Expeditions

Day trips are the backbone of teenage life: the day at the outdoor activity centre, the forest school session.  They are good. They get you out, and they create memories.

But they don’t change anyone.

Multi-day expeditions – three, four, five days in places like Dartmoor or the Lake District – do something fundamentally different. Not because they are longer versions of the same thing, but because duration itself creates conditions that brief experiences simply cannot.

Teacher James Herndon, writing about education in How to Survive in Your Native Land (a remarkable, irreverent book), observed that schools operate on ‘artificial time’ – bells, lessons, arbitrary schedules disconnected from natural rhythms or real needs.  Learning that matters, he argued, requires proper time to unfold.

The same is true in other experiences, especially in the outdoors.  Day trips operate on borrowed time, while multi-day expeditions operate on lived time. For teenagers discovering who they are, that duration transforms the experience entirely.

The second day is when it actually begins

Day one of any outdoor trip runs on nerves first, and then quickly onto excitement.  Everything is new, there’s a significant undertaking ahead, and adrenaline is at work.  Teenagers are still their ‘weekend selves’, just in a different location (I think of it as an ‘indoors mode’).

Day two is different.

The thrill has worn off.  They’re just… here.  On the ground, in yesterday’s clothes, with a day ahead.

They have now arrived.  This is when the real experience begins.

On day trips, this point is never reached. It’s over before the novelty wears off, before anything uncomfortable has to be fully worked through. (I write here about the importance of boredom and avoiding escape routes).

Multi-day expeditions force teenagers through a wide arc of emotion and experience, varying cycles of highs and lows that accumulate into a layered adventure.  By day two or three, they’re not doing the expedition anymore. They’re living inside it.

Gary Snyder writes about the difference between visiting wilderness and inhabiting wildness.  Day trips are visits. Multi-day, you stop visiting.  You become an inhabitant, temporarily – you begin to integrate with it, and gain a sense of being at home in the world.  For a teenager, that wild feeling of belonging in nature is crucial to wellbeing, and profoundly underrated.

Time reveals who they actually are

Teenagers are trying on identities. Some feel real, while some are provisional. It takes robust challenges that test which identities are genuine and which are just performance.

On day trips, the unripe identities stay intact.  There’s not enough time, discomfort, or consequence for anything deeper to surface.

On multi-day expeditions, something else happens. By the second or third day, maintaining a persona becomes harder than simply being yourself.  Energy is finite – the loud one gets tired, the anxious one discovers they cope, the quiet one finds a moment to step forward.

I love how this unveils itself, without any force applied.  Duration does the work, revealing who the actually are.

For a teenager, discovering who they are when they can’t hide is invaluable.  It helps them find their feet… which, even though they have just grown three sizes in six months, is a surprisingly challenging task.

Consequences stretch across days and actually teach something

Modern teenage life is remarkably forgiving: mistakes get reset overnight, discomfort is usually temporary, and poor choices rarely echo forward, allowing the same mistakes to be repeated with low cost.

School operates on what Herndon called “artificial consequences” – grades, detentions, punishments entirely disconnected from the actions themselves.  Get a bad mark, nothing real changes the next day, because there’s no genuine feedback loop.

School operates on what Herndon called ‘artificial consequences’ – grades and detentions disconnected from the actions that caused them. The feedback arrives later, imposed by authority, unrelated to natural results. Get a bad mark on Thursday, your Friday feels exactly the same.  The feedback loop is broken.

Multi-day expeditions restore natural consequences.

Pack your rucksack poorly on day one (or bring one that doesn’t even fit you), your shoulders hurt on day two.  Smash through your snacks on day one, and you’re reduced to begging by the next day.  Allow your feet to get wet, or don’t dry your socks when you do, and you’ve got cold feet for the remainder.

These aren’t punishments, they’re just reality providing clear feedback.  The magic in this is that there is moral development without any moralising.  And because consequences stretch across time, there’s space to adjust, learn, try again.  This is how humans learned for thousands of years before we built systems that protect us from feedback.

So as much as I would love to teach them that their choices shape tomorrow’s experience, that laziness compounds, that you can’t outsource your comfort, and that cooperation isn’t optional when you’re stuck together, it’s better to leave it to be spoken by the hill.  

Real bonds require time – not bonding exercises

One-day outdoor experiences keep groups polite, and roles stay shallow.  I don’t think many individuals are being their raw selves in one of those “3, 2, 1 Let’s Go!” teambuilding situations.

Multi-day expeditions remove that option.  After a hard day’s walking followed by an iffy night’s sleep under a noisy owl, edges start to show.  Especially when faced with the prospect of the same again today.

This sounds negative, but it’s not.  Although we like to applaud positivity, there’s nothing that unites a group like a good whinge.  So… maybe it is negative, but in such a positive way!

It’s the beginning of honesty.

Because there’s no exit, people have to work through it. No one can retreat into politeness or performance; it wouldn’t work. Shared reality replaces social manoeuvring.

This is how trust actually forms: not through bonding exercises, but through staying when things get uncomfortable – and discovering that the group holds.  The result is earned membership and belonging

Group alchemy only happens when there’s time for things to get real.

The inner clock resets

Remember that bad night I mentioned earlier?  That just tends to be Night 1, when they have yet to fully exit ‘indoors mode,’ which is the one where it’s possible to get mad at an owl.

As indoor mode and artificial time fades, without phones, without schedules, without extraction times… there’s a physiological shift.

Sleep deepens.  Teenagers sleep better than they have in months – they are sleeping because it’s dark and they are tired.

Hunger becomes intelligible. “It’s time to eat” is replaced by “I’m actually hungry now.”

Attention stretches, because there is nothing fixing it in place.

When this happens, they are going beyond merely “slowing down” and into internal regulation.  

Their nervous systems recalibrate in prolonged nature time. Circadian rhythms reset to natural light-dark cycles, away from artificial disruptions.  The result is that they feel different, even if they can’t quite put their finger on it.

It’s great to experience your own biology again.

Why this matters

Institutions are a fact of life.  They are essential at scale. But institutional life is characterised by time management, performance measurement and other group-level objectives, and so it encourages orthodoxy over diversity, conformity over individual pace.

For teenagers who are developing at such a rapid rate, it is essential to have time outside of this. Experiences where the unique, slow or quirky can have their time, where masks drop and systems reset. It’s also where parental relationships can really deepen – in different ways with fathers and sons, and with fathers and daughters.

Healthy adolescence cannot be a factory where grown-ups are forged.  It’s a period of individual transformation—messy, uneven, unpredictable.  Transformation needs time and space, which is not something that institutional settings will provide.

That’s why through human history you have seen teenagers enduring prolonged challenges out in nature… and when I’m around, you’ll still see them.

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I’m a Mountain Leader who runs multi-day expeditions for teenager groups, and for fathers and children (12+) in Dartmoor, Snowdonia, the Peak District, and the Lake District – as well as weekend camps for fathers and children (ages 8+) in Sussex woodland.

These experiences are designed for duration to do its work, and get you fully out of ‘indoor mode’.

Learn more about woodland weekends → 
Learn more about expeditions →

Email: cpacke@yahoo.co.uk | WhatsApp: 07940 272474