EDITOR’S LETTER
Hinterlands of the mind
Today was the day - perhaps the only day - to do this thing. Waking long before dawn to a crystal night, we were already far above camp as the light began to break across the spire-broken sky of the Pamir Alay in western Kyrgyzstan. My partner and I knew that this was the moment for what we’d come here for. It was the first and only day of truly settled weather in two weeks of climbing in the high valley of Ak Su, a kind of high alpine version of Yosemite in a remote and politically unstable region of Central Asia. The new route we climbed - a perfect, untouched 500 metre pillar of golden granite that rose between two even larger monoliths - stretched us both to our mental and physical limits. But as the sun sank below the summits to the west that evening, we were returning to base, making multiple abseils down a vast overhanging wall back to the scree cone a thousand metres above our tents. Late that night, we arrived back in camp, having pushed ourselves close to the edge of what we were capable of, but not across it. If the Roman philosopher Seneca was correct that luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, then I guess we got lucky that day. We certainly got luckier than top American climbers Tommy Caldwell and Beth Rodden, who were kidnapped at gunpoint by Islamist militants in the same area five years prior to our expedition, and only managed to escape after Caldwell pushed one of their captors over a cliff.
When questioning my own motives for leading an adventurous life, I often think about that day in Kyrgyzstan. Even now, almost fifteen years later, it still sends a strong signal back about how to tread the thin line between courage and stupidity. The special combination of spontaneity and careful preparation our Ak Su climb involved is just a personal example of how an adventure can be unforgettable without merging into epic, out-of-control territory; we pushed hard in the best available conditions of the whole expedition, and we just pulled the climb off using all our skills. I’ve been lucky enough to have climbed and explored in lots of other places since then, but that first ascent in Kyrgyzstan with Sam Whittaker still remains one of the defining adventures of my life, partly because it so delicately balanced the strange scales of risk and reward.
The concept of adventure itself, though, is a notoriously tricky idea to define. Every easy definition seems to dissolve like silt in a glacial river when held up to real scrutiny. The best summary I know wasn’t, ironically, coined by a well known practitioner of adventure sports, but by the writer and intellectual Nassim Taleb (who was also, interestingly, a former Wall Street trader). He writes in his most recent book Skin In The Game that ‘if you do not undertake a risk of real harm, reparable or potentially irreparable, from an adventure, then it is not an adventure.’
The most interesting part of Taleb’s aphorism is the notion of ‘real harm’. Clearly it encompasses both mortal danger and the other risks - financial, relational, psychological - that a serious adventure might involve. I’d guess that some of the most rewarding adventures probably involve most, if not all, of these separate species of hazard.
Defining adventure by what it isn’t, as Taleb does, might seem evasive. But it’s an effective way of separating proper adventures from the phoney, follower-driven heroics that proliferate on social media. I’d also suggest that adventure is as much a state of mind - a kind of psychic hinterland - as it is a physical experience. A variety of such hinterlands are explored right here, in the very first issue of BASE.
Expedition kayaker Will Copestake imagines the epic voyages of Magellan and Shackleton as he paddles the wild Patagonian waters they once navigated; climber and explorer Leo Houlding talks about the otherworldly isolation of climbing in the Transantarctic mountains (arguably the world’s most remote place and featured on our front cover); ultra runner Jenny Tough articulates her empathy with the Berber people of the Atlas Mountains whose villages she ran through; exploratory surfer Kepa Acero explains his passion for catching waves nobody has surfed before; leading rock climber Mina Leslie-wujastyk confesses how an injury forced her to see her home landscape of the Peak District in a completely new way; and illustrator Tessa Lyons along with poet David Wilson find their own equilibrium lines in the wild places of Britain and elsewhere.
And, just in case any of that was getting too serious, photographer Dan Milner introduces us to Kempston Hardwick, Bedfordshire’s greatest adventurer: he’s quite a character. (You’ll also come across Dan’s brilliant photos of North Korean mountain biking in the coming pages).
All of our exceptional contributors in this first issue of BASE offer their own different perspectives on the adventurous mindset. It strikes me that the value of a sense of real faith in ourselves, and in our personal desires to explore, is more important today than ever before. Social media has created a public sphere in which extrinsic motivation - the desire for peer group recognition and response - overrides intrinsic motivation, the desire for inner satisfaction and truth. In the context of adventure sports, as in most other areas, this is not an altogether positive trend. I’m glad to admit, then, that this magazine is part of the global process of pushing back against the aggressive infiltration of our cultural and social spaces by big tech companies, and what the leading technology thinker Shoshana Zuboff has presciently termed ‘surveillance capitalism’.
I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t upload your adventure snaps to Instagram, if you want to. At the same time, I hope that BASE magazine is part of a process in which the most important adventure stories move away from social platforms and are delivered in new, original, and inspiring forms. And I hope it’s also part of a parallel trend of people doing their own thing in wild places, either alone or in small groups, rather than following the crowd.
Exploration, at heart, is as natural a human instinct as the need for shelter itself. If there’s one character archetype that unites the disparate personalities of genuine adventure-seekers, it’s the figure of Peter Pan - the kid who never grows up. There’s often an ageless power in those who make choices enabling them to lead a genuinely alternative lifestyle. The legendary American climber Fred Beckey, who died in 2017, was the quintessential dirtbag: he never married or had children, and was still climbing and travelling well into his nineties. The story of Beckey’s life, I think, represents the freewheeling curiosity and sense of mischief required to maintain an adventurous mindset. Getting out there doesn’t just keep you fit. It keeps you young, too.
At the same time, the visionary perception of children is an interesting way of understanding the core value of exploration within the human condition. A child might look at an old oak tree in the garden and want to climb it, but an adult might look at the same tree and want to chop it down because its roots undermine the driveway. Whose priorities are the most important?
And whose agenda should determine the fate of the tree? These, of course, are existential as well as environmental questions.
Leo Houlding, one of Britain’s leading modern explorers, strikes a solid definition of what contemporary exploration might mean in this issue. When I asked him during our interview if he had his own philosophy of adventure, he came back with this brilliant, simple statement: ‘true adventure must involve true risk and true uncertainty’. He also added, after a considered pause, that ‘it should have a creative, imaginative element’. I personally find this second element, in some respects, most critical of all.
One of the reasons I’ve been deeply drawn to making first ascents in my climbing career is the creativity required to find a new way up a cliff or a mountain; you’re working with a blank canvas, tracing lines, joining the dots. This same process of creative exploration takes place in different ways in all adventure sports, and it’s one of the key reasons that self-organised, self-supported endeavours appeal to free spirits and independent thinkers. You have picked up this magazine, perhaps, because you believe the world is out there to be explored.
If you’re mulling over that thought as you turn the page, I’d like to wish you the warmest welcome to BASE, Britain’s new, free, adventure quarterly. I hope you’ll find it engaging, entertaining, and inspiring wherever you are: at home, at work, or - most importantly - out there in the wild.
Enjoy the issue.