4. The Hell Within - Aaron Rittenour

This is the story of a wanderer, of a lost soul tormented by his own mind. In today’s episode, we cover mental health and the struggle of not knowing your place in the world. We also talk about redemption through gratitude.

It's funny because people say that when you're shot, you don't hear the gun that shot you. You just don't hear it like your brain suppresses the sound or something of that nature very true. I did not hear the gun go off after it went through me. It didn't have a whole lot of speed. It kind of slowed the bullet down a little bit. But when it happened, I stood up and my leg just buckled. It buckled because there wasn't much the tibia had completely shattered. This podcast has started to help inspire and motivate the real stories and interviews with people who have overcome obstacles in their life. It's a place that you can hear what others have done and use their challenges to inspire and motivate yourself to become a better person. I am Nick Madiscalco, and today we are going to be interviewing Aaron, the main head host. Here the person who started up this podcast, Aaron, right now, would you mind saying your name and your age? Thanks for having me, Nick. I'm sort of being humbled today. I started this podcast to have conversations with other people. Not so much people hearing about me. Yeah. We both started out in Coral in Idaho or roughly in Northern Idaho. But where were you born? I was born just outside of Rafthroom, Idaho, near just above Twin Lakes, which is halfway between Raftham and Spirit Lake. I was born and raised, same place, same house. In fact, I was actually born on the floor of my parents'house that they live in now. So did zero amounts of moving. But same thing you have. That's true. I have done a bit of moving around on my own. A bit of wandering. I love North Idaho. North Idaho is great. I love the people. I love the environment. I love the mountains, the trees. Every single time I leave North Idaho for an extended amount of time, whether it be traveling abroad or within the United States. Every single time I come back to North Idaho, I realized just how lucky I was to grow up there. Well, I went to Borneo, Malaysia in 2007, spent two weeks there, and I came back. I spent, like, spring break over there. So we left with a little bit of snow here and get over there and it's like, 100 degrees and it's like, oh, wow. It's an awesome experience, but it just wasn't home 100 degrees plus a bit of humidity. Yeah. No, like, 110% humidity. Do you know what the worst time of the year is? As far as humidity goes, like, when is the rainy season, or do they have much of a rainy season? I think it was coming to the end of the rainy season. We went over there. Probably April got you. So it was like, Max humidity. Yeah. I remember one day it was 113 degrees and that's like, temperature wise. So it was warm. It's never been that warm here. No, not at all. We get our 90 degrees during the summer dry heat and that's about it. And that's beautiful. We love it. And we love the snow. We love the snow in North Idaho, right? Amen. Yeah. We look forward to driving in it. We're unlike any other human. I mean, listen, I guess they get snow other places, too, but people who live in areas that get enormous amounts of snow like North Idaho, because we get a lot. I mean, up on the mountain where I grew up, it would be 3ft in the mountains and five inches in the Valley and sometimes even more. I mean, in 2008, I think it was 20, 08. 20, 09 was very big winters. We had no exaggeration. Wake up in the morning, walk out to the end of the porch and the vehicles are gone. There's not even a hump. There was no hump where the vehicle sat. It was completely gone. No vehicles. It was a good six 7ft all at once. Yeah. Because I know that down here. I've heard I should say down here in between 85. I hear that they had, like, 3ft of snow piled up in between them because they couldn't take it anywhere. Oh, yeah. It was crazy that year we had a few years where we had to have obviously a dozer come out and push snow around and build some giant Hills because it came down to the point where shoving the snow off of the road was no longer an option. And it had gotten so narrow that you could barely fit one vehicle. Crazy times. Good times. That's North Island. Yeah. So now my wife and I are living over in Missoula, Montana, which the weather there is about the same as North Idaho. Been there for a little over a year. My wife and I have been married for about a year and three months now. I love it. I love it. You were homeschooled like I was. Yeah. Home schooled. Dude, the joy of homeschooling is beyond comprehension. If you've been home schooled when you're home schooled, you go through those times where you're like. I wish I wasn't being home schooled because I don't have any friends. I want to have more friends. I want to have more connection with people my age, but personally, I enjoyed the home school mainly because you'd be done with school by noon and you have the rest of the day to yourself or in my situation, I was able to work in the afternoon and make some money for myself. So it's nice. I was working at eight, seven, eight years old. As long as I can remember, I was working in my dad's cabinet shop. He has a cabinet shop up there on the mountain. He's been building cabinets for 30 years or so. Had his own business, building cabinets, living on the mountain, living the good life. I'm 26 right now. My older brother is 28 and I would say I was around seven years old. My parents would just let us go into the mountains whenever we wanted to. We would take a hatchet or we would take a hunting knife. And back then we thought that if we had a hatchet, if we had a hunting knife, we were good to go. We could kill any Cougar or bear that came along. And so we would just go into the mountains. We would make a lunch. We would go into the mountains for the day, put on between 510 miles. We'd go up and put on between five and 10 miles at that age, and that was very normal for us. It was amazing. Looking back now I see my parents letting us go off into the mountains like that and taking our bikes. We would take our bikes into the mountains as well and ride logging roads for many, many miles. In fact, that's where I met my first boss other than my father. My brother and I were biking up on up on the mountain behind my parents house. We met this gentleman along the road and he looked like a hardcore mountain man. And he walked up to us with this look on his face of complete disbelief that we were there. And we started talking to this guy and he told us right away. Later on he told us that he knew right away that we were home schooled because we could have a conversation with