Adventure Ramblings, July 2023
A journey through the borderlands where adventure meets social and environmental change
Curated by
, Adventure Ramblings is how Adventure Uncovered shares thought-provoking adventure stories. It follows in the footsteps of the seventeen Editions we published between 2020 and 2023 (the seventeenth is in the works!). You can read more about why we’re transitioning here.If you have something you think we should include, email Sam at sam@adventureuncovered.com for consideration.
Let’s ramble.
AU happenings
Join us in Wales at the first OUTSIDE Adventure & Film Festival
Alongside the good folks at TYF Adventure, we’re stoked to be organising OUTSIDE – a new festival celebrating slow adventure, outdoor films, and nature connection, all outside!
Tickets include:
Your choice of immersive nature adventures, including surfing, coasteering, wild ocean dips, climbing, and mindful coastal walks.
A film evening of inspiring, purpose-driven, nature-connected adventure stories.
A firelit feast of hearty, home-cooked food.
Interactive workshops, talks and discussions exploring environmental activism, ocean stewardship, the circular economy, creative writing, adventure filmmaking, and more.
Camping overnight in the heart of Pembrokeshire Coast National Park.
Stargazing amidst the sounds and smells of the ocean.
Morning yoga with Sophie Jones from The Flying Fit Foodie and Gurpreet Dosanjh from Brixton Yoga.
Shared stories of adventure, connection, and sustainability around the campfire.
Submit a film to the Adventure Uncovered Film Festival 2024
Are you a filmmaker? Do you know any filmmakers? Or have you recently seen an awesome film connecting adventure and the outdoors with social or environmental issues? 2024 AUFF submissions are open until November 30th 2023, with early bird entry rates until September 30th. Get involved with the only adventure film festival dedicated to stories with social and environmental narratives.
Paddling in the wake of the activists who saved Tasmania’s Franklin River
In 1982, a group of pioneering Australian environmentalists dramatically blockaded the proposed site for a hydroelectric dam on Tasmania’s Franklin River. The film Franklin follows Oliver Cassidy, born that year, as he rafts the Franklin to tell the story of those activists, that campaign, his father, and his own role in Australia’s future. We spoke with Cassidy and producer Chris Kamen for our Stewardship Edition.
Words
How old whaling logbooks are helping marine researchers
At the height of the sail-powered whaling industry in the mid 19th century, around 8,000 whalers scoured the high seas every year, keeping detailed log books as they sailed. It was the largest collective survey of the ocean surface in history, unlikely to be repeated. Earth Island Journal reports on how researchers are using these unique records to learn about whale distribution, weather patterns, climate, and more.
The last of the fire watchers
Thousands of active fire lookouts once criss-crossed the USA. Today, drones, satellites, and aircraft have gradually rendered them obsolete; most are now destroyed, abandoned, or repurposed as backcountry shelters. Arguably the most famous is the cabin on Desolation Peak in North Cascades National Park, Washington. Inhabited by Jack Kerouac for 63 days in 1956, it’s now staffed by Jim Henterly. This Backpacker profile is an ode to slowness, solitude, and watching the landscape as crisis looms.
How North Devon became the UK’s first World Surfing Reserve
Malibu, Santa Cruz, the Gold Coast … and now Devon. Told by Sam Haddad in Huck Magazine, this is the story of how eighteen miles of Devonshire coastline was recently inaugurated as a World Surfing Reserve, putting the surf community at the vanguard of social and environmental custodianship.
David Roberts on adventure storytelling
Alongside his friend and former mentee Jon Krakauer, the late David Roberts was America’s foremost writer on climbing and the philosophy of adventure. His memoir Limits of the Know, published three years before his death in 2021, explores our relationship with risk and exploration. This accompanying interview with UK Climbing touches on that relationship and the state of adventure storytelling.
Kayaking the Shipping Forecast to escape grief
In the space of a few years, Toby Carr lost his father, was diagnosed with cancer, and lost his brother to the same cancer. To process his grief after brother’s death, Toby embarked on a mission to kayak all 31 sea areas of the BBC’s Shipping Forecast. Sadly, he passed away before completing the challenge. Adventure.com recently interviewed his sister Katie, who has turned Toby’s notes in the book Moderate Becoming Good Later.
Sounds
Making music with mushrooms
Did you know mushrooms can sing? Alright, not quite. But they do conduct electrical impulses, which musician Tarun Nayar is turning into music. He’s also duetting with leaves, cacti, and other organisms. The results are predictably trippy.
Time travel through Britain’s ancient forestscapes
Part prose, part illustration, part soundscape, this immersive journey from Inkcap takes us from Britain’s abundant ancient forests through its history of deforestation. It’s at once wondrous and melancholy, with woodland symphonies slowly displaced by the roar of traffic and infrastructure, culminating in two possible futures.
The importance of playful adventure
“If we are not playful actors within our environment, then we risk becoming alienated both to it, and by it,” writes Warren Draper in The Art of Psychoecology, for The Dark Mountain Project. Culminating in a solar-powered musical piece, improvised beside and inspired by the river Don, Draper argues that play in nature helps us rewild our lives and cure the alienation at the heart of the climate crisis.
Films
Games of Survival: A Culture Preserved In Ice
This documentary by Nicholas Natale follows athletes competing in the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics, held annually in Alaska as a celebration of indigenous culture. All events are derived from the strength and endurance once required for survival: the ‘ear weight’ mimics the ability to endure frostbitten ears, for instance, and the ‘four man carry’ the need to carry hunt bounties over long distances.
For the Love of the Sea
This short film from Patagonia documents a family’s pioneering work to revive the Welsh coastline and fishing industry. Câr y Môr is the first community-owned regenerative ocean farm in Wales, cultivating versatile crops like seaweed with zero-input techniques. You can chat to Ella Sturley from Câr y Môr, and watch the film outside on a big screen under the stars, at OUTSIDE festival.
Photography
Documenting the subculture of African American cowboys
What do you see when you picture a cowboy? Probably not a black man – even though an estimated quarter of cowboys were African American following the American Civil War. To help correct this erasure, photographer Rory Doyle’s striking series Delta Hill Riders – part of his wider Global Cowboys work – documents the subculture of African American cowboys and cowgirls in the modern Mississippi Delta.
The female freedivers of South Korea
The haenyeo (literally translated as ‘sea women’) of Jeju, South Korea, are a fiercely independent group of mostly elderly female freedivers whose livelihood depends on harvesting mollusks, seaweed and other sea life. This Sidetracked profile, written by photographer Luciano Candisani, dives into a fascinating outdoor community.
Indigenous Ecuadorians resisting oil extraction
Photographer Nicola Okin Frioli’s project Piatsaw, recent winner of the ZEKE Award for Systemic Change, is a harrowing, stirring portrait of the courageous resistance of Indigenous Ecuadorian peoples to the devastating extraction of oil giant Chevron.