Pamela:
Hello and Good day, eh? Welcome to the Super Good Camping Podcast. I’m Pamela.
Tim:
I’m Tim
Pamela:
and we are from supergoodcamping.com. We are here because we are on a mission to inspire other families to enjoy camping adventures such as we have with our kids. Today we’re chatting with a gentleman who’s behind Latitudes Wilderness Films on YouTube and Latitudes.films on Instagram. Tim has been a fan of his for quite a while now. His photography is stunning. His ability to capture the vistas seen from the perspective of a canoe is incredible. There’s also a uniqueness to Pete’s narration in his videos. His storytelling weaves a connection to the land and the people who have inhabited it for millennia. He often does solo canoe trips, and occasionally has a friend or three along for the ride. Pete even adventures with his wife. That French river trip looks amazing. He’s also a mind-bogglingly good fisherman. Please welcome Pete Parke.
Pete Parke from Latitudes Films
Tim:
Welcome.
Pete:
Wow. I don’t know how in the world I could ever live up to that introduction. I was not expecting that. Well, I’m flattered. Thank you so much.
Tim:
Dude, you’re quite welcome. As much as I have camping issues, I watch far too many camping videos. I live too vicariously through other people that get out more often than I do, like yourself. I seldom will sit down for an hour and change and watch a video. If I see one of yours come out, I don’t care how long it is. Honestly, I just know there really is something that works for me watching your videos. So there you go. You’re awesome.
Pamela:
It feels like an immersive experience.
Tim:
It is.
Pete:
Oh wow. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.
Tim:
Personally, I would like to start with the question: “what is it that got you into backcountry camping?” Because that’s predominantly what you do. Also, what is it that keeps bringing you back other than fishing, but what is the allure? What is the carrot that keeps you going out there?
Pete Parke’s Inspiration
Pete:
Okay, all right. Well, I’d say that, unlike a lot of the other folks on YouTube who do the canoeing thing, I didn’t grow up in it. My parents were outdoorsy people, but we just never got out. We never did Provincial Parks. We’re very close to the Pinery Provincial Park here, which is very popular in Ontario. I didn’t go there until after I was married. So it just was one of those things that we didn’t do a lot. But we did sleep in the backyard. I grew up on a farm. My parents had a bush behind the house and I spent a lot of time back there. I grew up watching old western movies. When The Last of the Mohicans came out in 1982, which is still one of my favourite movies to this day, I was inspired to take my moccasins and run through the trails in the bush as fast as I could, pretending I was hunting deer. Of course, I never even saw one but probably scared them all away. But I say my love for the outdoors was kind of spawned by that. It just grew into one day when I had the opportunity to finally check it out for myself. I think I was probably 29 at the time. I got invited to go on a canoe trip to Noganosh with three other guys, two of them I didn’t really know very well. I had always loved fishing. That was another thing aside from the camping that I had loved to do, and that I was pursuing at the time. So this was a chance to actually go up north. I had never been and they invited me to go. We took two canoes and I packed a hockey bag. I took my hockey bag full of stuff and it probably weighed 95 pounds. When the rest of the guys saw it, it was hilarious, but we made it work. It was an amazing fishing trip, and it was an amazing experience. There was a fella on that trip who was a professional photographer. He captured some of the most stunning images that I had ever seen, and he captured our trip very beautifully. I was inspired to want to capture that someday like him. Yeah, it was that trip. I think it was the year 2014 or 2013 or something like that. So that was my first backcountry trip. The fishing was amazing, and I loved the paddling. So that’s where it all kind of began for me. So not that long ago.
Tim:
Really? I’m totally stunned. I would have backed that up by at least 10-15 years more, just because of your proficiency at it and your obvious love of it. So yeah, wow.
The Allure of Backcountry Camping
You can think very clearly when you’re out there. The troubles of home, the troubles of work, all that stuff is far gone.”
Pete Parke
Pete:
Oh, you mentioned the allure, what keeps me going back? To expand on that, I did my first solo paddling trip in Temagami. Those were the videos that I came up with. I think those were right after the pandemic first started. I think it was the first week of June 2020. I had done some solo trips with my Sportspal canoe with a motor on it. I was just doing little back lakes fishing and stuff like that. But this was my first venture out and solo paddle of about 100 kilometres and that was 8 days. That was an unbelievably amazing trip even though it was full of hardships, it was life-changing. I will say that what keeps calling me back is that I absolutely love being immersed in nature, being immersed in a world of beauty. I love it so much! I don’t really have any eloquent words for it other than just that I feel at home there. There’s a sense of peace that I don’t get anywhere else. I experience it with other people too. I do find when I’m there alone that honestly, I’ll say it, that I feel closer to God when I am there. I just feel the most intimate connection with Him when I’m out there alone, immersed in that environment. You can think very clearly when you’re out there. The troubles of home, the troubles of work, all that stuff is far gone. It’s far from my mind, and I absolutely love it. So yeah, so that’s what keeps me going back. Just that feeling of peace that you really can’t find anywhere else.
