• Next, pick a remote patch of Canadian wilderness close to the Arctic Circle; hire a bush pilot to leave you there.
• Spend 6 weeks building a primitive cabin by hand; spend the next 9 months (a full winter included) in that faraway location.

"In the summertime, mosquitoes were extremely bad," Andy says, recalling swarms of insects. "You couldn't eat; or you would eat mosquitoes, basically."

Well, how about that romantic Christmas excursion into town? For the holiday, the couple decided to trek to Yellowknife, civilization's northernmost outpost in the Northwest Territories, a province east of Yukon and north of Alberta.

One problem: Their cabin was roughly 200 miles away, and they miscalculated the mileage. "We thought, 'Oh, walking to Yellowknife, that's easy—5 days,' " Andy says. "It took us 10."

North American Wilderness Viewed by European Eyes

What was the appeal of lonely landscapes to newlyweds from Switzerland?

"Because of the emptiness of the country we always had been very fascinated by Canada," Heidi says. "We read lots of books from all the explorers, all these old guys and trappers who lived in Canada, So we thought, let's try it. We were young."

Andy agrees. "As Europeans, we are quite condensed. We see the scars of civilization from thousands and thousands of years ago,," he says. "It's totally different for you in North America, right? It's still quite pristine here. This we (Europeans) don't know. Even in the Alps, where you think, 'Oh, this is big nature,' go to any summit and you hear the traffic, you hear the noise, you smell civilization.

"But to be totally away from it all, it's such a pure experience." he says. "You feel like the first man on the earth."

A Perfect Pairing

He found a kindred spirit when he met Heidi during a college break on a beach near Barcelona. What was it about her that turned Andy's head?

"Both of us had sleeping bags, because we didn't want to sleep at the hotel," he says.

"We thought that was dumb, to separate ourselves from nature. We would just sleep on the beach."

They married in 1980. That August, when both were 28, they elected to immerse themselves in the Canadian wilderness that had fascinated them both for so long.

They hired a bush pilot to drop them off on the shore of Great Bear Lake, about 200 miles north of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. They camped in a tent while building their cabin/shed/shack out of mostly dead-standing trees.

"We really had to do it very fast," Andy says. "We brought a book, How to Build a Log Cabin, but most of it was completely wrong. Everything went wrong. But what goes wrong is usually what's really interesting. It was a huge adventure."

Andy says he and Heidi were relatively poor. They invested in high-quality down sleeping bags, but made do with Army surplus clothing and wool garments from his grandfather.

"Just old stuff," he says. "We brought a shotgun, too, but it was totally useless."

He estimates he and Heidi brought about 40 percent of their food provisions with them. "But the rest came out of nature," he says. Fish. Ptarmigans. Rock tripe, a lichen, became a dietary staple.

"Old explorers lived from that," Andy says. "You can collect it and make flour for bread out of it. Trappers in Canada know about it. It's very nourishing, but it's a bit gritty because there's some stone in it."

An Experience Not for the Faint of Heart or Weak of Spirit

Challenges were plentiful. A black bear once pillaged their food supply when they inadvertently left a storage sack lying on the ground. Mice were regular pests. Daylight was scarce during the winter months.

One night, before the cabin was finished, a bear approached their tent,

"He came really close, like 3 meters (10 feet)," Andy recalls. "We heard him clawing and snuffing, then we made some noise, and he just ran away. That really taught us: These guys, real bears (those not habituated to humans), are much more afraid of us than we are of them."

His Exped brand is best-known in America for its sleeping mats. I used a down-filled Exped Downmat 9 during a 2010 climb of Mount Rainier, and the 1-pound SynMat UL 7 comes on most of my backpacking trips. (The numbers refer to the mats' thickness in centimeters, by the way.)

In the United Kingdom, it's stuff sacks. In Asia, Exped is thought of as a trekking pole company.

"We are 13 people in Switzerland, 5 in Germany and 5 guys in the United States," he says. "We never want to be large, that's for sure. We learned it's exponentially more difficult to do what we like if we become too big. So we need to stay small and fast. We are a dwarf."

Dealing with too much gear is somewhat antithetical to Brun's aspirations for creating a gear company. A staffer says at Exped's Zurich offices Andy convenes "innovations meetings," not sales meetings. Too much gear could potentially obfuscate more sublime connections people can make when deep in the wilderness.

Minimum Means for the Maximum Experience

"The minimum means, the maximum nature experience," Brun says, summarizing the Exped philosophy. "Try to go light; try to go lesser and lesser. Try to go just with your brain.

"Now, that thinking's counterproductive to sales, right?," Brun says with a laugh.

He is amused by the paradox of his pursuits: producing quality outdoor gear while advocating a minimalist, purist point of view to wilderness travel.

"I think that's the final goal, because you're more exposed to nature. The aim is not to be like on the moon, with all this equipment and stuff. That's (the lesson) we have from Canada. The less you have, the more you are self-sufficient, and you feel more relaxed."

Symbolic of the self-reliance learned in the Canadian wilderness, the Exped logo features a Canadian goose in flight, which Andy and Heidi (shown above in 2011) often saw passing over their cabin.

"There are very few things that are really important," says Andy, who turned 60 on Wednesday. "One is to have a good connection to the people that you know. Two is to experience nature and to be…to be humble.

"Humble, you know? To get down to the real nature of yourself. You can really be absolutely relaxed deep in nature, and that's a major win. We have been out there; 200 miles, nobody around. We were absolutely relaxed. You can only find that, I believe, in nature."

Historical photos courtesy of Exped (thanks to Kaj Bune); contemporary photos of Andy and Heidi Brun by T.D. Wood.