Building Your Expeditionary Skill Stack

Introduction

Scott Adams popularized the idea of a skill (aka talent) stack in his book “How to Fail at Everything and Still Win Big.” It’s hard to become the very best at one thing. Very few people get into the NBA, NFL, or PGA tour. But it’s possible to combine a pretty good golf game, conversation skills, and knowledge of persuasion and psychology to launch a successful sales career. Adams could barely draw and had no idea how to actually color his cartoons when he began his career as a cartoonist. He argued that a willingness to take risks and an inability to be embarrassed by having your mistakes revealed in public, combined with solid (but not great) abilities in several skills that work well together, goes a very long way towards success.

Expeditionary Skill Stacks

Can the same idea be applied to expedition success? The Oxford dictionary defined an expedition as follows:

A journey undertaken by a group of men with a particular purpose, especially that of exploration, research, or war.
Oxford English Dictionary

So expedition success can be measured as newly discovered lands, important scientific discoveries, or military victory.

But what if we limit our focus to light expeditions, short journeys that let us venture into pristine, beautiful, wilderness spaces? What travel skills get us there, keep us (mostly) comfortable and well fed along the way, and get us safely back?

Can we build an expeditionary skill stack that might not get us to the top of Mount Everest, but does get us to exquisitely beautiful and private spaces that we can briefly own?

Saint Croix River near Grantsburg, Wisconsin.

The answer is yes. Consider the best expeditionary YouTubers: what do they have in common? They combine multiple skills to get them to remote wilderness spaces most people could not possibly reach.

RoKKiT KiT: Australian Catch and Cook

RoKKiT KiT combines small boat skills; an understanding of local weather, navigation, and islands; and fishing/spearing plus cooking skills to execute multi-day trips to deserted barrier islands in Australia. RoKKiT KiT also records his trips via GoPro and then posts the edited video to his YouTube channel. As of May 2021, his relaxed, engaging, you-are-there dialogue and beautiful locales have led to 343,000 subscribers.

The Baird Brothers: Canadian Wilderness Experts

Similarly, Jim Baird combines whitewater canoeing, bushcraft (including camping, cooking, and survival skills), and videography and editing to create and record his unique journeys in Canada’s wild North country. His brother Ted Baird is also highly accomplished in bushcraft and wilderness travel and has his own YouTube channel.

A Latter Day Viking Sailor

Expeditionary sailors like Erik Aandrea bring core sailing skills but up their game in navigation, heavy weather training, automation, and safety to achieve extraordinary sailing journeys within modest means. Erik has sailed the North Sea during winter numerous times, and recently completed a circumnavigation of the Norwegian Sea.

Building Your Own Expeditionary Skill Stack

Here’s an introduction to how to evaluate the best skills for expeditionary travel. First, you need a travel mode. Sailing, canoeing, boating, hiking, and climbing are excellent choices. Sailing in particular gives you tremendous mobility in open water without the need to constantly re-fuel (assuming you can wait out the slow or no wind days). Canoeing provides excellent flexibility including the ability to traverse lakes, rivers, and short stretches of land (known as portages). Canoes can also traverse highly technical whitewater rapids while carrying a ton of gear. And with canoes, you can always portage around falls and rapids to difficult to cross.

Once you’ve chose a travel mode, you need to learn basic camping skills. How to set up a tent and tarp for shelter, how to choose the right location for camp, cooking meals, avoiding bear encounters, getting water, lighting a fire, and more. Strong camping skills allows you extended stays and multiple day trips to remote spaces. The basics are relatively easy to learn, and the quality of camping gear in general has increased exponentially in the last 3 or 4 decades.

You Can Travel, Camp, and Cook. What’s Next?

Now you can move about in the wilderness and stay for extended periods of time via basic camping and cooking skills. What’s the next skill you should considering adding to your stack?

