One motivation for exploring a square each week, come rain or shine, was to make being out in nature part of my routine. I hoped that becoming connected with where I live, with its weather and seasons, would keep me attuned to the seedlings pushing through pavements, the migrating birds passing overhead, the provenance of the food I eat, and reveal some interesting new running routes too.

Taking just a few minutes every month to , which I’d done for the past three years, had certainly made me happier. Each time I returned to the tree I was surprised by how much nature had changed in the past few weeks. Fun, too, had been my year of full-moon forays, getting outdoors for a run, ride, walk or swim on every full moon, and also a year of enjoying coffee outside at least monthly. If hospital gardens help people to heal, if doctors now prescribe exercise in nature, then committing to fifty-two outdoor missions sounded like a sensible undertaking. By now the habit of heading out once a week with my camera and notebook felt comfortably established.

It was a flat, grey day beneath a flat, grey December sky. The river flowing through today’s square was flat and grey, rippling as the tide nurdled ever lower. My mood, however, was neither flat nor grey. I was looking forward to this one.

A few off-limit jetties jutted out into the current, infrastructure for pipelines and industry. A conveyor belt rumbled along one, filling a barge with gravel, but all else was quiet. This was, perhaps, a grid square that only a map nerd like me could derive pleasure from. More than half of it was blue on my map, but that was an incongruous representation of the muddy, intimidating industrial estuary spreading out before me. I didn’t dare swim out to explore it.

Behind me, the rest of the square was fenced off by a shooting range, an electricity substation filled with fizzing power lines, a cement factory, a slime-covered canal (featuring a sofa tipped into the water, whose lurid colour perfectly matched the algae), and a police firearms training centre complete with replica streets and life-size sections of planes and trains. This brought back fond memories of getting a day’s pay back when I was in the Territorial Army at university to don ‘civvy’ clothes and cheerfully lob half-bricks and milk bottles at massed ranks of policemen in riot gear. It was all fun and larks until they mounted their response charge at us…

And so, in terms of my exploration, the square was effectively reduced to little more than the footpath along the embankment’s flood defences, plus whatever muddy ‘beach’ was revealed as the tide fell. That was fine by me as I’d studied the tide timetable and arrived a couple of hours before low tide, past a yard filled with ships’ anchors, ten-feet tall and tonnes galore. I was here to go mudlarking among the slimy green rocks, brown seaweed and thick grey mud of the foreshore.

A mudlark is someone who scavenges in river mud at low tide, looking for valuable items. It was a way of life in London during the 18th and 19th centuries, when mudlarks searched the Thames’ shore for anything of value. They earned little but enjoyed an unusual amount of independence for the period, plus they got to keep whatever they found or earned.

Lara Maiklem explores the ancient, murky, tidal foreshore of the Thames, whose ebbs and flows still churn objects to the surface that have been hidden and preserved in the mud for centuries. I had recently devoured her fabulous book (and enticing ), and was fascinated by the greedy prospect of finding treasure, Roman roofing, Tudor shoes, and messages in bottles.

I donned wellies and waterproof trousers, climbed up and over the graffiti-covered embankment wall, and dropped onto the foreshore to begin my search. Its lowest reaches were a lethal gloop of deep, sloppy, stinking mud. I settled for making my way along the line where rock and mud meet, slipping over mounds of bladderwrack, a brown seaweed studded with air bladders that help it to float upright and absorb nutrients when submerged.

At low tides, the exposed seaweed forms dense beds, which theoretically should provide shelter for all sorts of creatures. But I’m afraid I saw not a single living thing among it all. A few gulls bobbed on the river, and semi-feral ponies grazed on the embankment behind me. But the water was pretty grim.

Only a few pearly-white oyster shells gave any suggestion of life in the grey mud. Over the past 200 years, habitat loss, pollution and overfishing slashed the oyster population around the UK by 95 percent, though it is now on the increase again. Across the country, things are improving from the low point of 1957, when the Thames was declared biologically dead and the river was a foul-smelling drain. It is a travesty, however, that even today, not a single river in Britain is free from pollution.

I had fully intended to find priceless loot within minutes of beginning my mudlarking. Instead, I found a rusty chair frame and heaps of plastic, including a label saying ‘BAG IT AND BIN IT, DON’T FLUSH IT’. I picked up a 1980s milk bottle with ‘PLEASE RETURN BOTTLE’ embossed on the glass. All interesting enough, but where was that jewel-encrusted sword when you needed it?

