If there was ever such a thing as a human Swiss Army knife, it’d be Roman Dial. While some explorers specialise to hone their craft, this guy is a master generalist with an uncanny knack for being on the ground floor of countless outdoor movements. 

If you’re reading this then you might have already seen the now-classic colour photographs of Roman, Paul Adkins and Carl Tobin taken during a seven week, 775 mile expedition across the Alaska Range that were featured in a 1997 issue of National Geographic, showing the three explorers  pedalling, pushing and paddling into the unknown on titanium Merlin hardtails and the finest Patagonia gear of the day, but that’s just a mere chapter in a life full of left-field adventure.

Not just an accomplished climber, mountaineer and skier (and professor with no less than four degrees), he was one of the first to see the value in the packraft in the early 1980s, crossing raging rivers with a basic inflatable dinghy to string together adventures that had never been thought of before. 

The same goes for bicycles—and after realising the potential of mountain bikes in the late ‘80s he pedalled off the fire-roads and into the Alaskan wilderness with a few other brave souls to create ‘hellbiking’, the multi-day off-piste slog-fest which blazed a rocky trail for the bikepacking of today. 

And then there’s the lesser-known art of canopy-trekking—an overhead-but-still-relatively-underground outdoor discipline he helped invent in the early 2000s which involves using a crossbow-assisted rope system to traverse the tree-tops. 

As you can see, there’s a lot to talk about here—which is why this interview is by far the longest one published so far on the Outsiders site. That said, it could still have easily been twice as long, as we talked about the adventures and the reasons why—getting deep on subjects like human nature, using bikes as ice-axes and Conan the Barbarian…

Sam: While you’ve spent a long time in the Alaskan wilderness, you’re actually from Seattle aren’t you? How did you end up in Alaska in the first place?

Roman: I first came up to Alaska when I was nine years old in 1970—I spent the summer at this mining camp where my uncles worked. They were working all day long at a coal mine, so I had freedom to do whatever I wanted and entertain myself, so I wandered around the countryside there. 

And then I went back again when I was 12 to go hang out with one of those uncles while he was working in a different place in southeast Alaska where it's like a rainforest. And me and my best friend, we just went fly fishing every day. Then when I was 14, I earned enough money doing odd jobs—like mowing lawns and delivering newspapers and babysitting people's kids—to bring myself to Alaska a third time, and I hitchhiked around the state while the Alaska pipeline was being constructed. 

Then once I graduated from high school 16 I moved to Alaska to go to college. And I've been here ever since. I came up in 1977, so it's been almost 50 years now.

Sam: What was it about Alaska that appealed to you? Was it that wide open wilderness thing?

Roman: I think so. When you fly over Europe or America, and you look out the window, it's just humans. Humans and their effects are everywhere. You might not see any people from 30,000 feet up, but you can see what they've been doing. Every so often, you might see a little island of forest or a natural area, whereas Alaska is like that inside-out, where you fly for hours in a small plane, and you look out the window, and you just see forests or mountains or marshlands. And then you'll see one cabin on a lake, or you'll see a little village, you know? So it's kind of the reverse of what it is everywhere else. 

Sometimes it feels overwhelming to go to Los Angeles or New York City or Texas or places that are just dominated by what humans have done. It just feels like, “Wow!”—it’s not that the end is coming, but the end of something is coming. My philosophy is that humans, and I don't mean this in a bad way, but we're like weeds. A weed is a plant that kind of spreads and can live anywhere. And humans live everywhere. There's no other species of organism that has as wide a geographic range over the surface of the earth as humans. Do you know what I mean?

Sam: We can adapt, can't we? We've adapted to pretty much every environment.

Roman: Yeah, we've gone to the moon. We're always pushing forward. If you just watch movies or read literature, we’re drawn to the independent individual who breaks out on their own—on the frontier. We're the kind of organism that just spreads and goes on, you know, and we're hardwired for that. And so that's why doing outdoor adventure stuff is really appealing to us.

