Unseasoned kids like Brittany are flocking to adventure travel and rising to new limits of achievement, thrill and dirtiness. Where there was once either plain old camping or the hard-core wilderness training of Outward Bound and NOLS, the ’90s brought a new class of adventure-travel companies that flipped the philosophy from less to more. Emphasizing fun over outdoor fundamentals and cramming more excitement into fewer days, these new trips attract kids for whom roasting marshmallows is so over. With their families or in groups of teens, they’re backcountry snowboarding, hiking across glaciers and swimming with stingrays. “Now kids are addicted to the rush, whether it’s going on the next roller coaster or conquering the next mountain,” says travel expert Emily Kaufman.
High-tech gear has helped get more kids off their chaises longues by making the adventures more comfortable and fun. Every year brings lighter, better gear and softer, faster-drying, more water-resistant fabrics. And which kid–or adult–doesn’t want to play with a toy like the Rino, which is like a walkie-talkie that maps the location of the other user? Meanwhile, advances in cell-phone technology are reassuring to parents whose kids are far away, while more sophisticated guides and training keep the adventures safe. And “the equipment has made it so you can get better [at a sport] a lot faster,” says John Dockendors of Adventure Treks, a travel group.
Younger and younger kids, and more girls, are taking to this more accessible playing field. Generally, kids must be at least 13 to go on one of the teen trips, like Brittany’s trek with Adventures Cross-Country. But many companies now take the whole family on an adventure–including kids in elementary school. “We have young girls climbing Kilimanjaro,” says Thomson Safaris and Family Adventures’ Judi Wineland. Kids, who should be at least 12 for high-altitude trips and 7 for other adventures, especially enjoy interactive trips, where they can swim with sea lions in the Galapagos, says George Morgan-Grenville of Abercrombie & Kent, which has seen the number of families taking its adventure trips double in three years.
Kids often end up learning as much about themselves as the fauna. For Jan Lewin, an Atlanta mom who took her family to Tanzania, “Adventure travel is an intellectual, spiritual and cultural journey.” Twelve-year-old Cara was less open-minded. “I thought it was going to be just a huge petting zoo,” she says, though she ended up having a blast. Back from her trip, Brittany reports that she got sick for a day, flipped her kayak in the rapids, never got to take a single shower, but learned that she was capable of things she never thought possible, such as white-water kayaking and making new friends. “I didn’t care at all about how I looked. We were like a family,” she says of her group of 13 teenage girls. “We were all dirty together.” It’s all part of the adventure.
