By Chris Avena
Greg McHale is a world class athlete, bush pilot and certified adrenaline junkie. He has competed at the highest level with some of the top adventure racing teams in North America. With his bush plane, Greg brings us into uncharted territory to some of the most remote regions on the Yukon. Hunting, trekking or kayaking, these adventures are unparalleled. Greg McHale will get your blood pumping and leave you at the edge of your seat. His desire and determination drive him to the brink as he brings us along on some of the challenging and physically demanding extreme adventures.
Chris: Greg, you started out as a Professional Athlete.
Greg: I've actually had, you know, a fairly eclectic career but in the athletic world. I started out as a kid in Ontario playing hockey. You're not far from where I grew up. Just to stone throw across the border there. As you know, in that part of the world, hockey's a pretty big thing. So that's where I grew up. And then I moved out to the Yukon Post University and started hunting and also started my athletic career after hockey and which was adventure racing.
Chris: Is that kind of like extreme racing.
Greg: It's definitely a different style of racing compared to the traditional sports where I grew up. Adventure racing consists of team sport of typically four people. And the distances would be between four hundred and thousand kilometers.
So, kind of long endurance and sports that are basically comprised of biking, paddling and running all map, compass navigation, no GPS’s and cross country over top of that mountain and kind of straight line. I did that all over the world for almost 10 years at the highest level. It was great fun.
Chris: what made you move to the Yukon?
Greg: I left Ontario in search of adventure. I didn't necessarily have a particular high goal other than I knew I needed to be in the mountains. And I knew I needed to be in wild places.
Chris: You be wilder than that.
Greg: In our country, there's definitely no other place that is wilder in that. Even growing up in Ontario, the Yukon is just so far out there that we really knew very little about it. So, I brought the idea back to my girlfriend at the time, and my wife now in university, she was kind of like, where is the Yukon? Like, what are you talking about? And back then it was a little bit research in the library and I'm dating myself.
Chris: There was no Google back then
Greg: No. So, I did some library research. And we actually told our parents that we were moving to Alberta to the mountains because we didn't want to tell them we were going to the Yukon because they would have been like, come on, what are you really thinking? So that's how it started. It was just really the search for wild places. Just these true natural environments.
Chris: Your whole life was a transition going up there. Did you buy a house? Did you have to build a cabin? What was it like transitioning to the Yukon?
Greg: I think that back then it was an opportunity to start a new life that would have been actually easier than trying to buy a house in southern Ontario and trying to get a policing job and Ontario was not the place that we wanted to be. So, it really wasn't that hard to make the change. We started out renting. We went there with nothing actually. We went there with her car. I didn't own one at the time. I owned a canoe and a kayak, and some backpacks and camping gear. That's what I brought to the team. That was it. We just worked our way through it and made a life for ourselves. We have two children, 7 and 10.
My parents in fact have moved to the Yukon. They kind of followed us there. My dad being very outdoors minded person introduced me to the outdoors when I was a kid in Ontario. I used to get a pile of fishing holidays from school. So that's kind of where my love of the outdoors started. It's great to have my parents, both my mom and dad right near us. Family is always important.
Chris: So how does that transition into a TV show?
Greg: Well, I've always hunted since I was a teenager. Hunting has always been part of my life. One of my first jobs in the Yukon was as a Packer. So, I started out in the mountains with an outfitter. I didn't know anything about horses. So that was out. I applied for a job with almost every outfitter that was in the Yukon when I first got there because I just wanted to live in the mountains. So, I applied to everybody and I got turned down by everybody because I was this kid from Ontario that knew nothing about hunting in the mountains
Chris: You were a tender foot.
Greg: Right. I knew nothing about packing a horse but what I did have was tenacity. I was not leaving the Yukon. I started working at this clothing store. And this guy walked in with a camouflage jacket. This is after I'd been turned down by every outfitter in the Yukon.
This guy walks in with a camouflage jacket, and I said, “I need to talk to this guy”. So, I started a conversation, and by the end of it I was on my way to head into the Mackenzie Mountains in the Northwest Territories as a packer for guys that bought hunts. I flew into the bush, came out three months later.
Chris: I'm sure your wife loved that.
Greg: it was hard. But she is an amazingly supportive woman right from the start. And obviously that's carried on through our whole life. We have married for twenty- three years.
Chris: So, you show, encompasses not only going on a hunting trip and taking an animal and tracking it. It really encompassed the whole lifestyle.
Greg: Yes. So that's after adventure racing as a professional. I guided for one year, and then I realized that there's not enough money in the guiding world for the aspirations that I had. It's not a full-time game, and I would have had to travel around and leave my girlfriend for extended periods of time, which was not what I wanted to do. So, I kind of cut my teeth at the sharp end of the hunting world, but left that for a job, I was in criminology at university and college before that. So, I followed that career path. I was a police officer for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
During this period of my life, I started adventure racing and that became the passion. I left the R C M P to pursue the athletic career of Adventure Racing. And kind of during the tail end of my adventure racing, I wanted to bring my passion for the hunt and my passion for Adventure Racing together around a campfire. One night the plan was hatched to produce a television show,
Chris: And that's a bold move.
Greg: So, I put those two things together and see how the world perceives it. And that's what we're now into season seven of the show.
It has been an amazing journey. But that's the style of hunting, is about pushing the human body, going further, faster, longer than most, but it's not about comparing myself to others. It’s about what I needed from me. And when you can put the two passions that you have together.