We like to be out in the wild where we can do what we want. But then also, in our brain—I forget what it's called, like in the middle of your brain, the lizard brain—that part doesn’t think, it just reacts, and when anything kind of frightens us a little bit, it triggers hormones. So climbing or whitewater rafting or bungee jumping or skydiving or touching big animals or caving or going deep in the water or going into surf—all those things scare us in a hardwired way. That's our survival mechanism—because anybody who wasn't afraid of that in our evolutionary history, they got wiped out.

But if you survive that kind of fear, then what your body does is it releases a hormone that says, “Hey, good work.” You feel so good you have survived. Do you know what I mean?

Sam: What was like your first experience of that? Do you remember first getting that buzz of risking something, and getting away with it?

Roman: It could go back to the first time I got on a bicycle. Speed is one of those things where we're a little afraid of, but it feels so good if you can control the speed. So maybe the first time would have been when I was learning to ride a bike and I went down somebody's driveway and I was able to not fall.

I can't remember the exact point, I just know that there's been lots of points where I've been afraid, but I made it through and it felt really good.

Sam: With some people, those things would be enough to scare them from doing them again. What kept you going and seeking out more wild situations? 

Roman: I think it was maybe because things happened to me and I wanted to get back on the horse. I remember in high school or college that if you witnessed something bad that happened to somebody else, but it didn't happen to you—you'd be like, “Wow, this is dangerous. I'm not going to do this anymore. That could have been me—I don't want to be the guy who broke his legs!” But on the other hand, if it's you who gets hurt, you're kind of like, “I’ve got to get back on that horse. I have to prove to myself that I'm not afraid of that—that I can overcome.”

Sam: That makes sense. You don’t want to let something like that win. I know early on you were into climbing, but it seems like by the 1980s you got into what I’d maybe call ‘traversing’. A lot of dangerous outdoor stuff is based around altitude, but you were covering big distances and moving through a landscape—whether you’re on a bike or a raft or walking. What led you in that direction?

Roman: That started very early. As a teenager, we climbed this mountain that was really beautiful. And after we climbed that face, we skied out to save money. And, it was the combination of the up and the out that kind of gave it this big full-bodied experience where it wasn't just like the thrill of climbing, but it was that thing of getting back to being a weed—the exhilaration of seeing all these landscapes and having the ability to cross them. 

And for that thing about switching sports, there’s a famous quote—maybe it's a John Muir quote—something like, “The world's a big place and there's not much time, so I'm going to go out and do as many different things as I can.”

I've always been interested in a lot of different things, but life is really short. I'm 64 now, and I've realised that if you’re learning something, then at first it's hard to learn, but then you get to a point where you're learning a lot really fast and you're like, “Wow, this is awesome. I'm getting better all the time and I'm doing stuff I never dreamed I could do.” And then you get to a point where you're not really getting much better. And it's just like, “Oh, this again.”

Sam: The curve mellows out once you get the hang of things. 

Roman: Yeah. And so when I get to that, I'll go and do something else, you know? And so I think that's a big reason why I jumped from thing to thing. I quit climbing cause I realized it was too dangerous. But I still liked being outdoors and I liked the little challenges you can get—and then somebody introduced me to the idea of carrying a raft. And I just embraced it. 

And in Alaska, getting back to how big and vast it is, there's all these rivers and they don't have any bridges over them. So the first time I came to a really big river, I tried to wade it. This is when I was 14. I tried to wade it and I got washed down and I had to swim to the other side, and I was like, “Wow, that's kind of crazy.” But then a few years later, I saw this packraft. It was this little inflatable raft—just a toy for a pool.

Sam: Like a kid's dinghy? 

Roman: Yeah, this old guy used it in a race. This was before we called them ‘adventure races’. It was what we called a ‘wilderness race’. It was 150 miles, and you had to carry everything with you from the start to the end, including all of your food and your gear. And you couldn't drop anything and you couldn't get help from anybody along the way—except from other racers. You couldn't use a pack animal or a motor or a road.

There were rivers along the way and we were all expected to swim them, and we did, except for this one old man. I was 21 and he was 55 and he had this raft and it was like, “Wow, what a brilliant idea.” And he almost won the race. So that really kind of changed my whole view.

