Aloha, Wanderers!
I want to tell you about our Sauvage Adventure logo. The name is pretty clear: the French word and its English lookalike both mean wild. But not everyone knows who the character on the logo is. So, who is he?
Meet the Mountain Man
Meet the Mountain Man, friends. Mountain men were the real explorers of the Wild West. They’re less famous in pop culture than cowboys, but they were the first settlers in places where everyone else was afraid to venture. Mountain men lived on the wild frontier, making a living from hunting and the fur trade.
When the fur trade declined, many returned to a civilised life, but some stayed out in the mountains and forests. They hired themselves out as guides for trading caravans and armed expeditions. The most famous mountain man in modern pop culture is Hugh Glass, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant.
Why Wild Jack Looks the Way He Does
Mountain men often lived among Native Americans, learning not only survival skills from them, but also adopting elements of their clothing and adornments. To other settlers, this gave them a wild-looking but fascinating appearance: men from the wilderness and mountains of the West.
Our Mountain Man, the one on the logo, let’s call him Wild Jack 😜🤘🏼 , has a beard because, as Oleg Kuvaev wrote (about Chukotka this time), “this is a land of men who wear beards for a reason, not because fashion tells them to.” On his head he wears a hood made from the head of a puma, a mountain lion: a symbol of strength and courage. The hood is decorated with eagle feathers, a symbol of freedom and taking flight towards your dream.
A Tough Exterior, a Tender Soul
To me, the Mountain Man is a romanticised image of a true adventurer. Someone who isn’t afraid of the hardships and dangers of a wandering life in the wilderness and mountains, who can survive in the toughest conditions, yet behind that rugged, tough exterior still finds pure joy in the rays of dawn, wildflowers, frost on the grass, singing birds, the warmth of a campfire, snow-covered peaks glowing gold at sunset and a rainbow in the sky.
He’s a man who smells of campfire smoke, with a weather-beaten face and roughened skin, but a heart and soul that are tender and deeply sensitive to the beauty of the world around him.
The Spirit of Freedom and a Love for Life
Yes, plenty of real-life mountain men weren’t the romantics they are in books and in my imagination. But you could say the same about any romanticised figure in adventure literature, from pirates (Captain Blood, a childhood favourite) and musketeers to Kuvaev’s geologists, Jack London’s Alaskan gold prospectors or African hunters like Allan Quatermain (another childhood favourite).
But this is an image meant to inspire, and what matters is what we put into it 😉.
So into our Mountain Man, Wild Jack, I put the spirit of a true adventurer, the spirit of freedom, and the spirit of love and passion for life!
