Yeah, and you know in the early years too, just like convincing people that this was even a thing that had a place in their life.
Like up until like 2015, 2016 really, it was our competition was not other apps. Our competition was paper.
And it was really convincing, convincing people that were already out in the back country using maps that like, here's an alternative.
And that this is a thing that believe it or not, this really actually works.
Like, you know, one of the main criticisms we would get from people was, yeah, but there's not cell phone service everywhere.
So this is garbage.
They were like, no, no, you can download the maps for offline and your phone is a GPS chip in it.
And it works in the middle of the wilderness.
And those early years, that was kind of one of the big challenges was convincing people that this was a thing that would be useful in their life.
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Now let's get to the show.
Hey, welcome back to the All Aspects podcast. We're really excited to welcome Jesse Crocker today.
He's one of the co-founders of Gaia GPS, one of your favorite mapping apps.
But before that, he was also a pro ski patroller at Kirkwood and Big Sky.
He's also done some wild adventures like Kiteski across Greenland, which kind of melts my brain.
So as we always do each week, we talk about how to do inherently dangerous things,
whether it's starting doing a startup company or traveling across Greenland, the safest way possible.
Jesse, welcome to the pod.
Thanks for having me.
Oh yeah, man. Excited to talk to you. Let's just jump right into this, man.
So when I was looking up your backstory a little bit, you're a Bay Area kid, right?
Yep.
Okay. So were you always kind of interested in like computers and that kind of thing?
Yeah, I grew up kind of around the tech industry.
One of my dad's good friends was a computer programmer who kind of introduced me at a very young age to like that.
That was a career path.
And my dad painted houses and computer programming seemed a lot more appealing than painting houses.
That's fair. That's fair.
And then when I was looking kind of your backstory up, it said your first like gig doing computer,
I guess, would you say computer science stuff?
Like you were tracking bison?
Yeah. So I worked for a nonprofit in West Yellowstone, Montana that is trying to get more habitat for bison outside of Yellowstone National Park.
So they have volunteers out in the field all winter long on skis and snowshoes going and seeing where the bison are and what they're doing and documenting sort of the different government management actions around the bison.
And I spent a bunch of time actually in the field out with the bison in like minus 45 degree weather in West Yellowstone in the winter.
But then also a lot of time working on the computer side of things, working on building a computer system for all these volunteers who are out in the field to log all their observations.
People come back at the end of the day and record, we saw this many bison doing this, we saw seven elk, we saw porcupine and creating a whole system for that.
And that that now has 20 years of observations from tens of thousands of volunteer days in the field.
And that was kind of my introduction to working on the mapping side of computers.
Okay, does that still exist? Does that system still are they still using it?
It actually it got replaced last year, finally after being in use for 15, 18 years, something like that.
But the data is all in use. There's actually someone's doing a PhD thesis with that with all that data right now.
That's awesome.
Hell yeah.
Was that how so was like freezing your ass off chasing bison around how you kind of got into the backcountry scene?
Yeah, that was before that I had spent, you know, growing up I snowboarded and I moved to West Yellowstone.
And the first time I threw snow shoes on and a snowboard on my backpack.
I saw the potential for having a lot of fun and honestly I couldn't afford lift tickets.
But snowshoeing was not the thing I like after a month of that went out and bought the cheapest touring skis I could buy and didn't step on a snowboard again for a long time.
That makes sense.
So then we're just kind of skating through the backstory here you then went from that to joining ski patrol at Big Sky first or Kirkwood.
Yeah, I spent a year as a volunteer at Big Sky kind of doing the ski bump thing, working on the volunteer patrol and skiing as many days as I possibly could.
While you were doing that stuff, you were still playing around like playing around the background with building kind of mapping apps or like what were you doing in your free time at this time in your life?
Yeah, so after Big Sky I went to Kirkwood, California and was on pro patrol there for four years and kind of three years into it realized my knees were not going to take 30 years patrolling.
Looking at guys I worked with and realized that I had to come up with another line of work and it was right as iPhone was coming on the scene.
So I decided I better get back into computer programming because that would let me still go out and play and have fun and not just be wrecked on my days off work.
So I started, I built a couple apps during my last year of ski patrol, built an app for looking at snow tail data and then I built an app called Avalanche Lab that was for recording snow pit data and recording avalanche occurrences.
Really kind of aimed at the pro side of things like looking at data logging or doing at work and like how can we make this easier? How can I not have to carry a field book for all of the compliance that needs to get done in a professional operating, avalanche operating environment?
Wait, so this is, so you said you got back into this when the iPhone was coming out. So what was that like 2003? Like when was that?
What, no, no, it was, what would that have been like 2009?
Okay, I think it was 2010, something like that, yeah.
Yeah, 2010, 2009 was kind of the first year we could build apps on the iPhone. It was like iOS 3 came out and then we could build real apps for it.
And I got immediately got on it, like seemed seemed like there was huge potential there.
Yeah, smart.
So yeah, then I was still doing ski patrol and doing that. And then actually that year I went to National Avalanche School and the field session of National Avalanche School, I got to have Bruce Trempner as my instructor for the field session.
And Bruce was like the first day was like, okay, like this new thing came out and we're doing maps on phones now. And this is going to be the future and everyone needs to get this app for mapping on their phone.
And that app was guy GPS.
And it was like months after just a few months after the first version of guy GPS came out and it, it was maps and track recording. It didn't, didn't do anywhere near the amount that any of the mapping apps these days do.
And that year, I finished out my season of ski patrolling and then concluded that I had to be done patrolling at the end of that year that like iPhone iPhone development was definitely where it was happening.
I was getting lots of great feedback about my avalanche avalanche lab but like not making any money off it. And realized that I should think about working on something else and then saw a job ad online for guy GPS and responded to that and the couple that originally
founded guy GPS Andrew and Anna looked me up online or I think Anna searched her email for my name and found it in two places. One was from the Pacific crash trail mailing list.
