Tyler, with the confidence gained from having rafted a California river once, has taken a seat in the bow.

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In 1995, he and a five-member crew rafted down the Santa Cruz River, in Patagonia, inspired by a journey that Charles Darwin had tried to make in 1834.

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He has rafted rivers in Yakutsk, dodged grizzly bears and black flies around Great Slave Lake (his record for fly bites is two hundred in a single night), and scouted rock formations on the Skeleton Coast, sometimes hiking more than twenty miles a day.

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