Why We Explore

It’s the single most iconic vista in all of Newfoundland, all the more prized because it’s so hard to reach. By the time we clambered over the final set of boulders to get there, we’d been climbing for more than six hours, accompanied by clouds of voracious and seemingly waterproof black flies that were undeterred by the steadily falling rain. We turned to look back at the route we’d traveled: the sinuous, glacier-carved fjord 2,000 feet below us, the billion-year-old cliffs that hemmed it in, the jumble of rocks and rainforest that led steeply up to the plateau where we now stood. This view of Western Brook Pond is a staple of the island’s glossy tourism campaigns; we’ve seen the pics, but on that particular day it was nothing but a blanket of mist.

We didn’t have time to linger anyway. It was nearly noon by the time the boat had dropped us off at the head of the fjord, then climbing up the gulch had taken twice as long as we’d anticipated. We were barely halfway to the alpine pond where we’d hoped to camp that night. As the mist thickened, finding landmarks was getting increasingly difficult. Muddy game trails carved by the area’s ubiquitous moose and caribou led in every direction through the boggy grass, frequently disappearing into sinkholes filled by several days of nonstop rain. No matter how often we stopped to orient ourselves, we were turned around again within minutes.

I felt panic rising in me. We were already a day behind schedule, because the waters of the fjord had been too choppy for the boat on our scheduled departure day. That had forced us to burn a day of food while camped by the dock waiting for our ride, leaving us with just four days to complete the hike instead of the planned five. And while my wife, Lauren, and I were capable of hiking as long into the night as we needed to, we couldn’t ask the same of our daughters, Ella and Natalie. They were just eight and six, respectively—and, aside from being exhausted, they were being driven bonkers by the flies, despite their full-body bug suits. But there were no exits from this hike. No roads traverse this part of Newfoundland. The boat was gone, and so was our cell signal. The only way out was onward. In that moment of maximal uncertainty, a puzzling thought nagged at me.

“You know,” I said to Lauren, “this isn’t bad planning or bad luck. It’s exactly what we asked for.”

We’ve been backpacking and canoeing with our kids since they were a few months old, and have put a lot of thought into the routes we choose. We want challenge and adventure, but also safety and pleasure and variety and natural beauty, titrated each year to the kids’ steadily expanding capabilities. They had already canoed in Algonquin Park, hiked in the Rockies, backpacked on the Bruce Peninsula. So when we planned our 2022 trip, we were looking for something with a twist—something that would feel like a voyage of discovery as much for Lauren and me as for the kids.

We found the twist on Parks Canada’s official website for Gros Morne National Park, on Newfoundland’s sparsely inhabited western coast. The park is a major tourist attraction—but like most such parks, the visitors tend to be concentrated in a few easily accessible places. What Bill Bryson wrote about U.S. national parks tends to be true around the world: “98 percent of visitors arrive by car, and 98 percent of those venture no more than 400 yards from their metallic wombs.” In contrast, the Long Range Traverse—“an unmarked and rugged backcountry route,” according to the website—cuts across the park’s interior. It covers 22 miles as the crow flies (or at least as the mapmaker, sitting in a comfortable room with a piece of string, calculates) between the head of an inland fjord called Western Brook Pond and the base of Gros Morne Mountain. The difficult terrain, impenetrable vegetation, and challenging navigation mean most hikers cover at least 50 percent more distance than that. Only three groups, with a maximum of four people per group, are allowed to start each day. The day before you start, you have to attend a safety briefing and demonstrate your navigational skills. Rescues along the route are extremely challenging but all too frequent. “We are, therefore, encouraging visitors to opt for less risky adventures,” the Parks Canada site warned.

Long Range Traverse on Trailforks.com

That’s the line that lured us in: rather than singing the praises of their beautiful hiking route, the park was begging people to stay away. We understood the risks, but we figured that our prior backcountry experience would enable us to do it safely and that a hike billed as three to four nights was within the physical capacities our kids had already demonstrated. The idea of a hike with no actual trail, where we would have to use our own best judgment to pick the optimal route through a swath of untrammeled wilderness, was irresistible. And it was perfectly in keeping with the way Lauren and I had approached our vacations ever since we started dating, nearly two decades earlier.