The next most important skill is judgement based on experience. My advice is to do multiple trips that feel comfortable to you based on your skills. This gives you a chance to experience adverse conditions, including weather, bugs, and gear failures, under controlled conditions. As your experience grows, you can start increasing the length (number of days) of your trips. You can go to more remote places and push the envelope on the level of whitewater rapids while canoeing or storm levels while sailing. Do this gradually and don’t get cocky, but be willing to push the envelope somewhat as you gain experience.

Food and Aesthetics

Once you’ve built up experience and can routinely travel where most people cannot, what’s next? My suggestion is to learn photography and videography. Modern GoPro cameras and drones are inexpensive and when combined with simple video editing tools the allow you to create high-quality videos of your trips that you can share with friends and family on social media.

The possibilities with today’s miniature portable cameras like GoPro are endless.

As you gain more experience cooking outdoors, you can build up your repertoire of possible meals. Portable refrigeration is becoming lighter and more mobile so that for short, 3 to 4 day trips, you can cook almost as you do at home with similar ingredients. Beyond 4 to 5 days, you need to dehydrate meat and other perishables to reduce weight and increase wilderness “shelf” life. For short trips, grilling is ideal because it is quick, can leverage campfires, and results in fewer dishes to clean up afterwards.

Outdoor grilling can create awesome meals in the wilderness.

Conclusion

An expeditionary skill stack is a force multiplier. You can go farther than 90% of the sailors, canoeists, and backpackers who strictly focus on their own specialty. Adding more skills to help you safely navigate and traverse remote wilderness areas means you get more solitude and can experience nature’s beauty without the noise, ugliness, and distractions of modernity.

To learn more about light expeditions and expeditionary travel, here are some previous blog posts you might find useful:

The Power of Light Expeditions

The Best Skills to Master for Light Expeditions

Light Expeditions, Lake Superior Style

Why Amundsen Beat Scott to the South Pole

And the Expeditionary Lessons to be Learned From This

“Adventure is just bad planning.”
Roald Amundsen, Leader of first expedition to reach the South Pole

Roald Amundsen and his team from Norway were the first to reach the South Pole on January 17th, 1912 after traveling 56 days to cover 1380 km. They used sled dogs and traveled on skis. A month later, the British team reached the South Pole after traveling 79 days and 1500 km. The Norwegian team made it back to their base on the Antarctic coast in 43 days, while the British team perished on their return trip, only 40 km from the safety, food and shelter of a large return depot.

Why Amundsen Beat Scott to the South Pole

This short essay is an attempt to understand why one expedition succeeded in a way that seems almost effortless, while the other ended in disaster. What are the lessons to be learned by expeditionary leaders planning their own journeys?

Key Points

Imagine and then plan for worst case scenarios.

The most important skill for explorers and expedition leaders is imagination. Specifically, imagination about what could go catastrophically wrong and the absolute worst conditions you expect to encounter on the journey. Then your imagination must in turn be used to come up with creative solutions to handle worst case events and conditions. In particular, reserves of food, fuel and equipment must be brought along to provide the necessary hedge against calamity.

The South Pole acted as a centrifuge. The two men revealed their true characters in this extreme environment. Amundsen had assumed that anything that could go wrong would go wrong. He over prepared in training. He was disciplined in preparation. He brought more supplies than needed. He assumed he would be hit by weather he could not predict (after all no human had ever ventured there). Scott, for instance, did not put black flags around his depots. He assumed he would be able to find them. And whereas Scott brought a single thermometer for a critical altitude measurement device, Amundsen brought five. Scott’s broke and he almost attacked a team member in fury. In every possible and impossible scenario Amundsen was ready for anything. Due to Amundsen’s training and preparation and discipline, he flourished; due to Scott’s lack of both, he died.
K. Barbera, in The Ascent

Small, skilled team of experts versus larger team.

For the journey to the pole, Scott’s team had 17 members versus 5 total for Amundsen. Amundsen’s smaller team consisted of strong, athletic men with navigation, skiing, and dog handling skills. Amundsen’s team were all experienced skiers (from childhood) and 4 were expert navigators. They kept the daily mileage lower than the maximum possible for 75% of the journey, and spent up to 16 hours a day resting, a shrewd strategy to get the most out of their dogs.