I was still climbing mountains. That same year, we’d skied a hundred kilometers and climbed the steep west face of a mountain and then turned around and skied back out. And to me, that was the kind of thing I wanted to do. I wanted to do everything.

Sam: The full adventure. Not just the end bit where you go up and down the mountain. 

Roman: Yeah—fly in, climb the mountain and then fly out—there's so much more involved than that. I know this is a horrible analogy, but it's the first one that pops into my head… flying in and climbing up, that's kind of like paying for sex. It's better to court somebody and date somebody, develop a relationship—the whole thing, you know? 

And so, the packraft kind of enabled me to do that. Before I quit climbing, in 1985 we flew into a mountain range and climbed some big rocks and made some first ascents and then skied and rafted out to the road. And that was really satisfying, just to have these big landscapes where you could really satisfy that weediness that we have as a human weed. I hate to use the word weed as it has a bad connotation, but I don't want to use explorer because we're not really exploring anything. Everywhere has already been explored.

Sam: You’re more of a rolling stone. It reminds me of the film Conan the Barbarian—they’re doing a lot of trekking in that film, just trudging around on horses through the desert for ages. I watch that and I think, “That looks pretty good, just covering big distances with my friends.”

Roman: Yeah, absolutely. It's especially good when you bring people with you. I brought my wife, Peggy, along on some of these things. She had grown up the youngest of ten kids in a family that frowned on any risk at all. She didn't learn how to swim until she was 25—she'd never gone downhill skiing or climbed a rock or rafted a river or camped away from the road or snowshoed. So she and I met when I was 19 and she was 18 and I was already doing some crazy stuff.

But she learned early on that to scare yourself a little bit feels good. She wasn't an adrenaline junkie by any means. But to cross those big landscapes, like your Conan analogy, and then have someone that you love along with you and you work together and you take care of that person, and that person takes care of you—that's super fulfilling. 

And then to add on your children to that too, then that's kind of what it means to be a human. It's what it means to be a human animal; a human as an animal, not like a human in a human environment, but a human in a wild environment. I've always felt that to be really satisfying. 

And then these other things—like the kind of scary bits that get a lot of attention from other people—that's not why I'm really there. I mean, I'll admit to it, I like to run a rapid, where everybody's standing around the rapid and we've got these packrafts and nobody's ever run a rapid like that in a packraft before. And nobody thinks you can do it. And then you do it—you're all worked up about it and then you do it and you make it. And it's actually super fun. And then everybody does it. I will admit to that, but it's not what I like the most—it's not really what I want.

Sam: Those bits are almost like a tiny piece of the big adventure thing, aren’t they? I suppose you kind of have to do things like that, or you’ll have to go around or go back or something. 

Roman: Yeah, so then you want to build your skill level up. Like when I was an Alpine climber, I’d go climb waterfalls and rock walls. But when we were doing these rafting trips out, I realized I didn't really have the whitewater skills, so I started to develop those by going out with other people for a day or a week—we were pushing the envelope. 

It's very satisfying to me, to do stuff that other people haven't done. Not in a, “Oh, look at me, I'm better than you,” way, but more because it’s just a cool feeling to have. I think it's back to that ‘weediness’. What do weeds do? They get into places where the others of that species haven't made it yet. I think that's hardwired.

Sam: It seems like you were almost trying to be ‘the Swiss army knife’. If you can climb well and paddle well and your fitness level is good, then there’s not much to stop you.

Roman: Yeah—I can get to that bit and I don't have to go back or go round—I can go straight up there because I'm good enough. In my education I did a lot of math, and I remember one professor told me, “If you want to use this much math, you've got to learn THIS much math.” So if you want to be able to run Class II or Class III rapids in the wilderness when you're cold, wet, hungry, you should learn how to run Class IV when you're back home.

Sam: That makes sense. When did the mountain bikes get added into the mix? 