Talking about a winter trip I had done on the john mirror trail. And then one was on an email list about the mapping soft mapping library that I used an avalanche lab and that guy GPS used.
And like the intersection of those two things was like okay great you're hired.
So I started working at guy GPS like kind of immediately and then at actually an ISSW that year I saw my patrol director and was like okay I'm done.
And then about a year into guy GPS. I guess Andrew and Anna saw the potential in me that I don't know that I saw in myself at the time but like they saw how much knowledge I had about the mapping side of things and gave me the title of being a co founder of guy
GPS and gave me an equal share of the company that they each had. Wow. And I ran the kind of the whole mapping side of things that guy GPS so led led her intro into making our own maps instead of just using maps license from other people built the Android app led the web team for some years led the iOS team for some years
and eventually led kind of the whole software engineering side of things. Damn. That's awesome. What so really really quick can I ask one question. What did the avalanche lab app do.
It was recording snow pit data log log and pit data logging weather observations and then mapping out slides. So the you know kind of the standard book that's used for in the US for recording all that stuff is this thing called swag that snow weather avalanche guidelines
and tons of people avalanche professionals are out there every day taking very exact notes based on this very specific data that needs to be collected. And it was basically a way to automate doing that and being able to submit it submitted and documented easily.
How are you how are you aggregating all that data back then. So you could input it into the phone and then generate a diagram of a snow pit just like you draw in a field book and generate you know generate a text format of your weather observations just like you
can just send it in a field book and then be able to email that off or print it out. Print it out and put it in your field book. OK. And then about six months into guy GPS like I realized that one of the two things I was working on was going to make money
and one of them wasn't and I sold sold off avalanche lab to someone. OK so what so when you sold avalanche like you sold it to a totally different group than guy.
I sold it to sold it to a guy who lives in Colorado who unfortunately has never really done anything with it. It's kind of a shame. There was there was some good potential there.
But I think he ran into this shortly saw the same thing I did that it was going to be a very hard market to actually make money in especially targeting the professional side of things like yet the number the number of avalanche
professionals in the US is small and you're trying to convince them to replace a paper notebook that their job is probably paying for anyway with something they have to pay for themselves. So the price we could reasonably charge was low.
And it was just never going to be enough to pay the bills. That's super super cool. Like really very forward thinking for the time. I mean it's hard to imagine now because mapping is such a thing. You know there's I don't know.
You probably know there's probably 100 plus mapping apps in the app store. But back then when you're doing guy a huge. I mean maybe we could talk a little bit about sort of the technical challenges of getting guy going and also the sort of social challenges of getting buy in for like him.
I mean back then like Garmin was a box that you said on your dashboard. Right.
Oh yeah I mean the people especially in the snow and avalanche world were super nervous at that point like I think 2011 maybe like I went up to the CAA Canadian Avalanche Association annual group meeting and gave a talk.
And I straight up had people telling me that I was going to get people killed by encouraging them to carry phones in the back.
They're like no if people have a phone in their backpack their beacon isn't going to work and you're going to get people killed. And it was like you know like there are some issues there but anecdotally we've done a bunch of testing and this is pretty much this is not nearly as much of an issue.
And they're like well the batteries are going to die and you're going to get people killed like you know. No we're actually making it a lot easier for folks with less experience to keep themselves safe here.
Well yeah as a analog Jeff knows all about that. Yeah I've heard that a lot too where people say you know Jeff the real problem is that people don't know how to navigate with a map compass and altimeter and that's what we need to be focusing on is training the millions of people out
of Avalanche train every year if they only knew how to do that we'd be alright. And I'm just like whoa like when I'm examining guides they can barely do it old school analog style let alone the general public it takes I mean hundreds of hours of practice and mentorship it's just it's so much
better. And then that cognitive load it's all you can do to navigate in a whiteout using paper map and compass and altimeter and then you've got no more energy left over to manage your group through the terrain and deal with the Avalanche problem.
Yeah. Yeah there is there was a lot of a lot of resistance like I would say up until like six or seven years ago to just the idea that it was okay for people to take smartphones in the back country.
Which everyone is doing anyway like the normies. I think it's like if you asked like I was a geographer and did map making in college and cartography and GIS and I think it'd be like talking to a cartographer you know 1520 years ago and said hey you know people are going to follow a blue dot around when
they're driving through Denver or San Francisco or ever and they would have been like that's crazy that's going to kill people that's gonna get it wrong and you're like it's so much harder with paper map to drive and navigate the cognitive load is so much higher and like certainly on a glacier when I pull out a paper
map I'm like I forgot to laminate this one and now it's a full storm and it's falling apart one time I had my laminated map blow away because it was such a meanest storm and I like oh god now we're totally hosed.
Wait Jesse I want to so well actually kind of piggybacking on that what was what were the. I mean you you I'm assuming you all had to develop a good amount of the tech that that kind of became the base layer for mapping apps as we know it right.