an adult. I've heard this many places that homeschooled kids. It may be harder for them to have a conversation with kids their age, but they can have a good conversation with an adult. So we had a conversation with him and come to find out he owns 365 acres up behind my parents house, and every year he would hire young boys to come up and work with him in the summer. And they were loggers when I was eleven years old, I went to work for this guy up on the mountain, falling trees at eleven. Well, I wasn't falling trees at eleven. I was basically picking up brush and those sorts of things, but I do believe I was 13 or 14 when he handed me a chainsaw and said, Go at it. Don't cut yourself. Even when we weren't running saws, we always wore protection for our ears. We would always wear chaps to keep, because if you're in the Woods kneeling down, getting up, picking up sticks all day long, you'd rip your pants up. So we always wore. That was the first thing we did when we showed up to work with Mike as we put on chaps again. Eleven years old and I was working full eight hour days between four and five days a week. Now there were days where I went home early, especially at that age. Mike would see that I was running thin and he would say, Aaron, you got to go home now. Go home now. So because it was on the mountain behind my parents house, we were able to ride motorcycles to work every single day, which was a benefit for us. It was a benefit for him because there were boys who he had hired in the past in which he had to drive and pick them up every day and bring them up to the mountain. Looking back, I realized that shaped who I was that shaped my work ethic. That experience has made me able to work on my own, running my own business. Now, without anybody on my back whipping me and telling me to work, he taught us how to problem solve. We did a lot of problem solving on the mountain. He would always come to us with a problem, and he would ask us what we would do. Nice. Yeah. Here's a kid, 12, 13, 14 years old, and he's coming to us and asking us, how do you think we should fill this tree or how do you think we should move this giant log that you can't even pick up? How are we going to move this? And Mike used to be a grade school teacher. He taught at a private Christian school, and so he really was like, the perfect boss. He was the perfect boss. He enjoyed working with young people. And that's the whole reason for why he did this. Mike never made a ton of money off of logging on his property every year. I imagine he made something, but what he gleaned from it is mentoring the next generation. I cannot say enough good things about Mike. He was like a second father to us. We thank him for making us the men that we are today. I think I was 14, maybe 13, when Mike took the keys to the old beater truck that we had on the mountain that we would use to pull logs around the mountain or to get to the location where we were going to be working. And he threw the keys at me and said, Aaron, I want you to take the truck manual, sitting on a Hill, an incline that you could hardly stand on yourself, because a lot of these logging rows on his property are very steep. He threw the keys at me and said, Aaron, I want you to take the truck, and I want you to take it up to the house. And he said, Wait five minutes before you do, because I don't want to be here when you do it. And he took off walking to the cabin. And five minutes later, I got in the truck, stalled it a few times, but I was able to get it to the house, to the cabin because he has up on his property. He has three different cabins. Him and his wife moved on to the property. He built this little cabin for his wife and himself, and I think they had a baby on the way. And then he had two boys, and he built a smaller cabin that was like a bedroom for the boys. And then he ended up building a bigger cabin, which is three stories tall. Three and a half built it with his own hands, a lot of the wood. He cut himself on his property and had it milled and then built this cabin. It is a very unique cabin up there on the mountain. Yeah. I'm sorry. I could go on forever about Mike. We were running the cat, driving around with a cat when I was, like, 15. 1415. Wow. Yeah. So felling trees. Yeah. It was amazing. I can't believe all those years from the age of eleven until 18, I worked with him every summer, I believe. And then I've done small projects for him since then. But all those years, nobody ever got seriously hurt. Yeah. God was watching out for us. Absolutely. And Mike is a good Christian man, too. So we would be sitting at the table, eating. Sometimes we would eat in the Woods. Sometimes we were close enough to the cabin that we would go back to the cabin for lunch break. Mike would sit there and we would have a prayer for the meal. And then he would pull out his Bible, and he would say, I've been thinking about something, boys, and he would go and give us a little mini Bible study. Awesome. Yeah. It was something else. We could do a whole, like, ten hour episode podcast on Mike, but we shouldn't go too far into that. Mike taught us how to have a good work ethic. That was the biggest role that Mike played in our lives. All the crazy stories of things that we did on the mountain and camping trips we went on with him, and there's a lot of them. But overall, work ethic was what he brought in to our lives. Work ethic is so important. Not enough kids have it. Today. I was thinking the same thing, and I was like, Well, how should I say that? Well, it's true. Politically correct or whatever. What Mike did with us would probably be considered criminal. But I would say it was the best thing that a human being could do for a kid eleven year old boy working a full eight hour day and fighting mentally within my mind. Why am I here? What's the point is the money really worth it? These are all the internal battle that you have in your mind when you're working a job that you may not. I mean, ultimately, we enjoyed doing it. But obviously there were times where we just wanted to quit, but we couldn't quit. And the reason why we couldn't quit is because this man was not our father. It would be easy to quit on our father. But this guy was like somebody that we looked up to, somebody that we respected and for us to tell him that we were going to quit and getting his disapproval was something that we did not want to experience. And it's funny because those days where we cut our day short when I was like, 1314 years old and I would work a half day, and I'd be like, Mike, I'm too tired to finish out the day. He would just call me and say, all right, go ahead. Quit for the day. But the look that he would give us was it cut to our very soul. And we knew that if we wanted to be a man, we