Adventure idea #20
Outdoor adventure courses can be a fantastic way to foster personal development! Programs like those offered by Outward Bound are designed to help participants build confidence, resilience, and leadership skills through various outdoor activities. These activities often include hiking, camping, rock climbing, abseiling (rappelling), rafting, and ropes courses.
A lot of the activities I recommend in these post are simple things you can do in an afternoon. Once you get through the initial fear, they are pretty easy. This is not. If you live a typical couch potato lifestyle, you may find a wilderness adventure course very challenging. The vast majority of us are used to this lifestyle. This is a way to break out of that rut. It is a great way to build fitness and mental fortitude.
These courses can run anywhere between a week to six months. I recommend the shorter courses to start. I took my course with Outward Bound. There are plenty of other good companies out there. However, OB is the gold standard of wilderness adventure courses. That’s why I stuck with them.
Each person on course has their own unique set of challenges and strengths. I was not bothered by heights, so rock climbing and Rappelling (Abseiling) came easy for me. At the time, I lived in Florida where it’s flat. I am also asthmatic. So, I found it extremely difficult to hike a 65-pound pack up a mountain.
Most of the ideas I post will help you overcome one or two fears. (i.e. ziplining will help you tackle a fear of heights, Caving will help you face the fear of enclosed spaces etc.) A wilderness adventure course is your own archetypical hero’s journey. I don’t want to go into a 20-page dissertation on therapeutic metaphor. So just understand hero’s journey or hero’s journey is a basic framework in storytelling. It goes like this: the hero leaves a comfortable life and goes out into a strange place. Then, the hero lives uncomfortably and faces difficult, dangerous challenges. Finally, the hero returns home transformed.
This framework has been used over and over in mythology and narrative fiction. But it is also is very effective at changing the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. People that have gone on these courses often have dynamic shifts in consciousness and report a positive ripple effect through the rest their lives. I can attest to this firsthand.
One thing you do need to know before you decide to take one these courses. The one thing they are not and cannot ever be or they would lose their value is completely safe! Although great strides in risk management have been made over the years there is inherent risks. The potential for serious real-world consequences is part of the process. That is the hero’s journey.
Hiking into The Devils Kitchen. Photos courtesy North Carolina Outward Bound.
