Kayaking Experience Quotes

Wilderness travel can be extremely taxing and dangerous. You can fall into a crevasse, flip your kayak, lose your way, become hypothermic, run out of food, or be killed by a bear. Far less violent events, however, are the common experience of most people who travel in wild landscapes. A sublime encounter with perhaps the most essential attribute of wilderness - falling into resonance with a system of unmanaged, non-human-centered relationships - can be as fulfilling as running a huge and difficult rapid. Sometimes they prove, indeed, to be the same thing.

Perhaps I am here because of last night’s dream, when I stood on the frozen lake before a kayak made of sealskin. I walked on the ice toward the boat and picked up a handful of shredded hide and guts. An old Eskimo man said, “You have much to work with.” Suddenly, the kayak was stripped of its skin. It was a rib cage of willow. It was the skeleton of a fish. I want to see it for myself, wild exposure, in January, when this desert is most severe. The lake is like steel. I wrap my alpaca shawl tight around my face until only my eyes are exposed. I must keep walking to stay warm. Even the land is frozen. There is no give beneath my feet. I want to see the lake as Woman, as myself, in her refusal to be tamed. The State of Utah may try to dike her, divert her waters, build roads across her shores, but ultimately, it won’t matter. She will survive us. I recognize her as a wilderness, raw and self-defined. Great Salt Lake strips me of contrivances and conditioning, saying, “I am not what you see. Question me. Stand by your own impressions.” We are taught not to trust our own experiences. Great Salt Lake teaches me experience is all we have.

I had never been to the Amazon, my jungle experience had mostly come from Central America with some short trips to Borneo, but the Amazon undoubtedly had a mystique all of its own. Surely the trees would be much bigger, the wildlife had to be much richer and more diverse and the people would be that bit wilder and cut off from the outside world. It gave me butterflies to think of spending time in the Amazon. Not knowing the geography of the area in any detail, my dreams were restricted to what I did know. There was a ruddy great river that virtually crossed the whole continent from west to east, and…that was about it. I had heard of expeditions that had kayaked the entire river from source to sea – phenomenal endurance feats taking five-plus months – the problem was I was a rubbish kayaker. Sure, I’d done a bit on the canals in England as a Cub Scout but that cold, depressing experience had been enough to put me off for life. What a dull, miserable sport, instructed by overenthusiastic dickheads in stupid helmets.

When pressed, hunters who claim that they just want “to be out in the wilderness,” will admit that the kill is essential—or at least the hope of a kill. As it turns out, there is no correlation between hunting and hiking, climbing, backpacking, kayaking, or any other outdoor activity. Hunters do not purposefully linger in the woods after a kill, but quickly begin the process of preparing to head home with the corpse. For hunters, the kill is the climax—the most important moment. They are not driving into the woods (or sometimes actually walking) for the sake of beauty, but in the hope of a kill. The kill can be likened to male orgasm. Sex is traditionally thought to be over when the man has an orgasm, and the hunt is never so decisively over as it is after a successful kill. As a teacher, I impatiently listened to a young man matter-of-factly defend the importance of hunting because he found the experience “orgasmic.” From his point of view, all that mattered was how exciting and wonderful the experience was for him. The “side affects” of the man’s preferred action—the experience of the deer (and the woman)—are deemed to be so irrelevant that they are not even mentioned.

LEADERSHIP | Intuit’s CEO on Building a Design-Driven Company Brad Smith | 222 words Although 46 similar products were on the market when Intuit launched Quicken, in 1983, it immediately became the market leader in personal finance software and has held that position for three decades. That’s because Quicken was so well designed that using it is intuitive. But by the time Smith became CEO, in 2008, the company had become overly focused on adding incremental features that delivered ease of use but not delight. What was missing was an emotional connection with customers. He and his team set out to integrate design thinking into every part of Intuit. They changed the layout of the office, reduced the number of cubes, and added more collaboration spaces and places for impromptu work. They increased the number of designers by nearly 600% and now hold quarterly design conferences. They bring in people who have created exceptionally designed products, such as the Nest thermostat and the Kayak travel website, to share insights with Intuit employees. The company acquired one start-up, called Mint, and collaborates with another, called ZenPayroll, to improve customer experience. Although most people don’t think of financial software as a category driven by emotion or design, Smith writes, Intuit’s D4D (“design for delight”) program has paid off. For example, its SnapTax app, inspired by consumers’ migration to smartphones, led one user to write, “I want this app to have my babies.