had to finish out the day. Very good. Yeah. So it sounds like you've been pretty active in your lifetime. I mean, as a kid all over riding your bike, motorcycle or whatever up. What else have you done? So, yes, growing up, definitely. I was an active person. My first motorcycle I bought when I was eight years old with my own hard earned money from working in the cabinet shop. That motorcycle was very precious to me because I worked to buy it. Absolutely. Yeah. So I had lots of fun hiking around the mountain, riding motorcycles. Growing up snowmobiles during the winter time. We never had any snowmobiles that were super nice, but we made do. We made them work. They got you from point A to point B, and they were fun exactly, pulling sleds around until our fingers were so cold that we couldn't properly use them. It was a good time. I had a really hard time learning. It's kind of funny because a couple of years ago, my sister was watching some old family videos, and she happened upon a video of my 16th birthday, and I was opening gifts, and at 16 years old, I couldn't read any of the cards that were given to me. Wow. Yeah. I've never been officially diagnosed. I've never been officially diagnosed with anything. The learning was no Bueno. It wasn't there. I'll never forget. I think I was in third grade. I don't know how old I was. I was up there in age, 1213 years old, and I was in third grade, and my mother came to me at the beginning of the school year and said, Aaron, I think we missed something and we need to go back to the basics. And so I ended up going back to first grade and started all over again because I couldn't read. Math was just something that was impossible for me to do anyway. And since then, it's kind of funny because since then, I'm a very good reader now. And some of these things just took time having problems with learning and the difficulties that I had. I had a hard time believing in myself. Self confidence was nonexistent. I couldn't really function in a human setting. I couldn't spend any time with people. It wasn't easy. I definitely couldn't spend time with kids my age because I was always terrified that they were going to make fun of me, and they were going to find out that I was special. Yeah, special. And so that was a challenge. It was a lot easier for me to hang out with adults because I knew that if they figured out, hopefully they would understand because of my learning disability growing up, I got it in my head that the only way that I was going to make it ahead in the world is by selling drugs. Being a drug dealer, I thought for sure that that was going to be the way that I was going to be able to get ahead in life as a kid who wasn't very intelligent. Yeah. Listen, I was a little entrepreneurial kid. I grew up working very young, so I was always thinking about money, even from a very young age. I was worried about money at a young age because I knew that my parents weren't doing well with money. And so I was always thinking about money from as long as I could remember. Wow. So, yeah, my thought was that I would be able to get ahead in life by selling drugs. It did go through my mind as well that maybe a way to get ahead in life for me was going to be a life of stealing. But I never went down that road. And the reason why I can thank my parents. I can thank the way that I was raised. I refuse to make money anyway than working for it. Did that make sense? Yeah. Made perfect sense for me. You were taught good work ethics, and you didn't believe that getting a handout that you didn't deserve, you didn't want to hand out. Yeah. I wanted to work for the money that I had and the idea of taking from somebody else in order to make money for myself, even if I was taking from somebody who had a lot of money, the idea of taking money from them so that I could have money was just I wasn't raised that way. I was raised, right. Hey, let's not get into politics nowadays, but I could say that this is a problem in society today. This is a mindset that's being created. The rich who have worked for what they had worked hard for, what they had been smart for, what they have the idea of taking from them so that the people who don't have a good work ethic can have money. It's a disease that mindset is a disease they're wanting to be paid for, what they have not worked for. Yeah, I totally don't agree with that. There's a big problem there with ways it all comes down to how the kids are being raised. That's what it comes down to. Because as much as I desire to do anything, I was willing to do anything, to be able to have money and to be rich. And I was totally on the cusp of robbing houses. But you know what stopped me is that realization that there was no way that I was going to take money that I hadn't earned. I've heard something about you having a really good time with guns. You're good with your weapons, I think totally good with the weapons. What do you want to know, Nick? Have I ever shot anybody? That's a good question, because I almost shot somebody, and that's not even listen, that's not even getting into what you're thinking about. But I just remember I came so close to shooting a neighbor once because this man, almost every single night for months would get drunk, drag his wife out into his yard and just start screaming at her. And then he would start beating her, and he would beat her to the ground. And I grew up on the mountain. Everybody's got ten acres of property. And so this man's house was a good 15 acres from our home. It was quite a distance from our home. But you'd be able to hear it every single night. And it got to the point where I walked down there to see what in the world is going on. And then I would go down there and watch through the trees as this guy is just beating his wife out in the yard. And I got so angry, I went and got my gun. And I was asking a cop friend of mine who is now retired. I'm like, Listen, what's the best way to kill somebody and be able to get away with it, right? Like, I know shooting him with a gun may not be a good move. And he was telling me, Well, your best option is probably going to be shooting him with an arrow. And so I was ready to kill the guy. I couldn't believe what was going on. I really wanted to get involved anyway, that has nothing to do with what you were asking. But I have shot myself, though. I've dealt with a lot of depression in my life, not really sure where that comes from. I've had some people say that they think I'm bipolar, but I definitely fall into very dark, dark places. And I came to a point when I was 18 that I wanted. I just wanted to end it all. And so I attempted to end it all. And the gun jammed when I did that, which is crazy, because the gun had never jammed before. It was a great gun. I kept my guns