Truth be told, my patience began to wane within about twenty minutes, as I had known it would. This was actually one reason I’d decided to try mudlarking in the first place, to remind myself to slow down, to savour the process of searching, and not to be so hung up on productivity or getting things done.

So I persevered, picking my way among rusty pieces of metal, crisp packets and drinking straws. We used to throw away 4.7 billion plastic straws, 316 million plastic stirrers and 1.8 billion plastic-stemmed cotton buds each year. Those numbers plummeted once they were banned: proof of the immediate impact that quick, simple law changes can have.

I stood up straight to stretch my back and to watch a ship pass down the river, filled with the romanticism of imagining all the places for which it might be bound. Nineveh, perhaps? But my maritime musings have become more accurate, if less exotic, since I downloaded the Marine Radar app, which tells you about any ships you see.

So this was the Maltese cargo ship Celestine sliding down the estuary with a salt-caked smoke stack and a cargo of cars. Heading in the other direction, a Dutch trailing suction hopper dredger slurped up the same gloop I was searching through. Dredgers work like monstrous vacuum cleaners, sucking up sand, mud and gravel from the channel to store onboard and discharge later. I wondered what gems had unknowingly been dumped through its pipes.

I bent down again and kept looking. Now I found a metal fork, a white comb and the compulsory shopping trolley. How did they end up in the river?

A discarded condom, unopened, told its tale of a disappointed date lobbing it off a bridge on his unplanned lonely trudge home to an empty bed. A golf putter, green with slime, had me imagining a pitch and putt rage, a nice day out soured by a tantrum and the golf club arcing through the summer sky into the water.

What else did I find? A pair of red pebbles caught my eye. A smooth, tactile fragment of green bottle marked ‘A.A. & Co’. Two symmetrical shards of tile. A fragment of porcelain decorated with blue and white lines, dots and circles.

That was about it.

But still, I was 99 percent certain that Christopher Columbus had dined off that very plate, munching corn on the cob as he set sail to discover Australia. One can always dream…

Even though I found no verifiable bullion or antiques, I had enjoyed trying to imagine stories for all the mundane objects I collected and brought home that morning. All these banal discoveries were grist to the mill as I learnt how to be an enthusiastic amateur. I was like the young boy Calvin in the comic strip, digging up the garden with Hobbes, his pet tiger. Hobbes asks Calvin what he has found.

‘A few dirty rocks, a weird root, and some disgusting grubs,’ answers Calvin from deep in his hole.
‘On your first try?’ asks Hobbes in delight.
‘There’s treasure everywhere,’ exclaims Calvin.

This is an excerpt from Local: A Search for Nearby Nature and Wildness by Alastair Humphreys. Available from�� and all good bookshops in the U.S., as well as directly from the publisher at

The post Why I Spent a Year Exploring My Boring Neighborhood appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

When I came up with the idea of ,��I created��all sorts of elaborate, fabulous escapades involving pack rafts, folding bicycles, climbing harnesses,��sea kayaks, mountain bikes, and vans to carry all the gear. These were all brilliant. But the idea only began to spread to a greater number of��people (with fewer��ludicrous stashes of outdoor gear in the garage) once I made the idea much simpler. Simple + short��+ local��+ cheap = an achievable microadventure, unlike��the vicarious adventure thrills you read about in magazines but never actually do yourself.

Just as the foundations of a delicious meal��are salt, fat, acid, and heat (though I would argue that an alternative route is to get yourself exhausted and cold in the hills and then melt with joy as you shovel anything edible into your mouth), so too are there staple activities in any good month of microadventures. These include��sleeping on a hill;��swimming in a river, lake, or ocean;��sitting still in a forest;��and doing something that scares or challenges you. Other ingredients��depend upon where you live, the time of year, and what motivates you to shake up your life. For instance, maybe you want to get some exercise in a fun, new way��or get head space away from your phone. Maybe you want to��spend more time with loved ones, discover (or rediscover) new places, save money, or prepare for a bigger adventure.

No matter what, it’s important to make the barriers to entry as low as possible. That means choosing activities that are local, easy to organize, short enough to be compatible with real life, and cheap. If you’re trying to become more microadventurous, here are a few things to��remember.

