Because of our lack of debt, our basic equation is that, in order to keep Boldly Went-ing, we just have to figure out how to keep our expenses lower than our income. The way we've been achieving that, I think, is probably what you'll find most helpful here.

In order to achieve a balanced financial equation, there are really only two things you can do: drop your expenses, and increase your revenue. This is where the rubber hits the road: the practical answer to the question of "how we afford to do what we're doing." How do we make more than we spend while also traveling around, making up a business, hiking a bunch, doing what we want?

The two categories of actions we take include dropping expenses we can live without, and maximizing the number of revenue streams that we can cobble together.

I mentioned above that we haven't had traditional contract-based full-time jobs for 3 years. But that doesn't mean at all that we don't work. In fact, we work more now than when we would if we did have normal jobs. I'm almost sure of it. It's just that the jobs take the form of a series of side-hustles. And they're organized so that we can do them in a way that's compatible with a peripatetic lifestyle. 

While for most of our lives, our sole income streams were traditional jobs, in 2018, there have been at least 10 ways that we've earned money. In roughly descending order, from most to least lucrative, here are our the ways we've made money this year (not including investments because we’re not planning to touch those pre - retirement, so the money’s not “real” yet for us):
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• Nursing - i.e., my per diem job where I can pick up shifts as needed/possible.
• Medical direction at outdoor events: i.e., Angel's contract with Destination Trail's series of 200 mile races this late summer/early Fall.
• Renting out our house
• Selling tickets to Boldly Went events.
• Patreon donors - people who believe in what we're doing giving little bits of money monthly to keep it going.
• Tour guiding through Boldly Went in the Seattle area.
• Renting out our Oru Kayaks
• Podcast/event sponsorships
• Selling merchandise
• Selling our personal stuff. 

None of those revenue streams is big, but pieced together, they're enough to allow us to travel around, work on establishing the business, and work on creating more revenue streams - writing a book, trying to build bigger events, finding more sponsors, and maybe picking up more fun side jobs that don't feel like a burden.

What’s life feel like in that context? Pretty damn flexible. There's no one job obligation that feels like it truly "owns" us. We have to figure out how to make money to keep doing what we want - but it's the "keep doing what we want" idea that feels like it's the focal point of our life, rather than the "making money" part. Life feels creative, and a bit unstable, but not in a threatening way because we always have nursing as a fallback. Our taxable income at the end of the year will be really low, but I definitely don't feel poor, because we have figured out so many options. And I think a variety of options in life is the true opposite of poverty. 

Mainly, life these last few years feels like investing in something we believe in with this project - something really personal, creative, and cool.

Will our income streams be different next year? Almost definitely. Maybe we'll find some online income? Or take different side jobs? Or just work more at the hospital? Or less? Who knows? It's weird - it almost doesn't matter, because it's not the point. The point is finding out a way to afford to do what we're doing - traveling, building a business, working on passion projects, creating something cool in the world that we believe in.

I gotta admit, the last year or so I've been feeling a bit like a gordo, because our previous regimen of endurance running and thru-hiking has largely been supplanted by travel - both internationally in Latin America and at our home in the US, for Boldly Went events. While we still get out for a healthy number of runs, hikes, and paddles, most of our energy has been going to learning Spanish and planning road trips.

I know we're not the only ones who share both passions - for outdoor adventure and for international travel - and the question of whether stories from abroad are welcome at our outdoor adventure events comes up in pretty much every city. All of this has me reflecting a bit on why there is so much overlap in the communities: between dirtbag athletes and vagabonds. 

The topic came up for me initially because, sitting on a plane, flying home from Mexico a few days ago, I was thinking about how this year I really want to get back into ultra shape (probably a 50k route we make up ourselves rather than a race) and complete another (shorter) thru-hike on the Colorado Trail after a couple years away from major athletic challenges. When I ask myself why, beyond wanting to stop feeling like an impostor when people ask me about my Cascade Crest 100 hat, I can think of at least 6 things that these kinds of outdoor adventures bring to one's life.
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1) A regular, heady, emotional mix of fear, insecurity and excitement.   

