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.
 
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.”
 
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 its development and, if possible, to escape it. I thus sought to journey to the wild beyond the reach of technology, assuming such a possibility. 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.
 
My master’s program allowed me to combine my philosophical and wild journeys. It helped that it was in Montana. I took off for a summer to hike most of the Great Divide Trail in the Canadian Rockies, my first major expedition. Near the end of this program, my thesis advisor advised me not to pursue philosophy any further, to go instead into law. I think this was less a rebuke of my talent than a realistic assessment of career options and perhaps also of what might actually affect the world.
 
I went instead to the wildest place I could imagine—Arctic Alaska—to be a park ranger. I believed at the time that philosophy wasn’t something one simply studies or thinks and writes about—a collection of ideas—but something one lives. This was a philosophical move as I saw it: I was seeking out the truth, the real truth, the truthiest truth. Not something written in books or orated, but a world distinct from human artifice, whether mass-produced or derived by art or reason. I don’t suppose I was ever really satisfied with the truths of the philosophers. And I was even less satisfied with the truths of religion, at least not the Judeo-Christian heritage of my upbringing. We had a nasty breakup, and I’ve moved on. Best to leave it at that. The book of Job is still a fun read though.
 
I thought at the time that being in nature—the wilder the better—was the highest one could aspire to in life. And that therefore looking after such places, even if that was only the mundane work of regulating human use through permit systems and sensible regulations, instilling leave-no-trace principles, teaching wilderness survival and navigation, or picking up bits of litter and human shit, was the highest act of environmental decency one could achieve. I took very seriously two of Thoreau’s penetrating insights: “In wildness is the preservation of the world” and “What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” I also was greatly inspired by his radical insistence on moral simplicity—his project to rethink our economic lives in relation to a broader environmental and social context. Thoreau demonstrated that a degree of withdrawal could be a moral and political act rather than isolation and resignation. I sought my own moral simplicity even as it slipped into exploration and adventure.
 
I wanted to live on the edge of things, not worrying about what I would eat or drink or wear, not toiling to store up for tomorrow. I wanted to array myself in the world’s spontaneous beauty, thereby partaking in it myself. I put balls to the wall, took fearless step after step over the void, with no idea where I was headed, if anywhere…
 
On wilderness journeys, the world is simplified; the noisy wider world slips away and the place where you are becomes your world; reality is the immediacy before you; distance must be felt and earned, by step and paddle stroke; the weather must be accepted and contended with; after enough time in the wilds, something lifts, and this decompression leaves space for an expansion of our innate powers of observation and reflection. There is something meaningfully special about a journey by your own power from one distant point to another, into and across and through a great expanse, whether a park or a continent. I like the sense of completion—it feels like the creation of an aesthetic object rather than a mere hike.
 
Of course, I knew of the world’s many environmental problems: climate change, mass extinction, pollution in its many insidious forms. These terrified and enraged me, not least because they dulled the sharp edge of the wild places I so cared about. If only people could understand these places, and what they were doing to them—collectively and lazily—they might change their ways, curbing some of these issues, I thought.
 
Somewhere in the midst of my tenure as a park ranger, my semi-religious Muirian fervor tempered and I shifted a bit more towards the outdoors as a place of fun, skill, and exploration, even enriched sociality, though these had always also been present. And my skills increased exponentially, opening entirely new realms, especially mountaineering and whitewater boating.
 
Wisdom also came with time and experience. Lessons learned came from forgetting things (spoons often), close calls (never too close, but enough to make me think), overestimating one thing or underestimating another. You can believe whatever you want at home but venture out very far and you must abide by the world’s demands. Sometimes visitors would come up from somewhere in the lower 48 or from abroad and think they knew. But sometimes when they crawled back into the backcountry office, they admitted they didn’t. “What was that!” This is why a colleague of mine called Denali Park the great humbler.
 
One instance comes to mind. I traversed an especially rugged route across the south side of the Alaska Range. Massive glaciers blanket parts of the landscape there, carving out sheer and foreboding terrain. I detoured around a bear and descended into a glacial valley. It was incredibly steep, the walls hardpack tuff riddled with loose stones, and cut through by broken cliffs. The route had seduced me. It started out moderately, but grew steeper, cliffier, and tuffer—a slick, hardpacked surface that was impossible to dig my feet in. Eventually, I was on all fours crabwalking down, desperately trying to avoid gaining any momentum that could plunge me over the cliffs below. I reached a point where I didn’t think I could go up or down. Not the first time! A massive tongue of ice sat far below me on the valley floor. I managed to scramble over to a pocket of vegetation. I considered putting on my dry suit and tying myself in until I could be rescued. But instead, I collected myself and found a way down—carefully and slowly.
 