I will say that what keeps calling me back is that I absolutely love being immersed in nature, being immersed in a world of beauty.”
Pete Parke
Tim:
Yeah, very cool. Ya know I agree. Hearing fire trucks and stuff going by doesn’t put me in a happy place, you know? Out of curiosity, how many days do you get outdoors period, whether it’s soft water, or hard water, because you do winter camping as well, how much time do you manage to get out there?
Pete:
I’m fortunate with the job that I have. I do work shift work. I work 12-hour shifts, which are three days on, three days off, three days on, three days off, and night shifts in there. So when I take a week off, I actually get nine days off in total, because I work in sets of three all the time. So if I take time off, it’s nine days off. So I’m able to spend quite a bit of time out there. I’m very fortunate in the fact that I have about as much time off as a teacher would get but it’s more spread throughout the year, as opposed to just booked in the summer. So I’m very, very blessed to have the job that I do that allows me the time off. I would say I spend, I’ve never calculated this at all, but I would say I spend oh, between 50 and 75 nights per year in the bush, I’d say something like that. Maybe closer to 100, some years. I really don’t know.
Tim:
Nice!
Pete:
Yeah, probably a little more than most people, so I’m very fortunate.
Tim:
I asked a similar question to Kevin Callan, and he said that he gets cranky if he doesn’t get 60 days out there. The normal person gets two or three weeks a year, and you have to do things that other people want to do, not necessarily what you want to do all the time. So yeah, I have the same answer for you, as I gave Kevin – totally jealous. That’s awesome.
Pete:
I’m definitely blessed with that.
Tim:
That’s a good deal. And kudos to making it work to be able to spend that much time out there and to do all the things that you do. This leads me to the question: you mentioned that somebody else did a fantastic job of capturing your trip as a great photographer. Is that why you do it? Are you trying to do that same thing? Sorry, it’s a bit of a truncated question. Because you do hour-plus videos, you do plenty of smaller ones, more mainstream style, too. I’m not sure what that is – attention span, sort of things that the YouTube crowd has. But you also do epic documentaries, which don’t fit that short attention span. It might not get all the views. So it’s not necessarily about the accolades and the clicks and the likes, right? Which leads me to ask, why do you put that much effort in?
Pete:
Okay, well, it’s very interesting, because when I started, I started my channel as Ontario Fishing Quest. I wanted to just capture bass fishing in Ontario. I was on the bow of a bass boat, flinging bait casters for hours a day and shooting really crappy, crappy videos about that. I’d catch a few small fish here and there and I was trying to give tips. Obviously, that never really didn’t anything for me, but it was once I bought my canoe, my Nova Craft Prospector and I started into the backcountry it started changing. I got immersed in that environment, and I wanted to capture it. I wanted to show the mood. I wanted to show the ambiance and I wanted to show the emotion that’s involved in it. Because I do think that we bring out the best of ourselves, or the worst of ourselves on those kinds of trips. I think we can sit there out in the middle of nowhere and really be in touch with everything that’s going on around us completely in a serene, serene place. I want to capture that and show it. I want people to be able to come out and do that kind of thing too. I especially want them to take on something solo and just push themselves to do it. But then just sit there in that beautiful environment and just take it in, soak it in. Think about how this is affecting you. Think about how this is going to make you a better person in the end. Think about things in your life that maybe you need to change, think about maybe something you need to make right at home, in your relationships. Those are all of the things that I think about on a trip. When you can try and capture emotion and show that, I think it can be a powerful thing. I was putting out more frequent videos and trying to show that kind of ambient side to the story, but then I decided that I wanted to just do something different. Honestly, it was just because at that time there were so many people coming out with so many videos. It’s still an immensely popular thing, still hugely popular to this day. I just wanted to do something different and that’s where the idea for the North to South French River documentary came from. I thought it was a really cool idea. No one’s ever done anything like this before. I thought I know this is going to take an absolute tonne of time, a tonne of work, and a tonne of research, but I think it could be really cool. So I took however many months off of putting videos out to just solely focus on that project. I think it was close to three, between three and four months of just editing and research and all that to put that together, and then it came out. Now that’s really all I would like to do. Because when you do something like that, it takes the pressure off of always coming out with something. And when you do something that’s longer, that takes a lot more work, people appreciate it differently than a 20-minute video every single week. That’s just my personal view. It’s just something different. It’s something fresh. There are a lot of people coming out with longer formats and bigger stories now. So that idea is kind of catching on. I think they do pretty well. It kind of takes the pressure off of always having to come up with something all the time. Because I haven’t come up with anything in quite a long time. That’s because I’ve got two big projects that I’m working on. When those come out, they’re both long, they’re both gonna be epic. We could talk about them a little bit, but I don’t want to give too much away about what those are.