2) Fun logistical challenges that involve incorporating both mental and physical aspects.

3) A sense of accomplishment for having done things that are on the edge between possible and impossible.

4) A sense of identity that comes from being a part of a tight-knit community, and from doing something that not many people do. Feeling strange, and special.

5) A better sense of one's place in the cosmos - as a small, weak creature in the middle of a big, beautiful world.

​6) A sense of being physically healthy, and strong. Feeling like, if you want to do just about anything, you will be capable of doing it (with a bit of training).

While we used to spend almost all of our leisure time on outdoor pursuits, we've gone through several phases, including during the last few years, when travel has taken over a significant amount of that energy and time. Sitting on a plane, thinking about why that's felt like a relatively even trade, it struck me that our drifting around has actually scratched a lot of the same psychological itches that the trails used to. For instance:

1) Stepping off of a plane into the middle of Guatemala City for the first time was a similar feeling to taking the first steps on our PCT thru-hike. It was the fear, insecurity, and excitement that comes along with setting out into an unknown environment to take on a challenge with some actual dangers that you're not sure you're up to confronting. Terrifying and exhilarating all at once.

2) The logistics of international travel are probably even more complicated than the logistics of running 100 miles through the wilderness. While the physical challenge is primarily to avoid putting anything in your mouth that will give you dysentery, when you're traveling every day is a puzzle to be solved - navigating foreign cultures, languages, and bus stations.

3) While social media makes it appear as if travel is just drifting around looking at pretty things (which, in some ways, it can be), in actuality it comes with a strong sense of accomplishment as you see yourself learning new languages and navigating formerly difficult situations more easily. On our recent trip to Mexico, it was still shocking to step off the plane into a foreign culture, but after 5 previous months of Latin American travel, it wasn't scary in the same way. It was a familiar kind of fear that we knew we were capable of navigating. Estuvimos listos.

4) There's also a strong sense of community and identity that comes along with meeting other international travelers. Beyond finding people who love the same places you do, there's a bond that comes with sharing the same types of experiences I've been talking about here, and of feeling like you're all the same kind of weird.

5) And there's no reality check that better helps you to understand your place in the world than being dropped into the middle of a foreign country, where you don't speak the language, and where you no longer understand how things work. You're small. The world's big.

Maybe those sets of psychological needs help explain why some of us are more drawn to adventure than others. But definitely, somewhere in that overlap is the reason that when we travel, we repeatedly run into people who are into the outdoors: as with our recent random connection through AirBnB with Edy, in Coatepec, Mexico, who has traveled widely and also happens to be a mountain guide. And when we meet people in the outdoors community, they are very frequently travelers as well - as when we met Chad Guenter in Canmore, Canada through a SUP boarding connection, and it turns out he'd previously lived in Jalcomulco - a town not too far from Edy's in Mexico.

So, I think that there genuinely is a shared psychology - a dirtbag DNA if you will - that defines people who are driven to explore, whether that's through outdoors pursuits or international travel. We're all after the same sorts of things in life - curiosity to see what's around the next literal or proverbial bend, sure, but also a shared desire for the types of growth that come along with both types of experiences. Maybe as a group we all get bored easily and need a challenge, or maybe we need to set ourselves apart as different in some way or another. Or, conversely, need to feel that even though we are a bit different, there are a lot of other people who are different in the same way.

And so, yeah, of course we let it slide at events when a storyteller wants to talk about a travel adventure that only peripherally involves the outdoors. ​

One itch travel doesn't scratch, unfortunately, is the need for physical fitness. So while the trip to Mexico that we just returned from was great, sitting around drinking cerveza and eating sweet, delicious mole poblano doesn't get you in ultra shape on its own. So I'm going to head out for a run. But we're going to keep it kind of short: we have a road trip to pack for tomorrow.

