Rogers, what's the story on this, man?

Well, this is Spalding's pit.

where he was gonna make his fortune, either from the silver or from his investors, I wish I could say.

But yeah, it's a rectangular, mostly square-sided shaft with horizontal, like the walls are sheer versus some of the other pits around here that are more gradually dug out like a bowl shape.

This one is a proper shaft, like you could run an elevator through here.

It's filled with frigid water and the visibility doesn't go down so far.

So we're on this fault line that runs along the shore of the lake and runs past the lake where we are now.

And that's what Rogers explores in his article, which is available for subscribers of Paddle & Portage Media at paddleandportage.com. It's definitely worth a read, particularly because it's Rogers writing it, and as we said at the beginning of the episode, he's one of our favorite writers in all of Minnesota and potentially beyond.

Cool.

And I stuck it out with those guys for a good 11 years.

I left for a little while, but, you know, I came back after a friend died.

Yeah.

And we actually wrote a song about that friend that died.

Yeah.

But we did another couple albums when I came back.

Like how much of a metalhead were you? Like hard metal or like what kind

and and then i just didn't hear about it and now you're telling me that there are these extracts so where is cr what's the status of kratom these days

So I don't think I've said this.

I think I might've said it last time, but I'm a recovering addict myself.

And I got sober January 2nd, 2017.

So when I was using back in the day, I used Kava and Kratom and things like that.

And like, as an addict who wants to get high, those things like weren't really, for me, weren't really worth messing with.

Cause like They were too weak relative to the price.

Where do you think we're going? And maybe this is the same question or maybe this is a different question, but what do you think therapy or counseling in the 21st century needs to accomplish?

Mm-hmm.

So talking about addiction, talking about w-How the, the pain of that and kind of flipping it into more relatable stories and bits and set up punchlines helped me to kind of cope with the damage of it very quickly and in a room full of people.

And the best part about it is, quite frankly, uh, after shows someone will come up and say, "Me too." They'll understand that it's such a universal thing, addiction, divorce, uh, there's just in- religion.

There's so much that's on the album too.

I mean, that's the point of comedy though.

It's kind of finding, finding a way in to make it more relatable, to telling your story and making it relatable and universal to a, a group of people, a room full of people live.

So I, I don't mind shying away from it.

Yeah

Any complexities? Anything that maybe caught you off guard or, or some things that you had to deal with? Uh, Ryan, let's, uh, let's start with you, man.

Certainly.

Uh, w- we found doing a few of these now that we went down the night before.

We set the room up.

Everybody gets settled in.

We get paperwork lined, lined down.

We get internet set up.

Go ahead, Ryan.

Through her work with the Sierra Club, she sees people every day applying their skills to fight climate change, and their work is a counterpoint to all the negative thoughts her anxiety shakes loose.

loose.Hope on its own ain't enough, but hope combined with determination, a little bit of anger, a little bit of moxie, can go a long way.

[laughs] And there are gonna be times, man, where, I mean, I have them, where I'm like, "What's the point?" But there is, you know.

The people, people are counting on me to not feel that way.

Skiing conveniently also offers something else that researchers recommend for coping with grief: community.

We can all kind of pool our sorrows together, and we're gonna ski when we can, and we're gonna enjoy every inch of snow that we get.

[skates scraping]

But in the long run, Rogers says, warm spells threaten his sport.

For the whole winter, you're just glued to your phone, refreshing the weather forecast.

Uh, just fingers crossed that it'll just get a f- a few degrees colder.

So it does take a toll on your mental health, for sure.

Skiing conveniently also offers something else that researchers recommend for coping with grief: community.

We can all kind of pool our sorrows together, and we're gonna ski when we can, and we're gonna enjoy every inch of snow that we get.

[skates scraping]