I think in the first couple years of guy GPS a lot of it was really even trying to figure out like what what should these products actually do like we know what a Garmin handheld GPS does and we know what a paper map does and a smartphone has all these
capabilities but like what features do you actually want in a GPS app just trying to figure that out was a big one in the early years. There was lots of interesting technical problems to like mostly related to just the amount of data people had as time went by you know people who are out every day recording GPS tracks and all of a sudden they have 10,000 miles of
tracks and figuring out how to deal with those but I would say honestly the harder part was really just figuring out figuring out the features and what needed what the useful things were do you do you remember specifically any one kind of feature or capability that really surprised you that people really wanted that you maybe you guys didn't see
So one of the features we worked on kind of in the early years was layered maps so the ability to combine multiple map layers and put them together and control the opacity and kind of build your own map and that really surprised us kind of how popular it was and also how many map
layers people would use you know we would we'd get screenshots from people tech support emails they're like I was using 15 different map layers all stacked on top of each other and the map didn't work so well like I test with like two or three like what are you doing with 15
Wow yeah I'm curious why isn't it working well I guess it's good to stress test it in that way you know yeah and you know so Jesse it sounds like one of the challenges was envisioning what the future user experience would be like of what people would need they hadn't quite imagined yet is that accurate
Yeah and you know in the early years to just like convincing people that this was even a thing that had a place in their life like up until like 2015 2016 really it was our competition was not other apps our competition was paper
Yeah and it was really convincing convincing people that were already out in the back country using maps that like here's an alternative and that this is a thing that believe it or not this really actually works like you know one of the main criticisms we would get from people was yeah but there's not cell phone service everywhere so this is garbage
They were like no no you can download the maps for offline and your phone is a GPS chip in it and it works in the middle of the wilderness and those early years that was kind of one of the big challenges was convincing people that this was a thing that would be useful in their life
And then at some point I think it moved just from the target market being those people to all of a sudden we were not just making things easier for existing back country travelers but enabling people who previously didn't feel comfortable going in the back country
and not just on snow but hiking biking people who didn't feel that they could safely do that because they didn't know how to read a map and compass like I've had so many people tell me that like guy GPS changed my life because previously I couldn't go hiking by myself
I could only go hiking with my friend that knew how to read a map or I could only go hiking with my husband and now I can go out by myself and like those are the stories I love hearing about like this thing enabled me to go out and comfortably go out in the back country by myself or with my other friends who also weren't comfortable with maps and compasses
That's awesome. And in some ways hearing that is a little scary too because like I you know I still carry a paper map and compass sometimes though these days more often it's a phone and a hardware GPS but people need to still need to have back up like phones are fallible they don't always work
Batteries die they get dropped in rivers.
Yeah, I like telling my team like if we're going to go ski the out route or something like that. I'll send him send them I'll be like hey download this on Gaia get the app and here is my tracks from the last couple years.
So we all have that and they're super psyched because then they get to preview the route and get all geeky about it and get excited and they get to kind of live pre live the experience beforehand and then we've got five phones with all the tracks loaded up and if one phone dies I'm like next phone pass it forward next
phone dies pass it forward we're super redundant in that way.
Yeah. So, like you said, like paper was your competition. What was there like a point where a bunch of other mapping apps started popping up and you guys had kind of real technical competition or what like what did that look like because obviously other mapping apps started.
Yeah, so I don't even remember what year that was but yeah at some point they're starting to be more competition.
A lot of our competition in the early years kind of doesn't is apps that don't exist anymore I think there was a lot of people who thought they were going to to build an app and ship it and then they were going to be done with it.
And it was going to be a thing that was going to make the money, but they weren't going to have to continuously work on whereas like with guy GPS you know for a long time we were kind of steady at about five people working on it, but we had a team of five people working on that almost all the time constantly
improving things.
And that you know let us kind of stay ahead of the competition for a long time. And you know kind of different niches to though, like in the original idea with guy GPS was hiking and backpacking.
But very quickly I think we realized that we couldn't just focus on those sports because there wasn't a big enough market just for that at that time.
You know, the way the way I think about it now like at that time maybe 5% of the people who were interested in hiking and backpacking would be willing to use an app.
And that was not not big enough so we had to we had to look at other sports and some of those kind of took us by surprise like, you know, six or eight years ago, overlanding started to get really big and we kind of got dragged kicking and screaming into
overlanding like it was not something that we necessarily knew about but all of a sudden people were sending in questions about like, you know, I'm going to drive this 500 mile route through dirt roads of Utah BLM and your app needs this one feature to make it happen.
And we were like, what is this? Who are these people? And we kind of they're the bunch of markets we got dragged into that way. But we really yeah, focus focused on a lot of markets in those early years.
Well, and correct me if I'm wrong, but guy was free for the first like, what six or eight years that existed.
Oh, no. So the originally the app, I think we launched it like $1.99 a year. And then eventually got or not $1.99 a year $1.99 upfront. That was kind of before the year of subscriptions. And then eventually we got to $20 upfront plus $20 a year for a subscription.
The subscription got you access to some additional map layers. But still the subscription was a small percentage of users like the majority of people, the just the base app worked for what they needed.
And then eventually we kind of we relaunched the app. So we launched it as a new app internally we called it guy GPS next generation. And we launched a whole new app on the app store that was had a free tier that you could do some things.
But to use it in the back country you really needed a subscription that was I think we started at $20 a year. And we're probably a couple years too late doing that we should have done a little sooner.
The a lot a lot of apps that already started to move to subscriptions and that was what enabled us to really grow like for years we were able to have a staff of five or six people. And then after that it was like every year hire two or three more people and have them building cool stuff.
And the company was able to support that.
Well that I mean, I feel like a lot of people don't know the only reason I've really ever thought about this is because I'm now involved with aspect Abby but the cost money to run a mapping app.
Like even if everyone on your team as a developer or whatever, like the data, like just to create the mapping layers and do all that stuff like cost money until like upkeep it.
So did that when can you just tell me a little bit like how the cost of that changed and how like the kind of business of that changed in the time that guy was happening.
Yeah, that you know that was a big part of relaunching guy GPS as a subscription app was that there were users that had paid $1.99 five years ago that the cost of those users at that point like how much we had spent serving them maps was like.
Many times what they had paid.
Yeah, the like maps are expensive satellite imagery like costs a whole lot of money to make and costs a lot of money to buy maps are big.
Sinking photo like photos are big all of it all of this stuff costs money.
And there it's it's really easy to lose money on a mapping application. I think definitely some of the some of our competitors in those years ended up going out of business because they didn't understand how much it was going to cost and their products were too cheap.
And after a year they realized that they were losing money on every single customer and had to go out of business.
Yeah, and at that point you're screwed because you're like well we can't just now go from charging like a dollar a year to charging $100 a year like that's going to kill us too.