Gear matters.

Amundsen followed the Inuit example and used fur loosely fitted versus Scott’s team’s use of wool and rubber clothing. Amundsen’s team was comfortable throughout their journey. Scott’s team was often cold.

Amundsen sleds did not have to be unloaded each stop. Gear could be accessed easily from canisters without unloading. Scott’s teams had to unload and then reload the sledges each day to obtain the gear and food they needed.

Amundsen’s team had issues with their boots but fixed them after observing these problems during several short trips early in their expedition. Their adjusted boots performed well during the trip to the Pole and back. Short “test” trips that simulate the longer trip is a low cost, low risk, high return practice that lets you find and correct problems that might provide fatal or catastrophic on the full expedition.

Mobility and speed versus weight.

Amundsen’s team used only dogs, whereas Scott attempted to uses heavier ponies and motor sledges in addition to dogs. The ponies required food brought in on ships, and the motor sledges simply could not handle the cold weather in Antartica. Amundsen used the simple and light sextant for navigation, and pre-calculated the numbers he needed while navigating. Scott used the heavier theodolite which required complex calculations during travel, when the men might be exhausted or distracted by conditions.

Know your location at all times.

Both Scott and Amundsen left food and fuel at predetermined points on their way to the pole. These supplies were then used on the return journey. Amundsen placed a large black flag on top of each depot, more closely spaced these depots than Scott, and also placed bamboo flags on either side of the depot for five miles. This insured Amundsen could easily find the food and fuel he needed on the return journey.

Roald Amundsen — Amundsen’s route to the South Pole.

Learn how the natives adapt to the environment, and follow their lead.

Amundsen relied on the experience of the Inuit and other explorers who had arctic and antarctic experience. This is one reason he preferred dogs over ponies, which were not native to the arctic. In addition, dogs could be eaten for food. Amundsen’s team left for the Pole with 52 dogs and returned with 11, the dogs being eaten along the way as the loads to be pulled lessened. Dogs could also be fed from local sources, including seals and penguins, ideal food for sledge dogs.

Amundsen outfitted his team with fur anoraks fitted loosely, exactly how native Eskimos did. This allows sweat to evaporate from the body before it freezes.

Scott’s team suffered regularly from snow blindness and sometimes this affected over half the team at any one time. By contrast, there was no recorded case of snow blindness during the whole of Amundsen’s expedition. On the return journey, Amundsen’s team rested during the “day” (when the sun was in front of them) and travelled during the “night” (when the sun was behind them) to minimise the effects of snow blindness.
Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World

Hard training under conditions similar to the actual expedition.

Amundsen trained himself and his men rigorously and spent a lot of time in the arctic and antarctic understanding conditions there, how the Eskimos lived and thrived there, and practicing the techniques necessary to succeed in such harsh conditions.

In physical training Amundsen had prepared like a maniac. He took every opportunity to push his limits past the extreme. HIs philosophy of life and adventure was “you don’t wait until you’re in an unexpected storm to discover that you need more strength and endurance.”
K. Barbera, in The Ascent

Emphasize experience over formal leadership roles.

Few of Scott’s men had experience under extreme antarctic conditions, nor were they trained or experienced in skiing or dog handling. Scott spent most of his transport budget on the three motor sledges, but one sank while being offloaded from the ship, and the other two failed early in the expedition. The engineer who had designed and built these sledges was left behind because the officer who was second-in-command didn’t want the more senior engineer brought on the expedition. Thus, the engineer’s experience, and the potential to fix the motor sledges,was lost to the expedition.

In general Scott failed to listen to more experienced explorers or follow the example of the Inuit, who had survived in arctic conditions for centuries. Yet his antarctic experience was limited to two prior expeditions, and he had spent most of his career in the British Navy as a gunnery officer.

Be perfectionistic and pessimistic in planning, flexible in execution.

