Dive a bit deeper.

At a glance, it would be easy to think that the main driver or benefit of participation in outdoor activities is in doing the activity itself. We talk about going biking, climbing or Munro bagging. We share success in terms of completion of a route, a trail or a climb; its grade or length, the speed or time you did it in. It can be like a tick list of accomplishments or peaks conquered.

It is of course very useful to talk about routes and objectives. We all need inspiration and a list of things to go for. The Munros offer a fantastic list of brilliant days out right across north Scotland which will get you out doing something on a weekend of poor weather when it would be all too easy to sit at home staying cozy. Guidebooks are full of routes to tick off and the star rating system accentuates the value of some of them in particular. I remember a description that said this is "a route for all aspiring Alpine ice climbers"; I was, of course, totally hooked until I had completed the climb. I still have my own personal list of objectives behind a magnetic badge on the fridge.

There's no doubt that reaching a state of flow in whatever activity we engage with is a powerfully beneficial thing. When our full cognitive bandwidth is taken up by the activity there is no space for anything else; our usual worries, day-to-day concerns and long term anxieties can disappear from our minds and we get some welcome relief. Just about any activity can do this, but an activity with a real risk of injury as a result of a minor lapse in concentration will focus the mind more easily and more completely.

Skiing and mountain biking can offer such experiences while at the same time we can be insulated from our surroundings. The infrastructure of a ski area tries to bring the comforts of modern living to the mountain landscape with restaurants and bars, uplift in sheltered bubbles and marked out and manicured pistes that we are to follow. All of this is good and it gets people outdoors exercising in a fairly wild landscape which sometimes has amazing views if we stop to look at them.

However, it seems to me that there is a greater depth of experience that might be missing from your average day of piste skiing or lift assisted mountain biking.

Instead of always doing things in these wild landscapes, perhaps we should take time simply to be in them. I think we should build time into our journeys to stop and connect with the place in which we find ourselves with the final goal of becoming a part of the landscape.

This might be a spiritual process in which we connect ourselves physically to the ground and meditate on our position in the world, in our lives and our existence. Or it might be a process of learning more about the landscape, how it came to be as it is now and of all the ecosystems and human influences that keep it this way.

Up to a couple hundred years ago people lived in these landscapes, subsisting on what they could grow and catch to eat. Clearly there was a deep connection with the landscape then, an interdependence that offered the possibility of life in what can be an incredibly harsh environment. Evidence of those lives is easily seen now; the footprint of black-houses and shielings, peat cuttings, lazy-beds and signs of ancient agriculture. 

Things have changed beyond recognition since then. We no longer depend on our landscape for sustenance and we can no longer say that the landscape is wild in terms of being untouched or unmanaged by human hands. It strikes me how the same landscape that used to be essential for survival 300 years ago is now sought after as a respite from modern day life and seen as essential to many people for very different reasons.

When thinking about experience instead of landscape, the term "wild" is subjective. To many people, experienced walkers and climbers, walking up a big path to the top of Ben Nevis alongside a few hundred other people is not a wild experience. However, to someone who has barely left an urban environment, being a few hours walk away from shelter, rescue, a coffee and a toilet, being unable to stop or change the weather and being totally reliant on nobody but yourself represents a very wild experience.  

At whatever stage you are at, I think the most fundamental value of exploring our beautiful landscape is in creating and fostering a connection with it. The initiator of this might be an activity or a list to tick off as a challenge, but the end result should be in becoming a part of the landscape, one that is in tune with it and understands its rhythm. Take time on your next expedition through our landscape to allow this internal expedition to start out.