Sunrise in White River NF, Colorado, August 2018.
I did not see a mountain until I was fifteen years old.
Hard to believe, right? Well, its true. Growing up in a small north Texas town, as kids we marveled at the sight of the highest landmark around—the highway overpass. Now, how can a person write about being “born wild” when they lived their entire life on a pancake? I’ll get to that momentarily, but first let’s talk about what it means to be “wild”.
What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word, “wild”? Maybe a lion chasing a gazelle in the African Savannah? Perhaps the coyote you saw in the neighborhood a while back? I always think of the time I came across a mother grizzly bear with her cub on the trail up in Montana. To me, nothing says “wild” like a 400-pound upset bear bluff charging your caravan of hikers while you fight the urge to bolt back down the trail as fast as you can. We generally associate “wildness” with animals acting on instincts. The things animals were trained to do through generations are what make them “wild” to us.
Conducting our own 5-minute adventure in the woods. In Frame: Brandon Diaz.
Luckily, we humans don’t have the same “eat or be eaten” situation, so it’s hard to compare us to the definition of “wild” we generally think of. So what makes us wild? What single thing can we point to that defines who we are, and what we do? If we look back through time, we may see one thing that humanity has never failed to do: explore. Since the first humans, we have ventured from our birthplaces and pushed ourselves to the brink of impossible time and time again. The discovery of the New World, Himalayan ascents, mapping the arctic, and the space race all exemplify our appetite for the unknown and our willingness to take calculated risks. Movement, adventure, community—these things connect us to our ancestors and to our neighbors. It lives in all of us whether we realize it or not.
I certainly didn’t think much about adventure growing up. My family didn’t travel much, being a large family of engineers that lived and ate well, but never exactly left the area save for a trip to the beach every once in a while. No need to go anywhere, everything we needed was right at home. The world to me was a pretty small place, and imagination would take care of the rest. As kids we’d even imagine “snowboarding” by removing the wheels from skateboards and sliding down grassy hills, pretending we were carving through powder in the Andes. It wasn’t until I was in high school that I traveled to Denver for a robotics competition (yes, a robotics competition) and flying in I saw the city of Denver with the Rockies behind, completely dwarfing the entire city. That was the first time in my life that I had seen a mountain, and the first time I realized the magnitude of the world we live in. In the following years I would find myself saving money for adventures. Studying abroad in Italy, scuba diving in Mexico, road trips every spring, glacial ascents, and two weeks in Costa Rica for photography completely sold me on travel.
Almost overnight I went from cycling in the Texas hills to climbing mountains all over the Rockies and Pacific Northwest. With every mountain summit came a renewed sense of being, with every campfire community came fun-loving antics, and with every new adventure, a passion for the unknown. This “wildness” of the human spirit had come to the light and ignited a fervor for living freely, going against the grain, doing the unthinkable, and showing the world that we are limited only by what our thumping hearts can dream.
This sense of adventure lives in all of us. It is a fascination with the unknown, a zeal for adventure, and a thriving sense of community that drives us towards achievement. Humans are explorers; it is in our blood to peek over the edge of what is possible and take a calculated risk to define who we are. We might be labeled. We might be challenged. But at the end of the day, the outdoors provides us an outlet to be silly, adventurous, and creative—to be human. No matter who you are or where you come from, there’s an element of wildness that lives within you, and in all of us. We just have to set it free.