Chris: So, you were an adrenaline junkie that's the end of the story. You're an adrenaline junkie, and you found a way to make a living being an adrenaline junkie.
Greg: yeah. Maybe
Chris: So, you are a pilot too?
Greg: Yes, I am.
Chris: So, you fly into a remote location, you hike into the woods, 20, 30, 40 miles, you do your hunt and you come back. Now when I go to a concert venue or something, I take a picture of the section that I parked my car in with my cell phone.
Greg: Yeah.
Chris: How do you find your plane?
Greg: Well, here comes the map and compass navigation part too. Right. So, I'm so comfortable in the mountains. I've spent a lifetime doing it. I'd be more uncomfortable trying to find my car than my airplane. You could be 20 miles away. But obviously with modern technology too, now you can GPS your backpack, whether you leave it on the side of the mountain but before all of this technology, we just had to do these things with the map and compass and your ability to identify different terrain features and understand. Okay. And even with technology, you don't know what you're going to get into when you walk in 20 miles, whether it's going to be bog and how thick the bush is going to be, how much you're going to have to deal with. And these are all nuances of a lifetime in the outdoors.
That is just second nature. It’s like walking through New York City for you, is just second nature. Where me, I come to Vegas and it's like, whoa, I try to navigate my way around this trade show. This is not second nature. So, I've built the skill in the outdoors over a lifetime, it's just there.
Chris: So, you go home, you have the Northern Lights, you come here, you have the Vegas lights and it's similar.
Greg: The interesting thing is that it is similar in a completely different way.
But a guy like me comes here and looks around and goes, wow. Like, this is the first thing that comes to my mind is like, this is crazy. But I think that somebody that lives here could equally come to the Yukon and sit outside in the complete solitude and quiet and look up at the Northern Lights and go, wow, this is crazy.
Chris: The way you do things, I think people can really learn from the way you navigate the woods, the way you track and stalk animal that hunting. All those skills were lost with technology and the way people hunt today. I was brought up doing spot and stalk hunting. Now everybody's in a tree stand. That's just your way of life. You read your compass and say, “okay, I'm going in here now I got to come out there”.
Greg: I think that that's where our show seems to resonate with the purest. We tried, obviously I use all modern technology, but we try to push and be more traditional in a manner that is respected to the animal. Obviously, aviation, it allows me to get back into deeper places where most people can't get to. And then that's where I find the most solitude and gratitude for the pursuit.
Chris: A lot of people don't understand that. So, what do you want people to take away from watching your show?
Greg: If I could provide anything to people, there's a number of things. Fitness is such a huge part of my life and the three things, the pillars that I always look to is health and how important that is to everybody. It is often lost in the ease of life and how everything is at our fingertips.
We are not forced to move. So, you have to seek that help and that movement. That is where I find it in the wild places. If that works for you, just get outside and go for a walk and just to look at nature and appreciate it. Even if it is in the city, appreciate that duck on a pond that you're walking past. It is encapsulated in health. Get out, move your body. If you can do it in the natural environment, you are gaining not just the healthy aspect of it, but the appreciation for nature.
Chris: while you are sitting in your tree stand, you get to see the woods come alive.
Greg: That is what I really like to do. I hope people when watch my program, they see me pushing myself physically and mentally in the natural environment. They don't have to do it in the same way I do. But if I could articulate how important that is and how rewarding it is I would love for people to be able to draw those two linkages. The next one would be family and relationships and the family environment. When I took my seven-year -old son on his first sheep with my 76-year-old father. The three of us together are navigating these environments that most people would consider very inhospitable but they're also very beautiful. The three of us doing this together working toward a common goal, which this situation was to get my father a sheep. So, I get to see a little boy becoming a man and an old older gentleman needing to rely on his seven-year-old grandson. These experiences that we as hunters have in the outdoors, it might not be a hunting sheep, but it could be just sitting around a campfire. But these experiences where we actually have to sit in front of each other and have conversations when our cell phone is not going off. And it's connecting to nature and connecting to one another.
I think that those relationships that are built through hunting and through being out in the wilderness are ones that all of us as hunters allow us to connect to each other on a different level. That is what makes hunting so special for me because the day-to-day life often does not provide that even if you are sitting around with your family at Christmas. There are distractions, there's noise, there's music. Sure, you are using these opportunities to get together, but it's not like what the wild place is going to provide.
My last pillar is, you need to be able to work hard to be able to afford things in life. If you don't have to worry about finances, which we all have to worry about.
To a point, but it's about working hard toward a goal. If you have your health and you have your family, and you have those relationships around you, not just family but friends as well, you have those relationships around you that are great, taken care of, then it becomes how do I build my wealth on a different side so I can help other people. I have a number of different businesses and I've been very fortunate. I have worked really hard and now I can utilize a platform to whether it is to motivate or help people move forward in their life. It is not a mountain or how do you climb that mountain? You take one step and move forward. But hard work is the key.
Chris: Yes sir. Hundred percent. So where can we find the show?
Greg: You can find me at Greg McHale's Wild Yukon. The show is Sportsman channel. Check us out on the Sportsman channel. Also on Instagram, all our social of our other social media is Greg McHale's Wild Yukon.
Chris: On Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, take a look. Check it out. You're going to enjoy it. Thanks again, appreciate your time. And you heard it here at American Outdoor News.