Yep.
Hey everyone hope you're joined the pod so far I just wanted to take a quick break to tell you about one of the most unique features of aspect app which is the forecast update.
We're touring this area it's a moderate day but all of a sudden we experienced signs of instability. We come up to the corner and we click this little button right here brings up the forecast update tool.
Then we can go in and let's say we got whoops and we got shooting cracks.
We click done your map is going to be updated to considerable abbey danger and will now have the updated high and low risk areas painted on the map in that forecast so this works even offline which is super badass.
If you want to try out the forecast update tool for yourself head on over to the app store and download aspect abbey for free on iOS.
Okay back to the show.
Can I ask you a bit about risk in a startup.
Are there some parallels with managing risk with leading a dev team, a development team whether it was the Android or iOS version or web app and stuff with Gaia and being like okay we're going to do something where the outcome is uncertain.
No one's done this before and say being on a control route with explosives going hunting for avalanches when you're back at Kirkwood.
Are there some similarities of how the team manages risk and how you manage your team into the unknown.
That's interesting. Being inside working at a computer the risks are different. There's financial risk.
There's reputational risk especially leading a team of software engineers.
There's risk of your reputation with the outside world, your reputation with your team keeping the respect of your team.
But I feel like in the ski patrol world that risk leads to team bonding.
The feeling on ski patrol is like what I think it's here people describe the military as like a band of brothers.
These guys are in your platoon or the closest people in your life, closer than your family.
I think ski patrol the risk leads to that same sort of bonding and in the software world I don't think that happens.
The software world we buy people t-shirts and hats and try and create team bonding.
Yeah try and create team bonding that way you give people a sticker for their water bottle.
It's the explosives. The explosives is what brings people together.
Yeah but there certainly is a ton of risk on just the financial side of things.
I have spent months and months working on things with no idea if they were going to work out.
My current project I think depending on how you want to look at is maybe start up number five for me.
Wow. So we sold Gaia GPS in 2021 and after that I started working on something totally different.
My wife is a farmer and I started working on software for greenhouse automation.
Wow.
And I spent probably six months building out a software platform for automating climate controls in greenhouses
and specifically targeting small farmers and got to the point I had a great prototype
but then got to the point where I realized to actually take it to market I was going to have to hire people
and like hire probably like three people who some mechanical engineers maybe another software engineer
and I didn't have the appetite for the risk like that was purely financial risk like I was either
going to have to put up a lot of money out of my pocket or give away most of my company to venture capital S
and didn't have the couldn't convince myself that it was a risk that had a high enough potential of paying off.
So I ended up just shutting that down like calling it a learning experience,
learn some interesting software, had fun playing with hardware that I hadn't really interacted with before.
But yeah, shut it down like didn't couldn't do it.
And honestly, I think if I had if I'd had the appetite for the risk, I think there's a decent chance it would have worked out.
Hmm.
Well, that's a way that's a great segue into your current project, which is goat maps, which is a new mapping app.
I believe it just launched. Is that right?
Yeah.
So after guy GPS worked on the greenhouse thing and then worked on a company doing weather forecasting for a while.
And then let's see two summers ago decided my son was kind of at the age where he could start really doing some backpacking.
And we spent a month backpacking in the summer in the subway, better wilderness and decided for most of that summer to just use paper maps.
And because I really the idea of doing something with mapping again was already kicking around in my head.
And I thought it would be fun to teach my son how to navigate with paper maps, but also would be a great time to think about like, OK, what are,
you know, all of these mapping apps that are on the market now kind of look the same.
Like what what are the actual core features? What matters?
So did a bunch of two different week long trips and then a bunch of three or four day trips, all with paper maps to really try to remember like what are the hard parts here?
Hmm.
Wait, what are the hard part with that going back? What did you learn? What did you what was something that stood out to you?
I think my so my conclusion was that a lot of the hard parts were around when when things went south, like metaphorically, not physically.
You know, we had one trip where we started out with an objective of a route that we were going to do.
And the second day came to a trail that just didn't exist and came up with a new plan.
And another day later, there's another trail that hadn't been maintained in 30 or 40 years and tons of just replanting routes on the fly.
Lots of yeah, lots of needing to replan out in the field and like drastically different plans, you know, week long trip.
We're coming up with a lot of miles. This isn't like we're going to go three miles this way instead of two miles that way.
It's like we're going to hop over the continental divide and go in a totally different watershed for 40 miles.
And hopefully this other path to get us back to the valley we live in actually goes.
Dang.
So then at the end, at the end of that summer, I was talking with Anna Johnson, who was one of the other co founders of guy in GPS.
They just talking about what we were what we were thinking about what we were doing and realized we had both been thinking about maybe building a new navigation app.
And not really sure what it was going to do at that point, but it sounded interesting.
So February of this year kind of really started started working on that and spent a few months kind of build lots of kind of off the wall features that maybe weren't going to go anywhere.
But over the course of the summer coalesced into what we actually wanted to build.
Yeah, last month we launched last week we launched Goat Maps, which is a navigation app initially targeting hiking backpacking and backcountry skiing.
Because I can't build anything that's not for backcountry skiing.
That's more than half my year.
Nice.
Currently it runs on iPhone, iPad and Mac.
And yeah.
Nice.
Congratulations.
And what's what would you say is the differentiator with Goat Maps from Gaia?
Yeah, so we really wanted to focus hard on reliability and ease of use.
You know, lots of these all of the lots of these mapping apps that have been on the market for five years, 10 years have acquired all these weird features.
I kind of like to use the analogy of barnacles on a boat.
Like, you know, you build up these things and they slow down your progress of what you can do.
And with software you get all these features and 1% of your users might use them.
And you don't want to get rid of them because those 1% of users are helping pay the bills.
So you end up with all these weird features that slow down your team, make the product more complicated.
Even though most people don't really need them.
