I'm having a very hard time taking this seriously since its a extremely long article about a simple fully managed 2 day hiking trip to go 18 miles, which any healthy adult should be able to do in 1 day with a full pack.
At first, I was willing to give the writer the benefit of the doubt, but when I realized that the writer was getting Wood/Food/Water dropoffs regularly, is when I realized this thing is definitely for sheltered rich people.
Also the person camped/slept in a dry river bed which is one of the worst possible places to camp. A flash flood or torrential rain uphill can wash him out in seconds..
and I can see even the company had recommended him to sleep. Really ignorant to put him at risk like that. Always follow the river but maintain distance.
Hmm, I go backpacking often on six day trips into wilderness, often off trail at 12K. We're beat by 10mi and start slogging past 13mi. And we dialed our gear down to ultralight (15lb packs with canisters). I think you may be projecting your own fitness level onto everyone else. 18 miles over 2 days is perfectly reasonable for me if you're not going to the gym 3-4x a week and training for 10Ks and marathons.
In the UK older high school kids will go on Duke of Edinburgh expeditions where Gold is the highest level, and they are going 14 miles a day carrying packs. That is young, healthy 17-year-olds. I deliberately didn't do it because I wasn't fit enough.
I'm only 38 now but I wouldn't keep up with those youngsters. 10 miles is a good day's walk for a normal person, or 6 miles for a pleasure walk.
I consider myself a healthy adult and I think 2 days for 18 miles sounds commendable.
The amount of elevation change does matter, too. I am talking about both the difference between the trip elevation and his normal living elevation as well as the total elevation change within those 18 miles.
Everything is in the elevation.
I'm rather fit, used to be in the army nearly ten years ago. These days I hike now and then. Last weekend I went on a wee tip, 25 km and 1400 m elevation; it took me 9 hours, not including my lunch break. Only carrying water for the day, the said lunch, dry clothes and a bit of gear ; probably a 10 kg pack. Mild weather and decent track. On flat ground, I would have halved that time.
18 miles is ~30 km (for us, people who use the other measuring system), which, computed roughly, gives me a 6-7 hours walk. Yes, it's expected of a person who goes on trips regularly to see that as a piece of cake but for us, town folks, it might not be that easy, in any case, not a piece of cake.
Of course. I walked four miles in an hour and half for this game called pikmin something but it was in a flat, suburban sidewalk in Colorado. I think most people can easily walk a mile every half hour all day under these conditions. Probably will even be fun if you have someone to talk to along the way.
A trail on a hilly terrain is a completely different story.
Nine miles of hiking per day is not gruelling but it's enough to feel like you did something.
I did half-dome in Yosemite many years ago, and if I remember it's about 7 miles one-way with ~4000-5000 feet of elevation change. But the trail is mostly quite good, and it's as much as I'd want to hike in a day.
For a two day trip, especially if the trail is rough, 18 miles sounds about right.
Yep. Marrakech is a cheap flight from London, and if you want to go to the Atlas Mountains you can probably find a guide to take you individually for $30, maybe $35 if they had to agree to walk behind you so you could feel like you were all alone.
Then again, the sort of person that buys these trips would probably be upsold $30k worth of carpets by the end of it.
You can pay a float/bush plane pilot to drop you off in the middle of nowhere in Alaska or BC for less than $1000 (depending on where) and have a great trip.
Not the ability, but mostly the desire. It’s tremendously liberating to just have a good EA, travel agent or concierge service taking care of everything for you.
Looking for flights and arranging other practical stuff is work, no reason to do it yourself if you’re filthy rich.
I’m still not really sure why this particular package costs 30k, Black Tomato seems to have some unusually high margins for luxury travel. We’d probably arrange this kind of an excursion for much less money (as a part of a larger holiday, which would cost at least 30k), but I’m not sure about the full extent of the support team they offer.
