Thompson: Horses. In this segment of the expedition horses were going to be used for four days, and the primary things that drove my selection were weight and accessibility. If you’re high on a pass in a narrow area, you can’t just jump off your horse and grab something you forgot; it really needs to be on your person.

I had a battery-operated DAT [digital audiotape] recorder and a microphone, and they were linked together. I have a sling I’ve devised that works with a large fishing vest. The sling attaches all that equipment to my body and allows it to go underneath rain gear.

MH: What surprised you on Y2Y?

Thompson: Everything surprised me. On day one the thing that surprised me the most was the warm weather. It was, for that part of Canada, incredibly warm. Then we were moving up to about 2,000 feet [600 meters], and the next thing you know I thought I was in the rain forest—no rain, just mist. Then came cold rain. It quickly changed to hail, and then snow—all in less than 30 minutes.

MH: How would you describe your role on the team?

Thompson: My primary job is to gather sound, to do technically correct recordings. My secondary responsibility is to introduce the concept of perspective. We’re always thinking about our listening audience: What would they be hearing if they were on the expedition? Where are they standing in the group, and what are they observing? And so I not only collect the focus, but I also collect the surrounding sounds from multiple perspectives, so we have options about how we “place” our audience in the expedition.

MH: How do you decide what to record?

Thompson: It’s a process of paying attention to the environment that you’re in. First you’re listening without headphones, but then you have to listen through the microphones, because they hear quite differently. Our brains tend to be able to ignore background noise. We may have a stream that’s quite loud over here, but we can focus on that bird over there. Our microphones can’t do that.

I might record a little bit of that stream, then some horse clip-clops, then a bit of that bird over there. When we get into the studio, that allows me to slowly transition my listener from a stream that we might have just crossed to horses to a bird in a quiet meadow where we’re going to do our first interview.

MH: If you’re listening for the sound of, say, a trout flapping in a stream, do you risk missing the overall sound of the place?

Thompson: You don’t do this oblivious of your environment at all. In fact, you’re very conscious of everything that’s around you. Finding focus points are part of a production process that you’ve been trained to do over a number of years. I do hear the overall—in fact, I’m often quite taken by it.

In one instance, in Banff, we were crossing the Dormer Pass, which is about 8,000 feet [2,400 meters] up. We were on the side of a glacial mountain rift made of a stone-slate type of material. It was a very steep mountainside and a very narrow trail that was only slightly flattened, and tipping towards a sheer drop. Well, the result was that I wasn’t running tape; I was really worried about whether my horse was going to fall over the side. I had to quickly refocus myself and get that tape.

In fact, I didn’t get enough of it, so the next time we hit a bed of the same type of slate, I got off of my horse and taped the other horses passing. Then I rode my horse across and taped the scene from the other direction. So I made sure that whatever I missed on the Dormer Pass was covered when we went back to the studio.

MH: What are some of the sounds you’re most proud of capturing?