So Goat Maps was a great chance to just start over really thinking about like what are the features that actually matter.
Like on that backpack, those backpacking trips I was talking about, we were really thinking about like, what are the features we actually need to make this work?
And it came down to offline maps that are totally solid that you don't have to worry about whether they're going to work or not.
Track recording and really good route planning tools and really quickly being able to replan a route in the field and measure where you're going.
So those are kind of the big areas we focused on for Goat Maps.
Like it does a lot less than any of our competition.
But I think it does everything that a lot of people are going to need.
You know, we get a lot of people asking like, for my search and rescue missions, I need this one feature.
And it's like, you know, maybe that feature may not end up being something we're going to build because it takes a lot of time.
And it's going to make the app more complicated for recreational users.
Like it could be that for your week long SAR mission, Caltopo is going to be the best option because they're really focused on that market.
But I'd like to think that for your three day ski tour or your week long backpacking trip or your 30 mile wilderness trail running loop,
the Goat Maps is going to be the best option because we're focused hard on that.
Is there a, so I'm just reading your description here really quick.
It says, introducing Goat Maps, the next generation of mapping for outdoor adventure built from the ground up for speed and reliability.
Maps route planning navigation, no BS.
So like, I love that mission.
Like, like, and from that description, you're like, okay, that sounds like the most basic mapping app ever.
But I, but then having you, you know, fill it in a little more is, it's kind of cool.
It's like, hey, we're going back to the basics of like, dude, I went and used a map, literally a paper map all summer.
And these were the things that I actually needed.
And I think that's pretty cool.
Yeah, and you know, we are doing some new innovative things too.
Like what one of the features that we prototype very early on and is going to launch in our next version is the ability to do totally custom slope angle shading.
I also two years ago, like decided to start over on my avalanche education path.
So when two years ago and did an airy level one and last year didn't airy level two.
And some of that was definitely market research.
Like I'm wondering what what what are these classes teaching people to do?
And how can I how can I build a product that's going to work for that?
And a lot in that airy level one, they're talking about, you know, crossing off terrain at the beginning of the day as part of your trip plan, which is a lot what you guys are doing with aspect avi to.
So my take on that was, you know, kind of all these apps have this standard slope angle shading that people don't know how to.
Some people know how to read, but certainly people at the beginner level in those airy courses do not know what to make of it.
Ten colors is overwhelming.
Just looks very awesome.
And you know, those maybe the very beginners are not what I was focused on, but I wanted to build a tool for myself going out and planning a trip to really quickly be able to say like, OK, north facing terrain over 30 degrees above 6000 feet is out of bounds for the day.
Yeah.
And so we built a feature in Goat Maps to, you know, in 30 seconds, I can color that terrain red and I can cover color, you know, let's say southwest to southeast facing slopes under 35 green and use that to plan to build my trip plan for the day.
So we're doing innovative stuff in Goat Maps to, you know, it's not all it's not all things that people were doing 10 years ago.
And I'd like to think we're doing a lot of innovating things with trip planning to one of our the other features I really wanted was the ability to plan out trips where I'm doing point to point sections and snap to trail and just freehand drawing lines altogether.
Because especially planning ski tours like we're not on trails. So the whole snap to trail thing doesn't work. But we're also, you know, not just taking straight lines all the time.
You might be planning, planning an uptrack on something where you know you know you're going to do five huge switchbacks. And I really wanted to be able to like measure out like, OK, what's the actual distance we're going to cover there on on those kind of routes?
What's the actual grade we're going to do. So we did a lot of work on being able to combine, combine those in the route planner and get good info from the route planner.
So will you be able, will you be able to do that offline?
Yeah. So currently we don't have snap to trail while you're offline, but we're going to we're working on that and we're even working on some other things with that to like being able to snap to rivers also like, you know, one of my summer sports is pack rafting and for pack rafting I really want to be able to snap to rivers when planning out those multi sport routes.
Really, really quickly, can you just for myself and for listeners, watchers, can you explain snap to.
Yeah, so, you know, it's kind of what you're used to with Google Maps or Apple Maps you enter in a start and an end location and it puts you on a road.
So that's kind of the simplest form of it is you give it two points and it gives you a road or a trail, whichever you've requested.
But then also with Goat Maps we have a feature where instead of just tapping two points on the map or entering names of points, you can draw with your finger kind of near a trail and then tell it put me on the trail and it will snap your route exactly onto that trail, which is great for coming up with more accurate
mileage estimations and more accurate elevation gain estimations. So you can very roughly draw a log a series of trails and then it will put you exactly on that trail.
Wow, that's cool. Okay, Rad. Thanks. That's cool. I think.
Yeah, I look forward to playing around with this more. That's awesome. Can I can I like ask you totally change topics and ask you one other question about your life.
You kite-skied across Greenland, dude. What's that about?
Yeah, so I started kite-skiing probably 15 years ago and had the dream of going to Greenland for a long time. It's kind of this this dream destination for kiting.
And for a long time, like didn't didn't think it was going to happen.
My kite skills weren't there. The I didn't have the time didn't have the money. And then we sold guy GPS and then all of a sudden two of those things were not as much of a problem.
Had a little bit more time had a little bit more money.
And I was kind of at the point to with kiting where I was kiting maybe five days a year. I I would say I had just enough skills to get myself hurt.
And then all of a sudden had some more time and decided to invest in taking some lessons in kiting. So I went up to I went to Alaska and went to a week long snow kite camp and got the skills or started to get the skills that I needed to actually be able to make the kiting part of going to Greenland reasonable.
And then after a week in Alaska was like, OK, like, actually want to make this happen and started to do some more research. And the logistics were like the single hardest part. And I had looked into guided trips because I couldn't even figure out like, how do you even do the logistics?
And there was had been one person offering guided trips, but they were exorbitantly expensive. And then on my way home from Alaska, I was like in the Anchorage airport reading about Greenland again and found a new company out in Norway offering guided trips for like a quarter of the price I had seen before.
