Festival
In this unconventional guide to summer adventure, we offer 23 big ideas — some that invite you to push your limits and others that will just blow your mind — to rediscover something truly wild: you.
Adventure, if you get down to it, is about choice. And it’s not the choice between flinging yourself off a radio tower or running your usual four-mile loop. It’s not Botswana versus Boston, or heli-skiing versus HBO. No, it’s a choice to approach the morning, the long days of summer — the world, in all its relativity — with bold, open eyes. It can mean taking risks or trying something for the first time or pushing your body until it screams.
Your choice, really, is this: Do you want to live a more interesting life? Do you want to nibble at the edges of your comfort zone — or leap to a whole new zone entirely?
It’s the uncertainty of adventure, and the adventure of uncertainty, that we’re getting at here — the unknown, the untried, the weird, the different. As an adventurer, your mission is to find new ways to define your quest. What better time than now, with the summer stretching ahead of you? In the end, true adventure leaves us with great stories to tell. What is yours going to be?
Dance all night
The creative energy and boundless freedom that flows through House of Yes might not change your life, but for one night it sure as hell could lift your soul.
House of Yes isn’t really a nightclub, though there are jalapeño cocktails and deep-house DJs spinning every evening, sometimes until the next day. And it isn’t really a theater, even though there are multiple stages showcasing the gamut, from amateur burlesque to magicians to independent films. Circus tent? Sort of: HoY’s founders (and former roommates), Anya Sapozhnikova and Kae Burke, are fluent in aerial performance art, stilt walking and costume design. Multiple cages stand above the dance floor; the vending machine sells sex toys; you can soak in a bathtub while a butler brings you drinks. Even taking a leak is a sensory experience: The gender-neutral, bedazzled bathrooms have been called the most beautiful part of the environment.
It’s no wonder that HoY has evolved into quite possibly the fiercest and most fabulous venue in all of New York, but it wasn’t all smooth sailing: The first House burned down in a toaster fire just a year after it opened. The second was pushed out of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (along with almost everything else authentic) by rising rents. The latest, greatest HoY is a warehouse on an unassuming corner in nearby Bushwick — just keep an eye out for the pop-up costume shop outside the ropes.
That’s because, yes, costumes are required on most nights, and most nights have a theme: Summer Camp (think Moonrise Kingdom meets Wet Hot American Summer); Throwback Friday (the best of the ’80s, ’90s and 2000s all at once); and Filthy Pony (a sexy, creepy variety show). Yes, it’s alluring and bewildering — but it manages to find the sweet spot somewhere between progressive, weird, inclusive and hedonistic. As one enthusiastic clubgoer said, “What’s not to love about this boîte? It’s like being transported to a happier universe.” If you’re looking for a spot to express yourself with no judgment — and dance all night while you’re at it — then House of Yes is ready to host your adventure until the sun comes up.
More spots to dance till dawn
- By day, the Electric Forest in Rothbury, MI, is a wooded chill zone (hammocks, art). By night, it’s a woodland dance fantasy (light displays, performances). In between, jam bands like String Cheese Incident share real estate with EDM artists and DJs from Marshmello to Bassnectar. June 21–July 1.
- Music festival in a Dutch safari park? A greenhouse where you pick fresh fruit to make your own juice? Accommodations in cardboard tents or “jungalows”? That’s Best Kept Secret, a boutique rave of sorts with a 2018 lineup that includes Arctic Monkeys, LCD Soundsystem, Father John Misty, Vince Staples and more. June 8–10.
- One of the world ’s biggest EDM festivals — the crowds pulsing across the Las Vegas Motor Speedway top 135,000 — Electric Daisy Carnival is the American glow-in-the-dark answer to Tomorrowland. This year’s lineup includes Afrojack, Diplo and hundreds more, but if you want a carnival, there are pirate ships and log rides, too. May 18–20.
Push your limits
The concept of the Red Bull 400 is so simple that you might underestimate how deep you’ll have to go to survive this 400‒meter race. But if you push through the inevitable pain you’ll reach more than the finish line — you’ll find what you’re made of.