Roman: I guess I got my mountain bike in 1986. I had gone as far as I could with the packrafts and hiking, and then mountain bikes arrived in Alaska and a bunch of us in Fairbanks got them. Fairbanks is in the middle of the state—it’s the second largest city, it’s where the university is and it's at the end of the road. Honestly I'd say that's where a lot of this stuff kind of got started—bike rafting or snow biking or fat biking and packrafting, and even long lightweight ski trips and backcountry skiing. 

I think a lot of that started with what we were doing in Fairbanks in the 80s and then it kind of trickled out. I mean mountain bikes were elsewhere but nobody was putting a mountain bike on a packraft, you know what I mean? 

Sam: That's what I was thinking. People were going out on big rides, but you were joining the dots and using it as this tool to get right out there. You weren’t just riding on some fire-roads for a couple of hours on a Sunday.

Roman: Yeah, and it wasn't that it was faster, it was just much more interesting and much more rewarding. When you walk, you can kind of walk in a straight line anywhere—you might have to push yourself through bushes and you might have to slog through the mud but anybody can go anywhere in a straight line. But it's much more rewarding if you're on a bike because you get punished if you don't go a good way, especially when you’re taking bikes where there aren’t any human trails, following animal trails or river bars or glaciers. That’s what we rode.

What was the first trip where you really put it all into practice—linking the rafts and the bikes and everything else together?

In 1988 we went from Nabesna to McCarthy. Nabesna is a town on the northern side of these mountains—a coastal range called the Wrangell, and then the St. Elias Mountains—and McCarthy is kind of on the south side. There's a big chunk of mountains between the two, but you can kind of go around them. 

I’d hiked it in 1986 by myself, and then I realized, “Wow, we could probably take mountain bikes around here.” I had these two friends I mountain bike raced with, Carl Tobin and Jon Underwood. Carl was this really super great Alaskan alpinist and Jon was a cross-country ski racer who'd gone to Dartmouth on a ski scholarship. 

So the three of us did it with one packraft, and it was remarkably possible. It was like, “Wow, this is cool, and nobody's ever done anything like it.” There was mountain biking and road touring, but there we were doing a wilderness trip, where there were no maintained trails and there were no bridges and there were these big rivers, and as far as I knew, I was the only one who'd gone from the Nabesna to McCarthy since the 1940s.

Sam: It’s almost like the kind of trip people would have done on horseback back in the frontier era. Trekking out to find gold or something. 

Roman: Exactly, people in the ‘40s did it on horseback, but once the airplanes showed up after World War II everybody was flying around and nobody did horseback trips anymore. But we biked it. We had the bikes and the raft, and we were forced to travel as light as we could because the lighter we were the more we could ride—and it was just super satisfying to ride these animal trails. All of a sudden you were rewarded if you could find a good path to ride because you could move faster.

It just felt so cool. I don't know how to explain it—it was the neatest feeling that I'd had up to that point. It felt really good to carry a raft and come to a river and be able to float the river and then get out of the river and climb over a mountain range to another river and float. And then to have a bicycle was like skis versus snowshoes. 

Like when you have snowshoes, you go plod, plod, plod. Flatland, uphill, downhill, all is plod, plod, plod. But with skis, you can go uphill and on the flats you can kind of skate and then you can go downhill and it's fast, and the bicycle was the same.

Sam: I don’t mind walking, but it's kind of slow and mindless. I know some people like that aspect of it—that meditative, ‘heavy boredom’ thing—but riding a bike off road is completely different. You can’t shut off otherwise you’ll be straight over the bars. You’ve got to constantly be in the present. Was that the appeal to you?

Roman: Absolutely. And to be honest with you, I don't like to walk on a trail because it doesn't allow you to get into that constant, intimate engagement of you and nature. But if you're walking off trail where there's a lot of brush and there's boulders and there's bogs and there's bad river crossings, then you have to engage intimately with the environment. You can't just sort of daydream except when the walking is good. I like the constant puzzle solving.

Sam: Maybe there’s two kinds of long distance outdoor traveller—there’s the slow and meditative or the fast and permanently engaged.

