Earned Not Given | Connor Koch on Risk Tolerance, Resilience, and the Road to Becoming a Hunter

EP 681: Connor Koch

Some episodes just take a minute to get right. We lost the first version of this one — somewhere out there is an SD card with what I’m sure was a hell of a conversation — and you know what? Maybe that was the universe telling us to go again. Because this one hit different.

Connor Koch is one of those guys who just operates on a different level. Arc’teryx ambassador for seven years, a man who’s climbed every 14er in the lower 48, skied big lines from Alaska to the High Sierra, and survived an 1,100-foot avalanche ride in ways that defy explanation. He’s the real deal. And now? He’s deep in the hunting rabbit hole, chasing elk solo through grizzly country with a bow he just learned to shoot, logging 70-plus days in the field and coming home with the kind of stories that remind you why we do all of this.

We cover a lot of ground in this one. Connor grew up in a tiny San Diego-area town, never saw mountains until his Nissan’s transmission blew up somewhere near a place called Zzyzx on the way to Colorado. He pulled into Vail Pass, jumped out into the June air, and knew — at a cellular level, he says — that he’d found home. That moment launched a decade of elite mountain pursuits that would shape everything that came after.

We dig into what it’s like to be a master of one discipline and a beginner in another — and how humbling it is when all your fitness and mental toughness still can’t outwit a wily bull elk. Connor talks about burning a shot opportunity 45 minutes into his first day of bow hunting, running 70+ days solo in the backcountry, getting his camp ripped apart by a known problem grizz the same night he hit a bull high, and why he doesn’t regret any of it. That’s the journey. That’s the process.

But it goes way deeper than hunting. Connor opens up about the avalanche that changed him — a full slope that fractured wall to wall, a 1,100-foot washing machine ride, karate-chopping blocks of wind slab before getting obliterated, and emerging from the toe of the debris alive while his partners tunneled out around him. He talks about what that does to your relationship with risk, with the mountains, and with yourself. And then, the hardest decision of his career: turning down a prepackaged invite to ski 8,000-meter peaks in Pakistan, not because he couldn’t do it, but because he finally understood that some pages in your book are okay to leave blank.

This is a conversation about reinvention, risk tolerance, the courage to step off t