If you love the outdoors, there’s a good chance you also love some form of outdoors media, whether it’s a great adventure blog, a crunchy Instagram, or yes, a podcast. We adventurers love to hear what our fellows are up to, perhaps enjoying some inspiration and daydreaming about embarking on similar missions. Nothing kills the adventure buzz worse than that daydream coming to a sudden halt as you wonder, how do these people make this stuff happen?
 
When we hear inspiring stories, it’s natural to wonder how we could make our lives more like them. It’s easy to convince ourselves others are in on a secret that allows them to go on all these epic adventures while we struggle to break out of daily patterns.

We might worry about not having the time or money to take off to the Alps for a week, or fret about our limited experience, or lack of gear. We might want to go camp alone in the mountains for the night, but hesitate for fear of being eaten by a bear. (Or a mountain lion. That’s what keeps me awake alone in the mountains!) All of these fears have one thing in common: They are mental limitations, and overcoming them is all about mindset.

If there was a secret to achieving a life full of adventures, I think it would be much less about technical skills or money and much more about the way we think about adventure. Today I want to walk you through my approach to tackling the mental hurdles that hold us back from living out our adventure dreams, take a look at three action steps you can take today to launch your next adventure, and examine a few of my favorite digital planning tools.

In my years with others who have made outdoor exploration their lifestyle, I have identified three common attitudes of the adventurer:

#1 Adventure has a variety of definitions.

What sets one person’s heart on fire may be of little interest to another, and what calls to us in one moment may not have the same pull in the next. There are as many definitions of adventure as there are people who seek it. The happiest adventurers know that just because someone else finds their fulfillment paddling whitewater doesn’t mean a winter summit of a nearby peak is less of an adventure. While it’s great to be inspired by the stories of others, we should exercise care not to judge ourselves by comparison.

Adventure is also not just about physical feats. When people talk about adventures they have had, common themes include doing something for the first time, experiencing solitude, facing a challenge, and, probably most common, having unexpected and fulfilling interactions with strangers along the way. If we have in mind a fun way to achieve one or more of these experiences, we probably have the makings of a good adventure.

So if you want to discover what your definition of adventure is, pay attention to what excites you. That moment when you see a picture or hear a story and your heart just says, yes! When you daydream, what makes you feel happiest, most alive, or most excited? What experiences have you had in the past that brought your soul to life? In the vast world of possible adventures, simply finding a good reason to choose one path over another can be overwhelming enough to keep us inside. Start paying attention to the subtle emotional responses you have to the outdoors world and you will be well on your way to discovering what adventure means to you.

#2) The goal of adventure often extends beyond the physical experience.
 
Whether we are embarking on a once-in-a-lifetime expedition, or making our daily snowshoe lap around the nearby farm, there is often a higher purpose than that of reaching the summit, the end of the adventure. What motivates us may be a simple desire to have fun or challenge ourselves, or we may be using adventure to help us deal with pain, or make a big change. Getting clear with ourselves on what our larger goals are will help us choose the most fulfilling adventure, as well as motivate us to follow through.

Practitioners of yoga, meditation, and other mindfulness-based exercises may be familiar with the idea of setting an intention for a practice. Adventure works in much the same way. Embarking with our intention in mind helps us see more clearly which adventure is the one for us here and now, and motivates us to see the dream through to the end.

Remember, there is no “right” reason to adventure.

#3) We can work through barriers in small steps.
 
If a shortage of time, money, experience, or gear is cramping our adventure style, or if we are limited by fear of being eaten by a mountain lion (or a fear of anything else!), we can always work through these limitations in small steps. Trying something new, working through fear, and getting outside of our comfort zones are common reasons why we adventure in the first place, so overcoming these challenges one step at a time can be enormously satisfying.

