Often these adventurers bring along cell phones and fax machines. The line separating the adventurer from the athlete has conventionally been financial. Think of the very rich who fly their hot-air balloons across the sky, only to be rescued at taxpayer expense when their adventure deflates. But the point of such sports is winning or losing, and the game must always be played within rules. Gravity, cold, the sky become the opponent.
Participants speak of the exhilaration of gravity.
For a time he bicycled in the desert. Then this young man wound up in Alaska, where he ended up dead. Why exactly, we never learn. All we know for certain is that here was a young man from a comfortable American suburb who needed to find himself, or to find God, in the far extremities of hot and cold. Every weekend, he comes to the forest all alone.