[01:08:46] Adam Weymouth: For just a, i i I really like cheese and peanut butter sandwiches for, for kind of 

[01:08:51] Chris Watson: cheese and peanut butter, 

[01:08:53] Adam Weymouth: for just a lot of calories all at once. And popcorn I'm quite into as well. Cooking popcorn, particularly in coconut oil, which is easiest to carry and it [01:09:00] gives it a good, a good sort of coconuty taste.

[01:09:02] Adam Weymouth: And lemme tell you one more, 'cause I, I got taught this once by a guy that had been in the army. If you get a tin of tuna fish, do you know this? If you get tin of tuna, fish in oil has to be an oil. Open the tin, get two sheets of toilet paper and lay them on top of the tuna and then light the four corners of the toilet paper.

[01:09:21] Adam Weymouth: It burns like a candle for about half an hour, and then you've got roast tuna in a tin. 

[01:09:26] Chris Watson: Oh wow. That I'm like, I was saying that Expeditional works' an absolute treat. I'm gonna, I'm gonna try that. Wow. I didn't realize that that oil in that would've been, that's excellent survival. I'm gonna throw a couple of them in a bag, uh, next week.

[01:09:46] Chris Watson: Excellent. Number five. If you could relive any moment from your life, what would it be? 

[01:09:53] Adam Weymouth: Goodness. For me. That's tough, isn't it? I'm gonna say my wedding three years ago 

[01:09:57] Chris Watson: took the easy answer. 

[01:09:59] Adam Weymouth: Yeah, [01:10:00] but true. But true. We were, we were all down. We had about a hundred people all together for a week down in Cornwall.

[01:10:05] Adam Weymouth: It was, uh, 

[01:10:05] Chris Watson: fantastic. 

[01:10:06] Adam Weymouth: It was a good time. 

[01:10:08] Chris Watson: Okay. Cut. Uh, number six. What's your favorite book? 

[01:10:14] Adam Weymouth: These are really, are Chris the Border Trilogy by Cormac 

[01:10:18] Adam Weymouth: McCarthy. 

[01:10:19] Chris Watson: Oh, okay. Okay. Number seven. What is the last music gig you went to? 

[01:10:25] Adam Weymouth: SA Williams. 

[01:10:27] Chris Watson: Who that is? 

[01:10:28] Adam Weymouth: American rapper. 

[01:10:30] Chris Watson: Alright. 

[01:10:31] Chris Watson: Uh, number eight. What scares you?

[01:10:48] Adam Weymouth: My kids getting sick probably. Yeah. 

[01:10:49] Chris Watson: Yeah, 

[01:10:50] Adam Weymouth: yeah. 

[01:10:50] Chris Watson: Yeah. It's 

[01:10:51] Adam Weymouth: probably, I, I, I was trying to think of a proper phobia, but I kept, I, I kept coming back to that. That's essentially, essentially it. 

[01:10:57] Chris Watson: Number nine, what makes you happy?[01:11:00]

[01:11:04] Adam Weymouth: What makes me happy? Riding my bike. 

[01:11:05] Chris Watson: Excellent. And finally, number 10. What's the best advice you've ever 

[01:11:10] Chris Watson: received?

[01:11:25] Adam Weymouth: Th this one's always stuck with me, that this was, uh, a, a Alistair Macintosh who, who is the, who, who is my teacher at Strat. He's got a line in his book, which is go out on a limb. That's where the blossom grows. Which I always, yeah, that's, you know, which comes back to me. I, I dunno if it's, yeah, I, I'm, I'm gonna go with that just because I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm drawing a blank.

[01:11:46] Chris Watson: I think I want with a can of tuna. I, I think, 

[01:11:49] Adam Weymouth: yeah, that's probably, that's probably a lot better, isn't it? 

[01:11:51] Chris Watson: Yeah. I mean, that's, uh, yeah. I'm, I'm gonna actually try that. Excellent. That, that's, uh, that has, uh, [01:12:00] completed our own little journey. That has been absolutely fantastic actually. I'm gonna be a bit cheeky.

[01:12:06] Chris Watson: Now, one thing I meant to ask you that didn't before we got to that was your writing process. 'cause I, I heard you on, uh, the, was it a Bailey g Gifford podcast or a soundbite? You talking about you write with pencils still and your processes, you still write with pencils? Is it, is it is. If Yeah. Were you Yeah, I've, yeah.

[01:12:25] Chris Watson: Were you doing that the journey? Yeah. I've got these. Were you doing that when you were away? You're writing, were you or were you ca kinda capturing it when you came back? How were you? 

[01:12:32] Adam Weymouth: Yeah. I, I always feel it, it is really important to write as soon as possible after the fact that a lot of the, a lot of the good details 

[01:12:41] Chris Watson: Yeah.

[01:12:41] Adam Weymouth: Evaporate very quickly. And that is one of the problems with doing it as these journeys is because by the time you've,

[01:12:47] Chris Watson: Yeah, 

[01:12:47] Adam Weymouth: got your tent up and cut your dinner and everything else, the last thing you wanna do is, is sit and write for a couple of hours. But when I don't do it, I notice, you know, that's when I have to remind myself that I'm actually working and this is my job and this is and this is what you have to do.[01:13:00]

[01:13:00] Adam Weymouth: Yeah, when we did the canoe trip, I found these waterproof notebooks you could get. So I'd have a waterproof notebook in the canoe and I'd be scribbling on this walk. I had one in my pocket. So, yeah I, and then I'll type everything up when I come back, but I normally write the first draft of books by hand with pencil as well, because I, I just, it avoids a lot of the distractions of the internet.

[01:13:20] Adam Weymouth: Yeah. I just, I think in a very different way when I'm, when I'm writing by hand. 

[01:13:23] Chris Watson: Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. Yeah, I like the craft. Excellent. That's been fantastic, Adam. It's been been thoroughly enjoyable, even though I'm still a bit under the weather, so hopefully it's, it doesn't sound too bad. And too, it sounded good to me too easily, but, uh, yeah, this has been, it's been absolutely wonderful.

[01:13:42] Chris Watson: Thank you. Thanks ever so much for coming on and, and sharing this. It's a, a topic I'm particularly passionate about as I'm with a lot of wildlife, uh, stories and conservation as well, and climate change as well. So I do thank you for joining us today. So where can people, uh, in usual fashion find out more about [01:14:00] Adam Weymouth and all your content, your books and your stories?

[01:14:02] Adam Weymouth: There's, there's my website, which has got a collection of articles and, and, and that, and links to buy the books, which is adam we com. And there's Instagram and then the book is available in all goods, independent books, shops. 

[01:14:16] Chris Watson: Excellent. Yeah. Excellent. Thanks very much, Adam. It's been a pleasure. 

[01:14:20] Adam Weymouth: Thanks a lot, Chris.

[01:14:21] Adam Weymouth: I've really enjoyed this. Thanks for the support and having me on. 

[01:14:24] Chris Watson: Yeah. And with that, I'll bring it to our close.

[01:14:29] Chris Watson: Thanks for tuning in to today's episode. For the show notes and further information, please visit adventure diaries.com/podcast. And finally, we hope to have inspired you to take action and plan your next adventure, big or small, because sometimes we all need a little adventure to cleanse that bitter taste of life from the soul.

[01:14:51] Chris Watson: Until next time, have fun and keep paying it forward.