EDIT – winners announced here.
Welcome to the 6th year of the Summer Solstice Microadventure Challenge! The aim, as always, is simple: to encourage people around the world to stop procrastinating and try a microadventure. (Not sure what a microadventure is? Here’s a video or find out more on my website.) I wrote recently about how a microadventure is an ideal way to kickstart your summer, your goals, even your life!
If the idea of spending a midsummer evening under the stars, out in nature, listening to birdsong and perhaps even swimming in a river is not sufficiently appealing, there are some great prizes up for grabs to act as additional incentives.
Last year saw people exploring almost every corner of the UK and many countries beyond. In previous years I have challenged people to make films or spend at least 24 hours outside.
This year I’mm asking you to choose your own microadventure, making it broader and more inclusive than ever. If you’d like some ideas there are loads here and a brand new one here. Grab your friends or go solo. Bike to the beach or bivvy on a hill. The only limit is your own imagination.
I’mm hoping that the 2017 challenge will achieve two things:
- Give you the impetus to get out and enjoy a microadventure
- Challenge you to use your microadventure as a step towards making life more awesome: a physical challenge if you want to get fit, a night round a campfire if you want to spend more time with your friends. I’mve written more about this aspect here.
We would all benefit from spending more time outdoors, with good people, doing energetic fun stuff. An overnight microadventure is a cheap, simple, memorable way to do this. I appreciate that some will find it hard to sleep out overnight but here’s some inspiration that might persuade you otherwise if you are too busy, broke, or have young kids. Please just remember the key rule of microadventures:
Rules are for the obedience of fools, and the guidance of the wise.
Do whatever you can, whatever excites and inspires you. Just get out into nature and go and do something new and different: that is the real prize in all of this.
Choose your challenge, then get out there on your microadventure. The posts here should answer all of the questions you may have about how to get started.
How to join the 2017 Summer Solstice Microadventure Challenge:
- Think up a microadventure challenge that appeals to you, and do it any time between the 5th of June and the 9th of July. These weeks span the summer solstice on June 21st, the lightest day of the year. Spend a night outdoors with a bivvy bag or a hammock and have fun! Perhaps you’ll cycle to the sea, sleep on a hill, or walk around your town. Bivvy on Beinn Spionnaidh and the sun will rise at 4am. Kip in a cave if you’d like a little lie-in, or head for a bothy.
- Share your microadventure photos, videos, stories, haiku or paintings on your social media channels. You can see what everyone else is getting up to, and check your own submissions, on this page if you add the hashtag #microadventure to all your uploads. Post as many things as you like. In order to be in with a chance to win a prize, post a photo from your microadventure on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook using the funky ViewRanger Skyline feature (see below) and the hashtag #microadventure. Download the ViewRanger app to your phone, for free, here, right now.
- Win stuff! There will be prizes for an as-yet-unknown number of categories including, perhaps, most enthusiastic novice, most friends you can persuade to join you for a bivvy, tastiest outdoor meal, the most hard core plan, best wild swim, most epic sleeping spot. It doesn’t matter one bit: just invent a category that appeals to you! (There will definitely be a prize for the best demonstration of Leaving No Trace wild camping.)
Prizes:
- 20 rugged CASIO PRO TREK Smart watches, each worth £450, and waterproof CAT S60 smartphones, each worth £650.
- Three Cetus sleeping bags from Haglöfs, each worth £300.
- The chance to join Trail magazine on a photoshoot in the hills: a free trip to the hills, lots of fun, and your microadventure featured in Trail. Also some subscriptions to Trail magazine.
- Three Microadventure bundles from Alpkit, each worth £110. Includes a bivvy bag, stove, cooking set, and headtorch. They are such nice chaps that they are also going to bung in a bonus sleeping mat too.
- A 12 week BeerBods subscription and a couple of boxes of cans of beer.
- Subscriptions to Sidetracked magazine.
- Tasty outdoor meals from Outdoor Food. (As a bonus, anyone heading to this link can buy an exclusive FIREPOT Microadventure Pack: two full-size meals for only £8.50, instead of £13.)
- Booby prizes from me.
That’s it! Good luck!
The adventures are their own incentive, but stuff always does make everything more tantalising, so I’d be remiss not to ask if the prizes are winnable by people outside the UK.
Some of the prizes are, yes. Not all – depends on the brands. Sorry! Hope you still want to get involved!
No doubt, my summer mountain trip season is already planned to start this weekend. Seeing this only reminded me of an idea I once had of bivvying atop a peak which, incidentally, is near where the group I’m going with will be setting camp. Thanks for organising all this!
Sounds a fantastic idea… I might even have to make it a Solstice post work – pre work mid week special! Want to come?
I have been really inspired by stumbling across your book on Microadventures. In fact tomorrow night I am hitting my first 5to9 with 2 co workers (also inspired from what I have told them about your book) and one of their fathers. How cool is that? Anyway, I would really like to complete a year of microadventure and get involved in things like this but it is all generated to focus on the northern hemisphere. I am in New Zealand and really keen to get involved.
That is cool!
You can still do the full year of Microadventure calendar – it doesn’t matter at all that your summer is our winter. Good luck!