Even after retiring as a seasonal backcountry ranger to enter my PhD program, I still sought out the world’s wild places, continuously expanding my range of accomplishments: summitting an 8000-meter peak in Nepal, completing several significant river trips in Alaska, exploring the edge of the Greenland ice sheet, finding new desert realms hitherto unexplored (by me).
 
In all these endeavors, I was still after truth, I think. Truth (and goodness) had, I thought, something to do with beauty. I’ve always been something of an aesthete—attracted from a young age to art and to literature—each of which has stayed with me in some capacity and each of which I have made some forays into. Nature, however, I found to be a level of beauty beyond anything human produced, the ultimate source of all beauty perhaps—in immersive magnificence, in bounteous variety, and significantly in origin—signifying—and in fact embodying—a realm apart from the human dominated. This latter point mattered quite a lot to me, rooted partly in disillusionment with the merely human realm of politics, half-truths, and outright deception. The manufactured, the marketed. My quest was thus both a negative quest, that is deliberately avoiding something negative (lies, ugliness, unfreedom), and a positive one, that is deliberately seeking something positive (truth, beauty, freedom).
 
As is widely acknowledged, we live in an era of increasing confusion and distortion—information chaos. Extremist political movements on the right and left (though overwhelmingly on the right at this exact moment) are willing to say or do just about anything to increase their own power. This is actually nothing new and is in fact the original impetus for philosophy. In Plato’s Republic, written over 2000 years ago in a bronze age society that might seem to have no connection to our own, the orator and teacher Thrasymachus insists, in a discussion with Socrates, that justice is nothing more than the interests of the stronger: might, in other words, makes right. If you allow me to extrapolate just a bit from his position, truth may be regarded as whatever the powerful say it is and nothing more. In an era of rising oligarchs and tyrants around the world, this ought to sound familiar.
 
What is new about our era is the presence of technology in many forms, specifically information technology in the context of truth. The internet—especially social media platforms like Facebook, X, and Tik Tok—is heavily implicated in the rise of misinformation, and in turn radicalized social movements, built upon conspiracy theories and lies. Information technology has, in other words, become a singularly powerful instrument of domination by the powerful, manifested most starkly in Q-Anon, Putin’s domestic and international propaganda campaigns, China’s mass surveillance (and propaganda) programs, and, to a somewhat lesser degree, the surveillance programs of the NSA and invasive data collection by private companies like Google.
 
The processes at work here are not simply the manipulation of information, but its ubiquity. Information delivered by digital and media platforms has become all-consuming to the point of trumping our basic sense of community and reliance on our own judgement of the world as derived from everyday interactions with place and with others. From the perspective of the media-saturated, often isolated internet junkie, the real world often appears more threatening than it really is. Philosopher Albert Borgmann calls this the disorientation of cyberspace. Wilderness stands out in his analysis, along with focal things and events like dining with others, running, and collective celebrations, as counterbalances to this disorientation—reorientation in other words, a way of holding onto reality.
 
My Environmental Studies graduate program (and the many side courses I took across disciplines including Anthropology, Geography, and Indigenous Studies) inexorably eroded into the canyoned depths of my convictions in at least one crucial way: showing me that wilderness (properly understood) is a good, but not the ultimate environmental issue, nor the ultimate resolution to the many issues of our time. It does have its role to play in all of them: mitigating climate change, preserving biodiversity, and curbing pollution. One thing I noticed was that for most of the other students in my program, environmental justice—adverse and disproportionate environmental impacts on people—was far and away their overriding concern—what motivated them, got them into the ring for the fight, but very different than what drove me. They also seemed not to think as much, at least not critically and skeptically, about technology.
 
On the other side of this PhD and with quite a few notches on my belt, I now wonder what have I devoted my life to? What was the point of my absurd and relentless quest for the wilder side of things? In my doubtful moments, it seems to me, it has cost me just about everything. I now have two graduate degrees (both devoted to aspects of wildness and technology), a substantial outdoor resume, a slowly increasing, ever-improving ledger of nature photography. But I’m not sure I have the life I imagined, nor imagine, for myself. But the story isn’t finished.
 
I’m not fully sure how I understand the relationship of the true, good, beautiful, and wild at the moment. I am sure that wilderness expeditions have downshifted in priority for me in favor of political issues, pragmatic environmental concerns, career development, creative pursuits, and other life goals. My relationship with and understanding of technology also continues to develop. I still maintain a healthy degree of concern and skepticism, but also an epistemic humility about what technology is and means for us as humans. Will AI live up to its hype as economic driver and progenitor of utopia—will it be our redemption? Or will it be our undoing? I don’t know. I am also sure that I will continue to query these issues.

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.