Don’t Overspend on Gear

All you need to get started is your basic outdoor getup:��warm clothes and raingear, a water bottle, a headlamp, your backpack. If you’re going to camp out, you’ll need a sleeping bag, bivy bag, and sleeping mat. If you’re up for some wild swimming, you’ll need your swimsuit. (Or perhaps not.)

Get the Right Mindset on Timing

How can you fit adventure into the realities of a nine-to-five��career? Simple—fit it into the five-to-nine. That’s the��16 hours of theoretical��daily freedom we all tend to undervalue and fritter. When somebody asks me, “What is a microadventure?”��I say, “Leave work at 5 P.M. Head out of town. Sleep on a hill. Wake up at sunrise. Get back to your desk for 9 A.M.”��Simple, but you will remember it a year from now.

Supershort Outings Can Be��Super Worth It

We often love the idea of living more adventurously��and dream that we could somehow do that with our lives. The idea is glorious, but making it happen can be daunting. I am besotted with wild swimming, jumping into rivers, lakes and oceans at every single opportunity. But at this time of year��the water is cold, and the prospect of getting in is nerve-racking. The first step in is a shock. But a few more seconds pass, I��plunge, and then I am in! I’m doing it! Whooping! Delighted! Often in this season, this is the end of the operation—I leap out of the water, grinning, and get dressed and warm as quickly as I can.

Breaks Are for Taking

Long before��work e-mail��and social media started screaming for our attention 24/7, some wise government officials in Japan coined the phrase����(forest bathing) to encourage people to become healthier by taking strolls in the forest. I love the idea of bathing in a forest, that feeling of being submerged beneath the green (or glorious fall colors), far from the tribulations of an overflowing inbox. Turn off your phone, go for a walk in the woods, and slowly you will learn to slow down, observe, listen, be calmer. What do I do when my work life becomes insanely busy? Turn off my computer and go for a walk in the woods. I never regret it.

There’s Always Something New to Try

Make an effort this month to seek out something that scares or challenges you. It could be entering a longer race than you have done before, whether that’s the wonderful ��or the Barkley Marathons. It might be taking a chilly dip or your first night of camping out.��One of the key aspects of microadventures is learning to look differently at the familiar, to see wilderness and excitement around your hometown, rather than thinking you can only live adventurously if you fly to Patagonia. A way that I love resetting how I look at somewhere familiar is to go for a walk in the dark. Pick a route you know well, perhaps your morning run��or the route you walk your dog��or your favorite out-of-town trail, and go walk it��.��The well-known becomes mysterious. A mile becomes a long way. Once you’re brave enough, turn off your headlamp. I love letting my eyes adjust to the moonlight��and paying attention to different senses. You notice the smells of the fields. I remember once hearing a rabbit run past me into the undergrowth. I have never paid such close attention before.

Don’t Be Afraid to Ask an Expert

One of the regular problems of adventure��is that newcomers can feel intimidated by the expertise, fitness, and elite nature of it all. Microadventures are the exact opposite.��Everyone is welcome. And here’s the thing: once you summon up the nerve to begin, to approach an expert��and say that you are new but keen, you will always find that they are only too eager to help get you started.��Google your local climbing wall, give them a ring, and say, “I’ve never climbed before, I’m totally unfit, really scared of heights, can’t do a single pull-up.” Staff��will say, “Great! Come along and try it out! You are very welcome.”

Don’t Be Afraid to��Be the Expert

However much of a novice you might feel (see above), the simple fact that you are reading this means that you’re��more knowledgeable and motivated than loads��of your friends. So take on the challenge of introducing a friend to the outdoors. You’ll get a real buzz from being the expert, and your friend will enjoy trying something new. It could be as simple as taking your camping stove to the park and making coffee. At the very least, this is an evening or a day that you will not soon forget. (And how often can we say that about the times we meet a friend for coffee or go to a bar or go out for a meal?)

Support Local Wonders

Have a look on Google for the state parks nearest to where you live. There are more than 10,000 in the U.S.—an incredible resource, and a great privilege to enjoy. Make the effort to explore one you’ve��never been to, and do your bit to support their upkeep. The more people that use, enjoy, and care for the wilderness regions of the U.S., the more the government will value them and take care of them.

The post 8 Principles for Living a More Adventurous Life appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.