Adventure Ramblings #8
Aquatic humans, Inuit bogeymen, Scottish snowboarding, epic tree climbing, and the case against tourism.
Greetings, friends.
This month’s ramble proceeds by foot, hand, wheel, and plank. It exhibits glacial patience and digital haste. It climbs from seabed to canopy and up into the alpine. Winter gear is advised.
As ever, curated by
. If you’ve spotted something worth sharing, I’d love to hear about it at sam@adventureuncovered.com.And if you enjoy these rambles, perhaps consider recommending them to others who might too?
Alright, let’s ramble!
📂 AU archives
Can video-game adventures replace the real deal?
Apple’s Vision Pro has put pep in the step of people marching towards a screen-mediated future. Early video reviews evoke goggled hikers enjoying alpine vistas augmented with floating TikTok windows. But are there less despairing possibilities? One of my favourite Editions pieces is Natalie Dunning’s essay on finding surprising solace in the virtual landscapes of Red Dead Redemption 2, after a debilitating spinal injury limited her outdoor access.
A view from The Loft in Red Dead Redemption 2. Screenshot from Natalie Dunning.
AU happenings
🚲 Pedal for nature this Earth Day with Ride the Change ‘24
We had a blast delivering Ride the Change in 2021 and 2022. Though we’ve passed on the logistics baton for 2024, we remain great friends with Hermione and the team at Do Nation. We highly recommend joining a fantastic community ride to raise support for nature and climate – not through cash, but through actions. This ride is from London to Brussels, 20th - 23rd April 2024. Intrigued? Learn more here and prepare to saddle up!
Ride the Change, October 2022. Photo: Hannah Bailey
💬 Words
Tourism’s great catch 22
“Again and again, tourism sacralizes the objects of its gaze, then desecrates them with footprints,” writes Henry Wismayer in this provocative Noema longread. The essay charts how capitalism has twisted touristic ideals of democracy, curiosity, and self-improvement into a bonanza of aesthetic performance and commercial pseudo-places. As he scratches around for a non-dystopian future in a global economy so dependent on tourism, Wismayer rightly keeps self-distinguished ‘travellers’ and ‘adventurers’ on the hook. Are we travelling for cultural cache, or meaningful change? The question gets ever harder.
Will humans be aquatic by 2027?
Most marine biodiversity exists in the mesophotic (‘middle light’) zone, where sunlight-dependent corals and algae co-exist with organisms adapted to low light. Field research here is vital, but limited by diving technology. Commercial and research aquanauts (also known as saturation divers, but would your LinkedIn say?) have been able to spend days in rudimentary underwater habitats since the 1960s. But DEEP’s Sentinel system of subsea modules, complete with private sleeping pods, office mezzanines, and kitchens, is breaking new water. For Oceanographic, Nane Steinhoff interviewed DEEP’s Human Diver Performance Lead, the fantastically named Kirk Krack.
Boiling magma, melting glacier, vanishing time
“In the geothermal areas, our earth reveals what it is actually made of. We are standing on a thin crust on a ball of boiling magma floating around a burning sun.” In this Dark Mountain essay, Icelander Andri Snær Magnason follows his intrepid grandparents into two mythic, deep-time landscapes in search of a better grasp of how “nature has left geological time and has started to change during a single human lifespan.”
The Lake District’s new wheel-accessible trails
Limited by the lack of accessible outdoor trails? The Miles Without Stiles project is a collection of around 50 Lake District paths built with wheelchairs and pushchairs in mind. For The Guardian, Ben Aitken and his friend Anthony walked and wheeled one up Orrest Head. “I could offer you something woolly and flora. Something about God and Mother Nature and the Sublime and whatnot,” Anthony reflects at the top. “But really it just feels nice. Really nice. The sort of nice you don’t feel very often.”
When powder skiing and caribou conservation collide
Floating on backcountry powder is the ultimate joy for many mountain folk. But this joy is often predicated on roaring snowmobiles and droning helicopters. For caribou and other wildlife, these sounds become invisible perimeters of fear. Here in British Columbia, biologists say heli-skiing flight data would help refine conservation efforts. But as Ainslie Cruickshank reports for The Narwhal, heli operators are reluctant to share.