Pamela:
We want to know!
Pete:
Yeah. Well, when you do something like that, I look at Jason Irwin from Tumblehome, as an example of stuff that is absolutely phenomenal, right? It’s insanely beautifully edited. It’s such an amazing story. People don’t complain about the length of time between his videos, because they know when it comes out it’s going to be amazing, right? So yep, I like that aspect of it not having that pressure to always come up with something just makes my life a lot easier. So yeah, there we go.
Tim:
Very cool. I have to say that I agree that with some of the content providers you can tell that they’re under the gun to put it out every month, or whatever. It sometimes leaves a little to be desired. It’s not that they’re not awesome, but you can tell that they maybe pushed a little hard to get that square peg into a round hole in order to make it come out on a Monday. Certainly, my viewing tastes are tending toward the longer ones, and it’s entirely your fault. So we’re good with that.
Pete:
Sorry about that.
Tim:
No, well, you can apologize to her, I’m good with it.
Pamela:
He’s not getting anything done on the couch watching your videos.
Tim:
I don’t know what she’s talking about! You mentioned research, and weirdly, that’s my next question. How do you decide what information you want to put into it? How do you dredge that information up? I mean, it can’t be easy to find out about the original Indigenous owners or the voyageurs. I think you talked about how the land came to be as well in one of them, where do you get that information from? It can’t just be a simple Google thing.
Pete:
No, it’s not. There are a lot of good old books out there. And it’s just a matter of digging hard enough to find that right information. I found a world of information on the French River in a book by Toni Harting called French River: Canoeing The River of the Stick-wavers. I think that was written in the 90s sometime. So once I figured out that that was a prime source of information, I had to order it. It’s not just on Amazon. I ordered it on eBay through the States. And so of course, at that time, the pandemic was on and we couldn’t cross the border. So I had to ship it to Canada and it cost more but it was awesome. Yeah, it takes digging on some forums. It starts with a basic Google search, but as it continues on, doors start to open and you realize okay, I need a copy of this book. I need a copy of that book and then it starts really going from there. There are a lot of valuable PDFs online that contain a lot of really accurate historical information about that time. It just takes a while to get there. It’s out there, it’s just hard to get started. Once I had that book, it just rolled well for me.
Tim:
Cool. Is the information just research for a documentary or is it something you’re interested in period?
Pete:
Well, I kind of kill two birds with one stone. Another project I have just started now, I put out a trailer for it, is called Absolution. It’s a documentary. It’s going to be on Grey Owl. I was always interested in his story and I had heard many conflicting opinions. People love him or hate him basically. I’d always heard some people say negative things and other people say positive things. My dad read Grey Owl’s books when I was growing up so I was always a little interested in that. Now, this opportunity came up for my cousin Bill and me to go paddle the French River. We’ve done a lot of trips together now. We paddled the Bark Lake route. Grey Owl resided on Bark, in that route as a Park Ranger for a few years. When the opportunity came for us to go do that route, I thought, let’s research this, let’s do it, and let’s try to put something together. Let’s come up with a documentary about Grey Owl. As a result, I get to order Grey Owl’s books, read his stuff, and research his life, and then in turn, I can share it from my perspective. So that’s one of the upcoming projects. It’s long and it’s hard!
Tim:
Yeah, the better half does all the editing for the podcast. I’m the poor sap that does the editing for the video of the podcast and I cut so little out of it because I suck at it.
Pete:
Oh, yeah, editing sucks.
Tim:
Yeah, I need to spend some time to get way better at that, man.
Pamela:
How many hours would you spend on a film?
Pete:
Oh my goodness. The other project that I have on the go is very, very different. It’s kind of like a movie in a sense, and so far, that one is around the 25-minute long mark, and it’s half done. So there’s still a whole other half to do. I have no idea how many hours I put into that, honestly. I would guess at least 100 hours for that. You have to realize that it’s not just sitting at the computer on DaVinci Resolve to move this clip into this audio here, this music here. It starts with reviewing your footage. It starts by saying “this is good”, and “this is not good”. Then document all of that into massive columns of lists of what’s good and what’s not, and what’s almost okay. I might shoot the same scene four times, but the second half of the second take is a little better than the first half, so let’s look at that one. It’s a lot of stuff like that. It’s a lot more than I think people realize. I would say the majority of the time is that. Then I can actually sit down and put a story together. There are a lot of hours in that too. But most of it is spent trying to figure out what’s good, and what’s not and how am I going to put this all into something that people are gonna want to watch.
