Why?

PRISANK, SLOVENIA

I don't really consider myself to be qualified to answer this question, yet duty calls - if this were a notebook I would write down my experiences, and I would like to think that the very act of recalling these events, memories, perhaps even disasters, answers why the outdoors is so magnetic. 

I will resort to the words of someone much more qualified:

'Somewhere between the bottom of the climb and the summit is the answer to why we do it'

    Greg Child

Can anything more be said? 

As the outdoors was once our, as discussed in the previous blog, playground, laboratory, home and workplace, a valid argument is that it can only serve for most as a great big playground in our modern age. 

Science has revealed the processes through which the natural world is created - the caves and mountains are no longer man's preferred laboratory. The caves and streams are replaced by 'concrete jungles', towering architecture and equally impressive infrastructure for electricity, water and other necessities. Our homes and workplaces occupy these man-made caves.

All is left is 'The outdoors as a playground'. We have tried hard to replace it - board games, computer games, the cinema - even for the 'outdoors lover' we have artificial climbing walls and gyms to get 'mountain fit'. Yet no activity can surpass the breadth, depth and (quite literally) height of the outdoors in terms of activity options. 

I think it is the way that the outdoors appeals so broadly to our hidden animalistic and primeval instincts that secures its addictive characteristics. Mountaineering, running, climbing, mountain biking etc. all simulate the dangerous, adrenaline-filled, constantly competing past of homo sapiens that thrills us all. The minute you step outside for recreation, both your physical and mental state are geared up to survive due to thousands of years of experience. On the other hand, we have recently acquired a desire, as a result of our increasingly developed and technological lives, to reject normality and go 'back to basics', a desire to plunge ourselves into mystery, away from comfort and superfluity to appreciate life better. 

What are your motivations for the outdoors? It is the challenge? Is it the scenery? The mystery? 

Are we living off the prehistoric momentum of man's relationship with nature, or is there an original interest in nature emerging in our modern era?

A Walker's Notebook: Introduction

BLACK CUILLIN RIDGE, SKYE

The outdoors provides such a convenient obsession for homo sapiens. Its mystery, with unexplainable crags, valleys, rivers and summits that science only partially explains, but also its comfort - having been the playground, laboratory and workplace for us for thousands of years. 

Unfortunately, early homo sapiens had no notebook. Instead they wrote down their exploits, tricks and histories on more familiar materials such as rock. Over time, whether rock, papyrus, wood, paper and now a blog - humans have always had a place to document their obsessions. 

With this apt introduction, welcome to my obsession. The Outdoors. 

Early man had to remember where the more favorable streams were, the more fruitful trees (pardon the pun), the most malleable rock, the best places to find food. Over time, this changed. Pliny engaged in writing detailed and lengthly volumes on the origins of the natural world. In the Pacific, Charles Darwin scribbled the beginning of the Theory of Evolution. 

Where would all these people be if they did'nt have a notebook, journal, a handy rock, or papyrus.

This is my notebook, albeit virtual, yet the experiences from which these observation are drawn are more than tangible. I intend to document what I have learnt from the outdoors, so as to continue this trend of taking experience from the outdoors, rather than 'taking only photos...leaving only footprints'. 

Please read this blog, and feel free to comment on any issue.