The hardest short effort I’ve ever done.” That’s how Brandon Crichton, a former pro cyclist from Vancouver, BC, describes the Red Bull 400 — a 400-meter sprint straight up a 37-degree slope on dry ski jumps, with a finish so steep it requires scrambling on a makeshift ladder. Crichton, 33, was never a runner, but he topped the Whistler podium in 2015 in a then-record 3 minutes, 53 seconds. “I had no idea what I was entering,” he says. “The next year was harder because I knew what I was in for.”
What makes it so grueling? From a physiological perspective, you have three energy pathways: high-power bursts that are under 30 seconds, anaerobic pushes that last a couple minutes and slow, steady endurance. “Working in the zone between high power and endurance isthe most difficult,” says Francis Neric, an exercise physiologist with the American College of Sports Medicine. “At the highest intensity, the pH level in your muscles begins to drop, which can cause muscle pain and fatigue.” From the time the gun goes off, you’re asking your body’s tachometer to redline. “Those who have the largest pain tolerance will be most successful,” says Neric.
But think of the upside. There’s great scenery (locations include Courchevel, Whistler and Park City). The end will come swiftly: Even athletic non-freaks finish in around 10 minutes. “A newbie needs to know it’s only 400 meters, and the pain can be over as quick as you want,” Crichton says. “You just need to go faster.” The reward? Clout— and maybe a drag on one of the oxygen masks waiting at the finish. “It’s not designed for an elite athlete,” he says. “It’s made for average Joes to step outside of your comfort zone — and smash it.
Four more ways to test yourself
- Challenge yourself to an ultra, ultra marathon: The TranSelkirks Run is a five-day, 100-mile stage race through Canada’s most breathtaking mountains, with steep ascents, alpine lakes, epic lookouts and daily descents back to the Columbia Valley. Aug. 27–31.
- From afar, the course for the groundbreaking Mammoth Mountain Kamikaze downhill mountain-biking race looks like a basic ski area access road. It’s not: You’ll start at 11,000 feet, drop a few thousand, and if you have enough guts or skills, you might hit 65 mph along the way. Sept. 13–16
- At the Peak Death Race in Vermont, the Warrior Dash, "The Amazing Race" and your least favorite history teacher from high school are all rolled into something that’s supposed to be really f-ing hard. Participants don’t know what the obstacles are going to be before the event starts, but in past years, challenges have included chopping wood for two hours, jumping into an icy pool, hiking 30 miles while carrying rocks and memorizing all the U.S. presidents. July 11.
- Even though some who climb Mount Rainier are training for Himalayan expeditions — the 14,410-foot volcano is the most heavily glaciated mountain in the lower 48 — local guiding services make it reasonably safe even if you don’t have technical chops. But you still have to step up: The round trip between base camp and summit goes up and then down 9,000 feet.
Go crazy at a festival
The world is full of strange and wondrous spectacles, but few offer as much good clean fun as you’ll have mucking around at South Korea’s Boryeong Mud Festival.
South Korea has weekends dedicated to green tea and lanterns, bamboo and butterflies. The country also hosts one of the world’s largest mime festivals (in case you’re trying to plan when not to visit South Korea). But the most popular days in summer may be when Korean students and busloads of tourists of all nationalities descend on Daecheon Beach, strung and draped in bikinis and board shorts and armed with water guns filled with soju and energy drink, prepared to spend all day pretty much rolling around in the mud.
Event organizers say Boryeong mud is high in minerals like germanium and emits far-infrared rays, both of which are good for the skin. That’s why, in 1998, bright minds created a party to plug the benefits of cosmetics made from the local goo. Before long, the Boryeong Mud Festival evolved into a real-life laundry list of weird and sloppy experiences: a mud maze, a mud marathon, mud slides, mud swimming, mud football, mud wrestling, mud massage, even mud fashion shows. If you’re not muddy enough, get ready for mud prison, where somebody — likely dressed up as a cartoon character — throws mud at you.
These days, attendance exceeds 3 million, and what started out as a promotion for pores has become closer to Daytona Beach meets Yellow Sea. (The ubiquitous “marts,” convenience stores that set up tables and chairs where people can drink, make it easy to get sloshed.) But mudless events like fireworks shows and K-pop concerts — yes, Psy was a headliner last year — are friendly enough for families. And when you feel too dirty, you can hop under the showers set up all over the venue.
