What does a 26-year-old German physicist do when he finishes his eduction?
Why buy a horse and ride off into the Canadian wilderness of course.
Or at least you do if you are Frank Kelleter.
The young man was hiking in the remote Spatsizi wilderness a few years ago when he met up with people on horseback and the appeal of horse travel though the wilderness caught his imagination.
"I realized how great it is to travel with horses," he said.
Funnily enough, the people he met on that trip were from Fort St. James, and so a connection was made.
Kelleter - who had never owned a horse in Germany - has been developing an affinity for horseback travel in recent years, spending time on a cattle station in Australia riding horses to work the cows, joining along with a Canadian hunting on horseback, and travelling by horseback through parts of Uruguay.
Now, with the intention of reconnecting with some of the people he had met on his last trip and then purchasing a horse and exploring B.C., the Yukon and possibly Alaska's wild north, he visited Fort St. James.
Through the connections he made here, Kelleter decided to head further north with people he had been introduced to through his Fort St. James friends and begin his trip in the Yukon. His plan is to leave on horseback into the wilderness and spend as many months as his visa allows exploring the backcountry.
How do you go from working on solar power projects as a physicist to traveling on horseback through remote Canadian wilderness for months at a time? You follow your heart of course.
After working and studying as a physicist, Kelleter realized physics was not what he wanted to do with the rest of his life after he completed his studies at the University of Berlin.
"I just did it with my brain, not with my heart," said Kelleter. "Now I just do what I want."