His experience — and that of others — taught him that successful explorers are cautious. They remain flexible, and are ready to adapt targets and plans in light of conditions. When conditions are not right, it is better to turn back rather than rely on hope and luck. He believed that bad luck is often the result of insufficient preparation.
K. Sengupta and L. Van der Hyden, Harvard Business Review

For example, food rations for Scott’s team were inadequate and lacked vitamins B and C. Lack of fuel also meant they could not cook all the time. Fuel canisters were found to be prone to leaks, something Amundsen anticipated and prevented by soldering them shut. Amundsen also started closer to the pole, from a better starting position that avoided sea ice and its complications.

Amundsen and his team at the South Pole.

Amundsen aborted his first attempted at the South Pole in September 2011. The weather and conditions made the trip to dangerous so Amundsen aborted this first attempt, even though his team pressured him to go given that Scott might get underway at any moment.

Scott’s team fought back against the harsh conditions and extreme events with courage and resilience. They did their best under very difficult circumstances, and nearly made it to safety. Without the courage and willingness to attempt the journey that they exemplified, men could no longer explore or discover.

Victory waits him who has everything in order — luck people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck.
— Roald Amundsen

Resources

Top Principles for Successful Light Expeditions

I recently introduced the concept of light expeditions as journeys accessible to anyone willing to develop the necessary strength, courage, and mastery. A light expedition is a short, performable (in personal cost, preparation time and duration) journey with a purpose that leverages and develops masculine skills and confidence while building self-understanding. It also affords opportunities to discover secrets and achieve firsts.

There are basic principles of execution that apply to all light expeditions. I’ve organized them into five groups: planning and organizing; equipment care and maintenance; training for skills; in the field; and post-mortem reviews. Following these principles can help you safely and efficiently complete your mission while focusing on the task at hand and recording your efforts.

Planning and Organizing

Have a Trip Plan and Give the Plan to a Family Member

Write up your travel route, planned and potentially unplanned stops, dates, and most importantly, the expected time and date of your return. Give the plan to a responsible family member or friend with instructions on how to contact the appropriate agencies (e.g., Coast Guard, National Park Service, etc.) in case the return date passes without them hearing from you.

Although this principle seems obvious, it’s often violated with sometimes deadly results. This past summer, a young family kayaking between the Apostle Islands on Lake Superior fell into the lake when their kayak overturned during a sudden storm; although wearing life jackets, 4 of 5 family members died from hypothermia while in the water. If a trip plan had been deposited with family or friends, it’s likely a search party would have gone out shortly after the storm hit and rescued the family.

2. Use Your Imagination to Determine Worst Case Scenarios

Think hard about worst case scenarios on your trip. If your sailing, what is the worst weather and wave conditions you might experience? What shoals (shallow water) and other navigation hazards exist on or near your route? If you’re white water canoeing, where are the large waterfalls and most dangerous rapids and what portage trails are available to avoid them?

Even as a beginner, it’s your job to know the most likely disaster scenarios. Then have a credible plan to adjust to these worst-case conditions, i.e., portaging around rapids (insure there is an actual route for that) or a safe harbor within reasonable distance.

3. Organize Gear Before and After Your Trip

Have a organized process for storing and staging your gear before your trip, then cleaning and repairing your gear after the trip. I avoided this for years until the complexity of my trips, which often included multiple different activities each with their own equipment (i.e., camping, boating, and kayaking in a single trip) made a haphazard system too error prone and time consuming.

4. Map out Team Dynamics and Have a Plan for Managing the Team

The more challenging and grueling the trip will be, the more you need to understand each team member’s strengths and limitations, their best and worst potential roles, and how the team will work together.

Training

5. Be in Shape and Eat Right

Light expeditions are physically challenging trips that require a base level of endurance and strength. Being overweight and out-of-shape increases risks and distracts you from the mission.