Roman: You're right. Like with sea kayaking, I just get so bored that I’ll fall asleep. And the same with road cycling or trail hiking. I get to the point where all I can think of is, “Wow, my feet hurt.” I'm walking on this hard pack trail and it's boom, boom, boom. I like that idea of flow or engagement—being in the moment and having to think about what I'm doing, instead of what I've done or what I will do. 

Sam: Going back to the bike stuff, that ‘88 trip was where the term ‘hellbiking’ came from wasn’t it? That was kind of the precursor to the much more friendly sounding ‘bikepacking’.

Roman: Some people like to say that me and my friends are the ones who started bikepacking, but we never called it bikepacking. To me, bikepacking is somebody carrying a bike. 

So when we did that trip, we got to this cabin, and in the old days in cabins in Alaska, they were open, and people would sign their names or carve their names onto the wood inside the cabins. Nowadays that’s kind of frowned upon—but it used to be that they never were locked. Nobody really owned the cabin, somebody had built it and lived in it and it was left over from the early 1900s, probably, and it was out on the tundra.

We were feeling really exhilarated about what we're doing, and Underwood had written, “Live to ride, ride to die,” and I wrote “Mountain bikes from hell,” and signed my name. After that trip, that winter, Carl said, “Well, what are we gonna do for a hellbike trip next year?”

So we started calling it hell biking, and back in the 80s, when I was putting a lot of thought into this sort of stuff, I thought, “Well, hell biking is a bike trip, where about half of it is riding, and then the other half is other stuff, like rafting your boat, or carrying your bike, or pushing your bike.” It was hellish on the bike, and hellish on you, and hell to do, but very rewarding.

Sam: And for the next few years it kind of developed from there, didn’t it?

Roman: In 1989, we did a part of the Alaska Range where we rode over these glaciers. I'd skied that route in ‘86, and then I'd also hiked it, so I knew that we'd be able to bike it, and then in 1990 Carl and I went across the Brooks Range. We went from an island in the Arctic Ocean and we each had a packraft—we paddled off this island, and we rode across the North Slope, and crossed over the Brooks Range, and rode down until the river was deep enough to float, and then blew up our boats, and floated down. I guess that was our first “bike-rafting” trip.

We did some smaller trips in ‘91 and ‘92, and 1995 we went across the Harding Icefield, which is a big 700 square mile icefield. We rode the ice on the edges, and then dragged our bikes in sleds across the snow, and then bike-rafted out.

Sam: That’s kind of the dream I suppose—this all terrain adventure in pure wilderness. And then a year later came the big Alaska Range expedition? How did that come about?

Roman: I pitched an idea to National Geographic to do a family trip, where it wasn't any bicycles, it would be like a hiking, skiing, packrafting, environmental nature trip, but they said, “No, we're not really interested in a family trip. What about a mountain bike trip, across the Brooks Range?”

I was like, “Wow, that's a cool idea, but we won't be able to do it across the Brooks Range, I think we should do it as the Alaska Range, because nobody has traversed the whole thing yet,” So that was in 1996, and that was where we did the big one.

Sam: Riding 775 miles over seven weeks… how do you plan something like that?

Roman: The main aspect was that this had to work, or it would be a failure. I've had plenty of failures—that's part of the game—so I wanted to be sure that we could pull this off. We’d done one section in 1988, and we'd done the next section kind of in 1989, and then there was this section that I hadn't done—but it all seemed doable, I knew that we could do it. 

When you're going to do a big sponsored trip that has a big budget you want it to succeed, and that makes it more stressful in a lot of ways. I'm not a big planner. The more I plan, the more I've kind of done the whole thing in my head, and if I don't end up going it's a big disappointment, and if I do go, well, I thought about it so much that I've actually lost interest in it. So I plan just enough—I don’t want to spoil it.

Sam: I suppose it’s like a holiday. People are always planning what restaurants they’re going to eat at… they walk past 10 amazing places and then the one they wanted to go to is closed anyway. And that’s kind of okay for something trivial like that, but if you’ve planned too hard on a big expedition—maybe you’re not prepared for something to go another way.