This is your chance to pick your favorite reason for not embarking on the next great trip. We’ve already identified a lack of time, money, gear and experience as common things that hold us back. Any one of these limitations can be overcome with baby steps. Strapped for time? Start by blocking off whatever amount of time seems manageable, even if it’s only ten minutes, and commit to enjoying it. A ten minute walk in the park might not quench our entire thirst for adventure, but it helps us practice the mindset of devoting time to ourselves. As we get used to the idea that it is acceptable, even essential, to take the time we need for ourselves, we will get better at finding space for more significant undertakings.

The same holds true for knowledge, gear, or money. Start small. Bringing more adventure into life does not have to involve radical changes, although radical change can also be achieved through small steps. Dreaming big is fantastic, except for when we dream so big that we don’t know where to start. So pick a small step that will inspire confidence, and go for it.

We may never feel “ready.” Sometimes we just have to do it. Don’t wait.

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With the mindset of a happy adventurer in place, we’re read to take the next step in getting out there!

#1) Talk to someone! Talk to crunchy friends, or cold-call a local adventure artist you admire. Ask them about a recent adventure or about their daily life. Tell them about your adventure dreams. Inevitably, someone else has a way of doing things that you’ve never even thought of. Furthermore, many great adventure stories involve a fortuitous meeting with a stranger. A totally routine outing can turn into an adventure, or inspiration for an adventure, when we put ourselves out there and connect with the people we meet along the way.

#2) Repeat an adventure you’ve already done. Sometimes we just need a confidence boost, and in this way we can remind ourselves that we have the time/know-how/money to do this!

#3) Plan something with a friend. It’s fun to have someone to bounce your ideas off of, and can be particularly beneficial if limited time tends to hold you back from adventuring. Committing to an adventure with a buddy helps us stick to it. It’s harder to bail on friends than it is to bail on ourselves.

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If you are looking to really get out of your familiar world for your next adventure, here are some digital tools I like to use when planning my far-away fun:

#1) Freecampsites.net. Ideal for roadtrips, this website will show you places where you can camp for free, complete with descriptions and reviews by other folks who have been there recently. You will find a mix of dispersed forest camping, RV parking behind gear stores, and established car-camping sites complete with fire pits and sometimes even an outhouse. The highest concentration of campsites is in the U.S., but parts of Canada and Europe are well-covered too.

In the U.S., free dispersed camping is allowed in most national forests and on some BLM land. Find your local forest on www.fs.fed.us to find out more. As ever when in wilderness, practice Leave No Trace in your public lands.

#2) Kayak.com’s “Explore” feature. This tool lets you search for flights by setting your departure airport and your budget, and it shows you where in the world you can go and when. You would be amazed how inexpensive flights can be if your dates and location are flexible. For example, a search this morning revealed that I could fly roundtrip from my current home airport (Portland, OR) to Barcelona, Spain for $400 this February! Or I could head to Denver next week for $40 roundtrip. If flexibility is part of your adventure style, this is the tool for you.

#3) Couchsurfing.com. This site unites a community of adventurers around the world and connects travelers with hosts who provide free accommodations for a night or two. Hostelworld.com is another favorite for cheap accommodations. Keep in mind that many hostels offer work exchanges. If you will be in one area for an extended period of time, you might be able to find a hostel that will let you stay for free in exchange for labor of some sort. If you are only passing through, you might be able to exchange a couple hours of work for a free meal. This can be a great way to keep expenses down!

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With so many ways to get out, so many places to go, and all the great tools available for explorers, there is definitely something to fit every adventurer’s lifestyle! Believing that we can do it is often the most difficult part. My sincerest hope is that you can use one or more of the ideas in this post to help make your next adventure a reality, and build more adventure into your lifestyle. If you do, or if you are trying but still struggling to achieve your adventure dreams, I want to hear from you! Please drop me a line at Carly3ski@gmail.com, or contact me via my website below. I’m always looking to connect with fellow adventurers!