clean, but the gun did not go off, and it scared the living hell out of me, obviously, because it's always that split second after that, you realize what you've just tried to do. And strangely enough, about three days after I tried to do that at this point in my life, I'm drinking all the time. I'm smoking pot regularly, sneaking around, coming home extremely high, driving extremely high to the point where I'm driving home one night after going to pick up a pound. It may have been more than a pound of weed to sell. I woke up driving a vehicle on my way home with the pot sitting there on the center console. And my friend is sort of almost completely passed out hanging out the window. So things had escalated to this point in my life. Just so you're aware of what's going on. And so after I attempted to commit suicide about three days later, I shot myself in the leg just below the knee. I was sitting and I was taking the gun apart. And in order to do so, you have to drive fire and not really sure what happened. But there was around in the Chamber at the time. I was not drunk. I was not high, but I shot myself. It went all the way through, shattered my tibia, went out the other side and went through a cardboard box and landed on the floor. My older brother was in the room. One of my cousins were in the room and the bullet it was probably a good 3ft away from my older brother, which after it went through me, it didn't have a whole lot of speed. It kind of slowed the bullet down a little bit. But thinking back and realizing that I could have shot my brother or I could have shot my cousin, that's pretty sobering. But when it happened, I stood up and my leg just buckled. It buckled because there wasn't much. The tibia had completely shattered, wasn't bleeding too much, though. I fell to the floor. And it's funny because people say that when you're shot you don't hear the gun that shot you, you just don't hear it like your brain suppresses the sound or something of that nature. And it's very true. I did not hear the gun go off. And when I stood up after it happened, it was almost out of shock because I was confused as to what just happened, but it didn't take real long before I knew what happened. The family was out of town at the time. My older brother was the only one that was home. My grandparents were home as well. My grandparents live on the same ten acres that my parents are on. Anyway, I got hauled to the hospital in an ambulance because the pain was just too unbearable. And the last thing I wanted to do is to have them try to throw me in a car and take me to the hospital. So we called an ambulance. I ended up getting a Rod in my leg, a bunch of screws. I think there's a couple of plates in there. But anyway, interesting that that happened three days after I tried to commit suicide. It was almost like a slap up here. It felt like a bit of a sign that that happened right after. It was kind of interesting that that happened. I don't know. Maybe God was trying to tell me something. So the whole shooting myself ordeal sort of threw me into a mindset because I was in bed for two months, like, I couldn't get up and walk around at all for two months. Wow. Yeah. Nothing compared to what you went through, Nick. No. But during that time when it did come to the point where the doctors were like, hey, you can start walking again. I started limping around by then. It was very painful to do so. But I started limping around because I wanted to get back to where I was at back to normal. Yeah. You know exactly what I'm talking about. This was around the time when my cousin and my cousin Craig, and he wanted to do he wanted to hitchhike down the coast, spend some time just kind of living on the beach and hanging out. And so him and I decided to do that. He and I decided him and I decided regardless, we decided. Yeah. So 2015, my cousin and I embarked on a journey. We started near Aberdeen, Washington, and we hitchhiked along with just walking down the coast. Anyway, it was just this journey. I don't really know what we were doing. We were trying to probably find ourselves at that time. I had not done a whole lot of backpacking growing up. My parents were not at all interested in backpacking, but I did some backpacking with the gentleman that I worked for. But when my cousin and I decided to hitchhike down the coast, in our minds, we needed to take everything that we needed. And so we had between 55 and 65 pound packs. They were very heavy. And so we were carrying these packs, and we were wearing boots. We're hitching down the coast, sleeping on the beach, finding places to sleep so that the cops won't wake us up. We spent a few nights in Cannon Beach, you know where Cannon Beach is. Have you been in Oregon? In Oregon? Yeah. Nice. So if you're at Cannon Beach, you walk out onto the beach, you look up to the right. There's a Hill that overlooks Cannon Beach, and there are signs everywhere. You're not supposed to go up there. And so we went up there and we slept up there, and we spent a couple of days. Of course not. So we spent a couple of days sleeping up there. At that point, we realized we have way too much stuff. And so we ended up shipping some of our stuff home. I'm not kidding you, man. We had a hatchet. We had a hatchet with us for, like, cutting wood. We really did not know what we were doing. We had to have just looked ridiculous. But we started to learn as we went along prepared. We came way too prepared, man. Like, if we had gotten lost in the middle of a forest, we could have lived in luxury for, like, a week and a half. All right. But we weren't in a forest that's the thing. We were hitchhiking. So we were spending every single night in or just outside of a town, right? It made no sense, man. We were on the road for about a month, lots of interesting experiences there. But when we got back from that trip, I came to a realization that I felt like I had gotten too deep in the life that I was living. I can't say that I was just living this crazy drug dealer life. I was trying to make money. I was a low end dealer with me and my friends, trying to make some money, trying to make something of ourselves. But I just came to a decision that the only way that I was going to get away from all of that was I needed to leave. I've always wanted to walk the Pacific Crest Trail, and so I decided to do that in 2015. The Pacific Crest Trail is a trail that goes from the Southern tip of California all the way up to Canada, through California, Oregon, Washington. It follows the mountains all the way up 2600 miles. I walked 1300 miles of it. How long did it take you to walk? 1300 miles? I was out there for three months, but I had to stop and work along the way because I kept running out of money. So that was an interesting