Roman: Yeah, exactly, and in real life you don't really know what's coming. I like to sort of plan about half the trip, and then let the other half develop naturally. That gives you the ability to experience things the way you have to in real life—where you know what you want to do, but all these things get thrown at you that you have to deal with, that you didn't anticipate. So I think it's important, personally, to kind of be flexible, and be able to be resilient about how you get pushed around in life, and I think there's no better way to kind of learn those skills, than as a human animal in wild places. 

Sam: What was the reality of that trip once you set off?

Roman: That trip was actually really good. There were some places where the riding was sort of bumpy, and sometimes there were bad bugs, and there was one place where I think it took us four hours to go one mile through the brush—the brush was so thick that we had to take our packs through, and then come back and get our bicycles, take the pedals off, turn the handlebars sideways, and wiggle the bikes through the bushes. 

And there were places where we had to wade rivers up to our chest and there were sections where we had to push our bikes through deep snow, because we couldn't ride, and the snow wasn't even really snow, it was slush water. And then we had to cross the crest of the Alaska Range through this pass, so we had to carry our stuff up and over the pass—and we didn't necessarily have a lot of food, or a lot of warm clothes, so we were kind of cold and hungry a lot of the time, and we maybe had one ice axe, and maybe two ice screws, but then we went over the pass and had to descend…

Sam: I think I’ve seen a photo of that—that’s where you were using your bikes as ice-axes wasn’t it?

Roman: Yeah—that's one of my favorite pictures in that National Geographic article, where Paul is stabbing his bike into the snow. There was this discomfort that bordered on this sense of discovery. Like, “Oh, we don't have that much food, but look, we can stretch our food this far, and that's a good lesson”, or, “We don't have any climbing gear, but here's how we can get down the steep slope.” It was this sort of yin and yang thing. 

Sam: I don’t really know how to put this, but it seems like you’ve got a very high tolerance for frustration.

Roman: Yeah—I don't get discouraged very easily and do enjoy solving problems through improvisation.

But are you enjoying that stuff at the time? Are you trudging through the slush for hours thinking how great it is? Or are you just thinking, “Why am I doing this?”

Roman: That's a really good question, and I'm gonna tell you a third way of thinking. I’m usually thinking, “I made a mistake, we're going the wrong way.” I'm kind of stubborn—I like to be the person in the front who's making the decisions on where to go. People don’t usually like to be in front of me because if I don't like the way they're going, I'm gonna go a different way. And that’s the best way to travel. 

When we did that Alaska Range bike trip, we were riding our bikes, and there wasn't really a leader—whoever was in front was the person who found the route that was best for all of us, and so you would follow it. So I might be in front and the route slowed, so then Paul might break off and go over here, and find something else, and then I'd follow in behind him, you know, so we worked as a team, kind of like swinging leads. You have to go side to side to find the good route to go forward.

Sam: In some of the photos where you’re riding down into a valley, you can see that there’d be this puzzle of working out where to go and finding a line. It’s not like there’s an obvious track. You’ve got to find that path of least resistance—like how a river would flow.

Roman: Exactly right. You're going where the river would flow, but then there’s a waterfall and you can't go down so you stop and your mate goes over here and finds a way around and then you follow him. 

I think if you're suffering you're doing something wrong—there should be a better route. So if I'm in front and we're suffering I'll often apologize to the people that I'm with and say, “Look, I'm sorry we're going a bad way I'm trying to get us onto a better route.” And that goes back to the fact that I wanted to bring my wife on these trips, and if she was miserable, she wouldn’t want to come on any more with me. 

Sam: You’re being a good host?

Roman: Yeah—I don’t want to be an army sergeant barking orders. We don’t need to suffer needlessly. And then when we had kids, we didn’t want to make it miserable for them because I wanted them to enjoy these trips too.

So my goal is always to find the best line. And that goes back to that thing about engaging in the landscape. I've done stuff in Patagonia where there aren't any big animals so there's no trails to find and it's just a matter of thrashing through the brush, but in Alaska you have to know something about the caribou and the moose and the wolves and the bears and the mountain sheep. You have to know where their habitat is and where they travel, and I really enjoy that. That’s kind of where I’m at—I’m not thinking that if I’m suffering, I’m doing something right.