Tim:
Excellent. Yeah, this one I do know. I spend a ridiculous amount of time editing because I suck at it. I don’t know what all the Ctrl-C shortcuts are, shoot! But yeah, winnowing the footage to look at it and say “Oh, no, that felt much better when I shot it” than it looks when you’re rewatching it. I suppose it’s probably not a bad thing to not know how many hours you put in because then you’re gonna feel like, “Yeah, I don’t know that I wanna do that.”
Pete:
Yeah, yeah, it’s a lot.
Tim:
Well, cool. On behalf of many, many viewers, I’m very thankful that you do it because I love watching your stuff. Seriously.
Pete:
You’re very welcome.
Fishing
Tim:
Cool. All right. I have to ask: 72 fish in one day? 72 fish in one day! What the heck? You just went to a friend’s place that had a stocked pond and fished? I can’t even! There are days when I get zero fish. So tell me about that.
Pete:
That’s a gem. You know I love fishing. Even before I was into canoeing, I have fished since I was a kid. My dad always took me fishing. My dad built a little wooden boat and then would take me fishing in that. I’ve always had a love for fishing. Then when I fell in love with canoeing in the backcountry, it was just lights out, I’m done. I’ve studied fishing a lot. The more I’ve done it, the more I’ve just gotten to know what lures are going to be hot, where the fish are going to be at what time of day. That’s never happened again. I doubt it would ever happen again. Honestly, you know, on a normal day, if Bill and I would be doing really well, we might catch half that amount. So it was pretty crazy.
Tim:
Just saying 36 is still a pretty crazy day!
Pete:
Yeah. You know what they were all a lot of smaller bass. We would get one big one mixed in, but they just kept coming and kept coming. We just developed a milk run of spots so we kept going around and around and around. We even took breaks throughout the day. I came back to camp and I think Bill even took a nap at one point. He was so tired of catching fish. So I think he slept for a couple of hours in the afternoon and then we got out. So yeah, it was 72 in a day. It was pretty wild.
Pamela:
Where was this Pete?
Pete:
It’s an awesome spot: Queen Elizabeth II Wildlands. It’s very accessible. It’s close to Toronto, and that was on Sheldon Lake and so it’s very easy, right? It’s very easy to get there. It’s a long portage to get there, but it’s a spot that’s pretty close to the GTA. It’s pretty close to Southern Ontario. Anyone can go there. It costs you nothing. It’s not an operating park. You just show up, first come, first served. Last year Bill and I did that same trip again. This time we took Bill’s son who was 11 at the time, his son Lincoln was nailing fish all the time. Bill caught a giant last year. I wasn’t filming because I’ve taken some time away from filming all of this stuff all the time. Bill caught a big five-pounder. I could have stuck my arm in its mouth. It was giant and on that same lake. I highly recommend people check out Sheldon Lake, especially as a first backcountry experience. Queen Elizabeth Wildlands has some amazing spots to go to.
Tim:
My brain just stops. The most I’ve ever caught in a day was actually ice fishing and it was like six. So I’m a little behind. Although, I did catch a five-pound walleye, so that was one of my best days. Yeah, I didn’t have any grey hair at the time so that was a while ago.
Pamela:
I caught a muskie when I was a little kid in Bobcaygeon.
Pete:
You did, oh awesome! Well, represent right? Yes. Awesome. There you go. Were you fishing offshore Pamela?
Pamela:
We were trolling. I thought I was snagged on the bottom. I was a little kid at the time and my dad was like, no, no, that’s not the bottom that’s a fish!
Pete:
That’s very cool.
Tim:
I didn’t know that. See you learn something new every day.
Pete:
You learn something new about your spouse every day.
Tim:
There you go. Favourite places?
Pete:
Favourite places.
Tim:
“All of them” is not the right answer, it is, but no.
