I’m going to jump right to the conclusion here – if you want to have a better time outdoors (or perhaps, really anywhere), learn to enjoy the easy trips and take things as they come. Not everything has to be an epic journey.

I have long been guilty of looking for bigger, better, longer hikes, higher peaks, etc. It hasn’t been a conscious thing, necessarily, but I have found that while poring over maps and daydreaming, I tend to think about long, remote trips, immersed in the wilderness for… two weeks? a month? More? I’ve felt at a subconscious level that a trip needs to be “epic” in order to be worth the planning.

Reality collides with this pretty quickly, of course. I’ve even written about the fact that “epic” means different things to different people and that accomplishment comes in different doses. My work for years with Scouts has run the gamut from absolute beginners to 17-year-olds in their physical prime all trying to one-up each other. That education and experience journey for an individual was in line with the trend to get more and more epic – but we always had great trips even when they were simple.

And by the way… when I plan and do simple trips, it turns out that I do a LOT MORE OF THEM!! Quantity isn’t always better than quality, but if I can spend 30 nights outdoors in a year and only five of those are on an “epic” trip, I’ve still had a pretty darned good year!

Alistair Humphries has it right. After years of (literally) globe-circling adventures, he started a family, got older (as we all do), and found the obligations of mature life really put a damper on his epic journeys. So, he’s made a U-Turn and spent the last ten years or so advocating for “microadventures”. He talks about the simple joys of sleeping on a hill, making coffee outside, swimming in a river. Easy, approachable stuff that gets people outside.

Honestly, that’s the same mindset that made me start blogging and YouTubing in the first place – but it’s hard to get eyeballs without being epic. And so enthusiasm wanes, the pressure of the algorithm is always on the mind. It’s part of why I had such a long hiatus during and after COVID, to be honest, but I’ll admit I was falling into the trap of trying to think and do bigger things, and missing some easy targets.

I’m actually struggling with the epic vs. approachable challenge right now – there’s a stretch of river I’ve wanted to paddle for a while, and I really want to do it all in one shot, which requires one, maybe two nights camping along the way. Planning it has been a bear, as timing it to coincide with suitable (not too high and not too low) water levels and still work around people’s work schedules isn’t easy… but I bet I could get the same group of friends to go out and paddle a ten mile stretch as a day trip, easily. I’d have done it by now! So why do I keep insisting on something bigger?!

Step one is admitting you have a problem.

My journey into teardrop RVs is another good example. I’ll be honest – I have spent years/decades criticizing RVs as “not really camping”. It’s a house on wheels, so isolated from the outdoors that… yeah, here I go again. BUT, after my kids moved off to college, my wife and I started spending a lot more time outdoors together, and the little trailer we now have (and that I’ve written about here and here) gives us the opportunity to spend time together doing something I love, with only a few compromises. I still need to go rough it with a backpack from time to time to feel immersed in nature – but once again, if I count the relatively easy nights in the trailer, I’m back up to the neighborhood of 30 nights out in a year, and many of them (17 so far!) are in circumstances my wife can enjoy too! Lowering my expectations of what makes a trip worthwhile and taking easy, low stress trips has been a winning strategy to give us more opportunities to go have fun!

What’s more, we’re now talking about vacation strategies that involve flying to distant, exotic (to us) destinations and living out of a camper van for the duration of the trip. This wouldn’t have even been on the radar a year ago, and now we’re using hard-earned vacation time to spend long periods of time outdoors, together. That’s an unexpected win for both of us.

So that’s my pitch. I appreciate the opportunity to ramble here and work through my own conflicting tendencies “out loud”, so to speak. Don’t give up on the big, awesome, epic trips – but pause and reflect on whether lowering your expectations might actually yield more successes, more frequently. I keep learning it over and over, but have to remind myself that easy is often just as good, and might actually be better. By trying to focus exclusively on epic trips, I may be missing out.

Get Out There