I have spent years of my life all told on extended outdoor adventures—self-supported expeditions usually undertaken as a combination of backpacking and river descent by packraft, in addition to a handful of significant mountaineering trips, and other human-powered activities. My expedition highlights include summitting Lhotse in 2019, crossing the Nussuaq Peninsula in Greenland in 2021 (including visiting the Greenland Ice Sheet in multiple locations), crossing Iceland coast to coast from south to north by foot and packraft in 2024, rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 2022, and traveling many thousands of miles in Alaska in over a decade, notably likely becoming the first and only person to travel the full length of the Susitna River from its glacier headwaters to the ocean, and multiple trips from the Brooks Range to the Arctic Ocean, among others.
 
Some might dismiss these endeavors as merely recreation or self-indulgence. While I acknowledge some truth to both, I wish to convey an important underlying motivation that may be less difficult to detect to an outside observer. For me, embarking on such expeditions is a philosophical act. Now to be clear, I believe that any trip taken into a wild place, whether formally protected as such or not, even for a short time with an unambitious objective, can also be a philosophical act. But there is something about the style of outdoor exploration that I have often undertaken that uniquely qualifies it as philosophical.
 
I set out on these trips deliberately seeking greater clarity on each aspect of the traditional triumvirate of philosophy: the true, the good, and the beautiful. And let’s add in a measure of wisdom while we’re at it. Philosophy is after all—by a common translation of the underlying Greek—the love of wisdom.
 
Perhaps the best way to relate this intertwining of philosophy and wilderness exploration is through a brief autobiographical account. I grew up during a time of massive proliferation of information technology. My family had our first PC when I was in high school. I began my undergraduate education studying computer science and eventually engineering. I had lived through a period of great techno-optimism during the dot com boom and the proliferation of the personal computer into nearly every American home. Not only did I see an engineering career as a practical path towards a respectable, well-paying career, but I had a great inherent interest in technology, captivated by the allure of computers in particular.
 
Philosophy however fundamentally changed my trajectory. I naively took an Introduction to Philosophy course and was blown away. I quickly became obsessed, taking every philosophy course on offer. It competed heavily with my engineering major in the number of courses I took on (always too many). And while I sought out a wide diversity of classes, philosophy loomed larger than all other disciplines. I ended up with a minor as my school did not offer a major at the time. And ultimately philosophy conquered my major, as I was accepted into a master’s program at the University of Montana in philosophy that allowed me to finish my undergraduate degree more quickly with a Liberal Studies major (it wasn't the math I swear, I made an A in Calculus 1 and finished through Calculus 3 and Differential Equations).
 
One aspect of philosophy that I encountered was a critical perspective on technology. My eyes were opened to the possibility that technology, for all its promise, might also be threatening and disorienting, so much so, perhaps, as to overwhelm its positive contributions. I’m not ashamed to say that I began to fear technology. My fear at the time was primarily of absorption into a dehumanizing, freedom-stripping, Borg-like, transhuman technology on a one-way evolutionary path towards an end state where humanity is no more than a mere organelle in a cell–the formerly free individual permanently brutalized, inescapably entwined into a dystopia of total surveillance and virtualization. I was struck by Thoreau’s worry that “men have become the tools of their tools.”
 
Was this fear warranted? At the time, direct neurological-network interfaces were just being developed and information technologies were developing rapidly in ways that showed what I thought were clear signs of such worrisome trajectories. Perhaps it is still too early to tell. Regardless, rather than mindlessly working towards this dystopian end, even if it meant stable and well-paying work, I thought I would be better off in a critical role. My intent was to try to alter the trajectory of this development by challenging the underlying thinking guiding it, and, if possible, to escape it. One aspect of this thinking as I saw it is a desire to dominate and control nature, including our own. I thus sought to journey to the wild beyond the reach of technology—at least in this pernicious manifestation—assuming such a possibility (and if not to find out firsthand). To where autonomy and vitality still reigned, where all good things are wild and free, where nature’s grandeur can be felt overwhelmingly, with our own works but scratches—the world as it once was. Wilderness is in this understanding a point of resistance, one starting place to reimagine our place in the world and our relationship with our own creations. A place where we are, but within a greater context of flourishing. I don’t want to give the impression that I was driven primarily by fear. Not at all. In fact, more by love—love of these places and their beauty. | Continued Here: Full Version.

