Matt Alley

"It felt like what we're doing, you could die.[...] You could fall into a chasm or there's bobcats or something out here, or you could lose your water bottle and not find your way back, and everything looks the same and wander around and then pass out and die. It was just this element of we're right on the edge of civilization but we're not in civilization, and I've never really been there before and this feels like where I'm supposed to be."

Matt Ally, founder of *Man Tsunami*, an outdoor men’s ministry, describes what it was like to experience a wilderness trip for the first time. Today, Matt creates spaces for men to escape the pressures of daily life, build brotherhood, and experience spiritual growth. These affordable, challenging excursions lead to personal transformation, healing, and reconnection with nature, each other, and God.

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Transcript

Walter Henninger:

I'm Walter Henninger. I am joined here in the world headquarters of the West Side Stories Studio podcast by my wife, Anne Henninger.

Anne Henninger:

Hello.

Walter Henninger:

And our friend, Matt Alley.

Matt Alley:

Hi, there.

Walter Henninger:

Matt, we want to talk about your interest in building relationships with men and giving your life to them in some pretty unique contexts. And before we get there, I would love to hear a little bit about where'd you grow up? How'd you end up here in Atlanta?

Matt Alley:

I have never lived more than 20 miles from where we're sitting right now. I've never spent a night in residence farther than that. I went to school five miles from here and grew up in Roswell, and have lived here my whole life.

Walter Henninger:

Well, I bet you got out when you were young, right, outside. Was that a part of your story growing up?

Matt Alley:

Interestingly enough, people my age were dismissed from the house and sent out to play, and so I spent all day outside, but I did not grow up doing outdoorsman kinds of things. My dad, fantastic dad, but that was not his focus. I didn't do Boy Scouts, I didn't do Cub Scouts, and to my recollection, never slept outside ever until I was 29.

Anne Henninger:

What happened when you were 29?

Matt Alley:

I was an outside salesperson. I had an inside salesman and he was old enough to be my father and lived the life of an adventurer. I was asking him, "Well, what was it like to camp?" He said, "Well, let's go do it." So the next weekend, he showed up with a truck and he said, "All you need is, I don't even know, a pair of boots or something." So he showed up with a pickup truck with a pack already packed for me and everything I needed, and we went up in north Georgia, slept on the ground for one night, and walked, I don't know, eight miles or something one day and eight miles back to the truck the next day, and I was hooked.

It was like, this is my life. This is unbelievable. And we did absolutely nothing memorable. I have no picture in my mind of what that was, but there was no turning back from that point.

Walter Henninger:

So what was it about it?

Matt Alley:

It felt like what we're doing, you could die. There's very, very, very little possibility of that, but you could die. You could fall into a chasm or there's bobcats or something out here, or you could lose your water bottle and not find your way back, and everything looks the same and wander around and then pass out and die. It was just this element of we're right on the edge of civilization but we're not in civilization, and I've never really been there before and this feels like where I'm supposed to be.

Walter Henninger:

So in some ways, the stability that you grew up with, the geographical stability it sounds like gave you more of a, wanderlust may not be the right word, but to go and explore... is far from home.

Matt Alley:

That's a good point.

Anne Henninger:

So you're married to Tiffany. Does she share this love?

Matt Alley:

Tiffany has been on two adventures of that type with me, one in North Georgia right after we got married and then our 20th anniversary, we both picked something to do in the month of September. So I got the first slot and I chose to take us to Calgary, to Waterton Lakes National Park. We trained, we did Stone Mountain and all that, and of course, training, you stuff some towels or a sleeping bag down in your pack and however many you need of weight plates. So she had, I don't know, 10 or 15 pounds of weight plates and I had more, and so we'd been training like this. And so then we go off to Waterton Lakes and midway through the first day, we're climbing up and she's like, "Man, Matt, I just don't remember it being this heavy."

I'm like, "Well, this is actually lighter than when you had all the weights in there, etc." So I took some of her stuff and we kept going, she's got to rest some more, and she was in great shape so I took a little more of her stuff and finished the trip and got back home, and I just throw the pack and for three weeks, it just sits in the corner or something. And so I finally go and I start emptying it out, and I found the 15 pounds of weight plates in the bottom of the backpack.

