(bright music) - [Announcer] On this episode of "Postcards".

- Photography and videography has just opened so many new doors for me.

I remind myself every single year.

I'm like you, you get to do this thing and you get to experience these things and not many other people get to do.

- Okay.

Great.

I love dog sledding.

I love the challenge of accomplishing a goal with a team of dogs.

(gentle bright upbeat music) - [Announcer] "Postcards" is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, Mark and Margaret Yeakel Jolene on behalf of Shalom Hill Farms, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Wyndham, Minnesota.

On the web at shalomhillfarm.org.

Alexandria, Minnesota, a year-round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information at explorealex.com.

A better future starts now.

West Central Initiative empowers communities with resources, funding and support for a thriving region.

More at wcif.org.

(gentle calming music) - The spirit that I'm trying to capture in any of my work, that heartiness, that grit, whether it's Minnesotans or otherwise.

I think Minnesotans have a lot of it, so I like to capture that with local people and the local stories and the local landscape that we have here, but also elsewhere around the world.

My name is Ryan Rumpca.

I'm a photographer, filmmaker in the area.

I take pictures of landscapes, outdoor lifestyle.

Dog sledding is something that I gravitate towards.

I shoot a lot of surfing, getting more and more into sailing.

Plenty of the shipping scene up here.

I'm looking at the things around me from a story lens and the process of seeing things in a different perspective and a different light, I think adds to my perspective on life and eventually the stories that I want to tell.

I had some foundational memories up at a family cabin in Canada.

I'd go up in the summers for the weekends and we would load up a little paddle boat with all of our fishing gear and all of the food, and we'd just go disappear in the woods for a day or two at a time.

And that really set the tone for my love of the outdoors.

If I had two weeks to spare and I had the option to go play in the mountains or go sit on the beach, I would probably choose the mountains.

I would definitely choose the mountains (laughs) even if it's cold.

I've been in Duluth for about seven and a half years now.

When I graduated from school, I was looking for a place that had a good balance between outdoor activities, outdoor adventure, with also a good community and a big enough community that you can choose to go grab a bite to eat on like a random Wednesday just as easily as you can go disappear in the woods on a Wednesday afternoon.

And I feel like Duluth is that perfect balance of both.

This is one of my favorite spots and it's so close.

I like the quiet of it.

When you get a bunch of snowfall, it dampens all the sounds.

So you can be outside in like the middle of the city even, and it's just quiet and peaceful.

You don't hear the traffic and that only compounds the farther you get out of town.

So you go into the middle of the woods and it's fresh snowfall, it's even quieter.

Now I get to look like a true nerd.

A little controller.

I go play video games in the sky (laughs).

If you guys can be my visual observers, which means try to keep eyes on the drone at all times, and if a plane is coming, let me know.

(drone revs) These are super fun and I love flying 'em.

They're great, but at the end of the day, I see these as tools.

I can go out and fly 'em and have a fun time, just whip around and exploring new things, but the main thing is to enhance my cinematography and my filmmaking.

Usually the saying goes, if you're not crashing, you're not flying hard enough (laughs) and there's a lot of merit to that.

It definitely rings true.

So, I knew that if I wanted to fly them, I probably needed to know how to fix them.

My background was in engineering, so I'm already a little bit of a nerd.

So went perfectly hand in hand with wanting to build these things and learned kind of how it works and all the intricacies and the problem-solving behind it, as well as getting the benefit of actually going out and using this drone as a tool to enhance my filmmaking abilities.

(drone revs) I mean, they are pretty fun (laughs).

They're super fun.

Yeah.

(gentle music) I was the on-trail videographer for the Iditarod Insiders back in 2024, following the sled dog teams throughout the entire 1,000-mile journey, all the way from Anchorage, Alaska, to Nome, Alaska.

There was points in the race where we spent two days out on the trail, rarely seeing anybody, and we're 300 miles from the nearest village or town or road system.

I had known about it from when I was a child and then getting more and more into the sled dog marathons in the upper Minnesota area.

It was definitely on my radar and I was like, gosh, it would always be really cool to do that and to photograph it or film it.

It's exactly what I am drawn to with cold, dog sled, grit, something that's hard, something that you can get a lot of fulfillment from.