experience. Doing that. I did a little calculating and figured out that I did the first 500 miles in 17 days, which, if you add it up and figure it out, it was just around 30 miles a day, seven days a week. I did that on a bicycle. Now I took days off. I obviously wasn't walking every single day. There were some days. My longest day on the trail was 45 miles. I did 45 miles in one day. So, yeah, I had a lot of 35 miles days, a few 20s. I had some days off, but it added up to about 30 miles seven days a week for the first 17 days. So I was cooking. I was moving, but I did have to stop and get work along the way. I could definitely go into that. So I had a friend, Steven, who wanted to walk the trail with me three days before we left. Three days before we left, there was a bit of a situation in which he was put on diversion. He was temporarily detained. He was not officially arrested. He was temporarily detained, and because he was underage, he was put on to diversion, which is basically you've got to take these classes and you've got to show up regularly and take drug tests regularly, or you can end up in more trouble than that. No kidding. So anyway, but strangely enough, when we told the police officer, when we told them what we were trying to do, we were trying to go and walk the Pacific Crest Trail, they actually said that he didn't need to start his diversion. He didn't have to start taking those classes until we got back, so they actually let us go. It was probably a situation where they thought that if they let him go, it may change his life, and it may help him grow up a little. Right. Well, we ended up going. We took a bus all the way down to San Diego, got out on the trail, and Steven lasted four days. He was having some serious knee problems. His body grew much faster than his knees. There's a name for it. And so his knees swelled up to like, twice the size. Oh, man. And we were kind of in a situation where my goal was to do the trip to finish the trail within a year or that year. I wanted to do the full $2,600 and his knees were in so much pain he was going to have to take, like, a week off and then maybe go a little bit. But the reality was that there was no way he was going to make it that year. So he ended up having to go back after four days. So I was out there on my own for the entirety of the journey. The Pacific Crest Trail is like nothing else, man, living every single day, not knowing what you're going to see what's going to happen. Hitchhiking regularly into towns to get supplies. I've got so many hitchhiking stories, man. I could go all day just with the hitchhiking stories. I definitely had a few hitchhiking stories that were more memorable than others. Pushing yourself every single day I was carrying a pack that was between 25 and £30. It was about £30 when I was going through the drier parts of the desert because I had to carry so much water. There was one situation you can go online and there are these been so long. I'm trying to remember the name of it. There's this website that gets updated regularly that lets you know where there is potential water along the trail. So you basically use this list. Is that like, natural water? Some of it's natural. Some of it is people who put water out regularly for people, there's a huge amount of that. I mean, you'll be walking through the middle of the desert and you'll come upon gallons of water, right? Or like a horse trough that's just full of algae and dirt and you never know what kind of water you're going to be drinking. You obviously have to filter most of it. Although when you're living on the trail, nobody knows you by your real name. They know you buy your trail name. Everybody has a trail name. My trail name was Titanium. Because of shooting myself and my leg. Somebody started calling me Titanium, right? The way that word travels on the trail is incredible. I mean, you can hear stories about somebody that you've never even met and then meet them at some point on the trail. The trail rumors are incredible. You will hear the craziest rumors on the trail, and everybody has heard the same thing. And it's just the stories continue to spread like wildfire. When you start out hiking on the trail, you run into different people all the time. But at a certain point, you start to hike at the same speed as like the group that you're in. So you run into the same, like 20 people regularly. Or so you've got a group of people who you continue to run into regularly. You pass them, they pass you, you'll see somebody. And then two weeks later, you'll run into them again in a town while you're trying to resupply on food. And so it's a really cool community. I would love to go back and finish the trail. I'd like to start from the beginning and go for it again because it is a very special thing. But going back to the water situation, though, there was this one specific time when I was walking through one of the drier parts of the desert, the Mojave Desert in California. There and there's this big section where you're just out on the flat and then you're up in these dunes. I thought I was carrying enough water and I got to a place where there was supposed to be water and there was no water. And the next water cache was 14 miles away. Now I've got about less than a half water bottle full of water, and I've got 14 miles to go. And it is hot. In fact, it's so hot that a lot of people will hike at night. They'll walk at night, they'll sleep during the day, and it's about 10:00 at this point. And it's getting really hot. And my choices are I push the 14 miles in this heat and hope that I can get water before I pass out of dehydration, right. Or heat stroke or I can stop. I can wait until night time. And then I can push to the water. Well, I decided I should probably push to the water right now. So I started pushing and I was pushing hard. I was pushing a good 4.5 miles an hour, which was almost a run. I was kind of in a panic, to be honest with you, I was a bit concerned trying to when it's that hot out, you take a drink of water and less than two minutes later, your mouth is completely dry. It's just completely dry and you need more water. And I've got 14 miles to go. Right. Well, what ended up happening is there was some water that somebody had set out in gallon jugs along the trail. There was a little four Wheeler path through the desert, and somebody had put some water there. And so I ended up not having to go the 14 miles. I ended up only having to go about six or seven. And then there was this water stashed along the trail, and it was not on any paperwork. There was no indication that there was going to be water there. And that was a huge blessing. I don't think I would have made the 14 miles. I probably would have passed out before then. It