All this raises a question: What, in fact, makes for a good adventure buddy? With the same anxious overpreparation I bring to trip planning, I began making a checklist, interviewing die-hard adventurers and poring over expedition literature in search of an ideal profile—with a nagging sub-thought of whether I myself actually fit that profile.
The simplest answer might be: whoever is available. A blank space on the calendar is probably the number one attribute. The dreary realities of mortgage payments, family obligations and prior commitments have scuttled many of my potential adventures, cooked up feverishly on WhatsApp or a barstool. Here’s a thorny theorem for you budding mathematicians: Take two middle-aged, employed, married dads and try to find three weeks in which they can fuck off into the bush together.
It’s also useful to go with someone who roughly shares your pace and ability. In cycling, I’ve been on both sides of the dreaded “Italian stop,” the group waiting at the top of the mountain for others. Waiting is bad enough, but even worse is climbing full-gas up some incline, only to find your group idling, looking fully reposed, and, saying, with faux concern, “You good?”—then restarting the trip while you’re still trying to bring your heart rate out of the red.
Another desirable quality would be a capacity, or at least some instinct toward, keeping you alive. Not long ago, aboard the NatGeo Explorer in Antarctica, I found myself chatting with the maritime archaeologist Maria Intxaustegi, who spends a lot of time probing ice crevasses. Her partner, she says, “doesn’t need to be my friend; I don’t even need to like him. But when you put your life in the hands of another person, priorities change and other skills are validated.”
Maybe that works for a dive or two. But what if you’re spending weeks together? “The longer the events go on, the weirder it gets,” says Brenton Reagan, a backcountry guide with Wyoming-based Exum Mountain Guides. That’s when mere capability begins to falter; you want someone you can truly bond with. As Joe Cruz, a professor of philosophy at Williams College and frequent long-distance bikepacker, says: “What’s fundamental to me in finding buddies to travel with—and this is the most mundane way of putting it—is they’ve got to be able to roll with shit.” Which means not just dealing with hardship but also “being curious, open, alert, and of a mind to listen, more than tell people how they ought to be.”
It’s of a piece with that “Big Five” personality trait that psychologists call “openness to experience.” As the photographer Alex Strohl—who publishes an occasional series of pamphlets called “Adventure Buddies”—puts it, “someone who can start with ‘what if,’ who’s down to try and can be OK with the decisions you’ve made.”
It is not necessarily a case of just grabbing your best friend and taking them on the trail. “The people you get along with really well in life, or relationally, or at work, aren’t necessarily your best match in an outdoor setting,” suggests Jennifer Pharr Davis, the record-setting through-hiker. “Sometimes going with your best friends is the worst idea.”
Your friends may not share your stamina. They may be “type-one fun” sort of people who blanch at the first sign of trouble. On a recent trip—nothing rugged—with a very close friend, I began to look at him, as a kind of experiment, via the adventure-buddy lens. As someone who likes to move through airports with Teutonic efficiency—I’m sure I’ve got the FKT on any number of jet-bridge-to-curb runs in the United States—I couldn’t help but notice as he constantly struggled with his luggage (which, to my mind, was overpacked), or stopped to use the facilities (what, you couldn’t pre-piss on the plane?), or paused by a TSA kiosk to (unnecessarily) download an (unneeded) app for Global Entry. We joked about it, but I also secretly wondered: How would this play out on a multiday hike? Could I cope with someone so not dialed in?
Tommy Caldwell told me that, early in his career, “I was so objective-focused, I would always be like, I want to go to this place and do this climb—then I would just find the other people that would go with me.” Now, he says, “I’m like, here are the people I want to go with—what’s going to be the best possible adventure?” More than sheer technical ability, he says, he looks for “a certain vibe with that person.” Call it people before peaks.
When I told Caldwell about my airport experience, his answer surprised me. “I tend to prefer people that are really good at rolling with the punches—those are not usually the people that are super buttoned-up in life.” Caldwell’s regular partner, Alex Honnold, might not seem the picture of laid back. “He’s Type A in certain things, in that he wants to train in this very specific way,” Caldwell says. “But on my first trip with him to South America, I gave him this whole list of stuff to bring and he brought like a third of it. We just had to figure out how to climb these big mountains without any of the right stuff. The fact that he wasn’t bothered by that was kind of nice.”
This rang a bell for me. In being so rigid about my airport routine, I wondered, was I theoretically setting up my own expedition for failure? I was asking myself a question every right-thinking person should, at least occasionally, put to themselves: Wait, am I the asshole?
