Two reasons make this topic timely. I just read another adventure history by Samuel E. Morison, called "The Great Explorers." Books like this always rub a modern fellow's nose in his own weakness and non-adventuresomeness. Compare Magellan to a modern traveler -- the latter doesn't even rate as an earthworm!
Secondly I am camped near large groups of RVers hitting the Quartzsite scene in January. It is truly amazing how serious and worried these people are about the microscopic practical details of their rigs. Don't they understand how easy and comfortable it has become?
But maybe there is a good reason for their constant and obsessive worrying: as a culture we are not so many generations removed from when travel was physically difficult and dangerous. So the tradition lives on...
At least one commenter on this blog would argue that we should just put physical adventure aside, as a thing of the past; and that we should move on to social, psychological, or aesthetic adventures. And he is probably correct. But I am not wired up like that; I want to see if physical adventure's lifespan can be extended.
Here are some approaches towards doing just that:
Secondly I am camped near large groups of RVers hitting the Quartzsite scene in January. It is truly amazing how serious and worried these people are about the microscopic practical details of their rigs. Don't they understand how easy and comfortable it has become?
But maybe there is a good reason for their constant and obsessive worrying: as a culture we are not so many generations removed from when travel was physically difficult and dangerous. So the tradition lives on...
At least one commenter on this blog would argue that we should just put physical adventure aside, as a thing of the past; and that we should move on to social, psychological, or aesthetic adventures. And he is probably correct. But I am not wired up like that; I want to see if physical adventure's lifespan can be extended.
Here are some approaches towards doing just that:
- Make one's camping style more backwoodsy. Avoid RV parks or highly improved, regulated settings like state parks, national parks, etc. Downsize to a more basic rig that is capable of doing backcountry camping. Turn 'discomfort' into an advantage, without becoming a pretentious holy-man-in-a-van who sees himself as a modern monk of the desert.
- Stretch your thermal comfort zone: don't always look for afternoon high temperatures of 72 F. For instance, if you lag behind the snowbird flood into Arizona in November, you can enjoy chilly locations to the north. These places will be gloriously uncrowded.
- Spend less time on the couch or at the desk. Satellite television and social media on the internet are just time-wasters. Stop trying to 'look up the answer in the back of the textbook,' by wasting hours and hours on yoob toob, travel blogs, or discussion forums.
- Experiment with more athletic outdoor pursuits. Start off walking, sauntering. Don't visualize it as grim, puritanical "hiking." Focus on tweaking it to make it more interesting. Don't focus on 'how far' and 'how fast.' You can gradually climb up the ladder of enlightenment until you become a mountain biker.
Comments
The Rest of the Story: (Submitted by Jan)
In 1816 there was no Kansas City, Missouri. There was in that vicinity,
however, a small military outpost, a fort on the fringe of what was then
our American frontier, Fort Osage.
Late in the year that outpost was visited by a fellow named Danny.
He was dressed in crude clothing, the kind worn by indigent hunters.
Would the officers at the fort mind putting him up for a while? No,
he was told, they would not mind.
So Danny remained at Fort Osage for two weeks, during which the
soldiers learned THE REST OF THE STORY.
For years Danny had been hearing wonderful stories about the
western wilderness. He had been told about the fabulous lakes
and rivers, of the grand mountains which lay beyond. Danny wanted
to explore them. He wanted to taste the fresh water and savor the
sweet air and see the crests of the Rockies surge upward into a
shimmering blue sky. The men at Fort Osage appreciated Danny's
youthful enthusiasm. Decades before Horace Greeley would
proclaim, "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country."
Danny was determined to go West.
Still, the soldiers wondered if Danny knew what he was getting into.
A half-dozen years before, in 1810, mountain man John Colter had
returned from that beckoning wilderness, the area which now so
intrigued Danny, and he, Colter, had just barely emerged with his life.
After the Blackfoot Indians had captured and almost killed him, the
weather and the wilderness itself had nearly finished him off.
Wouldn't Danny be just as happy back in the Missouri territory, the
soldiers wondered? There was still much hunting and exploring to be
done in those virgin forests, enough excitement to satisfy any eager
adventurer. No, Danny protested, Missouri was getting too crowded,
too civilized. He reckoned he'd be moving on.
And he did.
He left Fort Osage, headed north up the Missouri River, then west on
the Platte River across what is now the state of Nebraska. Danny
followed the Platte all the way to the Rocky Mountains. When he ran
out of river, he traveled overland. He crossed what is now Wyoming,
northwest into Yellowstone country. Danny had plunged almost a
thousand miles into a land about which white men were only
beginning to dream. A rugged, dangerous journey. Threatened by
Indians, he eluded them. Besieged by bitter weather, he survived.
After a season exploring that sometimes perilous, always awesome
wilderness wonderland, Danny returned to the Missouri Territory to
tell what he had seen. In one respect, his trek was unremarkable.
For if anyone should have found his way all that way and back, he
should have. You see, Danny was known as Kentucky's original
settler, a trailblazer with no rival, Colonel Daniel Boone.
And one thing more.
When Daniel Boone visited Fort Osage in 1816 before embarking on
his journey of almost a thousand miles, westward on the Platte River,
to the Rockies, to the Yellowstone, and almost a thousand miles
back -- before he had even begun that journey, he, Daniel Boone,
was eighty-two years old!
Sue
Perhaps I'm stretching a bit too far for comfort.
For discomfort there are few adventures that surpass Teddy Roosevelt's exploration of "The River of Doubt". Asked why he had explored the River, a 1914 trip that nearly cost him his life, he replied: 'I had to go. It was my last chance to be a boy.'
Why is that a ‘higher plane of existence ‘ than using our species oldest form of transportation; two legs?
A frequent cry of a hiker “get off the trail everyone, here comes one of those *@#’. mountain bikers. 😉