Anne Henninger:

Wow.

Matt Alley:

And kept that secret, thank you very much, for over 10 years. I told all my friends of course. All my Man Tsunami buddies, that was fodder for every trip. We had that conversation.

Walter Henninger:

I think I heard you say Man Tsunami a minute ago.

Matt Alley:

I did, yeah. That's the official name of what I do. There's nothing formal about it whatsoever. It started out in 1994. The first time I ever went west of Memphis is Yosemite National Park, and we just hiked, we just wore that place out. The expansive views, I couldn't believe it. So I bought all the USGS topographic maps that they sold there, I brought them back and I poured over them and I called my buddy, Michael, who was as inexperienced as me at these things. We'd never hiked more than one day, and this was going to be totally different, for 38 miles, so for five days. So it was unbelievable. Our world's really expanded. It was the greatest thing ever, so I said, "We've got to do this every year." So Man Tsunami, the name, it comes about because Fight Club. If anybody remembers Fight Club, check-

Walter Henninger:

1996 maybe.

Fight Club clip:

His name is Robert Paulson.

Come on guys, please stop.

His name is Robert Paulson.

Walter Henninger:

If you remember the first scene, it's like what they talked about and what they were combating with Fight Club was everything that I was combating in my life and the life of my friends.

Anne Henninger:

How do you find the guys to go with you?

Matt Alley:

Well, it started out with just me and Michael, and then I broadened it to some other friends in 2001 and 2002, and then some other friends. I did a tabulation. I think we've had about 30 guys have done it, but a lot of repeats in that group, and it is very organic. To get an invitation... First of all, if you get an invitation, you are an alumnus. An alumnus always has an open invitation to a subsequent one. And what I would be delighted to do with anybody is to sit down and have a long lunch and talk about how you can have your own Man Tsunami.

Anne Henninger:

I just took a five-mile walk in the western part of North Carolina. That was scary enough for me, but I think about... I'm glad I didn't hear your thoughts about Bobcats and all the things before I went on it. What is, in your definition, one of your scariest trails that you've been on?

Matt Alley:

It was in Southeastern Utah in Canyonlands National Park actually, and we ran out of water. There were supposed to be water in places and there wasn't, and we had no more than probably 36 hours of not having enough water and probably 20 hours of not having any, and that was pretty scary.

Walter Henninger:

So, clearly, the danger, the vague idea that your life may be endangered, that's part of it. You mentioned the expansive vistas, especially out West in the Southwest that you learned to love, but you said you fell in love with it. If you're by yourself, is it different than when you're with other men?

Matt Alley:

Absolutely. I've only done this twice by myself. I don't know, it was missing something. It was definitely missing something, and so the Western trips have always had a minimum of two of us. Five is pushing the limits of what I feel like we can accomplish, the five tenets of Man Tsunami.

Anne Henninger:

What are those tenets?

Matt Alley:

So glad you asked. The first one is we always want to have adventure that scratches the itch that is caused by over-civilization, because men are going to scratch it. They're going to go unhealthy, they're going to go addictive, sinful, all of those things to scratch that itch. And secondly is deep talk, which is really big on... Well, male bonding and deep talk, that's two and three. So the second one really is male bonding. Guys who have any chance of bonding, and everybody doesn't have a chance of bonding with everybody else, but if there's any chance for these two guys to bond and they go on a Man Tsunami, it is a done deal.

I've seen it time and time again where two guys whose only connecting point is that I know each one of them, they meet at the airport, for the first time, lay eyes on each other, and two months after Man Tsunami is over, I discover just by coincidence that they have been texting and they've met for coffee and they've got this whole relationship going on outside of me. It's got nothing to do with me now. So deep talk goes hand in hand with male bonding. We discover that a guy who comes in who's all bound up and he's never talked to a man before, and people are like that, particularly guys my age, less so guys in the late twenties and thirties, but maybe just don't have any outlet for that. And they come in and are quiet the first night, and maybe the second night, they start saying some things. The third night, man, it's all out there.

