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Outside Magazine, July 2005

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The Hard Way
The Calculus of Risk (cont.)

A CLOSE CALL makes you think. Three months later, I shattered my left wrist in a climbing accident in northern New Mexico. I fell 20 feet and hit the ground. It could easily have been much worse: I could have been paralyzed—or killed. As it is, I'm merely left with a hand that doesn't work right. Now, after a long recuperation, and as I prepare for my first major expedition since the accident—a remote trek in Central Asia—I find myself thinking about my complicated relationship with adventure and risk.

Being held under the Nile is no picnic, and at the time I thought I was a goner. Yet the chances, in reality, were remote. I wasn't the first person to go for what Nile guides euphemistically term a "long swim." In fact, capsizing is so common that earlier in the day we

Underestimate risk and overestimate your abilities and disaster can strike. Do the opposite and you'll be too scared to even try.

had practiced it—intentionally flipping the boat in flatwater, going under, staying calm while our bobber-like life jackets returned us to the surface, then dog-paddling back to the raft. In the eight years that the African outfitter Adrift has been running the monstrous headwaters of the Nile in central Uganda, it's guided 16,000 people down some of the hairiest whitewater in the world—Bujugali Falls, Easy Rider, Total Gunga, Overtime, Retrospect, Bubugo, Itanda Falls, and, finally, the Bad Place. Although thousands of clients have swum, no one has died.

This difference between what you fear might happen to you and what reasonably might—between the I'm-gonna-die! feeling I had deep inside the G-Spot and the statistical chances of actually dying—is what's known in the canon of adventure psychology as "perceived risk versus real risk." More than just a mind game, it's the keystone of modern adventure.

Your perceived risk in any adventure is based largely upon two factors—anecdotal and often apocryphal horror stories (grizzly eats entire Girl Scout troop) and personal inexperience (you have no firsthand information or knowledge). Real risk, on the other hand, is based on facts. In order to move from the subjectivity of perceived risk to an understanding of real risk, you need to take the leap and participate in the adventure. The more experience you have, the more acumen; and the more acumen, the more competence, which is the prime mediator in any adventure.

Not surprisingly, risk—both perceived and real—is inversely proportional to competence. As your skill in any sport increases, your perception—or, more likely, misperception—of the dangers decreases and, naturally, so does your fear. Once you learn how to roll your kayak, flipping over no longer freaks you out; when you can finally link telemark turns, steep slopes become inviting instead of terrifying; learning when to hunker down in a raft reduces your chances of a long swim. With this hard-won competence, real risk also decreases. If you know how to hand-jam, you're not likely to fall from the overhang; if you know how to bunny-hop, you probably won't endo over the log.

The capability to accurately assess these two factors—your own competence and the real risk—is crucial for both safety and success. Disaster can strike when you overestimate your ability and underestimate the real risk. Conversely, undervaluing your skills and overestimating the risk—thus amplifying irrational fear—can be so inhibiting that chances are good you won't give it a try at all, or you'll fail in your attempt, confirming what wasn't true in the first place. Between either extreme lies the sweet spot: that world-opening state where you have both an accurate understanding of your own abilities and a clear-eyed sense of the true risks.

This paradigm of risk is a recent development. For more than 70,000 years, humans lived outside, where life-and-death threats were a constant reality. To survive as a species, we had to adapt to adventure—physically, psychologically, and spiritually. Through much of the past millennium, adventure was synonymous with exploration or war, which meant you might not come back alive. In 1519, Ferdinand Magellan, bent on becoming the first man to circumnavigate the world, sailed from Spain with five ships and 234 men; three years later, only one ship and 18 men listed back into port—Magellan was not one of them. On his 1778 voyage, Captain Cook became the first European to set foot in Hawaii; he returned there a year later and was promptly killed. A month after becoming the first European to reach Timbuktu, in 1826, Alexander Gordon Laing was beheaded outside the fabled city.

Today, exploration and adventure have largely diverged in both meaning and substance. Apart from the deepest parts of some oceans, most of the world is mapped and explored, at least on the macro scale. A small core of adventurers are still attempting bold explorations—first ascents and descents, virgin BASE jumps, and mammoth waves—where the risks are truly unknown and death is a real possibility. But just one step back from the mortal edge lies the expansive kingdom of modern adventure, where the chances of dying diminish dramatically but the thrill of the challenge thrives. Genetically programmed for risk but now living in warm houses and paying fat health-insurance premiums, we still crave adventure—we just don't want to die doing it.

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