When we met, I was living in Washington, D.C., and Lauren was living in South Bend, Indiana. We went on our first date just after Christmas in 2003, while we were both visiting our families in Toronto. I visited her for a weekend in Indiana a few months later; she spent Easter in Washington. By then we were already planning what was effectively our fourth date: a ten-day backpacking trip in Alberta. We’d been contemplating routes in Banff and Jasper national parks when my cousin told us about the Willmore Wilderness Area, an obscure protected area north of Jasper that’s about 50 percent bigger than Yosemite. It has no official trails, no rangers, no facilities, and is hundreds of miles from the nearest airport. It’s the same awe-inspiring mountains as the crowded parks farther south, just much harder to get to and to find your way around.

We saw other humans just once during our ten days in Willmore, and that trip remains the template against which I measure all others. We hiked long hours up imposing passes to get deep into the mountains—and once we were there, we could look around, pick an interesting-looking peak, and spend the afternoon scrambling to the top. I remember taking in the view from one of these peaks, looking around as far as we could see in the distance and finding no signs of humanity in any direction—except for a tiny green dot migrating down the pass below us, which we eventually realized was our tent, blown free from its moorings by a vicious alpine wind.

In the years since, on travels both with and without Lauren, I’ve always opted for the less obvious, less well-trodden destinations. In Australia, we loved the Ningaloo Reef, hundreds of miles north of Perth on the barren west coast, far more than the Great Barrier Reef. In India to cover the Commonwealth Games as a journalist, I skipped a prepackaged day trip to the Taj Mahal in order to see if I could make it to the Red Fort from my aseptic hotel by wandering several miles on foot through the crooked alleyways of Old Delhi. On New Zealand’s South Island, I read all about the Milford Track, famously dubbed “the finest walk in the world” by The Spectator way back in 1908—and then chose to hike the less heralded Routeburn Track instead.

When I began writing adventure travel journalism for the New York Times in the late 2000s, I noticed that, without intending to, I kept circling back to this theme. On a canoe trip deep in the Yukon wilderness, I bushwhacked up nondescript ridges precisely because they seemed so unlikely to have attracted anyone else’s interest. “It was intoxicating,” I wrote, “to pick a point in the distance and wonder: Has any human ever stood there?” Backpacking along the remote southern coast of Tasmania—a route whose impenetrable landscape and miserable weather have a lot in common with the Long Range Traverse—I couldn’t help questioning whether it was all worth it, much less whether I should be encouraging Times readers to follow suit. “Why,” I wondered, “on our preciously rationed vacation days, were we here?”

And yet there we were once again, in the summer of 2022, stumbling semi-blindly through the mist and muck of the Long Range mountains—this time with our kids, who hadn’t really signed up for any of this. After a few more wrong turns, Lauren and I accepted the inevitable and started looking for a patch of rock flat and puddle-free enough to pitch our tent. I lay awake that night calculating and recalculating how long it would take us to complete the hike and how much spare food we had, and contemplating yet again what exactly had drawn me here.

This wasn’t my first sleepless night of the summer. Even back home, nestled in the comfort of my pillowtop mattress, I’d been regularly finding myself awake and staring at the ceiling in the small hours of the morning. My mind would spin through the various dramas of the week, and then zoom out to broader existential musings about my life path. Two years into the pandemic, I certainly wasn’t alone in contemplating my choices. But I’d been stuck in this loop since before the pandemic even started.

In 2018, I published a book called Endure, which explored the evolving science of human endurance. It was the culmination of a decade of reporting, during which time my journalistic endeavors had become ever more narrowly focused on that specific topic. I’d started my freelance career reporting for a wide variety of publications on physics, jazz, accounting, travel, philosophy, and anything else that piqued my curiosity. But by 2018, I was a regular columnist for Outside, writing about the science of endurance, having moved there from a columnist gig at Runner’s World, where I had begun writing about the science of endurance in 2012, while continuing to moonlight as a columnist at Canadian Running and The Globe and Mail, where in both cases I wrote mostly about the science of endurance.

