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<\/a>\u201cIt was a place on the map that represented one of the last truly wild places on earth,\u201d says Smith. \u201cAnd no one had been there with kayaks before.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although Smith has travelled all over the world, his trip to Kamchatka in 2011 continues to be one of his most memorable expeditions within the last decade.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen people ask me, \u2018What was the best expedition you ever went on?\u2019 I\u2019m like, \u2018Oh, it\u2019s definitely Kamchatka,’\u201d he says. \u201cI don\u2019t know if I\u2019m jaded, but I still think the landscape itself… I mean, I\u2019ve never seen fish in rivers like that before. You hear all these stories from hundreds of years ago when people were walking across the rivers on fish. That is what Kamchatka is like.\u201d<\/p>\n
Smith says that another memorable expedition was one that he had in Papua New Guinea.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s really wild in terms of the jungle and the rainforest but, culturally, it was the wildest place I\u2019d ever been,\u201d he says. \u201cI mean, there are still literally thousands of dialects in Papua New Guinea so, tribally, you have people that pretty much live in isolation and speak their own language. Just to experience that in a small area, some place the size of southern Vancouver Island\u2014just the bottom half of it\u2014[and] to have a really proficient translator not even be able to translate or understand what the people were saying was kind of like that experience in Kamchatka\u2014that feeling of stepping back in time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although Smith and his team are all trained professionals, it doesn\u2019t completely eliminate the risk factor of what he does. A lot of trust goes into knowing whether the adrenaline-pumping stunts are worth capturing.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe choose to work with people that are the best at what they do and my feeling is that they have the better judgment,\u201d says Smith. \u201cThey have the years of experience. There\u2019s a lot of trust involved and I think that anxiety is dissipated in developing a relationship and trust with those individuals.\u201d<\/p>\n
During moments of filming, Smith doesn’t always fully register the extent of the risk being taken until after the fact.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re highly focused on capturing the image or telling the story; you don’t have time to be scared, you only have time to be focused,\u201d he says. \u201cSometimes it\u2019s afterwards where you\u2019re just like, \u2018Holy shit; that was crazy,\u2019 but in the moment itself, just like the athlete is totally focused on running a big waterfall, you\u2019re making sure your exposure is correct and you\u2019ve got your framing right. Because a lot of the things we\u2019re filming, they only happen once.\u201d<\/p>\n
Smith urges people to take risks\u2014whether they be big or they be small\u2014in their own lives.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know what? If you get outside of your comfort zone and you try something you\u2019ve never tried before, you learn. And the vast majority of people that surround us in our day-to-day lives do the same things every single day. It\u2019s so programmed,\u201d he says. \u201cI constantly get bombarded with, \u2018Oh my god, that\u2019s the craziest thing ever, like, total adrenaline junkie, thrill-seeking, crazy\u2014it\u2019s crazy!\u2019 And it\u2019s like, no, it\u2019s actually not. It\u2019s about experiencing life, period. And, yeah sure, maybe what we do is a little bit more extreme but I say this to a lot of people: you could literally just drive a different way to work every day and you would see so much more of what happens around you.\u201d<\/p>\n