Not that you come here to be clean. Says the chairman of the organizing committee, Dong-Il Kim: “It’s the one and only festival where you can relive your childhood dream of rolling in the mud ... or is it just me?”
Or go wild at these festivals
- When shopkeepers cover their storefronts with plastic sheeting and trucks full of tomatoes roll into the heart of Valencia, Spain, you know it’s time for La Tomatina — where 20,000 people have one of the world’s biggest food fights, turning the medieval streets into spaghetti sauce. Aug. 29.
- Don’t forget: It’s summer here. But it’s another story down in New Zealand, where the Queenstown Winter Festival is one of the Southern Hemisphere’s biggest off-season celebrations. The 60 events include sliding downhill in suitcases, the “Undy 500,” and people dressed up as birds jumping into freezing Lake Wanaka. June 21–24.
- Founded back in 1969 in order to “strengthen bonds through the belly button,” the Furano Bellybutton Festival in northern Japan fetes all things umbilical, culminating in a huge dance contest and a 4,000-person parade of exposed and painted stomachs. Afterward consider touring a local shrine full of umbilical cords on display. July 28–29.
Volunteer
If you do a stint with adventure scientists, you won’t just take a long vacation — you’ll make an enormous difference, helping to protect one of the world’s last remaining prairies.
Researchers estimate that 2.3 million people get involved with citizen science projects every year — from photographing bumblebees to tracking black holes. But if you want to get a real taste of scientific fieldwork — and have a major hand in shaping one of the largest conservation projects in North America — sign up for a gig with Landmark: It’s a collaboration between Adventure Scientists (an organization that pairs skilled outdoors people with research missions) and the American Prairie Reserve, a Yellowstone-size parcel of plains in northeastern Montana. There are only four places left on Earth that contain vast stretches of unplowed native grasslands — Patagonia, Mongolia, Siberia and the Great Plains — and the Reserve, with Landmark’s platoons of volunteers, aims to protect our claim.
Instead of dabbling in an assignment for a week or two, you’ll spend one or two months living on the prairie, where winter temperatures can drop to -22 degrees and the summer mud can suck your Timberlands right off. Your crew might include a South African who grew up on a game reserve, an Outward Bound instructor or a recent grad with field experience in Ecuador and Siberia. You might check camera traps for footage of big cats, count sage grouse or hang out in prairie- dog towns. You might hike 8- to 12-mile transects every day, noting what species, old farm equipment and dinosaur bones you see.
What you’ll surely do is live the prairie — its spectacular storms and lightning shows, its floods, its snow, its aurora borealis. You’ll connect to the land and its history. You’ll set up an ecosystem that can eventually take care of itself. When complete, the APR will be home to many of the species that lived here when Lewis and Clark passed through, including the nation’s largest free-roaming bison herd. And just think: We’ll have you to thank.
Two more ideas to give back in a big way
- Less sexy, more impact: That’s the idea behind volunteering in a West Virginia holler with Global Volunteers. Spend a week building and repairing homes, assisting local elders with everyday tasks and tutoring young kids—all in a poverty-stricken (and often misunderstood) part of the country that needs all the attention it can get. globalvolunteers.org/ usa-west-virginia/
- Want to help the residents of Puerto Rico—who, it must be said, are still in need? It’s hard to navigate all the possibilities on your own. Sign up with VOAD (Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster), which will match you with one of dozens of agencies on the ground in Puerto Rico, depending on your skills, interests or availability.
Learn a new skill
With a friendly learning curve and the thrills of catching big air, the formerly niche sport of kitesurfing is like “jumping off the roof of your garage and into the sky.”
Robbie Naish might be the best windsurfer of all time. But he’s also a founding father of kiteboarding, which has exploded from a niche to a sport that now adds 60,000 kiters per year. “It’s so easy to get hooked,” says Naish, 55. “The wind in your hair, the water in your face, the sensation of speed, the feeling of flying — it’s like grabbing that balloon in your dreams and jumping off the roof of your garage into the sky.”