Endure did unexpectedly well. It scraped briefly onto the New York Times bestseller list, and it positioned me perfectly to brand myself as “the science of endurance guy” and milk that role for the rest of my working life. Speaking invitations flowed in; doors opened at magazines that I’d always dreamed of writing for. To the extent that my younger self had ever managed to conjure up a vision of a dream career (not including winning the Olympics as a runner), this was it. But something didn’t feel quite right. My decade of reporting for Endure had been a period of continual discovery, as I learned about new and new-to-me developments in biology, physiology, psychology, and other disciplines. By 2018, though, I was mostly caught up with the current state of knowledge. A future of reporting on the same topics would mean waiting for rare incremental advances and rehashing ideas I’d already written about. The spark of learning something new was gone.

The obvious move after a book like Endure is to get busy on a follow-up. But instead I found myself tugged in other directions, none of which sustained my attention for long. Weighing on my mind was my prior history of career swerves. I started out studying physics. After submitting my Ph.D. thesis, at age 24, I decided to go all-in as a middle-distance runner and train full-time in an attempt to qualify for the Olympics. A little over a year later, I checked my world ranking and my bank balance and decided to be a physicist after all. I took a postdoctoral research position in the National Security Agency’s quantum computing group, working out of a lab affiliated with the University of Maryland. It was fun and intellectually rewarding, but two and a half years later, at age 28, I left my postdoc to start a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University. Was I astutely following my interests? Or, I sometimes wondered, was I a dilettante, chasing whatever shiny new object caught my eye instead of sticking to the challenges I started?

What I worried about a decade and a half later, as I wandered in the post-Endure wilderness, was that I might be repeating this pattern: setting an audacious goal, spending years working tirelessly toward it, and then, once success was within reach, walking away to pursue something completely different. A decision like that might seem quixotic when you’re 28, but in your mid-forties it starts to look pathological. So there was an insistent voice in my head exhorting me to exploit all the effort I’d put in to become “the science of endurance guy.” And there was another, quieter voice reminding me that the seemingly irrational decision to explore a journalism career had led to the most rewarding professional years of my life, and that following that urge one more time might pay off again. In other words, I eventually realized, I was on the horns of a ubiquitous and exhaustively studied meta-choice that researchers call the explore-exploit dilemma.

In 1991, a professor named James March, at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, published a paper called “Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning.” March was a prolific and influential scholar, as well as a polymath: he published poetry and produced films about the leadership lessons of Don Quixote and War and Peace. Starting in the 1950s, his work with economics Nobel Prize-winner Herbert Simon and others brought nuance and complexity to the study of corporate decision-making. More than a few scholars believe March should have shared Simon’s Nobel.

March’s 1991 paper highlighted the fundamental tension between what he dubbed exploration, encompassing “search, variation, risk taking, experimentation, play, flexibility, discovery, innovation,” and exploitation, encompassing “refinement, choice, production, efficiency, selection, implementation, execution.” You can exploit the knowledge and resources you already have, or you can explore in search of an outcome that is uncertain but might turn out to be better. You can devote your corporate resources to churning out widgets as cheaply and efficiently as possible, or you can devote them to inventing a sprocket that will make widgets obsolete. But in a world of finite resources, you can’t give your all to both at the same time. You have to choose. March’s main argument was that the delayed and uncertain rewards of exploration mean that organizations tend to systematically underinvest in it.

The paper also had an unintended side-effect: the “explore-exploit” terminology caught on, crystallizing a concept that researchers in various academic silos had been grappling with in their own specialized languages. In the years that followed, mathematicians who had been toiling for decades on complex optimization algorithms realized that they were addressing the same fundamental questions as economists and business thinkers like March, as well as evolutionary biologists studying human migration paths, ecologists examining animal foraging patterns, neuroscientists decoding the brain’s decision circuitry, computer scientists teaching machines to learn, and psychologists and philosophers trying to understand why we want what we want.