6. Train for the Particular Skills You Plan to Use

It’s tempting to assume you can train for the skills you need while on the trip. In a few cases that is possible, but best practice is to train before your trip in progressively more difficult conditions. Training during your expedition significantly increases risk and and stress levels. Ideally you should train with a mentor or in a formal class setting. Before training begins, study and read about the skills you will train on. Get into a rhythm of training pre-trip, keep track of your progress during the trip, then up your training levels to match your new skill level. Skills like sailing, whitewater canoeing and surfing take a lifetime to master and you can always learn more.

7. Learn to Cook

Eating well during a light expedition is important for health and energy. But it also plays a big role in the quality of your experience. I personally find tremendous satisfaction in preparing a great meal after a difficult day. I once prepared dinner after a difficult 12-hour day of portaging and canoeing 15 miles in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota. A huge rainstorm was about to hit when we reached camped and we had just enough time to set up a tarp and get the burners going before the rain came down in torrents. In a few minutes I was ankle deep in mud and water working on the meal while the rest of the team finished setting up camp. Dinner never tasted as good as that night.

Although packaged de-hydrated meals are available for expeditions, light weight and convenience are emphasized; taste is not and they are expensive. With the advent of lightweight, portable cooling and cooking techniques, it’s generally possible to take real, fresh foods and cook them in a way similar to home. This has the added benefit of of allowing you to train yourself for field cooking right at home by learning to cook there.

Equipment

8. Be as Light as Possible, but No Lighter

As a general rule, use the lightest gear possible that you can afford and that meets the requirements for your expedition. For example, unless I’m in an area that is known for lots of rain, cold and wind, I use the lightest rain jacket possible so I can reduce weight and space required. For cooking, I use very small, light propane burners and find ways to work around their small, intense flame to get the cooking results I’m looking for.

9. Bring Spare Parts, Extra Fuel, and Emergency Food and Water

Bring spare parts to make repairs to critical equipment, extra fuel kept in canisters separate from the fuel tank, and 20% more food and water (or be able to produce fresh water in an emergency) than you need for your scheduled trip in case you are delayed.

10. Obtain and Know How to Use Communication and Signaling Gear

Light expeditions are generally in remote areas that lack cell phone coverage. Although some purists argue you should totally cut yourself off from civilization, that is irresponsible in the age of low-cost satellite phones and SPOT messengers ($75 at this writing plus $200/year subscription).

SPOT messenger leverages satellites to allow others to track your location at all times, and you can send and receive short messages to communicate in an emergency. From a review of cases where people became lost or accidents incapacitated them during an expedition, I would estimate that 90% of the time SPOT could be used to quickly find them. If a trip plan was filed and someone is watching and monitoring your progress, then it’s almost impossible to get into critical situations where you are lost or hurt and unable to obtain help.

11. Have an Emergency Transmitter (EPIRB or SPOT)

In addition to SPOT messenger devices, an EPIRB is an emergency transmitter that sends a signal to local authorities that you have a critical emergency and need help immediately. My recommendation is to use SPOT to allow tracking and messaging with friends and family, and leverage EPIRB in case of a dire emergency where the SPOT system fails or is lost. Having a backup for critical, life-saving devices is always a good idea.

12. Have the Right Safety Equipment, Including that Required By Law

Make sure you have the required safety gear and especially a way to signal your location both at night and during the day. Flares are helpful but if you are on the ground and want to be spotted by an aircraft searching for you, creating smoke is the best approach. Smoke “flares” are available and it’s a great idea to bring 2 or 3 on an expedition.

13. Adapting in the Field

When conditions change drastically and dangerously in the field, be it weather, lost supplies, massive equipment failure or something similar, you have three choices: adapt, migrate, or die. The third is unacceptable, the second is useful if there is no alternative other than a new location, but if you have to stay where you are at, adapting on-the-fly is critical. If you’ve followed step 2, you’ve thought through many potential worst-case scenarios and have to come up with a plan.

14. Situational Awareness and Workload Management

Situational awareness is “the perception of environmental elements and events with respect to time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their future status.” It means being aware of what is going on around you in real time, and making sure you have enough margin (in time and space) to react to the situation appropriately.

It sounds simple and obvious, but it’s not.