Cheers,
Carly

A simple, practical way to apply the role model idea is that when confronted by a person who has done something amazing, or better, something that you're jealous about, better than saying "must be nice..." is to ask the question, "How'd you do that?" When you ask it out loud, you almost always learn something valuable, even if the person's context is dramatically different from yours. 

For a personal example, we have a couple of friends, Matt and Julie Urbanski, who appear to have their act together as much as anyone I know. And while they're incredibly lovely people, I have to admit that in some ways my gut response when I think about their life is jealousy: particularly in the fact that they have only spent intermittent periods of time working since college, and have traveled for periods of up to three years at a time without traditional jobs. They both have degrees in finance, and because I'm completely ignorant of that field, my gut response to their situation is that they must have been able to save like a million dollars from a few years of work and so now can do what they want. Must be nice, but I can't make that kind of money as a nurse.

But, a few weeks back, they posted a helpful article on their blog about financing their lifestyle, and it prompted me to think more concretely about their situation. I know they live frugally, have a few sources of income that are portable wherever they are in the world, and basically have a huge sense of freedom and possibility in life despite the fact that they have a kid and careers and lots of goals that people tend to see as prohibiting travel. But I didn't know anything about the concrete financials behind that, and I was assuming that they were in a place financially where we weren't.

So, I asked specifically how they did it: how much money did you have in savings when you quit your jobs, and how much do you feel like is "enough"?  While I won't go into specifics, I was surprised to learn that when they started traveling their net worth looked very similar to ours now. I also learned pretty quickly that a key difference between us and them is that their sophisticated understanding of the way that investment works is what allows them to feel a sense of financial freedom and control as much as the actual money they have in the bank.

Their situation is significantly different from ours. I personally like having a home base in Seattle, while they seem to be persistent drifters. I'm generally happy with the working life, as long as I'm doing something meaningful, and while I want to be able to travel I see myself doing it for nearly as long of periods of time as them. But I do want their sense of financial freedom and control, and I do want to feel like I'm able to fully decide when and where I want to work, and when and where I want to travel, in the way that they do. And so, as we're making financial planning goals across the next few years, I'm going to be using them as a key resource rather than an object of ignorant bitter envy. They're way better role models than rivals (especially since they kick our butts in most important areas of life)!  
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Don't read the comments, but more importantly don't write any comments yourself. 

I really believe that to do cool things, you have to surround yourself with cool people. But more so, you have to recognize that those cool people can make your life better, and shouldn't be targets for your bitter frothy gleek.  ​

Two years ago today my dad died from an aggressive brain cancer. He died three months after he was diagnosed, out of the blue, having had no previous major medical issues, and at a relatively young age - 61. He also died with plans. The cancer struck with cruel timing - literally midway through maybe his biggest adventure: a move to Las Vegas from his lifelong home in small-town Ohio, to be closer to his grandchildren, and to prepare for a retirement in a beautiful part of the country. 

It also struck a month before Angel and I started a thru-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, and he died just days after we hit the midway point. Despite the fact that he was recovering from brain surgery, he and my mom drove us from Las Vegas to the Southern Terminus in Campo, CA, and then met us in Big Bear, several hundred miles in. Having always been strong, independent, and active, at that point my mom commented that a three block walk we made from our hotel to a pizza place was the longest he'd been on since surgery.  A cruel irony, having just walked several hundred miles through desert sun to the same spot.

Dad was a country person, but not exactly an adventurous person: I have fond memories of using gasoline to blow up underground bee hives as a family, and he spent hundreds of summer days outside mowing our massive lawn, and winter days shoveling snow from our long driveway, but he wasn't a camper, hunter, or fisherman for the most part.

He also wasn't that much of a social person. His memorial was mostly populated by family, with a few close friends, and it was strange for me to see that even a lot of the old acquaintances that showed up didn't seem to know that much about him. He lived a private life, and spent most of his time and energy on us, his immediate family. 

What he was, characteristically, was a good person. He was kind to people. Not particularly educated, but smart. He was faithful and unfailingly supportive to his wife and family. He was generous with money and had his priorities straight. 