Pete:
You know, I have to fall back on Donald Lake in Temagami is one of my favourite places of all time. I was inspired to go there by John from Lost Lakes. He was Backcountry Angling Ontario at the time and since changed to Lost Lakes. He did a trip to Donald Lake and I was inspired to go. I’ve returned since then a couple of times. When I go, I love to just go alone and set up a base camp and stay on Donald Lake for seven-eight days. That Peninsula campsite at the north end has to be one of my favourite places on earth. It has absolutely stunningly beautiful waters! Amazing! This past year Bill and I did the Dunlop Lake route near Elliot Lake and I will say that it was probably my favourite trip of all time. The fishing was incredible. The scenery was incredible. Bill and I did a five-kilometre slog down the creek. It’s a rocky, bony creek with no one around to get to a back lake in there that I think would hardly ever see any person at all. Once we got back there it was absolutely stunning. So I would say that lake would rank high on my list as well. You can’t not say the Delta and the French River. The old voyageur channel and all the channels down there feeding into Georgian Bay. That has to be one of my favourite places to paddle in Ontario, for sure. And the Pickerel River is actually just to the south of the French. It’s a phenomenal place to paddle. It has similar and actually far less-explored channels that travel all the way down to the Bay. I’d put that high on my list of favourite places as well.
Tim:
Yeah, cool. We were supposed to do the French from Hartley Bay, about a 50-kilometre loop, I think. My eldest decided to get a summer job so my paddling partner isn’t available. I have a plan, I just don’t know when it’s gonna happen. For us, it would be the first time we’ve done a river trip because we generally do lakes and portages. It was partially inspired by your documentary because that looks cool, and it’s a different type of trip.
Pete:
Yeah, it is. It is a phenomenal place. Once you go, you’ll be hooked. It gets its hooks into you. It’s an amazing place. Very serene. Very beautiful. Very unique. Very rich in history. Yeah, you will love it. You won’t regret going.
Tim:
All right, I will take your word for it. We’re going to run out of time soonish. Back to Temagami, watching you with the mesh, is it the serenity that makes you go out in that insane bugginess? Or is the fishing that much better that early in the season?
Pete:
The fishing is amazing. The closer to ice out that you are and the fish are in season, go. Also, the solitude is better because not very many people like getting out there in that environment. Right?
Tim:
No kidding.
Pete:
Yeah. It’s also just after winter. I have winter camped and all that, which is great, but it’s almost as soon as you can get the canoe on the water, even though the bugs are terrible. I don’t care. I’m gonna go. I’ve done it a few times since then, and it does get a little bit easier every time, you just get used to it. You learn your way around it. So yeah, it’s the solitude and the amazing quality fishing and just the itch, the itch to get out, for sure.
Tim:
The itch I know well.
Pamela:
That’s the twitch.
Pete:
There’s a twitch and an itch.
Tim:
Yeah, cool. I want to go now! Maybe I’ll call the kid’s new boss and say, “Nah, don’t hire him until after the 21st”. That’s when we’re supposed to be back.
Pete:
I hope you can make it work.
Tim:
We’ll figure something out. It’s a summer job. So I might steal him from school for a week or something like that in September and do that. I’m fine with camping whenever.
Pete:
September would be a good time to go with a lot fewer paddlers and a little bit less busy.
Tim:
We typically take either late, late, late September, or early October, and do the Kawartha Highlands. We just go in and get one site or something like that and hang out for three days as long as it’s not pouring rain. There’s nobody around except hunters. It’s a little weird to be woken up by shotguns at 6:30 in the morning but they peter out in an hour and your heartbeat goes down a little bit, and then it’s nice. Yeah, that’s a weird one. Thank you so much for coming out. and thank you for sharing your story with us. I’m looking forward to the new projects. I’m so sorry, that you have to spend so much effort, but know that they are well received and they are truly appreciated. I want to go camping.
Pete:
I don’t blame you at all. So I just go do it. Let’s just quit our jobs and go do it full-time.
Tim:
All right. Good deal, man. You’re in the bow though, no, you’re in the stern. You’re a way better paddler than I am. Your J stroke is much nicer than mine.
Pete:
It’s a pleasure to meet you guys and I look forward to hopefully talking to you again soon.
Tim:
I look forward to the next two projects. I would absolutely be into yakking about those as well.
Pete:
Absolutely, I can talk about them after they come out, there’ll be a lot more to say.
Tim:
Looking forward to the new projects. See you later. Thanks.
Pete:
Alright, see ya
Pamela:
That’s it for us for today. Thank you so much to our special guest, Pete Parke from Latitudes Films. We are so looking forward to checking out his new projects coming up on Grey Owl and the short film that he’s working on. Do connect with him, please, on Instagram, he’s Latitudes.films and on YouTube, he’s also Latitudes films, and we’ll talk to you again soon. I’m Pamela from supergoodcamping.com. Please do reach out to us at hi@supergoodcamping.com and connect with us on all the social media. We’re on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. I think that’s it.
Tim:
Yeah, since I screwed up, I’m supposed to say I’m still Tim.
Pamela:
Talk to you again soon.
Tim:
Bye.