If you’ve ever been bucked off your mogul line, stuffed a front bike tire, caught a toe on a rock, or collapsed the leg of a camp chair, you know that to go outside is to have an intense relationship with balance. But recovering physical balance is a lot easier than emotional balance. Just ask climber and balance Jedi Kai Lightner. Kai has been a climbing savant since he scaled a 50-foot flagpole at 6-years-old. He then went on to casually win 10 youth national championship titles, five youth world championship medalist, then evolved from an indoor climbing phenom to an outdoor climbing force. Along the way, Kai had to deal with physical and emotional stress and pressure that outsized his abilities, but climbing provided a cathartic way through it all. In Kai’s view, the physical demands of climbing—having to embrace fear and doubt—provides a kind of balance that can carry us through whatever life throws our way.

Have you ever wondered why you feel a pull to go for that grueling trail run or long bike ride or demanding backcountry ski? We have an innate need for adventure, but why? According to paleoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist Ella Al-Shamahi, it’s in our DNA. Ella’s years of Paleolithic study focuses on the first humans and how they behaved—everything from community building to tool evolution to the world’s first sea crossing, which populated Australia. Her research has helped uncover a bonkers “Lord Of The Rings” era, when our foremothers and fathers existed alongside other human species that she calls things like “Hobbits” and “Dragon Men”…seriously. Ella believes that we have a genetic predisposition for adventure, which explains why homosapiens populated the earth and the Hobbits and Dragon Men did not. More importantly for our purposes, it helps explain why we still love to sleep in the dirt, climb mountains, and seek out the next big adventure.

They say it’s not the fall that gets ya, it’s the landing. Fear of falling, or smacking one’s face onto the cold hard earth, is an innate human emotion. Even for athletes who’ve spent a lifetime climbing mountains, traversing sheer cliffs, balancing on knife-edge ridgelines, this fear never disappears. And that’s why folks who paraglide, speedfly, and skydive are both fascinating and confounding. What do they know that the rest of us don’t? Well, champion wingsuit pilot and quantum physicist, Alexey Galda knows a lot about it. Alexey spends his weekdays  in quantum computing at the pharmaceutical giant Moderna. And his weekends are spent jumping out of perfectly good airplanes donning a  “squirrel suit” that lets him move horizontally through the sky at speeds exceeding 200 miles an hour. Even if these worlds seem drastically different, they both impact the other and allow Alexey to, ahem, fly through fear.

In 1978, skier and kinetic artist John King, along with two pals, set out on a singular and epic adventure: a backcountry ski tour from Durango, Colorado to the Medicine Bow Range near Fort Collins. Over six weeks, the trio skied 490 miles, climbed 65,000 vertical feet. They finished gaunt and sun cooked, with boots held together by tape. Their route influenced the design of the Colorado Trail and the locations of the 10th Mountain Division hut system, but the journey has never been repeated. It’s not an overstatement to call this one of the most audacious wintertime feats of endurance in the history of skiing—a new documentary called Moving Line captures all of that beautifully. And for John King the true triumph was the artistic merit of the pursuit itself. John believes that his tracks on that trip sketched lines that extend into his present day and beyond toward his future. In John’s estimation, movement is creation, expedition is art, and all of it guides him every step of the way.

Chitchatting is a natural part of any adventure you do with a pal—what else are you gonna do around a campfire or sitting on the tailgate at a trailhead or going for a long walk in the woods? But most of us don’t set out on a journey for the sole purpose of talking with strangers. That’s exactly what writer and standup paddleboarder Dan Rubinstein did. Over 11 weeks, he paddled 1,200 miles from his home in Ottawa to New York City and back, talking to whoever he came upon in the process. He was partially inspired by a fascination with the benefits of so-called “blue space,” which is the aquatic equivalent of green space. But he was also looking to revive a spirit that was flagging under some existential weight. Dan came away from his trip with a better understanding of how time spent on and in water improves your life; more importantly, he came away with a renewed appreciation for his fellow man and woman.