And it was this whole kind of culmination of all the things that are really appealing to me.

It's a once in a lifetime opportunity.

I made my first film a couple years ago.

It's about a mother taking her daughters into the Boundary Waters and teaching them life and wilderness skills through this trip via dog sled.

And they learn a lot about each other along the way, and it's kind of telling their story of how they interact with each other and how they grow as a family together.

And I thought it would be an interesting way to tell the story of this unique perspective, not only from winter in the Boundary Waters because it's very popular in the summer, but not quite as much in the winter, and there's still a ton of beauty in the winter that most people don't know about.

And then, also the dog sledding.

It's a very unique thing to this region of Minnesota and this region of the lower 48th.

So, kind of partnering those two together seemed like a fun story to tell in a unique way that most people might not see on a day-to-day basis.

(gentle music) I wanted to get this tight, blocked-off shot of Annie as she's kind of holding onto the sled, and our director of photography did a really good job of getting multiple angles of that.

But what this came down to was our DP sitting in the sled with a full cine rig slung over his shoulder, bouncing around and getting jostled as the dog team moved its way through the trail.

We're all pretty happy with how they turned out.

Puts a good punctuation on the film.

The people that I ended up gravitating towards are those people that have that extra urge to go do things that are hard.

I know that the people that are doing those actions, that do take that extra step of work, they want to be doing it and they have a lot of passion for it, and I like to gravitate to those type of people.

So, my next project was about a sailing expedition in Svalbard.

Svalbard is a island archipelago way up in the Arctic.

It's 600 miles-ish north of Norway and Tromso.

And I actually met the captain of a sailboat when I was making the first film, and he's like, "Hey, you should come to Svalbard and come sailing with me."

And I'm like, that sounds pretty wild.

We actually ended up making the film about him and his dad.

The story tells why he thinks that we still should have a continued sense of adventure even when there's things that are very accessible in this day and age.

We spent 10 days on a 52-foot aluminum hull sailboat sailing up the western coast of Svalbard.

We ended up covering about 400 miles total to some of the most farther north land masses in the entire world.

(gentle music) We were very fortunate that when we were in Svalbard, we were way in the Northwestern tip and we were tracking down what we thought were polar bear, and we ended up turning a corner and sure enough, we had a mother and her two cubs, and we were able to observe this family for probably about two and a half hours.

(gentle music) Photography and videography has just opened so many new doors for me in my life that I would never have thought that I had the opportunity if I wouldn't have gotten into it.

I remind myself every single year, I'm like, you get to do this thing and you get to experience these things and not many other people get to do.

And a lot of it is just because of this catalyst that is a camera and it opens up so many doors, especially if you put a lot of time and energy and emotion into the things that you're creating.

That's what I want to continue to do.

That's what I'm drawn to, that's what I'm intrigued by and fulfilled by.

I wanna tell more stories, especially about the local people and the local community and the local landscapes as well as venture out and do things elsewhere.

Find that cool little unique story in the odd area of the world.

I'm still drawn to those things just as much as I'm drawn to them locally.

So, trying to find those unique perspectives on life and on the world.

(gentle inspiring music) (bright music) My name's Ryan Rumpca.

I'm the director of "A line in the Snow", which is a short documentary about a winter dog sledding trip into the Boundary Waters.

It follows a mother, Annie Aggens, who is a polar explorer, taking her two daughters into the Boundary Waters and teaching them life and wilderness skills along the way.

(dogs panting) (gentle bright music) - Why do I go back to the Boundary Waters?

Because there will never be a time when I do not learn something new.

I will always experience new things and I will always see new things.

I will always be amazed by the landscape around me and the waters around me.

(bright music) (dogs howling) You gotta do it a little bit tighter.

Just really remember.

So you gotta be in charge.

Actually, this is on backwards.

- Yeah.

- [Annie] A lead dog has a lot of responsibility and is really important to a successful dog team.

Okay, so now you can hold onto him here.

A lead dog is choosing the direction and it's kind of leading the way for the path.

There you go, good job you guys.

And so as a parent, yeah, I am definitely that way with my kids.

Okay.

- Wait.

- [Annie] Okay.

Great.

I love dog sledding.

