Adventure Tolerance

(SitNews) Ketchikan, Alaska - In July, my first set of friends from California will come up and get their week-long slice of Alaska. It’s been fun to see how far we’ve altered the threshold of adventure for a few of them since they first visited.“I’m really excited to come up, I don’t even care if we fish,” said Brian a high school teacher and softball coach before he was shown the ways of taking terminal salmon with a snagging hook.Fast forward five years and he’s the one checking the tides and recommending we get up at 3:30 a.m. to get on the road and make sure we get to the snagging grounds on time.His sense of wild has changed. His perception of the amount of adventure he can handle has changed. He craves the outdoors – as long as it’s for about a week, in summer and under my supervision.It’s normal to get hooked by the idea of being bolder. Not in that teenage rebellious type way, but in that, me vs. nature sort of way.I’m reading Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales. It’s a scientific approach to the survival book. Rather than a, “So there they were…” collection of outdoor stories, it attempts to answer the, “Why would someone do that?” question that we, the rational, logical reader, existing outside the context of emergency or adventure, ask.See column at:http://www.sitnews.us/JLund/060817_jlund.html