Wow.
And then some funny things were happening with the exchange rate between the US dollar and the Norwegian Kroner that like made the trip even more affordable. And then, yeah, 20, let's say I guess it was 2022, I went to Greenland and spent, we're up on the on the ice for 15 days and then a couple days of travel, either side of that getting onto and off the ice.
So we did a north south north crossing of about the middle third of Greenland.
The route was kind of dictated by where the logistics were cheap. The southern end and the northern end both start to involve helicopters. Where if you do that middle third, it's a pickup truck at the start and the dog sled at the end.
No way.
So we did about 1200 miles of travel with kites over 14 days.
What?
Whoa.
Wait.
Wait, how fast are you going?
Cruising is about 12 to 15 miles an hour.
Okay.
Yeah, kiting is, kiting kind of opens up all these possibilities in backcountry travel. Like the speeds and distances you can cover just get kind of nuts. Like I had a day in Alaska last spring. I did 27,000 feet of vertical kiting.
That was not even a long day. You know, I think I started kiting at 9am that day and was done at three or four.
Holy shit.
The kites really kind of open up another world for what's possible with non motorized travel.
And what's it like? I'm assuming you're carrying a sled to bring your food and sleeping bag and tent stove and stuff like that.
Yeah. So Greenland, we had two sleds each. Nothing fancy either. Just like kind of cheap plastic sleds. Two sleds each last side by side so they don't flip over and then on a spare sled.
And started out with probably around 150, 170 pounds of stuff each.
Oh, dude.
Food and fuel for four weeks.
Wow.
Spare ski, spare kites.
Yeah.
Wait, split between how many people?
Three people.
Okay, so roughly 55 pounds of gear each.
No, no. Like 150 pounds of gear each.
Dude.
Wait, how do you kite with that?
We started with 25 liters of white gas.
Oh my god.
Dude.
That's like half a sled of white gas.
Which basically gas equals life on an expedition.
Yeah.
Okay, so wait, are you like then you're kiting and you're like attached to the kite, but then how are you attached? How are the sleds attached to you?
So the kite, kites attached to a harness, sleds attached to the harness, and you're kind of just in the middle driving.
Okay.
So the kiting part in Greenland is not, I thought it was going to be difficult and the kiting part was not the hard part.
Once we got up onto the ice sheet, it was, it was flat.
It was not smooth.
Tons of Sestrugi, big wind texture in the snow.
Like I'm definitely a year closer to needing new knees after that trip.
Did it shake your belly?
Yeah, I actually, I did crack a tooth on that trip.
Whoa.
But the, the actual like travel with the kites was pretty straightforward.
You know, you, the sleds behind you, the wind is super steady in Greenland.
It's kind of some of the steadiest wind in the world.
So you get the kite up in the air and you hold your hand in one place holding the bar.
And sometimes it's cruising for an hour, just listening to music on the headphones and kiting in a straight line.
Like we kind of straight north for 900 miles.
Wow.
That's really surprising to hear that the wind is like that because we're in Iceland, Jeff and I were nice in the spring.
And I swear to God, the wind would be crazy every direction, every other hour.
Oh yeah.
It's nothing like the wind in Iceland.
It's the ice sheet is so big that it's a, it's catabatic winds coming down off the ice sheets.
So the high point of the ice sheet is a little over 10,000 feet and it's that big for a huge area.
And we were traveling at about 9,000 feet high enough to avoid fracture zones.
So there wasn't significant crevasse risk.
Wow.
But not as low as we could be because it just gets colder and colder and the wind is less reliable as you get higher.
But it's some of the steadiest wind in the world.
Like there were no gusts.
There were no direction changes.
Really?
Some of the fastest changes in wind speed we saw were like maybe a mile or two, maybe two or three miles an hour building or dropping.
Wow.
That sounds perfect.
Yeah.
What time of year was this?
April.
Okay.
Yeah.
So the permitting to go up on the ice sheet is like pretty strict.
Yeah.
Like they won't let you on the ice sheet before April 15th.
So we were, I think we got on the ice on the 19th and like the, yeah, they, you know, they, they really want to know that you know what you're doing and you're required to have rescue insurance.
And there is only one company that is authorized to sell rescue insurance for the Greenland ice sheet.
And it was the single biggest expense for the trip with search and rescue insurance.
Totally makes sense.
Because there's, you know, we had on a map like the zones that were within a single helicopter flight from a, from a heli base.
And then a big zone in the middle that's like, if you screw up here.
Yeah.
And then they fly out and drop fuel drums and then they fly back to base and then they refuel and then come back to the fuel drums and refuel and like all of a sudden those, the rescue logistics there are just astronomically expensive.
Yeah.
So that was the single biggest expense of the trip was just paying for that rescue insurance.
Damn.
That's Jeff quick.
Ask some more risk questions.
My mind is blown.
I don't even know what else to ask in this scenario.
I just, I just love hearing about stuff that I have no idea about and just couldn't even begin to imagine all the logistics and considerations involved.
And I would have thought navigating through crevasses with a huge sled would be incredibly dangerous.
And you're like, no, it's pretty smooth most of the way.
It's just a big ice cap.
And yeah, we never actually roped up.
Wow.
Yeah.
I mean, how would you rope up on kites?
Oh my God.
Well, while kiting, there's no roping up, but we started, we started out with two days of walking up on up through a glacier to get onto the actual ice sheet proper.
Yeah.
But the, and it was the glacier was really interesting.
I've not seen a glacier form like that before.
It was almost like sand dunes.
Really?
It was two days of walking sand dunes, but bare blue ice.
It was two days of walking with crampons, pulling sleds.
Did you show your loads?
Yeah.
Occasionally we'd actually have to like go one sled at a time.
Most of the time it was pull the sleds a hundred yards, unhook, walk and find the route for the next hundred yards and repeat.