For most of us, mountain biking is a great way to get into the outdoors, get a workout, get an adrenaline rush, and hopefully avoid losing any skin or breaking a collarbone. For the mountain bikers of Red Bull’s annual Rampage contest, mountain biking is a means of defining the limits of human performance and fear tolerance. Every year, these men and women gather on a sprawling ridgeline near Zion National Park in Utah, and proceed to see who can ride the least rideable-looking line down a mountain bigger than your last 5 descents, combined. It is one of the most unbelievable spectacles in the world of action and outdoor sports, and since it’s about to go down this weekend, we asked our friends at the Pinkbike Podcast—who know more about mountain biking than just about anyone on Earth—to give us a little preview of the what, who, and why to watch.

Ruggedness, dependability, and handiness define a lot of outdoor archetypes, from the ski patroller to the river guide to the park ranger. So why would you find all three in a famous actor? Maybe because the actor in question—Nick Offerman—is an avid outdoorsman in his own right. Surely you know Nick from one of his many memorable roles,  like Ron Swanson on Parks And Recreation and General Sidney in the latest Mission Impossible. And, when he’s not acting or performing on comedy tours, you can find Nick paddling the Los Angeles River or scrambling up peaks in the nearest National Park.  Relying on himself in a pinch informs everything Nick does, from acting to woodworking. And his new book,  Little Woodchucks: Offerman Woodshop’s Guide to Tools and Tomfoolery, is Nick’s gospel of do-it-yourselfedness, a starting point to building a tough and resourceful identity. Because eventually, we’re all gonna have to fix a flat tire or build a little shelter in the woods.

Many outdoorsy folks will happily slog for hours toward outdoor fun, despite the fact that any number of adventure derailing smackdowns await us. Gear malfunctions, crummy weather, and bloodied limbs don’t stop us from heading into the unknown. No one puts this optimistic persistence to better use than lifelong surfer and CEO of the Surfrider Foundation, Chad Nelsen. Chad grew up in smog-choked Laguna Beach in the 1970s, when pipes spilled raw sewage into the ocean regularly. He was inspired to pursue environmental science and a PhD combining his love of surfing with sustainability, thus dedicating his life to protecting and preserving the world’s oceans, waves, and beaches. Despite bureaucracy, apathy, and disengagement, Chad pursues environmentalism like a surfer paddling into pounding beach break, confident that the wave of his life is just outside the shore pound.

Wood chopping is objectively awful for all the obvious reasons: blisters, back aches, over-the-counter painkiller expenses. But that’s not what you remember months later, when the fruits of your labor warm you and your loved ones on a cold winter night. See, wood chopping is really an investment—both in terms of that crackling fire, but also your emotional well being.  That is something Nicole Coenen knows all about. The internet’s self proclaimed “lesbian lumberjill” grew up an uncomfortable tomboy in the suburbs of Ontario, and she found both her refuge and her calling in the woods. She’s amassed a huge following from the forest that surrounds her adopted home of British Columbia, and her videos are more than just wholesome, self-effacing clips of her wood chopping skills. They’ve a living journal of a woman who was saved by trees.

Spend time outdoors, and you’ll eventually spend time in brutal, even scary weather. Dangerous winds, flash flood-inducing rain, and vision-erasing whiteouts are sometimes the cost of entry. By the same token, you’re as likely to remember the upsides to those experience—the belly laughter of relief, the rainbows after the rain, the waist deep powder—as the scary parts. Hank Schyma, aka Pecos Hank, built a career out of those upsides by becoming one of the internet’s most beloved storm chasers. For decades, he’s captured astonishing photos and video of tornadoes, gathering new data on how they work and discovering new phenomena. On his wildly popular Youtube channel, his new photo memoir Storm, and in this conversation, we get to see and hear it all—from a significantly safer distance.