II 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.