I know at least one of our fellow outdoorists, Kate Calder, has done the same. Anyone else? Do you have other favorite outdoor calendars?

When I ran across Bryan Conant’s website, I knew I’d found a map-loving Outdoorist’s dream come true. Bryan has produced the definitive trail maps for the wilderness areas outside Santa Barbara, California. I arranged a phone interview with Bryan to find out how he accomplished this, and what it might mean to the rest of us.

Bryan Conant Interview mp3

Thanks to freesoundtrackmusic.com for the groovy intro music.

It was not yet my time. I managed some traveling, but was mostly supported by my family along the way. Eventually I found myself lurking at my dad’s house, in limbo, unable to find work. When a job as a government contractor came my way, I returned to life as a Weekend Warrior, and not for the last time. My outdoor values continued to grow, though, and I never stopped updating my cyberhobo web site.

I’m now four months into another attempt at establishing myself as a Weekday Warrior. I’m freelancing again, and have a growing base of good clients. I choose my hours, and spend a respectable of amount of high-quality time outdoors. But I’m not yet making a living. My wife is currently a Weekend Warrior. As fortune would have it, she’s found the best full time job of her life here in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We find ourselves in a mixed marriage of sorts, uncertain which way to proceed. We are certain of the importance of the outdoors in our life, and our intention to keep pursuing it.

So even though I’m not yet a self-reliant Weekday Warrior, I have taken note of a couple of tactics that helped me get this far.

• Establish a network through free labor. Independent, part-time workers all need some kind of network of clients or customers. I attempted a few entrepreneurial projects, and the one that ended up bringing me clients is an open-source product that I developed myself and make freely available to anyone. This is an old pattern of “paying your dues”, but I really had to see it work to believe it.
• Be persistent. Some of my projects failed. Many ideas came and went. I had to keep my day job longer than I hoped. I got tired, and often felt I was making no progress. I still feel that way sometimes. But whenever I feel the least bit inspired, I plug away at whatever project seems to hold the most promise at the time.
• Seek renewal outdoors. I can’t quite force it to happen, but sometimes I return from the outdoors completely refreshed and ready for anything. The more I go out, the more reliable a source of energy and vitality it is.

These are some of my lessons learned so far. My greatest liability is probably my tendency toward social isolation. The more people I can meet that share my values, the more opportunities I’ll have. I hope to meet Weekday Warriors more successful than I, and get them to share their secrets with us here…

I can feel the colors out there changing. Each day is different. It’s impossible to catch more than we miss, but it’s fun to try!

The duality can be seen at almost any level. It’s fun to come up with widely varying examples. Most have both a constructive side and destructive side. Let’s explore a few.

A single outing. The outing is planned indoors. Perhaps maps are used from an organization that supports outdoor conservation. During the trip, an intriguing encounter inspires an idea for another outing. On the destructive side, perhaps a lunch is packed indoors purchased from companies that create pollution. While hiking, a prick from a cactus spine creates a puncture wound that gets infected.

A lifestyle. A person makes her living indoors, but gets her creative energy from outdoor pursuits. Her trade requires the use of non-renewable natural resources, and she sometimes sacrifices good career opportunities to be outdoors more.

A society. Nature provides the resources for an industrial society, which in turn provides citizenry with technology that enables outdoor exploration without the struggles for food and shelter that our ancestors contended with. Meanwhile the industry destroys some of the natural resources that power it, and citizens who have come to value the diversity of nature begin to undermine the industry.

A brain. This perspective is illuminated by the book My Stroke of Insight, a narrative by brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor. She experienced full right-brain consciousness when the left side of her brain was disabled by a stroke. This was a state of bliss - she was completely absorbed in the present, thrilled with life, at one with the universe. I’ve had hints of this state in the outdoors. Blissful presence was not sufficient for survival, though. Without any capacity to speak or understand language, see distinct objects, perceive her body as a solid separate from other solids, or track the passage of time, Jill couldn’t live in our common world. She had to redevelop her left-brain skills to live, even though she had grown to dislike the left brain’s tendency to dominate thought, worry needlessly, fabricate stories, and sow discontent. These are things I do more when I’m indoors … often in association with making a living.

The common patterns in these different perspectives are often described nicely by the yin and yang of Eastern philsophy, the theory of the unity of opposites. One of the laws of yin and yang is that they are usually out of balance, dominance shifting from one side to the other. Outdoorism is my attempt to compensate for the dominance of the Indoors by emphasizing the Outdoors in my life.

We talk about our values all the time, treating them as a given. That’s appropriate, because most of the time I think they are given to us like a pair of Emperor’s Trousers. The real reason that I never pointed out the Emperor’s New Clothes was that I had them on myself, and wasn’t about to point out the fact that I was naked.

Of course I resented being dressed up in this bogus clothing. My first step toward discovery of my own clothes was to rebelliously fling off the clothing that had been foisted on me. In public, for real. Once I was discovered nude outside a formal fraternity dance at the liberal arts college I attended. Festivities before the dance had involved a heated plexiglass dunk tank, the kind where you throw a ball at the target to plunge the clown sitting over the water. It was left outside the hall, and when the gowned and tuxedoed couples emerged after the dance they discovered me having a nice soak, my clothes in a pile on the sidewalk. The next day a beefy frat boy approached me in the dining hall, taking off his glasses. I prepared to have my lights knocked out, but the gentleman instead made a public statement declaring me a “moral deviant”. That’s when I knew I had successfully shed the values that weren’t mine to begin with, but I still hadn’t found any clothes of my own to wear. And the next morning, I got dressed in the same old hand-me-downs again before going out.