If that sounds risky, it actually isn’t: Thanks to gear improvements, kiteboarding is safer to learn than ever. And you don’t have to book a trip to Fiji, Mauritius or Fortaleza, Brazil, either — though Naish admits that they’re sweet places to catch a side shore breeze. Texas, South Carolina and California have dozens of great beaches. First-timers gravitate toward the long season, consistent winds and flat water of Cape Hatteras, NC, home to the biggest kite school in the country, Real Kiteboarding. “Lessons are key,” Naish says. “You can get on your feet after two hours rather than beating your head against the wall for three weeks.”
For Naish, the short learning curve of kiting may be its biggest draw. “In a month, I guarantee you’ll be doing back loops — without any more consequence than a splash in the surf and another try,” he says. “What other sport can say that?”
More mad skills you want to learn
- Breakdancing combines martial arts, gymnastics and yoga into one discipline. You can learn flares, floating gremlin spins, elbow tracks or maybe just a sixstep from New York’s B-boy icons at PMT Dance Studio.
- Pick up survival skills that are apocalyptically useful (like starting friction fires, foraging for native plants and processing animals) at southern Utah’s Boulder Outdoor Survival School.
Get way off the grid
For a brief and stylishly comfortable escape from our relentlessly connected culture, PurePods offer a beautiful opportunity to discover true solitude.
New Zealand’s Department of Conservation operates more than 950 backcountry shelters around the country — but spending the night in one isn’t always a great escape. “Being squashed into huts while on hiking holidays with my family got me thinking,” says Grant Ryan, a serial entrepreneur and inventor from Christchurch. “There must be a better way to truly immerse ourselves in the landscape."
The answer: Build a system of secluded über-eco cabins in some of NZ’s most stunning scenery, from the Seaward Kaikoura mountain range to the Greta Valley. But his so-called PurePods aren’t exactly cabins — they’re one-bedroom structures that are almost all glass, including the floor and the loo, which make for an outside-in immersive night in the woods. (Even some of the furniture is transparent.)
And another thing is clear: These structures are not exactly designed for roughing it — they come with a Bluetooth speaker, two-burner stovetop and a mini fridge. Each of the half dozen pods are solar- and biofuel- powered; the water supply is spring-fed; the wastewater is processed by an ecosystem of microorganisms and tiger worms. “They’re engineered to have less impact on the environment than a tent,” CEO Stephanie Hassall says.
Ryan made sure that there’s no internet service, either; the pods are a 10- to 20-minute walk from an out-of-the-way parking lot and a couple hours from Christchurch. But it doesn’t take you off-the-grid too far: If you run out of wine, you can still jog back to your car, hit up a bottle shop and be back in an hour. Most pods are near hiking trails, or at least bush to whack, but the main entertainment comes in the form of the weather hitting the window, or the haunting hoot of moreporks, or the vivid splatter of the Southern Cross. (A New Zealand astronomical yearbook, a telescope and a double-sided planisphere come as standard quipment.)
Whatever the conceit, it’s working. PurePods just got a grant from the government to help expand to as many as 30 locations —basically, wherever Ryan can find places with nothing to do. Doubt it? Read the Purepods FAQ page. “What do I do all day — what activities are there?” “None. That is the point.”
Good spots to get way off the grid
- When a bush plane drops you at Alaska’s luxe, all-inclusive Ultima Thule Lodge, you’re 100 miles from any road, surrounded by the vast Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. From there, a fleet of whitewater kayaks, rafts and more planes can take you places that no one has seen before.
- Paddling the middle fork of the Salmon in Idaho is as bucket-listy as the Grand Canyon, but without jet boats, dams or artificial flows. Float through the rugged and mountainous Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, the largest contiguous wilderness zone in the lower 48, and hit more than a hundred rapids in 100 miles, some up to class IV.
- The new Parque Patagonia in Chile, a vision of Douglas (late North Face founder) and Kris (former Patagonia CEO) Tompkins, is three times the size of Yosemite and Yellowstone combined. To go deep, backpack the remote and dramatic Aviles Valley trail, 31 miles one way.