As an ex-physicist, I was a sucker for the mathematical approach to explore-exploit decisions. I wasn’t naive enough to imagine that I could plug a few details about myself into an equation and get quantifiable advice about my next vacation or my next book. But I began to see explore-exploit dilemmas all around me: in the tug-of-war between my longstanding love of running and my emerging interest in rock-climbing; in the music I chose to stream; in the friendships I chose to maintain, neglect, or initiate; in the investment choices I made with my retirement savings; in the search for alternatives to familiar clichés and overused adjectives in my writing. And as I dug into a century’s worth of progress on exploring algorithms, I found insights that helped me think through my dilemmas. For instance, the math is pretty clear about the lesser value of pure exploration in your forties compared to your twenties. “Your horizon is getting shorter,” a cognitive scientist at Georgia Tech, Robert Wilson, explained to me. There’s less time to reap the delayed benefits of a new path, and there’s plenty of evidence that humans get worse at exploring and do it less often as they age—though that doesn’t mean I should lean into this decline.

The quantitative approach also offers some clues about a thornier question: the why of exploring. If you want to teach a computer to learn about the world, it’s helpful to program it with an “uncertainty bonus.” A navigation algorithm, for example, might suggest route choices based on what has minimized travel times for similar trips in the past. But it will generate better results if you incentivize it to also check some possibilities that it hasn’t sampled recently, just in case there are new road upgrades or favorable traffic conditions there. It turns out that, in many real-world contexts, we seem to include exactly this sort of uncertainty bonus in our decision-making calculus. Data from food-delivery services shows that we pick new restaurants based mostly on how good they’re reputed to be—but if all else is equal, and sometimes even if it’s not, we opt for ones we know less about.

There’s a reason we’re wired this way: exploration works. In recent years, bestselling books have extolled the power of good habits, which exploit decisions in a hyperpure form. Good habits are certainly important: by one estimate, about 45 percent of our actions in a given day are habitually driven. But it’s easy to get stuck in suboptimal routines. Even regular commuters, who retrace exactly the same route twice daily, often turn out to be taking slower or less pleasant routes than alternatives they haven’t tried. Exploration, in this sense, is the anti-habit, and it has paradoxical effects: a single instance of exploring will likely yield a worse-than-usual outcome, but the collective effect of repeatedly breaking free of your usual routines will be better outcomes—a faster commute, for example—in the long term. By breaking habits, the uncertainty bonus helps you build better ones.

The lure of hiking the Long Range Traverse also starts to make more sense when you think in terms of an uncertainty bonus. For starters, neither Lauren nor I had ever been to Newfoundland. We’ve hiked extensively in the Rockies, so we know exactly how beautiful they are. Uncertainty bonuses are encoded in our brains, in part, with “reward prediction errors”: you get a shot of dopamine not because something is good, but because something is better than expected. That’s why, for a certain type of person, a decent view in Newfoundland might trump a jaw-dropping vista in Banff; or fresh pakoras in a Delhi back-alley make it worth skipping the Taj Mahal. It’s also, in part, why people who are addicted to drugs need a progressively bigger dose to get the same high.

The most potent source of uncertainty in the Long Range mountains, though, isn’t the view; it’s the hike itself, with no prescribed route and no trail markings. These days pretty much every travel experience—including, for better or worse, the Long Range Traverse—is documented on someone’s travel blog. For planning purposes, these blogs are amazing resources: you get a better sense of how long a route will take, what conditions you’re likely to encounter, what gear you’ll need, and so on. The danger, though, is that the trip then goes exactly as you predicted. You won’t discover halfway through a hike that you really should have brought crampons, which is great. But you also won’t get blown away when you turn a corner and discover a hidden waterfall: you’ve already seen the pics.