Successful situational awareness requires workload management: you need to be able to keep up with the your operational tasks in real time while still maintaining awareness of your current situation. If your workload increases dramatically in a short period of time, you typically need to slow down your progress so that you can maintain that workload and situational awareness simultaneously. The biggest danger is focusing exclusively on a single task (e.g., trying to restart your motor or get a sail back up when your drifting in to a pier or shoal) and losing your situational awareness altogether. (Note: the people in the boat that was thrown into the pier in the video survived with only minor injuries, a minor miracle.)

Losing Situational Awareness Can Be Very Dangerous.

15. Be Able to Fix Equipment in the Field

Make sure you have the skill sets and training to make critical repairs in the field.

16. Know the Basics of First Aid

Understand how to stop bleeding wounds via pressure, how to tie a tourniquet to stop severe bleeding, and recognize the three stages of hypothermia and how to deal with each. Knowing how to set a broken bone is also useful. Your goal is to stabilize the injured person’s condition and then get them to medical help as quickly as possible leveraging your emergency communications tools. Minor injuries (e.g., a lightly twisted ankle) can wait till you return. Serious life-threatening injuries must be dealt with via experts, so your job is to get to that expert help as quickly as possible.

17. Know a Core Set of Knots

Know the two half hitches, bowline, sheet bend, and truckers hitch and you can create a non-slip loop, tie two ropes together, and have an adjustable-length line. That covers 90% of the use cases for knots in the field.

18. Record your Trips with Photos, Video, Logs, a Diary, and Drawings

We are entering a golden age for amateurs to record and artistically express what they have accomplished on light expeditions. Incredibly cheap yet sophisticated digital cameras like GoPro’s, combined with cheap film editing tools like iMovie and Final Cut Pro allow literally anyone to beautifully record their light expedition.

Post-Mortem Trip Review and Organizing

19. Review what went right and what went wrong on your trip and aim to fix the latter.

Once you’ve returned from a light expedition, don’t just clean your gear and put it away. Write down what went right and what went wrong, and what you can do better next time. Yes it’s work, but writing forces you to think, and thinking is what helps you learn the most from your experience.

The Power of Light Expeditions

Expedition ( \ ˌek-spə-ˈdi-shən \): A journey undertaken by a group of men with a particular purpose, especially that of exploration, research, or war. OED

“Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, which takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.” Arnold J. Toynbee. H/T @MMLoneWanderer

Sir Wilfred Thesiger (1910–2003) was an English explorer famous for being the first man to cross the Rub’ al Khali (“the Empty Quarter”), an enormous 250,000 square mile desert located in the Arabian Peninsula. Incredibly hot and dry, with sand dunes towering over 1000 feet, Thesiger crossed this desert not once but twice, between 1946 and 1949.

Thesiger later wrote: “For years the Empty Quarter had represented to me the final, unattainable challenge which the desert offered…To others my journey would have little importance. It would produce nothing except a rather inaccurate map which no one was ever likely to use. It was a personal experience, and the reward had been a drink of clean, nearly tasteless water. I was content with that.”

He continued: “I did not go to the Arabian Desert to collect plants nor to make a map; such things were incidental. I went there to find peace in the hardship of desert travel and the company of desert peoples… It is not the goal but the way there that matters, and the harder the way the more worthwhile the journey.”

Can you think of a small but difficult expedition in your past that pushed you to your limits? Perhaps a long canoe trip in Boy Scouts, a long sailing trip with your friends, or a backpacking trip? How did you feel once you successfully completed the trip? What did you see along the way and how did it affect you? Did you bond in some special way with your fellow travelers?

Part of Becoming a Man is Testing your Limits

Testing yourself to find your limits and move beyond them, under the supervision of men you know and respect, is central to becoming and being a man. After you’ve become fit, learned how to approach and connect with the opposite sex, established a career and mission within your own frame, what’s left?

In this piece, I’ll argue that you should make light expeditions and the related necessary skills part of your mission.