We covered 10 miles in two days.
Oh.
Were them as prepared for what the first couple of days were going to be like?
I was pretty worried at the end of those first two days.
I was like, this is really hard.
I don't know that I can do this.
It was some of like some of the hardest physical stuff in the outdoors I've ever done like, you know, pulling because our weight loads were not optimized for that.
Like we went heavy optimized for the rest of the trip.
Yeah.
Knowing that like, yeah, we're going to suffer for, well, we had five days in the schedule for getting through that ice.
And we got, luckily we got through it in two, but it was brutal.
And it was so hot too, even though temperatures were well below freezing, just being on bare ice, the salt, the UV was so intense.
Yeah.
Yeah, I bet.
And you're pulling massive loads.
So you must have been burning six, seven thousand calories a day.
Oh, yeah.
Did you get super skinny on this trip?
I lost a little bit of weight, not too much though.
I, I, both of the other guys I was with probably had 40 or 50 pounds on me.
And I probably ate almost twice as much food as they did every day.
They were both Norwegians and they were just laughing a lot of the time at how much food I would eat.
Oh my gosh.
Were these guys guides or, or homies like?
One Norwegian guide and one clon, one other client on the trip.
Okay.
So when you were going, you said, when you're just talking about the hellies, what were, when you started, were you the closest to kind of civilization?
And then you got getting further and further away as you went or how did that work?
Yeah.
So we started starting out was like a 30 mile ride in a pickup truck to the edge of the ice and skiing up from there.
And then after a couple of days kind of out of that helicopter zone for five or 600 miles and then eventually towards the end, you get back towards another town.
Wow.
Damn.
Is it your description of pulling sleds is giving me PTSD flashbacks of skiing Denali and towing sleds.
Oh my God.
I know technically we're moving.
It just doesn't feel like it.
So one of the interesting risk management things with the kiting up there is the travel speed is so fast.
Yeah.
That, you know, we're cruising at 15 miles an hour, sometimes faster than that.
Wow.
So if someone stops for five minutes, they're a long ways away.
Yeah.
And they're a long ways away upwind.
So getting back to them is going to take significantly longer than it took to cover that distance downwind.
Oh, shit.
Wait, so do you guys have like radios in your ear or how are you talking to each other?
We did not have radios.
It was, you know, visibility is real big.
And then the kites also are kites are in Greenland or 50 meter lines.
So you've got a balloon up in the air way above you.
You can see people from a long ways, unless it's foggy and then you can't.
But, you know, you can easily see people from a couple of miles away.
So lots of hand signals to check in and then everyone carrying an in reach.
So that's kind of the plan B if something happens and don't know where people are is like everyone stops and you get out the in reach and figure out what's going on and come up with a plan to regroup.
Wow.
Wait, wait, you just talked about if it's foggy.
So, okay, I've only been on one massive glacier and it was very disorienting, disorientating.
I don't know.
But what so when you're going 15 miles an hour, are there days where it's flat light or you just like what's that like?
Yeah, so one of I think it was our second day of kiting.
We got up and it was full on pea soup fog like flat ground, flat light, half a mile of visibility through the fog, fully disorienting conditions that I had actually thought we wouldn't kite in.
Right.
They're conditions that like in Montana or Alaska, I wouldn't even think of kiting in because I would like I've skied off a couple of cornices kiting.
Yeah.
I just crashed my kite into the side of a mountain that I couldn't see.
And I figured there was no way we could travel in it.
And that was one of the biggest things our guide did was like convince me that like, nope, we can travel in this terrain in this because the terrain is flat and smooth and there are no real objective hazards here.
Wow.
So it's sorry.
So it's really flat enough.
It's not even like little bumpy.
It's flat enough that you could just cruise at that speed in flat light.
Yeah.
You know, it's a Struge so you're kind of always ready to hit bumps.
But yeah, really flat.
Like there is nothing to fall off of.
But whoa, super mentally taxing in the flat light days, constantly like working to keep ground orientation.
Like focusing focusing on my ski tips to know where the ground is and keep my head around what level is because the kite also adds.
It adds this additional element of force where you have force pulling you upwards that can get confusing, especially on the flat ground.
It doesn't.
But like so I got caught in in an avalanche kiting two years ago.
And small slide, but it was super confusing partially because of the force of the kite because I was going uphill kiting.
And there was like this two seconds that it felt like a minute where I could not figure out what was going on.
It was like I should be going uphill.
I feel like I'm almost not moving what is going on here.
Like the forces don't make sense.
And then I look at the snow and see cracks everywhere.
It was like, oh, okay, like now this makes now I understand why these forces don't make sense.
Like I'm actually staying in place on moving debris or maybe even moving downhill.
I'm not my speed over the snow from the kite.
Like, yeah, the forces get confusing.
Did you ever get like vertigo?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, it's like it's concentrating hard to avoid getting vertigo.
How do you do that?
What do you concentrate on?
It's a lot of, you know, sometimes taking turns being in front.
So you have someone ski tracks to look at.
Because having those ski tracks that's a linear feature will really help to avoid that.
Like, you know, kiting in Montana.
Absolutely desperate to, oh, if you've got two people ahead of you, it feels like you're on vacation on the glacier all of a sudden.
Oh, yeah.
The kiting is interesting.
Sometimes in Greenland we had times where everyone is moving the same speed and the same direction.
And you look at other people and it seems like you're not moving because there's no, there's no change in angle.
There's no visual change between yourself and the other people.
Well, that's how creepy.
But then you look at the snow and the snow is moving by at 15 miles an hour.
What?
All right.
Here's a question I've got.
I was listening to a really interesting podcast on Hidden Brain last night.
And, or sorry, Radio Lab and they were talking about psychedelics and the ways it rewires your brain.
And they said there's this window of learning post psychedelic experience and it varies with the compound.
And sometimes that window for rewiring your brain is a couple days.
