690a Hamburg; The Art of Europe; Extreme Sports

24:47Almost a good side, a positive side, the fact that we had to condense this into six hours is that you just see the whole sweep of history and how one civilization and one art style And one people evolves into the other, and it unfolds like a time-lapse flower. It's kind of blossoming and ever-changing, and you can see that evolution. And that's one of the beauties of it being so condensed. And we don't need to be or we've determined not to be Professor Stuffy Balding. We've had Professor Stuffy Balding, three of them from three different universities, read the script, so we know they're okay with what we say.

25:25We had to vet it that way, which is really important, and I'm thankful for that. But we got to build a Gothic cathedral out of 13 tourists. It's one of my favorite things to do as a tour guide. You need six columns, six buttresses, and one spire. And then when you've got it all in place, you understand the whole idea of the skeletal support of a Gothic church and the importance of a pointed arch. And to be able to show that in a fun-loving, creative way is just great. Another moment for me, Gene, when we were doing this was to go in tight on an Impressionist painting and look at the brushwork and the treatment of the color.

26:00Yeah. As I recall, we have Monet's water lilies and these beautiful things that show the water lilies floating on the pond in his garden in Giverny. And you're looking at it and you go, this is beautiful. I just feel like I'm immersed in it. And then, like you say, you get close up on one of these water lilies and you realize it's just this smudge of red and white paint and green paint. but then you back up and those colors resolve in your eye and it looks like a water lily. And we said, voila. Voila. Voila. I love that because it looks like an abstract kaleidoscopic explosion of color up close like some kid just went crazy with a brush.

26:42Pull back and you see the magic of Impressionism and then with that one example, our viewers, our travelers, when they do their adventure through Europe and they have this chance in a lifetime to go to Monet's Jevernay Garden and the Orsay Gallery and see all these masterpieces, they understand why it's so special. My colleague and longtime friend and collaborator Gene Openshaw is our special guest right now on Travel with Rick Steves. Gene was my original travel buddy on our first non-chaperoned trip to Europe right out of high school in the summer of 73. We're looking back at the work we accomplished when the Rick Steves Art of Europe TV series was first released in 2022.

27:26Gene also co-authors my illustrated art books, Europe's Top 100 Masterpieces, and Europe 101, and he shows up as my travel buddy in the memoir of our youthful adventures called On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to Kathmandu. Gene's also written his own unique take on Michelangelo's lifelong obsession to construct a landmark tomb for Pope Julius II. It's called Michelangelo at Midlife. Jean's website is jeanopenshaw.com. Jean, you have worked really hard on this, and I'm so thankful for... I mean, it's like you wrote a 200-page book and then you had to bring it down to 90 pages, and now we had to put it all to images, and it's so exciting to have it out there and in the public.

28:10What is your hope that our audience will have as a takeaway that'll make all of this work and investment worthwhile? while? Well, I think of myself as a traveler, especially a young traveler, craving the kind of knowledge that would make, that would bring this art to life. And so that's what I'm hoping this would do. I'm hoping it will teach travelers. It probably could be used for students of art history. It'd be a great overview of it in an art history course. And maybe even, wouldn't this be great. It would even inspire other artists who can look at work that's done in the past, learn from it, be inspired by it, and then go on and create their own art.

28:52Wouldn't that be great? You know, that's one of my favorite goals or triumphs as a tour guide is to be with a traveler who's never been to Europe for two weeks, seeing all this cultural wonder, all this great art, and you find people who have never written a poem, they write a poem. People have never sketched something, they sketch something beautiful. People who look through their camera as if they are an artist framing something to take home and cherish. And if our art series lets people be inspired by people who have done that through the ages, we can join the party. We can make life more multidimensional, more beautiful.

29:28In a way, when you're looking at a beautiful piece of art and you're looking at the pure beauty, you're experiencing the very same things that people did in the past when that art was made. You're like a medieval peasant going into a Gothic church and going, wow, the soaring arches, the light through the stained glass, and that sense of the soul being uplifted. Or you're just like the very first cavemen that were painting on cave walls, and the sense of wonder that that would have been when people went in and they saw a bison or an antelope being portrayed on the wall and flickering across the wall of the cave by torchlight.

30:07And when we see a piece of that art now, we can experience that same sense of wonder. Gene, our six-hour series started in one of those caves. It's just awestruck by the wonder of people. People like you and me. I mean, not that long ago, really, in the vast span of things, doing those cave paintings. and we finished with gorgeous street art filling entire empty sides of buildings all over Europe. Interesting, yes. It's like the graffiti on a cave wall is now, in the present day, the very popular art form, which is graffiti scribbled on walls in towns. And thanks to your work and your experience and thanks to our friends in public broadcasting, we're able to connect the dots from those early cave paintings to that street art that decorates Glasgow, Scotland, or Athens and Greece today and celebrate the creative spirit of humankind.