The fight over fake snow
Of the European ski industry’s various rearguard actions, artificial snow may be the most desperate: incremental improvements at great environmental cost, dependent on cold temperatures in a disproportionately warming biome. This Re-Action Collective piece by Gavin Fernie-Jones shows how the artificial-snow debate in Savoie, France, is a proxy for the ubiquitous tension between big capital and local community. As gentrification hollows ski towns out, it also dismantles resistance to destructive infrastructure investments. But the local community is organising.
🎥 Films
Stubborn snow riding in the Scottish Highlands
The death of snowsports is really a state of mind. Just ask the Scots. Thrawn – meaning stubborn, in a good way – profiles Scottish professional snowboarder Lesley McKenna, and her community’s philosophy of making the most of what’s available. Directed by AU friend Hannah Bailey, this is a fun caper of meagre lines skied with powerful enthusiasm – and an exhibition of the abundance mindset required for anything approaching a degrowth future.
Chased by the Inuit bogeyman
Santa Claus rewards ‘good’ kids and denies ‘bad’ kids in a merry, magical, sparkle-eyed kind of way. Imagine, instead, if he emerged from the darkness, masked and dressed in animal furs, to chase bad children into the night before beating them (gently) with a stick. Such is the experience of young Inuits in Labrador every January 6th, when the mysterious Nalujuk appears. This immersive short doc by Inuk filmmaker Jennie Williams, inflected with folk horror, is engrossing and a little terrifying.
The evolution of tree climbing
August 2023’s Adventure Ramble featured Climbing Giants, a film by Noah Kane documenting Costa Rica’s emerging tree-climbing scene. This followup revisits that film’s most striking strangler figs, with world-class rock climber Ethan Pringle in tow. As you’re probably aware, Article 7 in the Adventure Uncovered Charter states that any story must include groundbreaking social or environmental change – unless it features tree climbing.
Skiing Japan’s ghostcountry powder
Such is the rate of resort demise that ‘ghost resort’ skiing has become its own genre. This Black Crow Skis short – part of a series exploring abandoned ski areas – follows Celeste Pomerantz, Daisuke Fukasawa, and Akifumi Kitamura making mesmeric turns in tree-lined powder, haunted by spectres of the boom times. At times they seem like ski-borne agents in a futuristic alpine noir.
South Carolina’s mythical woodland skatepark
Nobody deserves legend status more than those dedicating their time, energy, and skills to others without expectation of reciprocation. And skateboarding’s DIY ethos offers fertile soil for growing such people. This film by Brandon Crosser tells the story of Tom Risser, who has spent a decade building a cult woodland skatepark for anybody who wants to skate it.
🔉 Sounds
Dispatch from the great human migration
Journalist Paul Salopek has been walking the ancient route of human migration for a decade. In this interview with Emergence Magazine’s Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, Salopek considers his journey through the lens of time. He reflects on how walking long distances can help us access a ‘sacramental’ sense of time, better notice life’s steady unfolding, and feel the furious speed of modern life. It’s a moving meditation.
Spoken Word & Nature Disco: Vol. 8
Regular Ramblers will know I’m a big fan of Caught by the River’s Spoken Word & Nature Disco mixes. Here is Volume 8, courtesy of The Dubwood Allstars. Spoken word, folkish music, and nature soundscapes woven into a fine soundtrack for walking, sunsetting, pottering, or idling.
📸 Photography
Bird flight as you’ve never seen before
Catalan photographer Xavi Bou’s new collection, Ornithographies, is a mesmeric rendering of birds in flight. Featuring mostly common species close to his Barcelona home, each photograph algorithmically combines hundreds of fast frames into painterly swirls, barbed-wire tangles, musical dances, and tempestuous clouds across clear skies and local landscapes. This interview with Huck Magazine delves into his process.
💡 Opportunities
A spring nature-writing festival
Enjoy nature, books, and country rambles? Head on down to this year’s Shaftesbury Book Festival, from 15th - 17th March, for all three. Enjoy Chris Smaje, Anita Roy, Amy-Jane Beer, Guy Shrubsole (who we interviewed for our Abundance Edition) and others speaking to the theme ‘Reading the Land’. I’ve never been, but Shaftesbury emanates ‘good pub walks’ energy.