And for other compounds, it's a couple weeks.
This sounds like you, this was a totally foreign experience like being on another planet where like the laws of physics are being rewritten or how you perceive them.
So did you find that your brain was different afterwards?
Like when I have a really great trip in the mountains, there'll be like a vacation half life where I can go back to that feeling and sensation and perception.
Wait, which kind of trip you're talking about psychedelics and.
Just, you know, being in the mountains, like a high gosh, I've been like that, where you think back to that beautiful place and the vacation washes over you and you can feel it and touch it and taste it.
So I'm wondering, did this change the way you perceive the world or interacted with the natural world?
And, you know, in what ways, maybe this spilled over into your work or your relationships?
I'm super curious because this just sounds like such a like, like no one on the planet has had this experience or very, very.
Yeah, it was tons of time to think the middle of the trip.
The days kind of all just started to blend together because it was, I mean, almost just like a flow state for huge extended periods of time because the technical difficulty is not that hard.
Like technical difficulty was well within my scope.
But you do still have to, you know, you got to pay attention like it's like minus 20 minus 30, you know, the kind of the kind of conditions where you have to pay attention because you really could die.
Yeah, but tons of time to think and yeah, it was wild how much the days just sort of blended together and maybe more time to think that I've ever had.
Wow. Did your family and friends perceive you as as different when you got back to civilization?
No, no. It was funny too, because it was a trip that we had all been dreaming about for so long.
Like, you know, I think like working towards that trip for like a decade and say with the other client on the trip like Wow.
And even the guide to like he he had been working towards being able to do it for a long time too. So just this elation at the end of like, oh my God, like we did this thing.
Yeah, yeah, like this really worked and it worked. It really came together like we had 21 days or 24 days on our permit maybe and we got it done with over a week to spare.
And like over half our food was left at the end of the trip like things really really came together.
Yeah, damn your buddies needed to eat more like well in April. Hold up Jeff. Just really quick in April. How long are the nights there even?
We saw our last sunset on night three of the trip. Wow.
So we were moving straight north days getting longer and moving straight north. So beginning of the trip it didn't really get dark end of the trip.
The sun is moving in circles around the sky. Oh, wow.
The one of the day is merged together. Our last night of the trip we were camped on the sea ice and had to have someone on polar bear watch.
And I got off my polar bear watch at three in the morning. But it was totally light out and the wind was up.
So I got to go kite on the sea ice around frozen icebergs at three in the morning.
Dude, that is awesome. Did you have a rifle with you?
We carried a 30 out six the entire trip. Yeah.
Wow. So how has this changed the way you do your work having this experience?
It gave me a lot of time to think about what I wanted to work on. And honestly, like a ton of the ideas for what to build for goat maps came out of that trip.
I also had a ton of ideas for like things to build for expedition travel that I would still love to build but there's just not a market for like there's just not enough people go.
Going on huge polar expeditions to ever make a living on make a make a living off those products.
Three people a year. It really opened my eyes to just like what we could do with these kites and the kind of travel that was possible.
Dude, that is so cool.
Hey, shifting gears just a little bit. So you obviously spend a lot of time thinking about how to do risky things the safest way possible.
And you're not just on your first startup. You've done a bunch of startups.
How what intrigued you about aspect Davi and thank you very much for investing in aspect Davi and then thank you for doubling down on your investment.
What was it intrigued you about aspect Davi?
I think my big takeaway from the every one in two courses I took last year the last couple of years is that decision making is still the hard part.
And decision making is not getting any easier. And all of the avalanche accidents that happen still seem to largely be about making decisions is hard.
And there's tons of like great new snow science research and even lots of research on the human factors too.
But like none of it really seems to be doing anything to make that decision making part of things easier.
And I liked your pitch about building something to help make people make decisions, giving people better tools for that.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I'd like to extend invitation we've set our in house aspect Davi team avalanche course and it's two weeks self directed online curriculum and then two days here in Crested butte if you can swing it on December 16 and 17 in person.
And then the two week self directed will have some zoom calls but it'll be a mixture of all the people who work on the app on the dev team as well as trailhead ambassadors and one of our newest ambassadors that we're excited to announce.
Molly Armonino she was number two on the world free ride tour last year she reached out to us to partner on this project.
And then yeah, a bunch of our investors and advisors so if you'd like to do the online part or make it to Crested butte for the field sessions it'll be totally different than anything you've seen before.
I might be able to make that I'll have to see I'm actually in a week and a half or no I'm heading to Ecuador to go do some volcano seeing.
Say what dude we got to have you on again to just talk about all the sweet adventures you're going on.
Fantastic fantastic that's sick.
Jesse where can people find you man.
Instagram threads skier Crocker.
Cool and then goat maps is goat maps.com and go maps on the Apple App Store and goat maps on any social media platform pretty much.
Awesome.
We'll put those links in the description.
Well, if there's anyone out there that wants to try out goat maps it's a subscription app but we do it a discount right now use the use the offer code launch when you go to when you go to try it out.
And you can get a think a 30% discount.
And we've got a great pro deal program to like if you are a working ski guide or working ski patroller.
Send me an email Jesse at goat maps.com and our our pro deal at least for the first year is free.
So hit me up.
I got to say Jesse I really appreciate the double meaning for goat maps.
Yeah.
I like the idea of the mountain goat like I love ibacks or Steinbach or bouquet and in Europe you know the giant horns and just how adept they are at traveling through the mountains.
But I love that you're like I've been working on this for I mean well over a decade in this space and you're like we're going to make the greatest of all time.
That's pretty fun.
Yeah.
Nailed it.
Well, Jesse thanks so much for coming on.
It was awesome talking to you man.
You got some great stories and cool insights and I would definitely like to talk to you again sometime soon.
So if you're available maybe you can come back.
Cool.
Thanks for having me.
Cool.
All right.
Cheers Jesse.
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