Choosing your own route through the mountains reinjects some of that uncertainty—the possibility of prediction error—into the experience. By necessity, our first camping spot along the Long Range Traverse was nowhere near any of the spots we’d read about or scouted. There was no source of water nearby, so I had to bushwhack back down the slope for ten minutes until I found a little rivulet that was clear and deep enough to fill our bottles. We had to scour far and wide to find rocks to hold our tent down in the wind, because no prior campers had left a convenient pile. These added challenges were inconvenient, but they also reinforced our sense that we were discovering this world afresh rather than simply following a well-trodden conveyor belt past some prepackaged scenic viewpoints—an illusion, perhaps, but an engaging one.

Is a hike through a national park really “exploring”? One view is that true exploring involves venturing into territory where no human has preceded you: if there are footprints, you’re not exploring. Alternatively, you could argue that exploring is simply another word for trying something new: if the TV show you’re watching gets boring and you change the channel, you’re exploring what else is on the airwaves. Neither of these definitions really captures what the concept means to me. The Latin word explorare meant to reconnoiter, inspect, or investigate. It was formed from ex (from or out of) and plore (to wail or lament); the original meaning is thought to have been “to scout the hunting area for game by means of shouting.” That’s not quite what I mean either, but there’s the kernel of something important there: you’re seeking information rather than just novelty.

Meaningful exploration involves making an active choice to pursue a course that requires effort and carries the risk of failure—what the mythologist Joseph Campbell called “a bold beginning of uncertain outcome.” Most importantly, it requires the embrace of uncertainty, not as a necessary evil to be tolerated but as the primary attraction. If you’re given a choice between being shot or being banished into the jungle, you choose the jungle to maximize your odds of survival. Exploring, by contrast, is heading into the jungle when your alternative is being an accountant. The stakes may be great or small, and the undiscovered country may be literal or metaphorical, but by choosing the uncertain option you’re seizing an opportunity to learn about the world. It might even be the murky boundaries of your own capacities and limits that you’re seeking to discover—a goal that maps nicely onto endeavors like running a marathon (“the great suburban Everest,” as London Marathon founder Chris Brasher put it) or hiking in a national park.

We did, in fact, make it to the end of the Long Range Traverse, more or less on schedule and with a few scraps of food left in our packs. Compromises were made. We skipped a side-trip up to the peak of Gros Morne Mountain. And starting on the second day, I began to rely increasingly on the GPS waypoints I’d loaded onto my phone from the Parks Canada site. My original intention was to have them available as a safeguard if we became unsure of our position. Instead, I ended up hiking most of the way with my phone in my hand, using the digital topo map and waypoints to guide us in real time. Something was lost in the process, and I knew it. But our margin of safety—and the kids’ tolerance—had worn too thin to risk any long detours or backtracks.

After the hike was done, and the celebratory mooseburgers and moose-sized ice-cream cones had been consumed, we spent the next few days driving up the west coast of Newfoundland, to its very northern tip. There, on a characteristically drizzly gray day, we poked around a boggy green meadow dotted with grassy mounds. Directly to the north of us, beyond a stern and rockbound coast, was the open water of Iceberg Alley and the Labrador Sea. Next landmass: Greenland.

In the spring of 1960, a Norwegian explorer and adventurer named Helge Ingstad began a painstaking search in the fishing town of Newport, Rhode Island. Ingstad had spent years combing through the ancient Icelandic Sagas for clues about the location of Vinland, the short-lived Viking settlement supposedly founded by Leif Erikson, traveling from Greenland around 1,000 A.D. Ingstad was looking for geographical clues that would match the description in the Sagas: a grassy meadow, a small river leading to an inland lake, a mountain whose ridgeline looked like the overturned keel of a ship. And better yet, he was looking for ruins that would confirm the presence of pre-Columbian Norse settlers. Newport had a “Norse” stone tower, but it turned out to be an eighteenth-century chimney.

Over the next few months, Ingstad traced the coastline north through Cape Cod, Boston, New Hampshire, Maine, Nova Scotia, and eventually Newfoundland. Everywhere he asked the same questions about landmarks and ruins, but it wasn’t until he reached the northern tip of Newfoundland that he finally got the answer he was looking for. “Yes, I have heard of something like that,” a man in the tiny fishing village of Raleigh told him. “Over at L’Anse aux Meadows. But you need to talk to George Decker.”

