Dag Aabye at his bus outside SilverStar in 2018.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED: Brett Popplewell

In the fall of 2015 while working as a journalist for SportsNet Magazine, Brett Popplewell met Dag Aabye.

Popplewell was supposed to be writing a magazine article about the somewhat mythical Vernon resident – an octogenarian who lives off-grid in a hut in the woods and runs ultra-marathons.

He never wrote the magazine piece, but instead spent years getting to know the former ski bum and has now published a book about Aabye's life, Outsider: An Old Man, a Mountain and the Search for a Hidden Past.

"Dag was so different... when I first met Dag I was fascinated by him and by his story," Popplewell said. "I thought he was an inspiring figure for people of all ages but especially people of his generation."

Popplewell spent six years penning his book on Aabye, flying from his home in Ottawa to Vernon to meet the elusive man.

"You have to go to him, you don't email questions to him, you don't call him on the phone," Popplewell said.

Sometimes the journalism professor would fly out to see Aabye without even having a meeting lined up. He got a "modest" advance from his publisher and spent it all on travel.

They met up more than a dozen times as Popplewell tried to capture Aabye's story.

Aabye's story begins in Norway in 1941 before he made his way to Canada some decades later. In the swinging sixties in London, he landed a job as a stunt man appearing in the iconic James Bond movie Goldfinger. He made his way to Whistler and became well-known for skiing off buildings. The Aabye Road run at SilverStar Mountain Resort is named after him.

Somewhere along the way he ended up living in an old school bus outside Vernon.

For the last couple of decades, he's spent the winters in the converted bus and in the summer months retreats to a hut he built deep in the forest.

This 2017 photo shows Dag checking out a Death Race brochure, which contains a picture of him.

(CHARLOTTE HELSTON / iNFOnews.ca)

In 2017, former iNFOnews.ca reporter Charlotte Helston tracked Aabye down and spent hours hiking through the bush with him before writing a story.

The story: The free life — and lives — of Dag Aabye is one of the most read stories iNFOnews.ca has ever published.

READ MORE: The free life — and lives — of Dag Aabye

"That story meant a lot to Dag," Popplewell said. "I have a lot of respect for what Charlotte did."

But neither Helston nor Popplewell were the first journalists to reach out to him.

"We are both members of a long line of people who have sought him out to tell his story," Popplewell said.

Aabye is featured in the 2007 book, White Heat: The Extreme Skiing Life by Wayne Johnson and multiple newspapers and magazines have covered his antics over the years.

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So what makes Aabye so special?

"I think he's an inspiration. I think he's one of our great enigmas," Popplewell said. "You meet a lot of people in this job, but there is no one else that has stuck with me as much as he has."

"His story is much more complicated and much more layered than I think that we have been told and that is what drew me back to him over and over and over again."

Author Brett Popplewell and Dag Aabye

Image Credit: SUBMITTED: Brett Popplewell

In Outsider, Popplewell and Aabye head back to his homeland of Norway to reconnect with his adopted family.

Without giving too much, Popplewell said the process became very personal.

"I was on a journey with this book and it was a large chunk of my life," he said.

Aabye was in his mid-seventies when he last ran the Canadian Death Race, a 125-kilometre marathon in the Rocky Mountains.

He still gets up every morning before the sun comes up and starts running.

"I think that that drives him as much as everything," he said.

The overriding question in all of this is, of course, why?

"Dag does what he does and runs as he does because he needs to in order to live the fullest life," Popplewell said. "He runs to survive."

The author says Aabye told him, "I have no problem with society, I just don't want to be a part of it."

While it's easy to romanticize Aabye's carefree lifestyle, Popplewell says he's not a perfect person.

"This book is not a statue of him, this is a very honest portrayal of Dag... in the fullness as what I understand him."

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For more information and to purchase a copy of Outsider go here.

Dag Aabye signing a copy of the book written about him.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED:Brett Popplewell

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