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Show _ MARKETING BEAUTY All you need is money to be an ‘adventurer’in the 2Ist Century By Alexandra L. Woodruff - Autumn is here and for the Woodruff family it’s hunting season. We don’t need day glow orange hats, camouflage suits or hunting rifles-we’re hunting mushrooms. All we need is a pocketknife and a keen eye for edible toadstools. I always know it’s time to head for the hills when the days wane into winter and the summer's vibrant greens change to orange, gold and brown. I don’t remember the first time I went on a fungi-scouting expedition, but reports from my parents say I wasn’t more than two months old. When I learned to walk I was assigned a few responsibilities. I carried my own backpack and poked around in the woods for mushrooms. | stayed close to my parents and sister, but it seemed someone else always spotted the mushrooms first. When I did finally find a red capped mushroom before anyone else could get to it, | quickly plucked it out of the ground and gallantly showed my discovery to my mother. Proud as she was, she felt an obligation to tell me that if I ate the bright gilled, red trophy I would be dead in a matter of hours. Discouraged, I gave up trying ‘|. to find edible mushrooms with expeditions trying to summit. Paid guides felt an extreme obligation to take clients all the way to the top. But because of overcrowding and poor decision-making, — 12 people died on the mountain that year. You would think the story of unskilled climbers dying because they relied too heavily on their guides would deter people from these guided tours. But as they say, "there’s no such thing as bad press.” Once the news media picked up on the tragedy, tour companies were flooded with calls asking how they could be guided to the top of Everest. : Marketing Beauty Everest may be-an extreme example of this new trend of destination based nature experiences. But the business of coughing up cash to buy an outdoor experience is happening on every level of skill and economic development. Nature is no longer a place for personal exploration; it is the next frontier for economic exploitation. These on my own. Most of them were partially buried underground or so camouflaged they looked more like rocks than anything else. I didn’t discover anything edible, but I did find orange mushrooms on decaying trees, puff mushrooms that disintegrate into powder when crushed, mushrooms with hundreds a a Awesome of little fingers pointing from under the caps. There were red mushrooms with white dots that looked like something out of a fairytale. There were mushrooms that turned blue when cut open and dozens of ‘others that I can’t begin to describe. I would wander the mountainside with my older sister, who was only slightly more skilled than I was at hunting. We looked to snags, moss growing, royal blue gentians, orange and red Indian paintbrushes and rock formations. Sometimes we ok ax ey% would see a moose. We learned the wildflowers from our mother and birdcalls from our father. This place was sacred to our family. We went here to escape and leave our problems behind. It was not a place you randomly invited friends, neighbors or even other family members. It was the one place where.we could leave the tension and fighting at home. My mother learned her gathering skills in her native Slovakia, where mushroom hunting is a national pastime. There she also learned never to tell anyone where we went. Secrecy is.a cultural element to mushroom hunting. Brothers won’t tell brothers and best friends lie to one another about where they go. Our family would park at different locations to disguise our destination from fellow mushroom pickers. If we took guests along, we would take them to other spots. Some places are just to special to spoil—we didn’t want it loved to death. Planning an Adventure? Over the last few decades, the outdoors experience has changed—it has devolved from a mission of peace to a war of conquest. Extreme recreational experiences, in particular, are becoming the status symbols of out time. Climbing..er...bagging the tallest peaks on each continent offers more cachet than a Ferrari in the garage or a fat diamond necklace draped around a very wealthy neck. It is the New Opulence. Wealthy people are not all that different from the rest of us; money can buy stuff but it often can’t buy relief from boredom. Some try to turn their boredom into something productive—they turn to charity work, or get involved in environmental issues, although sometimes their dedication seems a bit thin. Some try to return to nature by building mansions on secluded hilltops. If there is any sense of guilt, they need only to remind themselves that they recycle aluminum and pay their Sierra ‘Club dues. But beyond high-end housing developments in wild lands, the greed associated with nature is expanding to other venues. Adventureguided tours are currently in great demand by the wealthy. An “experienced guide” leads novice hikers and climbers to world-class wilderness destinations. For a price...a HUGE price. eo Isn’t the definition of an “adventure guide" an oxymoron? It is as contrived as a ride at an amusement park. It’s not an adventure or mystery if the entire experience is plotted and planned. It might be challenging, but it certainly is not adventurous when someone is paid handsomely to think and work for you. The best things in life were once free--watching a bird or smelling a forest or desert, feeling the wind. Not any more. : There are places in this world that I will never go to. One of them is Mount Everest. I do not have the strength, ability or endurance to make this climb and therefore will never step foot on the Earth’s highest point. And that used to be the sole criteria for an Everist climb. But now it only takes one asset—money. : : Siill no longer keeps people off the peaks; poor economic status does. Back in 1985, the owner of Snowbird Ski Resort, Dick-Bass decided he wanted to climb the . 29,028-foot peak. He paid a guide to make the summit and opened the floodgates for Everest tours. Bass showed that Everest was within the realm of possibility for regular guys. "Assuming you're reasonably fit and have some disposable income, I think the biggest obstacle is probably taking time off from your job and leaving your family for two months,” said Beck Weathers, a pathologist who attempted to climb Everest, in Jon Krakauer’s book, Into Thin Air. ~ Just a decade after Bass’ paid expedition, the mountain was packed with clients paying guides more $50,000 to take them to the top. Oxygen bottles littered the main trail and Base Camp is a bustling little village of people waiting to ascend. The 1996 Everest climbing season was doomed to disaster. The mountain swarmed ZL. i (Yr Lf) rar } f Yf 1 (acre Over the last few decades, the outdoor experience has changed--it has devolved from a mission of peace to a mission of conquest. developers are seeing green in more ways than one. Most have convinced themselves they are doing a good thing—making money in . the name of protecting the environment and its natural resources. From so-called ecodevelopments, like the proposed Cloudrock planned for a mesa overlooking Moab, to $100 day hikes to see once secluded red rock canyons, entrepreneurs are more inventive than ever at making a "green" buck. But in order to make their nature-based companies profitable, they must fundamentally alter and manipulate the very thing that makes the trips valuable: the land’s unadulterated state. You must promote and attract clientele. The more successful the business is, the more detrimental it is to the place or experience being marketed. The fee demo program, which promotes entrance fees for public lands is an example of how the government is trying to make a buck off the land. It is done in the name of maintenance, upkeep and improvements on public lands. The only “improvements” I've seen are fee booths, enlarged parking lots, outhouses and information signs. To me, leaving areas alone or removing human-made structures are the best and only ways to improve wild lands. Making areas more physically accessible to larger amounts of people degrades the quality of the land. Streams of REI outfitted hikers can be more annoying than a cow chewing its cud. As more areas are exploited with increased traffic and devolvement, places are degraded in an insidiously slow way and the demise is usually invisible to newcomers. Two years ago the Associated Press published an article on climbing the Grand Teton in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming. It describes an almost surreal scene on the upper saddle of the mountain—cell phone chatter drowned out the wind and the ravens as lingering climbers, waiting for a chance to get to the summit "maximized their down-time.” Checking the NASDAQ from 12,000 feet. This is not the way it |