We do the shoulder seasons, late fall, late winter. It gets dark at 5:30 and you're up till 10:30, so you got five hours of sitting around with a campfire and nothing to do but make the campfire keep burning. Guys, you've got to talk and that's all there is to it and it comes out, but it's completely organic. Absolutely [inaudible 00:11:06]. It's unimaginable that I would say something like, "All right, guys. Tonight, I want everybody to share a time that you felt undervalued by your wife." It's unthinkable. Anybody that's been on a Man Tsunami that's listening to this right now is just laughing their head off, because whatever comes out comes out when it comes out, and it does come out.

And the thing is it's different because you might get that at a coffee with a guy in your small group, but then you don't see each other for the three weeks again and then maybe it's awkward and everything. But see, when it comes out at 10 o'clock at night and then you go to bed and you get up the next morning, I can't tell you the number of times that a second night or a third night campfire, a question began with, "I've been thinking about what you said last night, and..." So it ratchets that conversation forward. It doesn't let it die out, it takes it to the next level very quickly.

So male bonding, deep talk, beautiful scenery, I already spoke to that. We deliver. That's one thing we always deliver on is fantastic scenery that you can only see if your two feet have propelled you to a place that you have to have your house on your back and sleep that night.

Finally, affordability. I've already booked something in Moab for two weeks from now, and I think we're at like 86 bucks, splitting an $86 room.

Walter Henninger:

I think in one of your documents, you described these as sleazy motels. Is that...

Matt Alley:

Sleazy is well said, yeah. Now, we've stayed in some really bad... One of them in Flagstaff was the kind of motel that people lived in, and we looked in and it was so bad that we literally went several blocks to a Walmart or something and we all bought flip-flops because we're not even taking the shower. And we've been in the woods for five days without flip-flops, and they had a grocery bag taped over the smoke detector. Anyway, yeah, we've had some bad ones.

Anne Henninger:

So apart from sleazy motels, how do you take a wide variety of men and help them pass through some limits that might be challenging for them?

Matt Alley:

In 21.1, I had three novices with me, and one of them was 69 years old and had never slept outside. He's very athletically fit, but he had never slept outside at 69, and absolutely ate it up alive once we were doing it. A lot of the times if we're doing four-wheel or off-road driving, that's where people really get their limits tested and pushed, and so I love teaching people to do that. So I might have my own vehicle, either a Land Rover Defender or an old Jeep. If not, I'm friends with a guy named Joe who runs Twisted Jeeps in Moab, Utah, and Moab is ground zero for off-roading in America, and it's unbelievable and it's what's called slick rock trails, so you're going through these old mining...

It's where all of our uranium and plutonium came from for all the years that we were building lots of bombs and I guess also energy plants. So there's all these old trail or roads that were maybe halfway graded 50, 60, 70, 80 years ago, and are now decrepit and falling into disarray, and there's giant rocks everywhere, things that your body is not used to feeling from inside of a vehicle, and your body resists it very strongly when you're in there.

Walter Henninger:

Do you think you're about to flip?

Matt Alley:

It always feels like that, yeah.

Walter Henninger:

I've actually done that before.

Matt Alley:

You have flipped?

Walter Henninger:

Yeah. Well, slowly.

Matt Alley:

They're usually slow.

Walter Henninger:

In an old FJ40 Land Cruiser coming down a trail where the ruts in the trail had eroded so much that they were probably three or four feet deep, and one of the tires tipped down into it and the whole thing-

Matt Alley:

Just kept going?

Walter Henninger:

Kept going over on the hood and the roll bar, but it was fine.

Matt Alley:

Yeah, we've had to roll one over once, but it's just something you do.

Walter Henninger:

So it's clear that this is fascinating, beautiful, adventurous, dangerous, all of those things, but for you, what's the big why?

Matt Alley:

I just still love it. I love it as much as I did in 1994. It scratches that same itch in me. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against men being civilized. I intend to try it at some point, but it's over-civilized that I feel like I can get, and certainly the guys that are doing this, I'm semi retired now but the guys that are doing this that are just nose to the grindstone that don't have the ability to rest that you talked about today or haven't discovered how to do that. Personally, I thrive on that. I love to see guys get a chance to do that, who think that the whole world revolves around their work. And all I mean by that is that that is the world that they feel trapped in or the world they feel that they have to spend their lives on.