was pretty serious. I was in a bad situation when I even got the six or 7 miles to that water cache. Oh, wow. Yeah. That was an interesting situation. There's been a few situations in my life where I've nearly died, I don't know, maybe four or five. And that was one of those times where there would have been no chance of survival if I would have had to go the full 14 miles. In my opinion, unless somebody would have found me along the trail. At some point, I would have been a goner. That was definitely a blessing. That was a godsend. I know you started drinking water as soon as I started talking about water. The saying on the trail is the trail always provides. And it's so funny, because when I got out there on the trail, I was like, hey, I'm going to be sober. I'm going to do this trip sober. And then one day, I just met this random dude again. We're all using trail names, and I can't remember the guy that I met, but he's like, Dude, I found this pipe along the trail and like, I don't want it. Do you want it? He's like, I already have a pipe. And I was like, oh, dude, sure. I'll take it. And it was like, this little compact pipe that held your bud and you could light it up through a little hole. It was a good travel pipe, right? So I was like, great. Awesome. So now I have this pipe, and I'm like, Well, I didn't want this. And then a day after that, I'm hiking down the trail and Lo and behold, I just find this random baggy of weed hanging from a branch, like a Bush along the trail, like, full of pots. It's got a couple of NUGS in there. I'm like, what the whole trail provide thing is just I was like, Man, this is being provided to me, man. So I've got to do the trail gods of service and smoke this. I started smoking and hiking here and there. It's kind of funny. I definitely have some funny hiking and getting high and hiking stories. The first time that I took a hit from the pipe, I was sitting on a mountaintop looking down at Palm Springs. In fact, if you are a 7th day Adventist and you have heard of Doug Bachelor and his book, The Richest Caveman, I was hanging out right near the area where his cave is. To get to his cave to get to his cave, you have to actually leave the trail and drop down this, like, really Rocky embankment down to the Creek. And it's funny because shortly after that, I met somebody that I spent a little time with hiking on the trail. And his trail name was Swampwater. And the reason why his trail name was Swampwater was apparently he spent twelve or 13 years of his life living in South America. Somewhere in the area that he lived. There was a huge drought, and the only water that there was was this a little bit of swamp water, and also the well. A dog had fallen in the well and died, and nobody had realized it. And so he was drinking the dog in the well along with drinking the water directly out of the swamp. And he wasn't boiling it properly. And he got really sick. And he almost died. But he ended up surviving. And now he swore that he didn't have to filter water anymore because his body could handle it, which I kind of call BS on. But it was a great story. I hiked with this guy for close to a week, and I ran into him off and on the whole time, I was on the trail, and I never saw him filter water. Not once I saw him drink out of the worst water. He drank the worst water without filtering it, and he's like, oh, I'm totally fine. I'm not going to get sick. So I was hiking with him. We were getting some water, and he was like, oh, dude, you don't have to filter this water. It's coming straight out of this spring. It looks really clean. And this is in California. I don't know. Trusting water flowing around in, like, stagnant in sand is kind of sketchy, but I was like, hey, he probably knows what he's talking about, and I didn't want to take the time to filter it. So I just got the water and continued on my Merry way. Well, what ended up happening is that was the first and only time in my life I've ever had, and I've drank all sorts of water without filtering it. But I got jardia and it was not great. And it was on my birthday, too. I'm sorry. It was the day before my birthday. So I ended up spending the night before my birthday in a hotel room. I was able to get out. I was passing by this town just outside of La, and I spent the night in a hotel room, and it was terrible. Anyway, the trail is a big part of my short life. It helped me grow up. It gave me time by myself to really contemplate my life where my life was going, where I wanted it to go. I had a situation before I was on the Pacific Crest Trail, where I was sitting in a room with a bunch of people doing drugs, and there was more than just marijuana there. Everybody had their own drug of choice, and I sort of had this out of body experience in which I could see myself as if there was a security camera in the corner of the room, and I saw the room in closing. And at the time I was almost completely sober. I feel like it was God talking to me. I realized that that was not where I wanted to be. Of course, everybody loves a good story where people are like. And then from then on, I follow the Lord in all my ways. And I'm not going to say that that story doesn't happen. But I think that normally does not happen, right? It's a process. It's a journey. At that moment in my life, I realized, and I recognized that that was not where I wanted to be, right. And it's not like that day I stopped, I had some really crazy experiences out on the trail with hiker trash as we call ourselves and living it up. But it was that moment before I went out on the trail that really stuck with me the whole time. And I didn't let myself go because I knew that that was not where I wanted to be in life. Did you ever have to do any hitchhiking out there? Yeah, I did. Quite a bit of hitchhiking. Yeah. You have to do quite a bit of hitchhiking to get into town to pick up your supplies. You're never on the trail for more than three to five days at a time before there's another town where you can easily stop and pick up food. So you're moving pretty fast. I would travel between 100, 120 miles every three to four days. So I was moving, which is great, because when you're moving that fast, you don't have to carry nearly as much food because you get in and out of those towns very quickly. But, yeah, I had a lot of crazy hitchhiking experiences. One in particular that stuck in my mind was I was trying to get a ride into Lake Isabella in California and where I was trying to. Where are you? To be honest with you, I can't even tell you Lake Isabella is the Lake. I think that's the town, too. Lake Isabella. Okay. You had just started roughly. Yeah. I think it's about an hour from Bakersfield. Yeah. More than half of the Pacific Crest Trail, like, 16 or 1700 miles of the whole trail is in California. It's a long way. So you're there a lot. I never got out of California. 