The truth is, discovering your own values is like unlocking the Secret of Happiness, deciphering the Meaning of Life, or Finding Yourself. Anyone who claims to have the answer ready for you is probably selling some brand of royal fashions. In my case, no clothes fit me until I went on a journey to find them. A few journeys, actually, all outdoors.

So even though I can’t tell you where you’ll find your perfect pajamas, I did get some insights into the reasons why the outdoors worked for me. I suspect these things may apply to the journeys of others as well.

The primary benefit of an extended outdoor journey is that it changes one’s basis of survival. The set of circumstances that provided me with food, shelter, and security changed drastically when I went backpacking or rock climbing. I think this change of perspective was important in that it allowed me to examine my prior circumstances from afar, without having my immediate survival at stake. This provided a clarity of vision that I haven’t found in other endeavors. It also made me cognizant of the fact that there are ways to survive other than those I know. This is incredibly encouraging.

Going a little deeper, I think immersion in the outdoors is beneficial because ultimately, our survival always depends on the natural systems we experience there. My attempts at school and work seemed almost designed to make me forget that the building blocks of my body and everything around it were at some point grown or dug from the earth. Somehow we must relate to the land to survive, but my cultural situation had taught me to relate to organizations, corporations, and various other constructions instead. It didn’t sink in that these entities must be conducting my relationship with the land for me until they were removed from the picture. Sleeping and walking on the earth for a long period of time helped to restore my sense of connection with it, and this in turn helped me to examine those organizations, corporations, and constructions more objectively. When I found things of value from this perspective, those values stuck with me instead of shifting and fluctuating like the Emperor’s clothes.

These are ways the outdoors helped me to find my values. They are part of the reason that one of those values is the outdoors, but that isn’t really my intended point. I think the outdoors can help people to discover their values, even if the outdoors itself doesn’t end up ranking high on the list. It helped me see the relationships and ideas that are most valuable to me in my indoor life, and I believe it can do the same for others. Just go on your own outdoor search for the Holy Grail. You may find you already have it, but it takes a step outdoors to see it in the light.

It’s easy to visit the outdoors, see all the grand sights that await you there, and not realize that the places we visit are changing. Mountains especially seem stoic, immovable, and almost changeless. We take our pictures and make our memories in an instant, and take home an impression of a place during only that instant. I love going outdoors this time of year, to mountains and deserts especially, because the wildflowers growing there are so effective at shattering this illusion. They express their impermanence in their fragility, throwing all their energy into a paper-thin bloom that couldn’t possibly survive a cold night. Try to count the different kinds, and there always seems to be another variety not yet seen. Pass a dull shrub in the morning, and on the return trip in the afternoon it has exploded with blossoms, while its neighbors have closed up. All of this activity happens on a time scale we can witness, which makes it a sort of language the outdoors can use to speak to us. I believe the flowers express in their diverse dance the stories of other changes happening in the places we visit that are less perceptible to us. Changes that take place over days, weeks, years, and millenia are all underway during our visit, and all reflect the patterns shown to us by the flowers in some way. There’s always something new to learn from them, so I’m always inspired to get outdoors this time of year to see the wildflowers, and listen to them as well!

The bridge builders were from Reineke Construction, spending their weekend doing more of what they love, building better trails. Mark Reineke was kind enough to answer some of my questions about their work.

What do you think the benefits of your volunteer work will be?

As avid mountain bikers and owners of a small business, we have very tangible connections to the benefits of our work –- great trails to use. On the less tangible side, we want to enhance each person’s outdoor recreation experience through increased access via sustainable, well-designed and constructed, safe trail systems and trail access points. Volunteer work gives us a chance to give back to land owners (in this case, the U.S. Forest Service, who manages these public lands on behalf of all taxpayers) and helps protect and maintain the trails we enjoy using. We believe that volunteering encourages a spirit of “good will” and shows a commitment by mountain bikers to give back, thus, hopefully demonstrating that we are good stewards of these precious resources.

What other motivations do you have to volunteer your time & effort?

First and foremost, it is a lot of fun to see the physical improvements take place and to hear from other trail users how much they enjoy the fruits of our labor. In addition, our company’s vision is to create and continuously improve a self-sustaining, small business, focused on high quality services provided through cooperative, partnering relationships with its clients. Working both as small business owners and as volunteers, we show that we are serious about these cooperative, partnering principles.

What do you recommend to others who are inspired by you to volunteer?

Try it, you’ll like it!” In fact, you might get hooked. Call your local forest service office, open space office, or city/county land owner’s office and ask to speak to their volunteer coordinator about upcoming projects. Also, we encourage folks to contact IMBA (http://www.imba.com/) to get involved with a local mountain biking group – many have trail maintenance groups.

Who else can we thank for the vastly improved bridges?

We want to provide credits to several key folks for the bridge building projects we have done in the Jemez District of the U.S. Forest Service. First, Phyllis Martinez of the USFS is the visionary and the person who made all this possible. Without her, these projects never would have happened. Secondly, Joe Hancock and his team of horses, Jake and Chester, made it possible to move the 45-foot long beams and tons of concrete to the construction sites without adversely impacting the natural resources along the East Fork of the Jemez River (a wild and scenic river). Lastly, Reineke Construction, a member of the Professional Trail Builders Association, offers its thanks to the many volunteers who helped build 7 (soon to be &8;) bridges to make this trail accessible to more of the using public.