30km of hiking on is definitely not something that any healthy adult would handle in a day (especially carrying a extra 10kg pack). That's a good 7 hours of walking - at the very least my feet would struggle with that.
I think that's pretty reasonable. It's not like you are previously occupied, you just keep walking.
It might be useful to know what you and the grandparent comment consider healthy though, you could both have very different ideas of base level health.
This sounds like backpacking... which you can do for way less than $30k. A nicely equipped pack from scratch can be had for less than $1k. Add in a little more for food, airfare, and any accomodations before and after, and you can do a trip like this for a couple thousand dollars max.
Of course prior wilderness experience is also essential, so I guess some people will want to spend extra for a special forces guide.
> This sounds like backpacking... which you can do for way less than $30k.
I mean...you can do a lot of things for less than they are sold for. This should not be a revelation. People, however, pay extra money for convenience and hand-holding. This should also not be a revelation. You need look no further than bloated SLAs.
The idea of being dumped in the middle of nowhere seems like it has scope for much more vicarious entertainment. Imagine a challenge where a point on the Earth's land surface is chosen at random, and competitors are dropped there (at random times of the year) and told to reach the nearest airport. They could then sell the vlogs to a production company.
Of course there would be rules about not starting in active warzones, or countries where you would be locked up as a spy, but I'm sure viewers would accept that. Also, it would be a bit unfair if a competitor had to start on a remote island, but I recently calculated that 99% of the Earth's land surface is accounted for by continents and islands no smaller than Sicily. The other edge case would be starting in Antarctica, but people do complete solo crossings of that.
Group of people get dropped in a field in Amsterdam and need to reach Monaco in 5 days to win a 5k prize, the catch is there have no money on them so they have to rely on the kindness of strangers.
I've also been thinking about a time-travel themed spin off to this idea. Imagine you were sent back in time some thousands of years, to a random location on Earth, and you had to communicate (via some fictional device) to a referee in the present day, telling them where you are, and when you are, in order to be "rescued"/win.
Largely it would be the same challenge as the present day version, except you couldn't use vehicles (except riding horses/camels), and you'd have to navigate using only information that would have been visible at that time, like mountains, rivers, and long-lasting settlements.
To enforce this fiction, the players could receive information from a team mate that had access to a 3D model of their location as it would have looked in the relevant historic time period. That team mate would then be able to instruct them which direction to walk in, and which geographical features to follow.
Every night, players would try to observe the location of the moon and planets relative to constellations, in order to calculate which century, year, month and approximate day they are in. Of course, the players on the ground would know the answer, but would have to show how they worked it out, and their team mate would have to perform the same in a 3D model which uses a planetarium system for rendering the night sky of the intended period.
To accurately determine their location without cheating, the player on the ground would have to find their way to a location which existed at the time, and whose exact position is known in the present day, such as the Parthenon or Stone Henge.
> To accurately determine their location without cheating, the player on the ground would have to find their way to a location which existed at the time, and whose exact position is known in the present day, such as the Parthenon or Stone Henge.
Survival in the wilderness sucks though, especially without a tribe, so for this competition to avoid turning into a snuff film, the contestants would have to be dropped somewhere survivable, which would almost guarantee that the terrain is easily identifiable without human landmarks. I.e. no Antarctica, no Saharan or Midwestern desert, etc.
Then I think everyone would just converge on the strategy of finding and following waterways because the probability of being within a reasonable distance of a human settlement with a surviving landmark is relatively low. Most medium to large lakes were formed either millions of years ago or right after the last ice age so between them, local topography, and visible distant mountains it'd be relatively easy to triangulate a location.
For the survivability aspect, I was imagining that these "time travellers" would have a device that could create unlimited free food and water (basically a support crew following them).
You're right about the strategy, though. If a player could find their way to the coast, and knew their rough latitude (by observing Polaris, for example), their team mate could probably work out which river they had been following, and then guide them back from the coast to some ancient monument.