I love the challenge of accomplishing a goal with a team of dogs.

Whether you're working with people or whether you're working with dogs, they're a part of your team.

Working with dog teams is really special.

- Paw.

- [Annie] You don't always have the language to communicate with them.

(dog howls) (dogs panting) (gentle music) I have a daughter who's Lola Ray.

She's 13.

Lola loves wilderness travel.

She has done a lot of canoeing.

Spent some time, quite a bit of time in the Boundary Waters.

- Piper, go over there.

Go over there.

- [Annie] And I have a daughter named Piper, Piper Hern is her middle name.

She's 11 and she's in sixth grade, and she has also spent quite a bit of time camping and experiencing wild places.

♪ I got the eye of the tiger ♪ The fire ♪ Dancing through the fire ♪ 'Cause I am a champion (dogs panting) (gentle music) - [Lola] Go, go!

Go!

Oh!

(gentle music) - My great-grandfather, my grandfather, my mother, my father spent time in the Boundary Waters.

I grew up going on canoe trips in the Boundary Waters.

(gentle music) My background is in wilderness adventure and taking people into wilderness areas and on expeditions to far away places.

The North Pole, it's one of the most unusual places on the planet.

There's nowhere else on the world that's like it.

The ice that you're on and that you're skiing across or dog sledding across, it's in constant motion.

Here's another thing that's really important, I think, to wilderness travel, and that is having an expedition mindset.

And that mindset is sort of looking inwards and saying, "How can I absorb this experience?"

And then, looking outwards and saying, "How can I give back to this place?"

(dogs panting) Yeah, I know.

Spending time in nature and spending time in wild places is the best way to grow up, the best gift to have in your back pocket and the best way to learn about yourself and to learn about other people.

What I've gained and what I've seen my daughters also gain from the Boundary Waters is that plan B is oftentimes better than plan A.

And I want them to learn from their own lessons, how strong they are, (dogs howling) how smart they are.

- No!

- No!

Whoa!

- [Annie] And how adaptable they are and how they can go with the flow, and how they can have really hard days that have such good benefits for them.

- It's really wet.

- I think one of the coolest things about taking kids camping, especially in wilderness areas, is that kids see that parents don't have everything in order, that parents aren't the masters of the world.

They're not experts in everything.

And so, for my kids to see me figuring things out helps me to see them start to figure things out.

It's just so beautiful because we're in this place together.

We're in a wild place together.

None of us are in control.

Very dry.

(fire crackling) (gentle joyful music) (people chattering) Look at it and you see where the tail is, so it's gonna go on him like this.

This is gonna be in the back.

So you're gonna go ahead and- - Oh, like this.

- Yeah, you can go ahead and put it on.

A lead dog is choosing the direction and it's listening to the musher, kind of leading the way for the pack.

And so as a parent, yeah, I am definitely that way with my kids.

Good, good.

Right there is good.

Good job.

Good job.

I help my daughters see that I am open to lots of different circumstances, that I give every challenge my greatest effort, that I accept when things aren't gonna turn out the way I hope they would, and that I look for the positive in any situation.

(dogs panting) What keeps driving me back to the Boundary Waters is how incredibly beautiful it is.

- [Piper] Go, go, go, go, go!

- [Annie] And how much solitude I experience there.

For hundreds of years, people have known that this is a incredibly special place, and they have passed this down through the generations of their families and through their friends.

(inspiring music) I want my legacy to be that the places that I love and the places that are biologically so important are protected.

I don't care if anybody knows that I had anything to do with it.

The legacies should be that our planet is cared for.

(inspiring music) (dogs panting) My name is Annie Aggens.

I am from outside of Chicago in Wilmette, Illinois.

Good job!

The best legacy I could have would be that- Nice, Mike!

I share with people how important it is to protect the places that you respect.

(inspiring music) (bright upbeat music) - [Announcer] "Postcards" is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, Mark and Margaret Yeakel Jolene on behalf of Shalom Hill Farms, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Wyndham, Minnesota.

On the web at shalomhillfarm.org.

Alexandria, Minnesota, a year-round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information at explorealex.com.

A better future starts now.

West Central Initiative empowers communities with resources, funding and support for a thriving region.

More at wcif.org.

(bright music)