See also Wild Places and Beyond Forever and Photography and Art.

I lived through a school shooting. I thought it was an isolated event, a horrible rift in the fabric of normalcy. I was wrong—it was barely the beginning. And it was in fact near the beginning: a month to the day after Columbine. The first of the copycats. Before the copycats of the copycats of the copycats of the…
 
It was nothing compared to so many of the gun massacres that have followed, whether in schools or in, for instance, a grocery store that I had visited many times a few miles down the road from me in Boulder, Colorado where 10 people were murdered on an early spring weekday afternoon. In the shooting at my school, no one died and only one person was significantly injured. But it was still shocking and upending. And his intentions were far worse.
 
I knew the shooter. Years before he was actually a really funny guy, awkward and weird as teenagers often are, but funny. I liked him.
 
But things started to change. And I knew it, better than anyone else. Only I didn’t know what to do—it didn’t even occur to me that I should do anything at all. How could I have known?
 
In this article featuring Beverly Kingston, director of the University of Colorado’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, she states that there are nearly always ample signs, and thus opportunities for intervention, to prevent such events:
 
“They're stockpiling weapons. They're talking to other people about what they're going to do. They have more interest in following the Columbine shooters or others who have been radicalized. You can also see changes in their behavior: depression, isolation, intense or escalating anger and changes in their appearance. Shooters in these studies had five or more of these signs. One study found 81% of attackers told someone about their plan, and 93% exhibited strange behavior or other red flags.”
 
I saw nearly all these signs. He would leave the cafeteria during lunch and sit by himself at the furthest possible hallway—just sit there and stare. His girlfriend (yes, surprisingly he had one) would futilely plead with him to snap out of it. His demeanor was utterly changed—he was dark, brooding, humorless. I don’t however ever remember him mentioning Columbine, but he did mention it to others.
 
He invited me to his house one day, the first and only time I ever visited it. It was at the end of a cul-de-sac, and I was impressed by its size compared with my own. No one was home. He showed me his parent’s guns. He shot one into a nearby hill.
 
At some point, I must have been in the bathroom. I just remember walking into a living room with no lights on, only faint sunlight streaming in from some distant window. He was sitting in a chair in the middle of the room with a gun against his head. He asked me if he should do it. Of course, I told him no, begged him to stop playing around. He pulled the gun away. I think he said he was just kidding. It was terrifying. But at the same time, I thought it was all a joke. Despite such obvious signs, I still had no idea what was to come.
 
I never went back to his house, and I don’t think we ever spoke again.
 
Then one morning some time later, just after leaving my bus and approaching the school doors, a flood of kids suddenly came bursting out. I heard pops in the distance. He had entered the school cafeteria with a revolver and a shotgun and fired at the floor. Ricocheting bullets injured six people. He fled the building and put the shotgun in his mouth. The school principal stopped him. And the rest is history as they say.
 
In retrospect, over 20 years later, he was trying to recruit me, to enlist me in his death plot. Or maybe it was a plea for help. Or both. In retrospect, I could have stopped it, as minor as it was. If I had known what to do. I was a stupid kid, trying to do the right thing, but not properly equipped to do so.
 
My intention here is not to say that increased gun control measures are not part of the solution. They probably are. But this is a deep seeded, multi-faceted issue that likely has no simple solution. What I can share is my own experience, which strongly affirms the analysis by Beverly Kingston.
 
Every potential mass murderer knows someone.