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Category: Hand Built

Published: November 01 2012

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Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
- Mark Twain

     Exploring the world is not a static process.  As we move about our environment it effects us in subtle, often profound ways. There is the belief that as far as land goes there is no more unexplored territory.  This is untrue, a matter of perspective and not cartography. Technology is rapidly altering the way we perceive the world. Take for example the popular yelp app which has the Monocle feature. Looking down a busy city street, information is automatically overlaid over our perspective. An unfamiliar place suddenly becomes accessible to us in our native tongue. But take that same app into the woods and you are forced to rely on yourself and anyone else with you instead of the series of tubes known as the Interwebs. People accustomed to instant access to all available information suddenly find themselves in what seems to be uncharted territory.

     The wild places in the world are the next "last frontier" to be explored, mapped, catalogued, cross-referenced, and linked. Soon though you will be able to use your phone to identify plants and get turn by turn trail directions to the top of the mountain. It is only because our technology has become so embedded in our way of life that these places seem unexplored to our instant-access minds. The means of physical exploration such as the ship have provided new frontiers for centuries and now the app allows us to be explorers in our own backyard. The journey has changed us and vice versa, the tools of exploration have become integrated into our lives and minds.