L’Anse aux Meadows, at the time, was an even smaller fishing village with just 13 families, accessible only by boat. It had a small river, an inland lake, a keel-shaped mountain, and open meadows where George Decker grazed a few sheep and cows, and where the local children played among what they called the “Indian mounds.” Ingstad’s ride—a medical mission’s small boat carrying a nurse along the northern coast to vaccinate children in remote outports—was soon leaving, but he made plans to return the next year with his wife, a trained archaeologist named Anne Stine Helgstad. In succeeding years, the Helgstads led the excavation of what is now generally assumed to be Leifsbudir, or “Leif’s camp,” the heart of the Vinland settlement. To help dig, they hired a few of the locals, including a young boy named Clayton Colbourne.

When we visited L’Anse aux Meadows in 2022, Clayton Colbourne—now a trim septuagenarian with a thick white beard—was our tour guide. He was hired on when Parks Canada took over the site in 1973, helping to build the replica sod houses where visitors to the national park now hobnob with costumed Vikings. In his current role, he finds that visitors are almost as fascinated by his tales of growing up in L’Anse aux Meadows in the 1950s as they are by the saga of the Viking settlement and its rediscovery. As we wandered through the remains of the settlement—a large leader’s hall, huts for the crew, a shed for boat repair, a smelting hut that appears to have been used just once—his patter jumped back and forth between the distant past and a more recent past that, to us, was almost as foreign. “I used to play on these mounds as a kid,” he said. “We just figured they were Indian remains.”

Along the boardwalk leading across the bog from the archaeological site back to the visitor center, Colbourne paused at a giant two-piece sculpture looming like an arch above the path. The curves and whorls of the 3,000-pound bronze monument evoke billowing sails, crashing waves, and, more abstractly, two hands reaching toward each other. “The Meeting of Two Worlds,” by Newfoundland sculptor Luben Boykov and Swedish sculptor Richard Brixel, was unveiled in 2002 to symbolize the closing of a giant loop. After humans migrated out of Africa, some went east through Asia and across the Bering Strait into the Americas; others went west through Europe. “This is where they came full-circle,” Colbourne said. “This was their first meeting in 100,000 years.”

We can quibble about the exact dates. Patterns of early human migration are complex and still the topic of vigorous academic debate. But the idea—the symbolism of this massive monument, perched on the edge of an angry sea in one of the remotest corners of the continent—stopped me in my tracks. Scattered around the Norse site are excavated fire pits and tent rings, along with debris from tool-making left behind by at least five different Indigenous groups dating back as far as 5,000 years ago. The Norse weren’t the only ones who made intrepid journeys to reach this spot. In fact, the people who were there waiting for them had made even more improbable voyages, through harsher environments, with much simpler technologies—but spurred, perhaps, by the same unnamed urge.

Standing beneath Boykov and Brixel’s archway, the dilemmas that had been keeping me up at night—my masochistic fixation on the vacation itinerary less traveled; the recurring allure of a freshly trodden career path—began to feel like part of a much larger human story. Like my far-flung and long-forgotten ancestors, and like everyone else on the planet, I was born to explore. That exploration can take many different forms for different people, and it has changed—and will continue to change—across my lifespan. The great age of geographical exploration has mostly passed, at least here on Earth, but exploration in a broader sense has never been more important as we confront destabilizing shifts in technology, society, and climate.

I’ve also come to believe that the drive to explore can be both a source of meaning in our lives and a spur for growth. What makes exploring hard—the uncertainty, the struggle, the possibility of failure—is, at least in part, what makes it rewarding. That doesn’t mean that pushing onward to see what’s around the next corner or over the next ridge is always the right choice, though. Letting your exploring circuitry take the reins can also leave you starving in the jungle, stranded on an ice-jammed ship, or staring endlessly at the flickering screen of your phone. To harness the power of exploring, we need to understand why we’re drawn to the unknown, what we’re seeking there, and how we can do it better.

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