America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston

Baratunde ventures into the wilds of Idaho to explore its evolving outdoor culture. He finds ranchers and backcountry pilots sharing the wilderness with newly resettled refugees and sees how climate change is impacting an age-old salmon fishery.

Baratunde meets the people of Appalachia who are driving a revolution in how we see and interact with nature. Meet a record-breaking hiker, former coal miners raising bees, and activists working to make the outdoors accessible to everyone.

Baratunde ventures to Minnesota’s Arrowhead Region, one of the last places where you can hike or paddle into the remote wilderness. He meets with passionate birders and harvesters of wild rice and hears from them why wilderness means so much.

In Arkansas just about everyone you meet is into the outdoors, yet to the rest of the country, the state barely registers as an outdoor destination. Now, Arkansas is on a mission to earn recognition as a wild mecca.

Oregon is known for its wild coastline and misty forests, but its a place where a few hours in your car can take you from the coast to the high desert or the Cascade mountains. Embracing this incredible variety, Baratunde embraces forest bathing, goes spearfishing to discover underwater kelp forests, rides along with cowboys on the cutting edge of sustainable ranching and rollerblades through Portland.

With its magnificent coastline and densely wooded interior, Maine is a place where outdoor adventure has a long history, and a love of wilderness starts in childhood. Baratunde meets a Mainer reviving the timeless craft of harvesting ice, straps on snowshoes to understand how being outside can help folks recovering from addiction, and takes an icy plunge in the winter ocean to embrace the cold.