Sam: You’re not making it awkward for awkward’s sake. You’re wanting it to be frictionless.

Roman: Yeah—or at least the least friction. That’s the puzzle. When you're riding your bike on a challenging rocky trail you keep your eye on where the smooth gap is, you don't want to look at the rocks or the trenches—you’re focussing on the good and not the bad.

Sam: This is maybe a bit far out but I sometimes wonder if we do this kind of thing because we can’t fly. Like riding a bike through a landscape is maybe one of the closest things we’ve got to flight.

Roman: Oh absolutely—I dream about that. I have dreams where I'm like a bird flying through a forest, moving through a cluttered atmosphere that's full of stuff but I'm moving through it not hitting it. I’ll think, “Oh finally, it’s real! I'm really doing this because it's all in color and everybody knows that you don't dream in color…” 

Sam: Haha… I think that stuff is wired into us somehow. Rafts and bikes have come a long way since the 80s—but is there a beauty in these things when they’re kind of new and undeveloped? 

Roman: When the packrafts got better and better I remember we'd be out and be like, “This isn't even really packrafting anymore—it's too easy.” And it was the same once bicycles went full suspension—you didn't really have to pay as close attention to what you were doing anymore, you could just go straight through anything. 

I don’t want it to be too crude—building a raft out of sticks—I’d rather repurpose some surplus raft that people used in airplanes in the war. 

Sam: There’s a balance isn’t there? It’s like there needs to be maybe 30% technology, and then 70% skill. But then when it’s like 80% tech, 20% human input, then it gets dull. 

Roman: Yeah—I kind of lose interest once the technology gets too good. The climbing I liked the most was when, as you said, it was like 20% technology and 80% human ingenuity and you were just dealing with how you moved across the landscape rather than what tools you used while you moved.

Sam: And now in 2025 we’ve got these fancy gadget-filled mountain bikes, big fat bikes that go over everything and super-stable packrafts. What would you get into now if you were young? What do you think would give you that same buzz as ‘hellbiking’ did in the 80s, back when it was new and uncharted?

Roman: There are a couple of things that really appeal to me that people do. Getting back to the idea of flying, there’s these camps that paragliders make called ‘vol bivs’. The ‘vol’ is short for flying, as in ‘volant,’ and the ‘biv’ is short for ‘bivouac’. I have friends who do it—you climb up a mountain and you jump off with a paraglider and then you soar around in this little sleeping bag thing all day then land and camp. This one friend of mine who I did a lot of extreme packrafting with early on named Thai Verzone, he'll carry with him a packraft and a sleeping bag and a little cook pot and he goes off for days doing that. He flies and then he lands and makes his vol-biv and the next day he floats down a river that nobody's ever floated before. 

The other thing is something I tried in the 2000s. It began in the 90s when I was working on my PhD in the Caribbean. I was riding my mountain bike up into the rainforest every day to maintain these experiments in the rainforest canopy. I spent nine months climbing trees every day for three weeks out of every month and I thought, “I bet you could go from tree to tree without coming down to the ground.”  

Sam: Like a squirrel? 

Roman: Yeah like a squirrel or a monkey. The idea would be you'd have a rope that would go from the tree you're in to the next tree and you’d do a Tyrolean traverse to the next tree. And you’d have water and food and a hanging tent with you. You’d basically move from tree to tree across a forest canopy for days without coming to the ground or getting any help from the ground.

Somehow the idea got out to this other scientist. He got in contact with me and so we actually got together with this super innovative guy who made tree climbing stuff and we came up with this idea of having a crossbow which would shoot what we called a “magic missile” trailing fishing line from a fishing reel. Then we’d send a piece of parachute cord over, then tie a rope to it and pull the rope over. Then use the rope for a tyrolean to the far tree.

We called it a canopy trek. The first one we did was in a redwood forest in California where we went from one redwood tree to another 300 feet off the ground, and then we went to the sequoias and did a three-day canopy trek in the forest there—camping out in the trees with a hanging stove.

