Not too many generations ago, our ancestors hardly distinguished between “indoors” and “outdoors.” What we now think of as roughing it and camping were just a part of everyday life. People cooked over open fires, pooped on the ground, ran from animals bigger than they were, killed and ate animals smaller than they were, and walked around in the woods while doing what we would now call “hiking.”
Nowadays, most of us (okay, pretty much all of us) are disconnected from the outdoors, spending most of our days looking at glowing screens and not having to worry about staying clean and dry or fed. We only occasionally visit wild places, and some of us never see them at all. But do we, as a species, have some sort of submerged memory about those days of life in the outdoors and somehow miss them? There’s a sort of inherent, ineffable satisfaction we get from staring at the red-hot embers of a campfire, sleeping under the stars, or living for three or four days while carrying everything we need on our backs—even though we know we don’t need to do these things anymore given that we have gas furnaces, comfortable beds, and fully stocked pantries and nearby grocery stores at home.
So we’re lucky in that we get to choose to go on adventures in the outdoors as a respite from our comfortable lives, and to push ourselves to climb mountains, ride waves, and ski deep snow on steep slopes. But it can be tough to know where to start—what kinds of activities you might be good at, what will challenge you most, mountains versus ocean, what kind of gear you need, and where you should go. It can be daunting, scary, and sometimes awkward as we fumble our way through a new endeavor (carving a turn on a snowboard is in no one’s DNA, for example).
This book represents more than a dozen years of my personal fumbling through all the activities in it, learning the hard way so you don’t have to. I’ve spent my vacations and weekends climbing sheer rock faces, getting altitude sickness, paddling down rivers, pedaling across the United States, shivering in a sleeping bag, getting rained on, snowed on, and sunburned, swinging ice tools into frozen waterfalls, warming frozen fingers and toes, gaining experience but not necessarily skill, and wondering what the point of it all was more than once. The point of it is, of course, the accomplishment you feel from the doing rather than the watching, and the experience and joy you gain once you leave the comfy confines of your home.
The point of it is also this book, which I hope will help you dream up some adventures of your own, have some basic but essential knowledge that will help you be a little more confident and comfortable when you venture out—and keep you healthy, alive, and thriving through all of it.