I am recently a self-care skeptic turned believer. It’s been a 180-degree mental flip that took a quarantine to inspire, more specifically a life-saving routine of daily yoga, Instagram fasting, and the escapist fantasy of the Nintendo game Animal Crossing, all of which kept me sane while stuck at home. It’s not that I hadn’t thought it was important to take care of myself, or that I never partook in any number of practices that could be seen as woo-woo wellness. It’s just that, until the urgent flood of worldwide panic, I’d yet to see up close how vividly a downward dog can change your day, or felt the peaceful receding of existential dread while in pose, my unease washed away by a vinyasa flow.
And so, when my favorite outdoors brand Arc’teryx asked me to join them on a nature excursion, part of their new Outer Peace initiative dedicated to promoting the healing power of being outside, I was receptive to, if still a little unconvinced by, the notion that a few hours amongst the trees could cure my considerable lingering restlessness. While I am an urban New York creature, at home on streets and subways, I do have a powerful if amateur taste for wide open spaces. I’d probably not be the first to pitch a tent to camp in the woods sans running water, but I spend as much time as I can hiking and swimming. Would taking it up a notch—not only spending more time outside, but, as Arc’teryx recommends with Outer Peace, being purposeful and deliberate once there—be a recipe for a weller me? Based on the proposition that the outdoors can substantially improve lives, Arc’teryx is giving $1 million this year to organizations like Big City Mountaineers and Brown Girl Outdoor World, to help “remove barriers and protect nature, so people who have been traditionally excluded from access to nature may find Outer Peace.” With their invitation to join them on a few days in the great green, brown, and blue of wilderness, I would get to test their theory first-hand.
The science, as I learned from the writer Florence Williams, whose book The Nature Fix partly motivated the Outer Peace program, backs up the Arc’teryx idea that any time in nature, even just minutes, can lower blood pressure, improve mood, and help keep depression and anxiety at bay. “The first place I went [to research] was Japan, a really stressed out country. I watched them do the science—physiologists were measuring people’s blood pressure, stress hormones, heart rates, and respiration after just a 15-minute walk in the woods. And these biomarkers really improve,” she says. Williams attributes these organic gains in part to the concept of biophilia or, as she puts it, “the idea that we are innately wired to love living things.” “We are animals who evolved in nature, and our perceptual systems, the way we read an environment, is based on natural landscapes. We understand on a subconscious level that a river means we can find clean water,” she says. “There’s something subconscious that our brain aligns with when it’s interpreting a natural landscape, as opposed to a city intersection, which we can navigate but at a cost. It’s stressful!”
I set out to leave those stressful intersections behind, at least for a weekend. Arc’teryx is from Vancouver—just “10 minutes from wilderness,” as the company’s George Weetman told me—where the magnificence of nature is impossible to miss. Though they now make all kinds of minimalist and tasteful gear (my personal style hero Frank Ocean is a fan) for any level of outdoors experience, from expert to novice, they were born back in 1989 primarily as a climbing company, and so for day 1 of the Outer Peace experience, we went up to the rocky Mohonk Preserve about 90 miles upstate from Manhattan. The preserve is around 8,000 acres of forests, clifts, and streams, and a big destination for rock climbers, with about 50,000 climbers each year who check out the 1,000 climbing routes.