31:05Thank you, Gene. It's been a real pleasure. Thanks, Rick.

31:14If you haven't seen the Rick Steves Art of Europe series on your TV schedule lately, you can watch it whenever you like from the on-demand video we post on our website. You can view it in either half-hour or one-hour episodes in the TV section at ricksteves.com. Or simply follow the web links in the notes for what you're listening to right now at ricksteves.com slash radio. There's also a backstory to the thrill-seekers that we sometimes get to see in action, jumping out of airplanes or working their way up or down sheer mountain slopes. John Branch writes for the New York Times about ordinary people doing extraordinary things at the edges of the sporting world.

31:54He shares a few of their stories next.

32:25His reporting on everything from rock climbers and base jumpers to skiers tumbling in avalanches will often leave you wondering what motivates these thrill-seekers. Do they have a death wish? John Branch has won nearly every major journalism prize for his sports reporting for The New York Times. Of the thousands of stories he's reported on, John gathered a few of his favorites in his book, Side Country, Tales of Death and Life from the Backroads of Sports. He joins us now from his home studio just north of San Francisco. John, thanks for being with us. Thank you for having me, Rick. So you collected 20 favorite articles out of some 2 ,000 that you've written for the New York Times.

33:06There are the small-town coaches, inspiring young people, and the amazing bowlers, but it seems like a lot of people ended up in your favorites who either were doing death-defying things or things that were actually deadly. You know, I just watched the documentary Free Solo about climbing El Capitan without a safety rope, and the climber Alex seemed ready to die for the challenge. What's your take on adventure sports and adrenaline and death? Yeah, I am really taken by people who do things that I can't imagine doing myself. And so there are a lot of stories here that sort of tickle that funny bone for me.

33:45You mentioned Alex Honnold, who climbed El Capitan without ropes and who's now become famous as this free solo climber, whether he has a death wish. And he's very thoughtful about this, as the movie talks about and as I've talked about with him, because I've gotten to know him a little bit too. Does he have a death wish? No, not at all. He just sees the world, I think, a little bit differently than you and I might. And he sees what he's doing as relatively safe because he knows the protocols he has in place. I think most of these people don't see what they're doing as crazy just because they're in it and they respect the process of how they go about doing it.

34:22And if some Yahoo is going to do it, yeah, they're going to be dead next week. But if you're a professional and knowing your limits, I suppose it is not risk-free, but it's not really reckless. Right. And I'll give you a crazy example. I've just been in Switzerland talking to Olympic athletes, talking to them about what scares them. and when you talk to a downhill skier, you ask them what sport in the Olympics would scare you. These people go 90 miles an hour down a sheet of ice and they say, oh, I would never do the half pipe. Or you talk to a half pipe snowboarder and they would say, I would never ever think about going over a ski jump.

34:57They're all scared of something else. And I think it's because to your point, they don't know exactly what that entails. And they know how to be safe in their area of expertise. Exactly. You know, in your Don Wall article, you talked about some hikers or some Climbers from 1970 or something, Dean Caldwell, said, everything is padded and comes with warning labels. I can see how that, for a certain kind of person, you'd almost be belligerent about that. Everything is padded, and they keep saying, be careful. Yeah, and I think people say that even more and more with, you know, helicopter parents and everything else, all the safety restrictions that we put on kids and adults.

35:33People, I think, are looking to sort of do something free and feel like they're doing something independent, and that scares them. I think there's something liberating about doing something that scares you. But then you quoted Warren Harding in that same 1970 climb. He reached the summit and somebody asked him, why do you do this? And he said, because we're insane. Yeah, there is the old Yosemite climbers, I think, were a little bit insane. They were at the edge of the frontier there. And they were the ones who were first climbing El Capitan and nobody else was like them. Now, of course, you go there certain times of year and El Capitan is covered with people like ants on the side of a wall there.

36:10Everybody's climbing it. But back then, they were pioneers. I mean, when nobody had climbed Mount Everest, there weren't ropes in place for you and ladders in place. Everest is a great example. We've seen those pictures of people, you know, the conga line of Mount Everest. Oh, yeah, the conga line. Couldn't have imagined 30 or 40 years ago. No. And somebody did it 30 or 40 years ago. Say, what is this? Just take me, you know, send them back to Disneyland or something like that. But in your Don Wall article, you talked about the reward, why people do this. And in fact, you said there's the adulation and a warm shower.

