Published August 26, 2026 09:00AM
Sometimes there is no template. Eddie Taylor, a high school chemistry teacher who summited Everest, puts it plainly: “I don’t really have a blueprint for what I’m doing, and I’m just making it up as I go along the best that I can.” Slackliner Faith Dickey invented an industry that didn’t exist. Jody MacDonald built a round-the-world catamaran business off $200 and a pitch. Marshall Miller taught himself to BASE jump off a bridge in Idaho because nobody would teach him. Chef Aidan Owens began a relationship with the sea simply by hanging out at the docks and chatting up fishermen.
What connects these people isn’t summits or records, though there are plenty of both. It’s the hustle. The hitchhiking to trade shows, the fundraising, the saying “yes” before knowing how. And it’s the fact that none of them treated a job, a family, or a mortgage as a reason to stay inside. They climb before homeroom. They surf between shifts. They fly on weekends.
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And because they’ve been improvising for decades now, they’ve picked up the thing you can’t hustle your way to: wisdom. About fear, which turns out to be worth listening to rather than conquering. About risk, which reads differently once there are kids at home. About discomfort, which—ask any of them—is where the good stuff lives.
Then they do the most interesting thing of all: they hold the door open for whoever’s next. The future of adventure doesn’t come with a script. These five never needed one.
Eddie Taylor
Eddie Taylor’s alarm goes off at 5:30 a.m. By six he’s in Eldorado Canyon, 20 minutes from home—ten pitches, sometimes more. By 8:30 he’s teaching high school chemistry to kids who mostly have no idea what their teacher does on weekends. Most learned he’d summited Everest from a kids’ weekly magazine. That’s Mr. Taylor.
The former D1 decathlete came to climbing after track, where a whole season might buy you one good day. Climbing was different: “You hit a new style of climbing and it’s success because you’ve never done it before.” That appetite led, via a chance dog-park meeting in Ouray with climber Phil Henderson, to Full Circle Everest, the first all-Black expedition to summit the mountain. At the time, it was just an idea. Taylor went into “full-time fundraising mode” to help raise the roughly million dollars it takes to put 11 people on Everest. Then he climbed it. On the first summit window of the season, he passed a 150-person queue, unclipped, and walked the upper mountain alone.
Strangers still tell him that his life—full-time job, young family, big objectives anyway—made them believe in theirs. He deflects. In his classroom, he says, “I try to let them be the heroes of their own story.”
Aidan Owens
Aidan Owens’ relationship with the outdoors runs through the docks. The Byron Bay–raised chef and spearfisher does his best work by loitering—“just poking and prodding and asking questions, and then just standing there and listening”—until the fishermen tell him what actually came up. The bycatch nobody wants? He wants it. “I’d rather it come to me than go in the trash.”
“You’re that white boy cooking snails.” That was the greeting at an Ensenada, Mexico, bar the night Owens served whelks, sea snails he’d taught himself to break down the week before. The room lost its mind over them. It’s the reaction he’s chasing: take the unloved catch, cook it with care, and change minds. “You can make anything taste good if you try.”
“Farmers and fishermen, they’re not rich people,” he says. “When you spend money with them, you’re keeping money local.” His open-invitation butchery classes, where 30 or 40 people watch him break down a whole pig, the rancher standing right there, close the loop between the wild and the plate.
Between shifts, there’s a surfboard in his car. And when extreme reality show Chopped Castaways marooned him on a Dominican island for five weeks, he dropped ten pounds, got pneumonia, pulled a drowning fellow contestant from the water, and finished second. Of course he did.
Marshall Miller
Marshall Miller’s origin story is a Warren Miller film: a wingsuit pilot buzzing ten feet over skiers’ heads down a French ridge, and a kid from Salt Lake City in the audience thinking, What was that? How do I learn how to fly my body? Nobody would mentor him—BASE jumping was still taboo—so he bought a parachute and jumped off an Idaho bridge, mid-family-vacation, his kids watching with their heads between the rails. Charming or alarming? Probably both.
BASE was the gateway. Skydiving, wingsuits, and eventually paragliding followed—the last one less about the plunge than the opposite: staying up. The surprising thing about a man who jumps off things is his patience. Launch too early chasing thermals (“a case of the go-sies”) and you sink out. Wait, read the cloud streets stacked over invisible columns of rising air, and you can fly a paraglider 100 miles, Snowbird to Wyoming. His masterpiece required waiting on the sky itself: the 2017 eclipse, a one-minute window, Miller and seven friends in wingsuits, jumping in a sliver of sunlight.
“You could see this huge shadow just coming across the earth,” he says. “Like someone just turned the lights off.”
Having kids helps keep things in check. “I don’t like the words ‘adrenaline junkie,’” he says; he’d like to be doing this into his 70s. His Instagram bio says “enabler:” “I would feel really proud of myself if I was 100 years old, knowing that I enabled people to be better than they thought they could be.”
Jody MacDonald
Start with the paradox: Jody MacDonald has circumnavigated the globe twice, doesn’t like sailing, and gets seasick. “I loved the idea of it as a vehicle for exploration,” the photographer says—so she built the vehicle. With $200 to her name, she co-created a round-the-world kiteboarding catamaran business (a golf membership for kiteboarders, essentially) selling the five-year dream to strangers before she owned a boat. Hedge funders took one trip and quit their jobs.
Then came the tumor: five inches, in her abdomen, and a prognosis of one to four years. When it came back benign—she’s one of eight in the world known to have grown it—she went straight at the bucket list. Which is how a woman ends up riding a Royal Enfield solo through the Himalayas, sleeping wherever night falls: “They’re called homestays, but it’s just somebody’s mom.”
Her thesis crystallized after a four-day storm, crossing passes between 17,000 and 19,000 feet: bike down on ice, trucks off the road, strangers laughing and lifting together, and MacDonald in the middle of it thinking, This is the greatest thing. Real adventure strips away money, religion, everything but the shared problem. “If I could pay to manufacture this, I would,” she says. “And guess what? I live it.”
Faith Dickey
Faith Dickey held highlining world records—one of them for 12 years. Her method, she says, “was to be fearless, and I thought fear was the enemy.” She punished the fear out of herself, walk after walk, until everything collapsed with it: her body, her drive, an identity fused to being the best. She spent a year working construction, another on a food truck. Rock bottom, at ground level for once.
What she rebuilt is more interesting than the records. Through parts work, Dickey developed an actual working relationship with her fear. “Hey, fear, I see you. I understand you … You’re just trying to protect me. But I’m actually very strong, and I’m very capable, and I really want to do this. So I’m gonna take you with me, and I’m gonna show you how strong I am.” It’s a script she teaches clients now, having learned it the hard way herself—and highlining is the perfect laboratory, because humans didn’t evolve with ropes. Your brain simply refuses to believe you’re attached.
In her first year on the line, she and her friends sat around campfires saying, “I bet someday there’ll be guides for this.” Now she runs Elevate Outdoors, the Western Hemisphere’s first highline guiding company, walking clients (including people with spinal cord injuries, brittle bone disease, and amputations) into thin air. “I’m here for each step,” she says, “not because I’m trying to get to the other end without falling.”
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This article is from the Fall 2026 issue of Outside magazine. To receive the print magazine, become an Outside+ member here.