1000, 1000 hundred miles. I never got out. I was still in California. I was getting into the mountains into the beautiful part of California. So I was trying to get a ride into Lake Isabella, and I had been waiting for hours, and I was desperate for a ride. Not a lot of cars came by. There was a car every, like, 20 minutes. And of course, you're never going to get a ride from the first person. So when a car came, it was a minivan, an old beat up minivan. I didn't even question it. I got in the vehicle. There were no seats in the back. So I was sitting cross legged just behind the drivers and passenger seat. And if you've ever watched the show, trailer park boys, I'm not kidding. This was the gentleman in the vehicle spitting image of the guys from Trailer Park boys. The passenger looked like bubbles. He had these giant, thick glasses. They were both wearing suits, but their suits were like, three sizes too big. And the guy that was driving had long ratted hair, like he hadn't taken a shower in a month. And they started driving down the road. And it didn't take long for me to realize, hey, these guys are very intoxicated. They're both drinking one guy smoking some pot. There are bottles in the back that are rolling around and empty bottles, and they start to explain to me with very slurred speech as they drive down the road way too fast, taking these corners almost hit a semi. The semi honked its Horn because we came so close to hitting the semi. And the driver starts to explain that he was on his way to the courthouse because his wife was, I don't know, something to do with his wife. And he had all sorts of excuses about how everything was her fault. And he was just going on and on and driving erratically. And I kid, you not. I can't make this up. I know it's stereotypical, but the passenger pulled out a pipe, and he's like, Man, do you smoke crack? Do you want some crack? What have I gotten myself into? And I started asking them to let me out of the vehicle. They would not let me out. They're like, oh, there's no reason for us to let you out. No problem. We'll take you to the town. And at this point, I'm like, legitimately thinking, like, there might be a possibility that I die here today and make it to the town. I might not make it to the town if I don't make it. They're definitely not going to make it right. And they started telling me that Lake Isabella is a good place to be. When the United States is hit with nuclear weapons, they were telling me about their bunker. They have a bunker and an underground bunker to protect themselves from when the nuclear blast comes. They were crazy. They were on a whole nother level than I was right. I finally was able to convince them to let me out. There was a hiking trail that they were passing just happened to be passing along the road, and I was like, okay, guys, this is where I'm actually trying to go, and they're like, oh, okay. And so they let me out. But that was a pretty sketchy experience. I've had some really weird experiences. I rode with these two guys through the Redwood forest that had literally three gallon bags full of weed. They had so much weed, and the vehicle was just a haze. Most of the trip, it was insane, but at least their driving wasn't too erratic. They were super stone. But due to how stone they were, there was no chance that that vehicle was going to be going any faster than about 40 anyway. 40 and a 60. No problem. Everybody's passing honking their horns, and these dudes are just hanging out their windows and like, smoke is billowing out of the vehicle. I kid you not. Yeah. Hitchhiking is fun, Nick. You should try it sometime. You meet lots of great people, and you also meet some sketchy ones. A lot of sketchy ones, but it's a good way to meet people. Makes for adventures. Yeah, it makes for adventures. I'm in a Walker or a cane. So me hitchhiking is not really a wise thing, but at the same time, I couldn't really go out and walk the Pacific Crest rail. So an average. You've done some different things. You've been adventurous. You've definitely taken some travels in your lifetime. Yeah, but don't you like to climb mountains? You don't just hike trails. Yeah. I've been up Mount Reiner quite a few times amongst some other ones. But Mount Rainier is kind of the big one. I always wanted to climb Mount Rainier. The first time I saw Rainier, I was like, eight years old, and I told myself I wanted to climb some time in my life, but the thought of doing it scared me to death. It gave me butterflies in my stomach. But after all these years, I was finally able to climb it. And I've tried to do it every single year, ever since. Wow. Yeah. As a bit of a pilgrimage. And we go up there and take friends and take people who have had the same dream that I had for so many years to climb the mountain. And it's exciting to get to the top with somebody that their lifelong dream has been to get to the top of Mount Reignier. Didn't I hear you climbed Everest? Yeah. Hey. Interesting that you bring that up. I climbed the equivalent elevation of Mt. Everest from Eleval and back again. I chose a mountain that was very steep, so it was only 60 miles and so gaining 26,029ft and descending 26,029ft. It was 16 reps, 60 miles. It took me way too much time. It was ridiculous. It took me, like 28 hours. I'd never done anything overnight like that. Was it very new to me? The most I'd ever done. It once was about 45 miles on the Pct, and that wasn't climbing the kind of elevation that I had to climb during the Everest challenge. So it was a good experience. I did it to raise money for a nonprofit in Corda Lane, Northern Idaho Crisis Center. The media was involved. We built a website. I learned a lot from it when it comes to raising money for nonprofits. I should have started advertising way sooner, got involved about a week and a half before it happened. It was good, though. A bunch of people showed up just to show their support to climb on the mountain with me. Yeah. It was a lot of fun. That was a couple of years ago. I've always wanted to do it again. I really wanted to do it again for myself, along with the idea of making this a yearly occurrence. Getting people involved. The Everest challenge becomes a yearly thing where people come out and they climb. They do reps to raise money for something that's close to my heart, which is mental health. And that's kind of helping me in my future endeavors. With Nick recycled helping you with your endeavors and just knowing how much work it actually takes to do such a thing, to raise money for a nonprofit, to advertise, to prepare. It's a lot more work than you think it is. 100%. You didn't climb Everest, but