Maybe because Dad's death happened, for me, in the context of a life lived outdoors on the PCT, a lot of my reflection on it has focused on life's cycles. Dad didn't deserve to die in the way he did, or at the time he did, but death isn't exactly something one earns or doesn't. It's just something that is in life. It's strange, in a way, how much we ignore its inevitability, and how much it takes us by surprise when it comes.

Two years out and looking back, that perspective on death has inspired a weird sort of boldness. When death is inevitable, your time alive matters more, and because you know it is limited, it becomes urgent to try to live well.

The ripples out from Dad's death among those of us who were close to him have moved in that direction, which is a great testament to his life. In the immediate aftermath for Angel and I, it meant getting back on the PCT and pushing ourselves as hard physically as we ever have to finish in the same season following his death. For my mom, it meant months training and preparing for her first backpacking trip, hiking the 8 miles in from Manning Park to the Northern Terminus to meet us at the finish, completing the circuit, and spreading some of Dad's ashes.

Two years out, my Mom's life has - to me at least - looked like a living out the goals that she and Dad had set. She's traveled all around the West Coast from her Las Vegas base, has gone on several more camping and backpacking trips, and has spent the bulk of her time at home with their grandkids. 

For Angel and I, the path that Dad's death set us on eventually led us here, to this blog, because it drove us deeper into the pursuit of what we love, life outdoors. It drove us to a trip around Latin America last year, a few months dirtbagging around the West Coast, a decision to give this business a go, a kayak trip down the Hudson, and an intentional reshaping of our lifestyle to try to minimize time spent on things that don't matter and maximize time spent on things that do.

This weekend we spent a few days camping on the Olympic Peninsula with our niece, and with the anniversary of Dad's death looming, it was impossible not to read it in this context. Lilly is 6, and is Angel's brother's daughter. She lives in Ohio and on her first trip to the West Coast it was poignant to see the life at the flip side of death, as she dove headfirst into some of her first outdoor adventures: scaling trees, paddling furiously in circles on a mountain lake, racing down rugged Pacific Coast beaches. The hope and possibility is that her life is full of this kind of thing.

Life can be beautiful, and the ripple of Dad's death is always a reminder that it's worth the risk to try to make it so. 

Excepting a brief boat ride on the Sault St. Marie and a Disney cruise to Nassau, the first time I left American soil, it was 1998, and I was an 18 year old clown evangelist. It was a church mission trip to Lima, Peru, and we were going to spend a week sharing the gospel with the Latin world through the universal language of whatever is happening here:

We'd spent months preparing, but our careers were short lived, because the first time we put on our makeup the street kids we were supposed to be entertaining cried and ran away. Some tried to hit us, some froze in terror. None were drawn up into spiritual rapture.

The choice to travel the world as a clown evangelist, it seemed, was a grave mistake.

I'm not proud of any of this, but I can say that we learned from our mistakes. We cut our losses, put away the costumes, and spent the rest of our week in inner city Lima painting a deaf school and listening to stories from families living in a leper colony. We all vowed to never speak of it again, and I'm breaking a blood oath by posting this here. (That last sentence is the only part of this story that isn't true.)

I tell you this because 1) when you have a story about Peruvian clown evangelism, you can't let it go to waste, but more importantly 2) it's a prime example of adventure travel gone wrong. 

Personally, I have to admit that the term "adventure travel" itself makes me cringe a bit because it triggers so many problematic mental images. If I'm in a historical state of mind, I see a British guy in a safari helmet forcing locals to carry his crap through the jungle while he searches for ruins to plunder and pretends to "discover" places where people have been living for thousands of years. If I'm picturing modern adventure travel, it's backpackers harassing wildlife in New Zealand or getting drunk after their kayak trip in Cabo. Whatever the merits of the happy hour at Senor Frogs, it's just not our jam. 

