Published August 26, 2026 09:00AM<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Sometimes there is no template. Eddie Taylor<\/a>, a high school chemistry teacher who summited Everest, puts it plainly: \u201cI don\u2019t really have a blueprint for what I\u2019m doing, and I\u2019m just making it up as I go along the best that I can.\u201d Slackliner Faith Dickey<\/a> invented an industry that didn\u2019t exist. Jody MacDonald <\/a>built a round-the-world catamaran business off $200 and a pitch. Marshall Miller<\/a> taught himself to BASE jump off a bridge in Idaho because nobody would teach him. Chef Aidan Owens<\/a> began a relationship with the sea simply by hanging out at the docks and chatting up fishermen.<\/p>\n What connects these people isn\u2019t summits or records, though there are plenty of both. It\u2019s the hustle. The hitchhiking to trade shows, the fundraising, the saying \u201cyes\u201d before knowing how. And it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n And because they\u2019ve been improvising for decades now, they\u2019ve picked up the thing you can\u2019t 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\u2014ask any of them\u2014is where the good stuff lives.<\/p>\n Then they do the most interesting thing of all: they hold the door open for whoever\u2019s next. The future of adventure doesn\u2019t come with a script. These five never needed one.<\/p>\n Eddie Taylor\u2019s alarm goes off at 5:30 a.m. By six he\u2019s in Eldorado Canyon, 20 minutes from home\u2014ten pitches, sometimes more. By 8:30 he\u2019s teaching high school chemistry to kids who mostly have no idea what their teacher does on weekends. Most learned he\u2019d summited Everest from a kids\u2019 weekly magazine. That\u2019s Mr. Taylor.<\/p>\n The former D1 decathlete came to climbing after track, where a whole season might buy you one good day. Climbing was different: \u201cYou hit a new style of climbing and it\u2019s success because you\u2019ve never done it before.\u201d That appetite led, via a chance dog-park meeting in Ouray with climber Phil Henderson, to Full Circle Everest<\/a>, the first all-Black expedition to summit the mountain. At the time, it was just an idea. Taylor went into \u201cfull-time fundraising mode\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Strangers still tell him that his life\u2014full-time job, young family, big objectives anyway\u2014made them believe in theirs. He deflects. In his classroom, he says, \u201cI try to let them be the heroes of their own story.\u201d<\/p>\n Aidan Owens\u2019 relationship with the outdoors runs through the docks. The Byron Bay\u2013raised chef and spearfisher does his best work by loitering\u2014\u201cjust poking and prodding and asking questions, and then just standing there and listening\u201d\u2014until the fishermen tell him what actually came up. The bycatch nobody wants? He wants it. \u201cI\u2019d rather it come to me than go in the trash.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re that white boy cooking snails.\u201d That was the greeting at an Ensenada, Mexico, bar the night Owens served whelks, sea snails he\u2019d taught himself to break down the week before. The room lost its mind over them. It\u2019s the reaction he\u2019s chasing: take the unloved catch, cook it with care, and change minds. \u201cYou can make anything taste good if you try.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFarmers and fishermen, they\u2019re not rich people,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen you spend money with them, you\u2019re keeping money local.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Between shifts, there\u2019s a surfboard in his car. And when extreme reality show Chopped Castaways<\/i><\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Marshall Miller\u2019s origin story is a Warren Miller film: a wingsuit pilot buzzing ten feet over skiers\u2019 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?<\/i> Nobody would mentor him\u2014BASE jumping was still taboo\u2014so 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.<\/p>\n BASE was the gateway. Skydiving, wingsuits, and eventually paragliding followed\u2014the 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 (\u201ca case of the go-sies\u201d) 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.<\/p>\n \u201cYou could see this huge shadow just coming across the earth,\u201d he says. \u201cLike someone just turned the lights off.\u201d<\/p>\n Having kids helps keep things in check. \u201cI don\u2019t like the words \u2018adrenaline junkie,\u2019\u201d he says; he\u2019d like to be doing this into his 70s. His Instagram bio says \u201cenabler:\u201d \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Start with the paradox: Jody MacDonald has circumnavigated the globe twice, doesn\u2019t like sailing, and gets seasick. \u201cI loved the idea of it as a vehicle for exploration,\u201d the photographer says\u2014so 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.<\/p>\n Then came the tumor: five inches, in her abdomen, and a prognosis of one to four years. When it came back benign\u2014she\u2019s one of eight in the world known to have grown it\u2014she 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: \u201cThey\u2019re called homestays, but it\u2019s just somebody\u2019s mom.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/i> Real adventure strips away money, religion, everything but the shared problem. \u201cIf I could pay to manufacture this, I would,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd guess what? I live it.\u201d<\/p>\n Faith Dickey held highlining world records\u2014one of them for 12 years. Her method, she says, \u201cwas to be fearless, and I thought fear was the enemy.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n What she rebuilt is more interesting than the records. Through parts work, Dickey developed an actual working relationship with her fear. \u201cHey, fear, I see you. I understand you \u2026 You\u2019re just trying to protect me. But I\u2019m actually very strong, and I\u2019m very capable, and I really want to do this. So I\u2019m gonna take you with me, and I\u2019m gonna show you how strong I am.\u201d It\u2019s a script she teaches clients now, having learned it the hard way herself\u2014and highlining is the perfect laboratory, because humans didn\u2019t evolve with ropes. Your brain simply refuses to believe you\u2019re attached.<\/p>\n In her first year on the line, she and her friends sat around campfires saying, \u201cI bet someday there\u2019ll be guides for this.\u201d Now she runs Elevate Outdoors<\/a>, the Western Hemisphere\u2019s first highline guiding company, walking clients (including people with spinal cord injuries, brittle bone disease, and amputations) into thin air. \u201cI\u2019m here for each step,\u201d she says, \u201cnot because I\u2019m trying to get to the other end without falling.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n This article is from the Fall 2026 issue of Outside magazine. To receive the print magazine, become an Outside+ member here<\/i>.<\/i><\/p>\n <\/div>\nPaid Advertisement by Citizen Watch <\/span><\/h2>\n
Eddie Taylor<\/h2>\n
Aidan Owens<\/h2>\n
![\"Aidan](\"https:\/\/cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/adventure-unscripted_aidan-owens-after-spearfishing.jpg?width=3840&auto=webp&quality=75&fit=cover\"\/)
Marshall Miller<\/b><\/h2>\n
![\"marshall](\"https:\/\/cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/OM0326_THE_FUTURE_OF_ADVENTURE_CITIZEN_002.jpg?width=3840&auto=webp&quality=75&fit=cover\"\/)
Jody MacDonald<\/h2>\n
![\"Jody](\"https:\/\/cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/adventure-unscripted_jody-macdonald-pier.jpg?width=3840&auto=webp&quality=75&fit=cover\"\/)
Faith Dickey<\/h2>\n
![\"faith](\"https:\/\/cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/FaithDickeyOOL.png?width=3840&auto=webp&quality=75&fit=cover\"\/)
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