Lose the Thermometer

Why when I’m out in the wilderness do I see thermometers hanging like cancerous little growths off of people’s backpacks and jackets? What’s the big secret? If it’s cold out, add a layer, if it gets warm, remove one. What’s so complicated about that? Okay, ‘big deal’ you may say. However, if you ask me, these little plastic cysts are symptomatic of something far more insidious. The thermometer is just a small outward expression of the growingly invasive control that metrics now have over the outdoor experience.

What’s that rated? Where’d you finish? Which model is that? What’s your resting heart rate? How long is the climb? What grade is the hill? How many repetitions? What’s your time on that? What does that weigh? How much did that cost? What’s the beta? Where’s the guidebook?

Anyone who takes even a passive interest in outdoor sports has heard questions like these, if not asked or received them themselves. These questions help us to graduate our adventure and, by quantifying it, to remove its claws. They seek to cast light into the dark corners of our experience and act as preemptive knowledge of our act and, having performed it, to describe it in the most precise terms possible. By taking our own capabilities and the obstacles against which we pit them and reducing them down to mere numbers, we can extrapolate the outcome of our endeavors to so fine a point as to almost make it unnecessary to undertake them in the first place.

This is not how I want my outdoor experience to be. Instead, I want to experience adventure and the outdoors on their own terms. I don’t wish for guaranteed success or an overly forgiving safety net. I certainly don’t want to spend my free hours hemming and hawing over the tools that take me to where I want to be, or to wile away my time hashing out the minutiae of my future plans. I’d rather not be glancing at a digital read out, monitoring progress to assure myself I’m having the correct sort of experience.

Instead I’d like to turn corners without knowing what lies ahead. Start up a 5 mile climb without getting my heart rate pegged. Reach the next belay not knowing what gear I’ll need to build an anchor. Just once in a while I’d like to move a weight or a make a pedal stroke and know that I’ve just made myself stronger based upon feel alone. How I’d love to return from a mountain and simply describe it as ‘awesome’ or ‘gnarly’, without paying heed to numbers.

Now don’t get me wrong here – I think precise empirical information has its time and place. I appreciate the advances, innovations, and hard work that makes it so readily available. I’m a father and I sure as hell want to do what I can to ensure that I am around to see my son through all the best years of his life. I’ll look at a map, check the forecast, read a topo, and stuff my compass and GPS in my pack lid before I cast off - ensuring that I’ve bought the best model of each. But I certainly won’t continue to anesthetize my outdoor experience by shaping and molding it into another artificial construct like much of the world around us already is. If I should be charting it on a graph or describing it using anything other than a few choice adjectives, then I’m not sure that I want to be there.