36:40Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, it's interesting. All these people that I've written about over the years that do these kind of daring things, nobody I've met is doing it for fame or infamy. Or if I thought they were, I probably wouldn't be covering them. They have their own personal motivations. And people like the guys that climbed the Don Wall, they studied that wall for years and worked for years and years and years on how they're going to make their way up there. someday that way. And so when they started doing it, they were doing it with an audience of three or four or five. And then I showed up, I caught wind of it and showed up.

37:11And as the New York Times started to write about it during their 17 day expedition, suddenly television trucks started to show up. We sort of created, I think, by accident, a little bit of a story where they were not looking for any of that. We kind of foisted it on them. I mean, when you fall into that culture, you egg each other on, you inspire each other, you conspire together, and there's a game plan. It can be a many years project, I would suppose. Yeah, I think that's true for a lot of these people. Certainly the Don Wall, certainly people like Olympians who spend four years for one moment in time.

37:43But yeah, they're trying to game plan this out. And again, not doing it for fame or riches. Who's paying you a million dollars to go climb El Capitan? Nobody is. Right. You know, that's funny because when I was a kid, Evel Knievel, I think he was doing it for fame and riches, wasn't he? Yes. Yeah, I think he was. He was making sure that all the television cameras were on before he started, yes. Some of these guys, it's just an annoyance. It's an annoyance. And yeah, I think with the Don Wall guys, they were not pleased that all these people were showing up. And at one point, Tommy Caldwell, about halfway up the Don Wall, about eight or nine days into it, dropped his phone from 2 ,000 feet and joked that it was an accident.

38:17I'm not sure it was really an accident. He was tired of getting text messages and calls. Yeah. Well, I would suppose it would get in the way of their concentration and actually contribute to the risk. Absolutely. And, you know, we talk about things like Kodak Courage, where, you know, are we influencing people because we've put a camera on them? Are we making things more dangerous to them? Well, I kept thinking about that on Free Solo with Alex. And I think the movie, the filmmakers there, you know, Chai and Jimmy Chin both said that. They said, are we contributing somehow potentially to his demise?

38:46So it took on a subplot. Are we all part of this? And if something goes wrong, are we sort of complicit? Yeah, and I think as a journalist, I'm very much aware of I do not want to be part of the story, and I don't want to influence the story. I want to be a fly on the wall if I can. This is Travel with Rick Steves. I'm talking with John Branch. He's written 2 ,000 articles on sports for The New York Times. 20 of his favorites are featured in his book Side Country, Tales of Death and Life from the Backroads of Sport. John won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on an avalanche in the Cascade Mountains just outside of Seattle.

39:18and that took the lives of three prominent skiers on a quiet Sunday morning in February a few years ago. He's joining us from his home in California right now on Travel with Rick Steves. We have links to John's work with this week's show at ricksteves.com slash radio. So, John, I want to talk about a few other death-defying sports and athletes that you've reported on, and I'm curious, how do you get access to these stories? And is it a kind of ambulance chasing? Are you looking for a disaster? I would like to think not. But certainly if there has been a disaster and I've written about, you know, the avalanche in Washington, about people who have died on Everest, I think there's a compelling story there.

40:00And how I try to frame it to the families and the people left behind is that I'd like to tell the full story of what happened. These people may have been a blurb in a newspaper or a scroll across a screen on CNN or something. You know, we all live deeper and fuller lives than that. And so what can I do to help portray these people in an honest and full light? And that's where I try to go with these. Because it is a culture. Even I remember my roommate in college was a rock climber and one of his buddies died. And, you know, the attitude was he died doing what he loved, you know, and it was they sort of know it's a package deal.

40:34You got to embrace life and you live life to the fullest and it comes with some dangers. It's kind of beyond me, but that is it is a culture. Yeah, it's a little bit beyond me too, which I think is why I'm fascinated by them. Because, you know, a lot of people I report on do things that I wouldn't do myself. And so I'm trying to tap in, I think, a little bit selfishly to figure out what makes these people tick. And they do it even if it's illegal. I mean, you wrote a fascinating article called Lost Brother. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, Lost Brother was about Dean Potter, who was a premier climber and a base jumper and a wingsuit flyer, where he would jump off the cliffs and fly with one of those kind of winged suits.