have you ever seen Everest? I've never seen Everest down that way, kind of haven't you in other countries, haven't you? I have. Yeah. I've been to India five times now. I've gone over there with a nonprofit organization that trains Bible workers. And I've also been over there with an organization that trains health workers to go into remote villages and to educate people, along with helping them with their health needs. There are so many major health problems in India that come down to lack of education. Cleanliness is a big one. A good diet, eating properly. Yeah. So I've spent a lot of time in India. Never been able to see Everest, though. I've never been that far north, and also the smog would never allow for you to see Mount Everest. Even if you could see it, you wouldn't see it because of all the pollution. The pollution in India is very bad, but I spent some time spent quite a bit of time in India, going over there for two months at a time for the last five years and spending quite a bit of time there going into remote villages and filming for this nonprofit. I've since started my own company about ten months ago. I started my own company that has been an incredible journey in and of itself. It's been so much more successful than I could have ever imagined. Can't wait to see the future of everything. But I do a lot of video work for nonprofits, and it gives me satisfaction and a fulfillment. Yeah. Spent some time in Thailand, traveled through Europe. I don't know. I've been to, like, 16 countries, so I'm blessed. I've been to Malaysia. I went through Korea and to Cuba, Mexico and Canada, but those don't really count. I have a really good friend from California. We did quite a bit of traveling together. She took me on a trip through Europe. She's an incredible travel companion for sure. And here we are, Nick creating this podcast, we could go into depth on a lot of things in my life. But the idea of starting this podcast came to me, and I felt like I really needed to do it, because when you share your own story, when you share your own experiences and you're able to help other people through the challenges that you have faced, it really brings a certain satisfaction that nothing else can bring coming at it from a religious standpoint. A testimony is what keeps your Christian walk alive. Having that testimony. Sharing that testimony, I think it's very important to share your testimony and to tell people what you've been through and where you are, where you're going. And so I hope that this podcast does what I was hoping it would do. Surely we want to give the average person a voice. People who have a story, everyone has overcome something in their lives. And I believe that through sharing, it doesn't only benefit others, but it benefits the person that's sharing as well, for sure. Well, it's looking like it's been a little bit longer than I had expected, but no stress. I apologize. No, it's been perfect wrapping up. Do you have anything that you might want to share with anybody else?Yeah. If you are somebody out there that's in a very dark place in your life, you may be contemplating ending your life or anything of that nature. I would just ask you to look to gratitude. What are you thankful for? What in your life? What things in your life can you be thankful for? Is it family? Is it friends? Everybody has something that they can be thankful for. And when you're deep, deep in the bowels of depression at the very lowest point, it's very difficult to see anything good in your life. But you have many things in your life that is good. And I beg you to look at those things and to meditate upon those things regularly, because that will ultimately save your life. You and I lost a really close friend a few years ago, Levi, and we lost him through suicide. And it was such a shocker. I was in India during the time, and I had spent some time snowboarding with him the day before I left for India. I spent time with him. Yeah, we went snowboarding the day before I left for India, and he just seemed so happy. He was such an inspiration. He was such a light to so many people. And he had just started going to College. And we believe that it happened because of medications that he had stopped taking because he had previously had thyroid cancer. And so I think that was a big factor. He had stopped taking his medication, I think, is what they're thinking happened. But that was a real shock. And when that happened, I was really taken back because I realized that just a few years before that could have been me. If that gun had gone off. And so for sure, I have now come to a point where I want my life to be a living example of success and coming out of a dark situation. A dark place. Overcoming exactly. Many people who know me have no idea that I face the things that I do. And I still face these things sometimes on a daily basis. And people like us were very good at hiding these things. We're very good at sort of being the life of the party. Oftentimes, nobody would ever guess that we struggle with these things on a daily basis. And it's not something that I've stopped struggling with. It's just something that I've learned how to adapt with. And I've realized that even if I am in a dark place, I can come out of it. And that's what keeps me alive is knowing that I can come out of it and that I do have a future and that I can be a living example to others. And that's what keeps motivating me. And that's what keeps me going. Well, I think that's a great time to wrap it up. Thank you, Nick. Thank you for joining me on your show there on your podcast. Yeah. I'm glad everybody is. Listen, if you've stuck around to the end of the episode, I'm shocked because this guy is hella boring. No, you're not so hot on your type of testimony. I could care less than mine. I've given it how many times it's like, okay, give me something new. Yeah. I don't think we understand what our story can do for others, and we need to realize that it can do something for others. And I think we need to find our testimony and find our story. That's something I need to work on being able to share with young people. Young people are not going to be able to stick around for an hour and a half all the time. This was long. This was long, and I feel like, in a lot of ways, we just scratched the surface. I mean, I wanted to talk about my religious experience, and we never even fully got to that. But I think it's a good stopping point, and I appreciate it. There are many other episodes that we can make from this. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you. And you guys have an amazing night or day or whatever point in time it is for you. All right, man, we'll see you next time on the Simply Overcoming Podcast. All right. Enjoy. Bye bye.