Then we got some money to go to Australia, so we spent five days there without coming down to the ground. We wanted to go for a week but we got into a windstorm that chased us down. And then in Borneo we did a really hardcore canopy trek—we didn’t camp out because it was so uncomfortable with stinging wasps and stinging plants, but every day we’d go from our research station over to our trees and pick up where we left off.

I still like that idea, but I kind of got to that flat top of the curve where I was like, “I know what this is about now.” Life seems too short and full of all kinds of neat activities to pursue the last 10% of true mastery in any single one.

Sam: Like the fun was gone once you sussed it out?

Roman: Yeah—and that's kind of the recurring theme in my outdoor adventures. I used to do photography, but after a while I'd look through the lens and think, “This is that same picture I've taken before,” and it was just too much effort to take a new and better picture. And then it became digital and I didn't want to buy a new camera, and I just set photography aside and moved to something else. I don't ever get really good at anything, and that's okay—I don't want to be the greatest or the best. 

Sam: And it’s another string to your bow. It’s another thing to add to the mix. 

Roman: There were about five years in the 90s into the 2000s where I did these adventure races like the Eco-Challenge and the Raid Gauloises. There would be a mountain bike section, then they would they take your bikes and they give you some whitewater rafting gear and set you up with a big whitewater raft and that would end, and then there would be some sort of climbing section on fixed ropes, and then that would end and you would trek over to some horses and then ride some horses. 

And I liked those because I liked the team aspect and variety, but they were non-stop and people thought that the only way to do them was to not sleep and hurt yourself and I thought that was really bad style—especially hurting yourself. Plus it was hard on my family life—that’s always been really important to me. These things pulled me in a direction away from my family. 

Sam: That stuff is kind of at odds with family life. But maybe it’s not about going away on some crazy huge expedition, you can get the same feeling from being away for a week if it’s interesting and new.

Roman: Yeah—I never did a year-long thing—apart from when me and Peggy took packrafts around the world when we were in our late 40s. And that was really enjoyable, but I wouldn’t have done it without her—my relationship with her is too important. I'm really fortunate because if I start going too far with something, she's the first one to tell me that she doesn’t like the fact it’s pulling me away. 

Sam: You need someone to keep you grounded in reality sometimes. I suppose I better wrap this up now as we’ve talked for a while. Looking at all this stuff you’ve done, whether it's being in a raft going down some river or it's on a mountain bike or climbing or even going across the treetops, what do you think you were looking for?

Roman: I think it would just circle back to this sense of discovery and exploration with other people, and I think that comes back to being a human animal. I guess what unifies everything that I've done is that it’s some kind of novel landscape crossing, with other people. And they’re novel in the sense that they might not have been done before—but I’m not just looking for things that are silly. I don’t want it to be contrived. 

Sam: It’s not extreme ironing. It makes sense. 

Roman: Exactly. It's not a stunt—it actually improves the experience. I think ironing on top of a mountain would detract from being there. First of all, ironing seems like work, and I wouldn't get to experience the mountaintop. But a packraft allows you to cross a river and hike on the other side, and then float down another river. 

Sam: People look at this stuff and think, “That’s crazy.” But maybe this kind of wilderness experience is more human than being sat on a computer all day, or living in some kind of hyper-urban setting. 

Roman: Absolutely. I’m not the first to think this… Bob Marshall, who founded the Wilderness Society, realized that you kind of need this frontier environment—a frontier away from civilization where it's not the human built-up environment, but a wild nature where we can recreate what it means to be human. 

We don’t have to hunt animals with spears or club them with a rock, but we can still have a primitive situation where we've reduced the amount of technology we bring, and that forces us to deal with the problems that we run into. That's why sometimes I like to do trips and not bring anything that has any battery or electricity—no headlamp, no phone, no GPS, no way of calling for help. I've still got nylon and boots and I've maybe got a stove and a packraft—but I can't call for help. I feel that helps us develop that side of being human that we don’t get to develop much in civilization.