Admittedly enough, in our years of travel, we've gone on our share of tours that were marketed as "adventures", and they haven't been all bad: we met some really hardcore people "volcano boarding" in Nicaragua, and "100% Aventura" will always be one of my favorite inside jokes because of a zipline tour we took with friends in Costa Rica, which I'm going to keep to myself in the spirit of inside jokes. But really, in those contexts, "adventure" just translated as "cheap thrill".

Like clown evangelism, compared with the adventure experiences that we know are possible, that kind of definition just seems wrong, wrong, wrong. So as we've decided to delve into the "adventure travel" business, we've had to define the concept for ourselves in a way that seems more accurate​ to our experience.

For us, adventure has been 100 mile mountain runs, multi-day river excursions, local bus rides through places where we don't speak the language, 15,000 foot peaks, unexpectedly wandering into llama sacrifices, calving glaciers, and erupting volcanoes. It's been human connections that have changed our career paths and physical challenges that have redefined our sense of what is personally possible.

And so, as we define it, adventure is:

1: Something you work for. You really need to have trained, researched, learned a new language or skill, suffered or sacrificed, gotten deeply uncomfortable in the process, or worked hard to get there. Doesn't mean it's not fun. Just that it's not easy.

2: Transformative. It's an experience that changes you, teaches you something about the world, impacts your relationships and outlook, and that you won't forget. Bonus points if it also impacts the world in a positive way.

3: Beautiful. It happens somewhere spectacular, or connects you with other human beings in a deep way. It's an experience of overcoming a challenge or living out a dream, or it moves you. It makes you laugh, cry or hurl.

4: Responsible. It doesn't count as an adventure if it's exploitation. If other people, or the ecosystem, are harmed in the GoPro'ing of  your outing, you're an ass, not an adventurer. If the locals don't benefit in some way from your having been there, it's problematic.

​Putting all of those things together is a challenge, which means that a real adventure is also rare.  

At our events and on our podcast people tell adventure stories to share inspiration, but as a business and community we want to go beyond inspiration to also help people make adventures actually happen.

While there's no true shortcut to real adventure as we think of it, and you can't sell it in a canned tour, as we've traveled we've realized that there are ways to make it more accessible. And that's what our newly launched and constantly developing Navigator Network is aimed at.

All over the world, we've realized that there's nothing more valuable - and often more difficult to come by if you don't speak the language - than local connections, and local beta. So, we're working with locals to connect travelers looking for real adventure with the cool people in cool places doing cool things. They're the people in their communities that know where you should go, know who you should go with, and can help you plan your adventures or go along with you. And by connecting with them, paying a price that they set for their services, you can be sure that you're putting money directly into the economies of the places you're adventuring in and leaving communities better than when you left. 

​We already have navigators signed up in our hometown of Seattle, Nepal, and Guatemala, where we're particularly excited about our partnership in San Pedro la Laguna on Lake Atitlan. Javier (pictured above) is our hookup, and we initially met him when he was our Spanish teacher in early 2016. We learned that he also runs a small non-profit called Trek for Kids that provides livable wage guiding jobs to locals and donates money to send local kids to high school and college. Only 20% of kids in their area graduate high school, but they're currently making education possible for 7 students from small communities around Lake Atitlan. Javier is just the kind of guy we think you'll want to meet, and we hope you'll get in contact with him through our Navigator page to start planning a trekking trip on the hills and volcanoes around Atitlan.  (Pro tip: he's also super well connected, so can likely help if you're interested in trail running, kayaking or other types of adventure near Lake Atitlan as well. He can also teach you Spanish, Mayan culture, and grills a mean chicken. And you can donate directly to Trek for Kids through their page, hyperlinked above.)
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We're relying largely on referrals and personal connections to build this network, so if you're interested in being a navigator in your area - or if you know someone in any part of the world that you'd trust to make real adventure possible - contact us!
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Also, I'm a little rusty, but if anyone needs a clown I'm still secretly keeping the dream alive.