Power of Light Expeditions — Jack Donovan

Jack Donovan in his seminal work ,“The Way of Men”, argued that four virtues — strength, courage, mastery, and honor — are what make someone good at being a man (which is distinct from being a “good man”). Donovan argues that these virtues were born by warfare among small groups led by men, who established and defended a perimeter from which civilization was born. As civilization advanced and war was no longer a necessity, today just as in Roman times, men lost touch with this warrior instinct and masculinity waned.

Donovan is right that we can’t fully recreate this brutal early environment (barring a zombie apocalypse). And yet that environment, small groups of men in warfare with other small groups of men, has clear advantages in developing a deep, powerful masculinity, great men, and ultimately great civilizations (e.g., the Founding of Rome). What’s the closest we can come today without the overhead of lots of violence and bloodshed?

What is a Light Expedition?

The Power of Light Expeditions — 1922 British Team that attempted Everest. Mallory is second from left, back row.

I argue that we can capture some of its essence via “light” expeditions. A “heavy” expedition requires months or years of training and other preparation, is expensive, time-consuming and inherently extremely dangerous. Examples include Thesiger’s journey through the Rub’ al Khali, Mallory’s fatal attempt on Everest in 1924, and Teddy Roosevelt’s nearly fatal trip down the Amazon’s “River of Doubt”. Very few men are wealthy or skilled enough to even attempt such trip, and in fact modern transportation and communications technology has made true exploration at that scale nearly extinct, except in the deep sea or outer space.

Light expeditions, in contrast, are accessible to anyone willing to develop the necessary strength, courage, and mastery. A light expedition is a short, performable (in personal cost, preparation time and duration) but potentially difficult journey with a purpose, that leverages and develops masculine skills and confidence. Successful light expeditions create experiences that deepen our self-understanding, build confidence, add color and depth to the story of our lives, and make us more interesting and admirable to others, often via shared experience.

Secrets and Firsts

The Power of Light Expeditions - what is? — Heaven Bay. Photo by Matthew O’Keefe.

Now some may not be interested in self-understanding, so perhaps practicing the actual skills themselves in the field will be enough reward for you. Or the potentially rich experiences might hold attraction.

But there is another reward from light expeditions: finding secrets and performing firsts. Large-scale explorations (e.g., Lewis and Clark) have become nearly extinct due to technology as every part of the globe has been mapped and is somehow accessible. But there are secrets and firsts everywhere. Traditionally secrets or firsts like a heavy expedition require huge efforts that are typically beyond what one or small number of individuals can afford to find or complete.

But secrets exist locally and at small-scale. For example, in fall 1971, a small floatplane disappeared after taking off in heavy fog at the Canada-Minnesota border. It’s loss was a complete mystery, until nearly 12 years later, in spring 1983, a forestry survey crew found the crash site by accident a few miles north of Hovland, a small village on Lake Superior in northern Minnesota. The plane and the crash victim’s remains laid there undiscovered in a site fairly close to people, yet so hidden from view no one noticed its secret location. Before the plane crashed, it was heard close to ground by someone near the crash site. A light expedition that concentrated in that area, methodically combing through the forest, would likely have found the plane.

Similarly, smaller-scale firsts are attainable. For example, there are quite a few remote but accessible locations that could possibly be surfed but have not been attempted. Up until the 1980’s, there were numerous rivers in northern Canada that had never been canoed by non-natives. My father, in his 60s, was the first person to travel the whole Lewis and Clark trail via float plane. Really any activity you personally perform for the first time qualifies, as personal firsts are critical to developing further mastery and courage, in particular, and serve to contribute to your own sense of personal honor.

If you’ve read this far, you probably wondering what skills might best support light expeditions and why. In the second of this three-part series, I’ll outline the principals and characteristic qualifying skills should have and why, and walk you through my list of preferred skills. In the third, I’ll describe some example light expeditions I’ve done and propose others.

The links below point to all three essays in this series on light expeditions.

Part 1: The Power of Light Expeditions

Part 2: The Best Skills to Master for Light Expeditions

Part 3: Light Expeditions, Lake Superior Style