"FOR ME, BEING IN NATURE DOING INTENSE THINGS IS ONE WAYTO EXPAND MY MIND AND LEARNTO LIVE IN THE WORLD.”
BRUCE HAYSE’S OUTDOOR ADVENTURES sound like a movie. Born in 1949 in eastern Oregon, he spent his childhood camping in the mountains, worked for the Forest Service, and was a mule packer. He says as a kid, he wanted to be outside all the time and would sleep in his yard if he couldn’t get farther away.
In 1979, he helped start the environmental group EarthFirst! in response to the degradation he and others were seeing in wild places across the American West. In the following decade, he began carrying a 45-pound inflatable double kayak into the wilderness to paddle streams no one had tried before. Hayse is also a doctor—he established his family-medicine practice in 1983 and still sees patients at an office on W. Broadway Avenue in downtown Jackson today. Plus, he’s a husband; the father of two grown daughters; and an avid backcountry skier, hiker, and boater.
Hayse always chooses the most untraveled path he can find. He doesn’t want information about an objective before he goes, preferring to figure things out on his own. To feed that drive for the unknown, he started taking a yearly adventure vacation to Africa in the late 1980s, where he ran rivers for which he had no map, no GPS, and no guidebook. One river appeared to have a single waterfall from the information his team gathered. It had four. All the rivers required his party to navigate challenging rapids, make long, arduous portages around unrunnable sections, and deal with poisonous snakes and dangerous hippos. He also got sick from malaria and survived tsetse flies. His expeditions are athletic endeavors in that they require fitness, expert skill, and hard work, but more than an athlete, Hayse considerers himself an explorer and is driven by his passion for the natural world and love for the beauty of the places he visits in a boat, on foot, or on his skis. “I guess I go seeking enlightenment,” Hayse says. “You can find it lots of different ways. For me, being in nature doing intense things is one way to expand my mind and learn to live in the world.”
Hayse says the biggest dangers he has faced on his adventures came from humans. He was taken hostage in Africa not once but twice. The second time, his captors threatened to cut off the heads of two native men traveling with the group. Hayse, who was carrying a satellite phone, told his captors if he didn’t call in regularly, the U.S. government would bomb the area. His story was a lie, but it worked.
Hayse says he thinks there is less mystery in the world now, because we have information about everything, and that makes him sad. For him, trips into wild places have always been about the unknown. “My athletic endeavors were never based on personal achievements,” he says. “I was really focused on my love of the universe manifested through the love of nature.”