Adventure by definition is in degrees
Adventure by definition is not always climbing Everest, surfing giant waves, submerging in deep caves. Adventure is whatever activity pushes your boundaries. Those activities that are just beyond your reach or the cliqued ‘outside of your comfort zone’.
In this issue of Adventure we feature the caving deep inside Mt Arthur featured on page 14, which makes me squirm just looking at the images and the editorial does not make you feel any better. Dark, wet, dangerous and confined underground! Could it be worse? By comparison there is the feature on Dan Vicary whose tragic death brings into the limelight the cost of freefall flight. Ok these are extremes, but Dan didn’t one day wake up and start wing-suiting - he possibly started with tandems, loved it and grew from there. However, I am sure he was so thrilled by his first jump and he just wanted more. Our brain patterns want to expand – go faster, go higher, go deeper, but with each incremental step away from our start point the danger levels continue to grow until there is no room for error.
Resident kayaking writer Barny Young takes us down the Kokatahi River Possibly one of the most beautiful rivers in New Zealand while Jenny and Pete Hirst bring us along on their first encounter the Milford track - not everyone’s ideal way to spend an anniversary. Once you get past the stunning Kiwi editorials in this issue you get to the new section on ‘Events’. Now that is another whole new ballpark of drama and adventure. The adventure can be a run around the park or 4 days with no sleep, kayaking, running rock-climbing, abseiling, something for everyone and adventure by degrees.
Whether it is a tandem skydive to BASE jumping or a half marathon to a four days adventure race, the experience of adventure is an incremental expansion by degree, in this issue you will find both ends of the scale but it’s all Kiwi and it’s all Adventure.