Overcoming Inertia - Part One
Kim Slade — Unknown Epic
“I want to smash my head through this fucking table!” It was safe to say the build up to our first ever group adventure was causing tension. It was the day before and I could not relax until we were absolutely ‘ready’. Jake felt like putting his face through the map in an attempt to break the marble slab below. I was a man frantically obsessed with getting every detail right. Inside I know we have to just do it and see what happens , but I struggle with the idea that I have to just let go and improve later. I am not in control. Jake naturally masters this and I envy him for it, but I’m also grateful for him to be half the team that got us here. If it had not been for his ‘do it now’ attitude we would not be here. Tomorrow we leave for the mountains with 5 brave lads whom I will be forever grateful for joining the first ever Unknown Epic team.
After what feels like months of researching, planning, and meticulously choosing gear that would fulfil practicality and the adventure aesthetic we were after, the bags are packed. I actually really enjoyed this process. It was a big puzzle which maybe, subconsciously I didn’t want to end. It was though, solved. Everything we need to survive and thrive in the wilderness within hand luggage size packs. We could just walk out of the door into the wilderness and be fine. Yet, I still potter about looking for things to do. Everything I find a square inch for in my pack now is a ‘just in case’ item. It’s true what they say — “if you have a big bag, you fill it”
This pottering slows and I finally feel ready. We channel our mutual anger for one another through a violent high five. On the instant of that smack, a weight was lifted. We truly smile for the first time in a while. We are actually ‘ready’ I can’t quite believe it.
Overcoming inertia. That’s a phrase I have only recently learnt, in literacy and literal terms. We are up and running, the ball is rolling, we’re over the hill. Well, not quite, we still have a mountain to climb tomorrow.
I wrote the above on my phone as the plane took off on our first ever group adventure.
This is my first blog post as Co-Founder of an Adventure Company. Just writing “Adventure Company” as something I own is pretty exciting and something I never expected to do in my life.
Just over a year ago myself and co-founder Jake Denham were in a room with a bunch of creatives creating a rebel sci-fi subculture that revolves around saving the creative freedoms of a dystopian future generation from evil corporations (this is another story).
We started a conversation with Jack Hubbard. Now for anyone who knows Jack will know that you have to be careful what you say around him. A mere whiff of anything you dream of and he will have you doing it before you know it. He may as well have blue skin and a goatee, but with a pokey belief stick instead of a smoking lamp. We wanted to run over a few business ideas. All Jack wanted to hear about was our recent wild camping trip to the Alps (we had been doing this regularly for a few years as an escape from the everyday). Before we knew it we had scrapped all the business ideas as we were going to start an adventure company.
Hang on. I ‘do’ social media. Jake makes pictures of boats. We are not mountain guides. We have never ran a business before. I have no idea how to carve a spoon. This was mad right? Surely this was a bit too ambitious? I mean, us two, leading teams into the wilderness!?! But the more I thought about it the more it made sense. I love nature. I’m addicted to maps. I’m good at finding cool places and most importantly, I get a kick out of helping people do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do. The rest we can learn.
As soon as we started telling people, it felt right, it felt real. The excitement and positivity of some, along with the sheer bemusement and fear of others motivated us in equal measures of: “let’s prove them right” and, “let’s prove them wrong.”
The first thing I did as an Unknown Epic director was to go on a research mission to the Royal Geographical Society where the inspirational Alastair Humphreys was hosting an adventure meet up. I kind of felt a bit of a fraud. I was chatting to people like Levison Wood who just became the first man to ever walk the entire Nile. I was in a room with some of the worlds great adventurers and there’s me saying “yeah I’m starting an adventure company”. But then something Alastair said to me rang true, “everyone’s adventure is different”. So what if we weren’t going to cross the Pacific in a rubber dingy dressed a Batman and Robin. We were about to set out as novices on our own journey of discovery, this was our big adventure.
I asked everyone I could grab a minute with one question: What does adventure mean to you? There were a few answers that bubbled to the top every time and these were to form an ethos that underpins our trips. “The excitement of the unknown.”, “Everyones adventure is different.” and, “It has to make a change in you.”
We knew that we wanted to give people a new experience, their own experience. We want to make a change in them as it did for us on our first ever trip into the wild. It only seemed natural to base many of our first decisions and inspiration on our own first adventure.
An example of this is our logo. About two days into the hike we encountered something on the trail. This thing was huge, like the king of all goats. It’s horns were gigantic and it looked like a powerful beast that could end us in a flash. We had no idea what it was and at first it was shit scary. On one side was a sheer drop and the other a steep face. We stopped and watched in silence. It stared at us for a while before disappearing over some rocks. That was a pretty intense moment for us and my first real encounter with a big animal in the wild. What we saw that day we later found out was was an Ibex, so that made an obvious choice for our logo. Luckily for us we didn’t see a rat.
The name came pretty easy too. We knew taking people into the unknown was to be part of what we do and it was all about helping people feel epic. But this was not just for our customers. We were starting our own journey into the unknown and wanted to make it epic. At first I wasn’t sure on the word ‘epic’. People use it too lightly these days. Insurance adverts, crisp packets, people falling on a banana skin is labeled as an ‘epic fail’ FFS. The internet has diluted that word. In the Oxford dictionary under adjective epic means “Heroic or grand in scale or character”. We could have changed it, but instead we’ve set out to reclaim it.
So we had a name, we had a logo, we were in business. Fast forward six months and we’re sitting on a mountain with 24 hungover festival goers watching the sunrise over the alps. This was the first ever Sunrise Service and the first ever Unknown Epic event.
Fast forward another not so easy six months and we are sat on a plane about to take our first team into the wilderness. The guys didn’t know where they were going. All they knew was that the trip was called The Forgotten Valleys . All I knew is that I was buzzing so I got out my phone and started writing what was to be part of my first blog post about our journey.
Oh by the way, about that mountain we had to climb…
If you would like to know what happened after that first adventure of ours, read Overcoming Inertia - Part Two now.
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