A close friend of mine who's been doing this for 20 years invited two of his sons on one about five years ago, and the older son had struggled with addiction. They're in their thirties and had struggled with addiction since he was 12, and had been clean about two years at this point. We flew into Salt Lake, we're driving two different vehicles down to Moab to have dinner and then down to Blanding, Utah, to lunch in the Bears Ears wilderness. It's going to be where the backpacking is. We got to Moab and I was in a vehicle without the father and his two sons, and they pulled in and the oldest son, he's literally been throwing up into a garbage bag non-stop for four hours from Salt Lake. And he's like, "I'm just going to stay out here and sleep."

And so he lies down. We go in and eat and come back out and he's still horrible. And it turns out that that is, in his case, his body's reaction to the toxicity of drugs. This was the tell. This was how his father and his brother discovered that he was surreptitiously using again. So they stayed in the motel in Blanding for four days with no transportation and nothing to do, and when we came out for this trip, dad was mad at son. Son was probably self-loathing over this. Brother who was the planner of the trip, and it was his first one that he planned, younger brother was furious at older brother for ruining his trip, in fact, estranged from him for a period of time.

But what came out of that was older son went into another rehab program. It's been almost five years now. He didn't just quit doing the drugs. He made real his commitment to Jesus, he became involved with a ministry as a foot soldier that does ministry weekly, or for him now, much more than weekly, to homeless people and addicts, and then has risen up through the ranks to where he's a director of that. But he is absolutely passionate about that. He's gotten married, his wife is passionate about it. His brother is leading Man Tsunami 24.1 next week and he is coming on it, so that will be his first one in five years and it's all come back together.

Anne Henninger:

That's beautiful.

Matt Alley:

Yeah, we love that.

Walter Henninger:

And so like the Lord that it would all start with a bust.

Matt Alley:

Yeah, exactly.

Walter Henninger:

And yet-

Matt Alley:

Everybody was mad.

Walter Henninger:

Yeah, that's beautiful.

Anne Henninger:

As specific to the male species as this is, I can't help but think of females need this too. There are ways that there's so much pressure in civilization on us, and there is elements of danger, if you will, that we need to push and become more bold. But I just keep thinking, yeah, we don't need just spas and pedicures or whatever, but there are ways that it's making me sit there and think, I wonder what a female version of this can be like.

Matt Alley:

Well, my daughter, Sierra, and as her name would indicate, she did not grow up with this, but when she was a senior, we had her first one. I busted her out of school on a Thursday afternoon and we went out to Aspen and did the four-pass loop out there. It was a great way to get exposure to the mountains of the high country, and she, as children often do, left me in the dust. So she's done this in Patagonia, in Nepal. She's done the Annapurna Trail, 15 days or whatever in Nepal. She's done it in South Africa, Swaziland, Ireland.

Walter Henninger:

How do you think all of these trips have changed you? How do you show up differently in civilization because of Man Tsunami?

Matt Alley:

I think I'm much more patient and more adaptive to wrenches being thrown into the works. In the American West, there is a way that... I love this place, I love this building. I believe there's a spirit of place and that places have spirit, and good spirit or bad spirit, and this one has a magnificent one, and every church I've ever gone to, I dearly love the spirit of there. And if I take you early in the morning and we hike two and a half miles up from the parking lot up to Delicate Arch in Arches National Park, and as the sun's coming up and before the multitudes of people show up, there's no way you can't believe that the spirit of God is there in a way that he's not confined to there, but he is there, at least for Christians, in ways that are different than the way he is here, the way he is at my work or other places. And so there is an expansive spirituality about the American West that invites us into relationship with God in a different way and different facets than we experience in a sanctuary.

Walter Henninger:

We're all going to get on Travelocity now and plan our next trip. But Matt, thank you. This has been utterly delightful and truly idea-inspiring. My wheels are turning. I love it.

Matt Alley:

Me too.

Anne Henninger:

Yes.

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