In short, Thetenthub are a team of outdoor enthusiasts who deliver in-depth walkthroughs, how-to guides and product reviews on all things camping and outdoors. With vast experience between our team, from backpacking, traditional campsite camping, to remote tarp camping all the way through to hikers and kayakers we hope to serve the community. Our shared knowledge and passion for the outdoors combined, we aim to share our experiences, thoughts and ideas on a global scale, with like-minded readers.

At OBSS   An unexpected occurrence did come of this escapade, even though I didn’t care for the program. Andy, you may or may not be aware that Outward Bound teaches interpersonal and leadership skills, not to mention wilderness survival. The first two skillsets were not unlike our education at the Enlightened Royal Oracle Society (E.R.O.S.) or the Dale Carnegie course in which I had participated before leaving Malaya for school in England. It was the wilderness survival program I abhorred. Since I wasn’t rugged by nature (and remain that way to this day), this arduous experience was made worse by your absence. In 1970, OBSS was under the management of Singapore Ministry of Defence, and used primarily as a facility to prepare young men for compulsory ’National Service,’ commonly known as NS. All young and able 18+ Singaporean male citizens and second-generation permanent residents had to register for National Service compulsorily. They would serve either a two-year or twenty-two-month period as Full Time National Servicemen after completing the Outward Bound course. Pending on their individual physical and medical fitness, these young men would enter the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF), Singapore Police Force (SPF), or the Singapore Civil Defense Force (SCDF). Father, through his extensive contacts, enrolled me into the twenty-one-day Outward Bound summer course. There were twenty boys in my class. We were divided into small units under the guidance of an instructor. During the first few days at the base camp, we trained for outdoor recreation activities such as adventure racing, backpacking, cycling, camping, canoeing, canyoning, fishing, hiking, kayaking, mountaineering, horseback riding, photography, rock climbing, running, sailing, skiing, swimming, and a variety of sporting activities.

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since it is the experience that gives traveling its value and not the traveling unto itself, you may want to focus on having adventures instead of just merely travel.  For example, I have individually “traveled” to: The Wind River mountain range in Lander, Wyoming. Dinosaur National Monument in Vernal, Utah. Canyonlands National Park in Moab, Utah. The Grand Canyon outside Williams, Arizona. And The Hoover Dam outside Las Vegas, Nevada. And each individual visit was fun and enjoyable in its own regard. But what I really want to do is raft the Green and Colorado Rivers, which connect all those locations above.  This will not only send me through the Flaming Gorge of Utah, but the confluence of the Green and Yampa Rivers in the canyons of Dinosaur Park, the heart of Canyonlands National Park, Lake Powell, the Grand Canyon, and inevitably a long paddle across Lake Meade to the Hoover Dam.  It will be a genuine, epic, Indiana Jones adventure that very few, if any people, have ever done.  And instead of a mere picture of the Hoover Dam or the Grand Canyon comfortably taken from a paved road, when my little nieces ask me, “What did you do, Uncle Aaron” I won't say, “I went to Paris and sat at a cafe.” I will say, “Uncle Aaron kayaked the whole damn Green and Colorado rivers from Wyoming to the Hoover Dam!”  This doesn't mean we all have to become Larry Ellison, sailing around the world or racing in regattas.  But having adventures as opposed to mere site seeing will add an inordinate amount of purpose and meaning to your life, not to mention a lot of fun.