Suffering for people who have never suffered. This comes up on here again and again (the last one was why rich people do triathlons). People who have done well in life need to justify themselves with some organised (and usually artificial) suffering. No-one does middle-class guilt like a Brit.
Also, this guy lives in Manchester. He lives next two spectacular national parks (Lake District and the Dales), and he goes to Morocco. Could have gone to the Highlands if you wanted remote. Inexplicable. Smh. Embarrassment.
There are companies which offer such tours to Kazakhstan. They drop you off in complete wilderness, no other living soul in the radius of 500km.
They give you all the gear/food/ammo, a bunch of coordinates with supplies pre-cached, a Thuraya satellite phone in case you decide to give up midway.
Without fully reading the article, if you want to go somewhere really far out then Awasi Patagonia and White Desert are worth checking out. Antarctic Logistics offers some crazy multi-month expeditions too.
Amankora in Bhutan is very cool, but also very different.
Africa obviously has tons of options too, but everybody goes there.
It really depends on what you are looking for. There are lots of expensive ways to climb a mountain if you want something more extreme (but still controlled).
My suggestions are kind of all over the place because I don’t really know what exactly you’re looking for. I could list hundreds of options.
Thanks so much for your response. I will research Awasi Patagonia and White Desert.
I am interested in seeing what curated adventures are out there, reading first hand accounts of the experience, and considering them for myself. Doesn’t necessarily have to involve a mountain and I do have a predisposition for wanting to try it DIY before relying on a guide but I recognize that that kind of thinking may need recalibrating outside of the US.
There are barely any useful public reviews for this kind of stuff*, if you’re looking for something at a similar price point you will need a good luxury travel agent to work with.
I would suggest that you avoid the big ones like Black Tomato or Mr&Mrs Smith, you will have a much better experience working with a boutique where you can know all the staff, and more importantly the staff will know you.
* FWIW this is something I intend to solve next year.
I don’t really have to explain why and how the current situation sucks, that’s self-explanatory after you see the PDF above. I want to offer the same (but better) for free, and make my money from the industry standard 10% that goes to travel agencies.
If you want to talk high-end travel, or even just get a referral to a good luxury travel agent you can write me at travel@safe.im I’m more than happy to answer any questions, even if you’re just planning a trip :)
(For user generated content the gold standard is the flyertalk luxury section, but this requires a lot of reading to get into. Tripadvisor is completely full of fake reviews)
Suspect any Marrakech travel agent can knock up the same walking itinerary for <$300 with a private guide (or $30 if you're happy for a shorter mountain walk on a group tour..) though you might stop at a few more gift shops on the way.
Not sure if this is similar to what you’re looking for, but I saved this “adventure travel agency”’s website in my bookmarks a while ago, thought it could be interesting.
Comments here feel a bit rough. If you've got the time, I'd recommend a read here.
Regardless of the "stats" here (absurd price point, 2 days / 18 miles, plenty of supervision), it feels the author is as self-aware as one would hope. The article, longer than necessary to be sure, is still well-written.
His experience, his feelings throughout -- make any arguments you want about them, but it feels genuine. I learned a good amount about Black Tomato et al., and regardless of their merits, they do exist and people are using them.
University of Minnesota, Duluth campus has (used to have?) a winter survival class where the final test is to live on your own in the North Woods for a few days. Never done it, but I heard it's fun.
This is silly beyond belief. 18miles? Easily done in 6-8 hours. Sticking to the dumb managed schedule vs hanging out with the locals?! What a fool. What a dumb trade of potential experience. What story would his grandkids want to hear? “Dad spent a night with locals in a tent serendipitously” or “Dad did a Disney-fied hike by himself”.
So silly. Disgusting.
At first, I was willing to give the writer the benefit of the doubt, but when I realized that the writer was getting Wood/Food/Water dropoffs regularly, is when I realized this thing is definitely for sheltered rich people.