41:13as much as he could. And he was a big proponent of legalizing base jumping in the national parks. Most of the best base jumping spots in the US are in the national parks or in places like Yosemite or Yellowstone or Zion, the Grand Canyon, and it's illegal there. And so he would do it in the dark of night in Yosemite mostly because he'd have less risk of being caught and being spotted. And he and a fellow climber of his were killed a few years ago in Yosemite when they both followed each other. They jumped off a cliff and were flying with their wingsuits and tried to cut through a notch in one of the walls in Yosemite Valley and miscalculated and were killed.

41:54And that became a story I wrote called Lost Brother, again, trying to illuminate these lives and what made them tick. You have the opportunity to talk to their loved ones. It's like visiting an airplane crash site and piece through the debris of their lives. It is. You're trying to piece together not only what happened, but also who were the people that were there. I've written a lot of stories about people I've never met before. And in some ways, it's like writing a very detailed obituary. You're trying to talk to as many people as possible about who they were and what they accomplished and what they believed and what their values were.

42:22We've talked about rock climbing and we've talked about base jumping and wingsuits. What's another extreme sport that you think is just flirting with death? Yeah, I think a lot of the Olympic sports are. I would never go down an icy run on a face first on a skeleton, on a sled, or on my skis. I'm a skier. And the idea of going downhill at 90 miles an hour on what is literally a sheet of ice. Well, you know, what's interesting for me, John, is you have to do it with abandon. Absolutely. It's rare that we do anything with total abandon. Right. And I've talked to Olympic athletes about this. Like, they can't do that halfway.

43:00way. It's pedal to the metal, baby. Right. Because it's actually, in a lot of ways, more dangerous if you're just trying to do it halfway. And so you have to get the gumption. And when it's your turn to go, you have to believe that you are going to make it and you can do this. You got to factor in safety. But I would just think when you're lunging off a ski jump or when you're going downhill or if you're in a luge, you've got to go full broke. Full broke. Yeah. Because anything less than that could actually be more dangerous. And as soon as you let those doubts creep in, then maybe you change.

43:32And in some of these sports, we're talking about just minutia. I mean, just in luge, for example, all you do is twitch your shoulders to make the thing turn. And so if you wince, that could be the end. And that's the minuscule that you get to report on that we don't appreciate. I try to, yes. Yeah. One critic wrote that John Branch covers sports the way Lyle Lovett writes country music. John's our guest right now on Travel with Rick Steves. We're talking about the people he's profile for the New York Times, who often engage in the most adrenaline-pumping of extreme sports. He includes their stories in his book Side Country.

44:07John's also written a profile of a Utah rodeo family and how they try to keep a part of the Old West alive. That book's called The Last Cowboys. We have links to John's earlier interviews with us with this week's show at ricksteves.com slash radio. John, I don't know if people are going to die at a rodeo, but from reading your articles on that, it's clear they're going to get injured and they come back for more and more. What's your insight on riding a bucking bronco just for a sport? Yeah, I think I described it as eight seconds of a car wreck. I have never met tougher athletes than the rodeo athletes.

44:45And it's because they know they're going to get hurt. They know it's just a matter of time. And they also aren't getting paid very much. If they don't ride eight seconds, they get zero dollars. They are doing it for that chance. And if they get hurt, they will jump back in the truck, maybe drive 500 more miles to a rodeo for the next night and try to do it again. And if they don't get on the horse or don't get on the bull, they have no chance of making any money. So these guys just suck it up more than any athletes I've ever seen. And they know they're going to get hurt. And once you're hurt, it's easy to get hurt again.

45:16But they've got a grueling schedule. What do they do? They do three rodeos in a weekend. Yeah. I mean, they'll do 100 rodeos a year. Most of them crammed into the summer. And so from June to August, they are on the road back and forth across the interstates of the West going to rodeo to rodeo to rodeo. You know, that's another dimension of this addiction a lot of extreme athletes have is once they're injured, they keep having to perform. And when you're injured, it's tougher to perform to the limit you want to perform at. Absolutely. You know, the injuries snowball and they just keep thinking, if I can just heal through this, I'll be back to where I was.

45:51And one thing that I've found with every athlete, it happens in rodeo, it happens with Olympic athletes, is that they're all trying to figure out their exit strategy. They know there's a short window for what they do. It might be until they're 30, it might be until 35, it might be until the next Olympic cycle. And they're just trying to get there and try to maximize themselves so they can get out safely and figure out what they're going to do with the rest of their life. That's probably a challenge people that get all of this adrenaline have is your exit strategy. and then how do you provide for that once you're no longer in the saddle?

