The Happy Camper: 4 Outdoor Adventure Films on YouTube

April 1, 2019

Looking for movies to get you through shoulder season? These four documentaries are free... and excellent.

It’s that time of year when the joys of winter are over, but in some places, spring has yet to arrive.

Whatever the reason, if you’re taking a break from the great outdoors, you can still binge-watch other outdoor adventures to get you through the shoulder season.

Here are four FREE documentaries to watch on YouTube.

Hailey Sonntag and Michael Oliphant, graduates from Mohawk College Broadcasting – Television and Communications Media, have just released their full documentary on legendary canoeists Hap Wilson and his wife Andrea. The film highlights Hap and Andrea’s relationship with the Temagami wilderness and the threats that the land faces.

I was so pumped to see this. Hailey and Michael were the ones who pitched their tent on my septic bed a couple years back. They were working on their final college assignment before graduating—a documentary on me, “The Happy Camper.”

I got to know them a bit then—and I saw their enthusiasm. Wild Temagami shows their passion unfold and blossom.

Richard Alexander, Course Director of the Newfoundland Kayak Company, put me on to this new “In Level Five Conditions” production. It’s one you’ll want to watch over and over again.

Rising Waters documents an attempt to be the first group to run all the rapids of Newfoundland’s lower Terra Nova River in Tandem Canoe. At the start of the decent, water levels were 50 per cent higher than the group had hoped and heavy rain during the trip pushed the levels higher, increasing the group’s anxiety. The story also connects two generations of paddlers that love the river.

Shawn James has had a extremely well received YouTube channel called “My Self Reliance” for a few years now. However, his popularity increased two-fold once he started filming the construction of a log cabin in a remote wilderness area north of Toronto.

Now he’s released a full hour and a half film: a condensed overview of the last couple of years at the cabin.

Shawn depicts his life after leaving the city life behind to build a cheap off grid log cabin and homestead in the Canadian wilderness, including a log home, an outdoor kitchen, an outhouse, a woodshed and a sauna bathhouse. Building mostly with hand tools, Shawn harvests materials from the surrounding forests and crafts them into functional tools and shelters using traditional woodworking tools and methods.

I’ve always enjoyed Brad Jennings videos on his Explore The Backcountry You Tube channel. Lately, he’s turned it up a notch; especially with his latest film. Brad and his partner Leah Catherine paddled the Lake Superior coast, covering 220 kilometres in 10 days. The footage he captured is stunning!

The couple dealt with the full gambit of Superior’s moods: fog, wind, waves and absolute calm. This is an incredible body of water to paddle. Superior is the world’s largest freshwater lake and very much an inland sea. This powerful body of water is larger than the country of Austria and directly influences the climate of its surrounding landmass.