46:24Right, when you're no longer in the saddle or you're hurt. In the case of the rodeo family that I wrote about, it's by handing it down to the next generation and just sort of living vicariously then through the kids that do what you used to do. There you go. That would be a solution where you wouldn't get depressed, that you have a heritage. You have a heritage. You stay connected to it. John Branch, the book is Side Country, tales of death and life from the backroads of sports. You wrote an article called Deliverance from 27 ,000 Feet about climbers and Sherpas who die on Mount Everest and the people they leave behind and the government rules starting to limit crowding and so on.

47:01Tell us a little bit about what's going on in Mount Everest. Is that a unique situation where it's just like the ultimate, so it's got all these congestion problems? It just seems like a tragic thing. if you're a great mountain climber to be dealing with a bunch of rookies cluttering up the trail to the summit of the greatest mountain on the planet. Yeah, you will find the greatest mountain climbers avoid Everest with all they can because it's just a crowd place. It's a Disneyland. It's a place where people come who in many cases have no business being there. It's a bucket list item for them. And so it has gotten crowded.

47:34And there are climbing companies in Kathmandu that maybe don't have your best interests at heart because they just don't have the financial pull or the right training and that sort of thing. So it has become dangerous. And again, Everest is one of those places where several people are dying for the most part every year. So John, what do you think that the greatest accomplishment or goal these days is for a mountain climber? I think it certainly depends on the mountain climber. There are people who are trying to climb all 8 ,000, all the, I think 14, 8 ,000 meter peaks. Some are trying to do that without oxygen.

48:07But, you know, when I covered the guys that were covering El Capitan and Don Wall, one of the things that Kevin Jorgensen, one of the climbers said was, find your own Don Wall. This was his Don Wall. This was his, I know it's going to be probably the greatest accomplishment of my life. I know it's going to be in my obituary someday. What's your Don Wall? And that's always stuck with me. I love that because I have a real short Don Wall and it's, I just hiked around Mount Blanc. And for me to go to the limit six days in a row was really a personal accomplishment. It's nothing for a mountaineer. Not at all.

48:38I was so proud. I felt so good. And it was something I'll never stop being thankful for. Well, you'll appreciate this. My Dawn Wall is probably taking my kids through a hut-to-hut hike through the Dolomites and making sure all four of us survived. It was not the craziest thing I'll ever do, but it was a great experience. And it was nerve-wracking in all those ways when you're watching your kids step to the edge. So do these adrenaline hikers or these adrenaline sports people that you've covered and you've spent years and years covering them, do they ever cross the finish line or are they just addicted to adrenaline?

49:12Is it just endlessly, I got to do that. I got to do more. I got to do it again, you know? Yeah, that's a great question. I think they are always trying to find some other way. So if they can no longer climb, they will drive cars or they will become trail runners or something. For the most part, people are wired that way, where they need something that scares them that they can then overcome. And if it's not climbing, it'll be something else. So I just want to close our discussion, and this has been a fascinating chance to explore what you've been exploring for years. I'm so impressed. We've been talking about adrenaline sports and extreme sports that can be deadly.

49:48And you've been there. You've talked to people. and I just wanted to ask you, what have you learned from the widows? Yeah, that's the toughest part and the interviews that stick with me are the ones talking to the widows and it's the regret. It's the what if, what if I had done something differently? What if they had done something differently? It's the people left behind. So as much as the headlines are about the people who died, most of these stories are about people who were left behind and what they're going through. It's the other side of the story that you don't hear very much about. Wow.

50:20That gives it a whole other dimension, and that makes good journalism. I hope so. John Branch, thanks for being with us, and best wishes with your continued sports writing. Thank you so much, Rick. Travel with Rick Steves is produced by Tim Tatton, Kaz Moore Hall, and Donna Vardsley at Rick Steves Europe in Edmonds, Washington. Affiliate relations are by Sheila Gerzoff. Website uploads are by Andrew Wakeling and Sherry Quirt. Jerry Frank wrote and performed our theme music. You can find links to our guests and search the show archives at ricksteves.com slash radio. We'll see you next week for more Travel with Rick Steves.

50:59Hey, I'm Rick Steves. Season 13 of my TV series, Rick Steves Europe, is now out. And this and every season of public television's most watched and longest-running travel series is available in its entirety, free and ad-free at ricksteves.com. That's our entire library of episodes cutting Europe into more than 100 slices ranging from Iceland to Portugal to Turkey. Let's say you're wondering where to go in Scotland. Well, three episodes answer that question in 90 minutes. You can also read the full script for each show and find links to the places we visit. Sure, our TV shows entertain, but they're also practical guides to the smartest possible itineraries, turning your travel dreams into smooth and affordable reality.

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