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The quantitative approach also offers some clues about a thornier question: the why of exploring. If you want to teach a computer to learn about the world, it's helpful to program it with an "uncertainty bonus." A navigation algorithm, for example, might suggest route choices based on what has minimized travel times for similar trips in the past. But the algorithm will generate better results if you incentivize it to also check some possibilities that it hasn't sampled recently, just in case there are new road upgrades or favorable traffic conditions there. It turns out that, in many real-world contexts, we seem to include exactly this sort of uncertainty bonus in our decision-making calculus. As we'll see, we pick new restaurants based mostly on how good they're reputed to be—but if all else is equal, and sometimes even if it's not, we opt for ones we know less about.

 

There's a reason we're wired this way: exploration works. In recent years, bestselling books have extolled the power of good habits, which are exploit decisions in a hyperpure form. Good habits are certainly important: by one estimate, about 45 percent of our actions in a given day are habitually driven. But it's easy to get stuck in suboptimal routines. Even regular commuters, who retrace the same route twice daily, often turn out to be taking slower or less pleasant routes than alternatives they haven't tried. Exploration, in this sense, is the antihabit, and it has paradoxical effects: a single instance of exploring will likely yield a worse-than-usual outcome, but the collective effect of repeatedly breaking free of your usual routines will be better outcomes—a faster commute, for example—in the long term. By breaking old habits, the uncertainty bonus helps you build better ones.

The lure of hiking the Long Range Traverse also starts to make more sense when you think in terms of an uncertainty bonus. For starters, neither Lauren nor I had ever been to Newfoundland. We've hiked extensively in the Rockies, so we know exactly how beautiful they are. Uncertainty bonuses are encoded in our brains, in part, with "reward prediction errors": you get a shot of dopamine not because something is good, but because something is better than expected. That's why, for a certain type of person, a decent view in Newfoundland might trump a jaw-dropping vista in Banff; or fresh pakoras in a Delhi back alley make it worth skipping the Taj Mahal. It's also, in part, why people who are addicted to drugs need a progressively bigger dose to get the same high.

The most potent source of uncertainty in the Long Range Mountains, though, isn't the view; it's the hike itself, with no prescribed route and no trail markings. These days pretty much every travel experience—including, for better or worse, the Long Range Traverse—is documented on someone's travel blog. For planning purposes, these blogs are amazing resources: you get a better sense of how long a route will take, what conditions you're likely to encounter, what gear you'll need, and so on. The danger, though, is that the trip then goes exactly as you predicted. You won't discover halfway through a hike that you really should have brought crampons, which is great. But you also won't get blown away when you turn a corner and discover a hidden waterfall: you've already seen the pics.

Choosing your own route through the mountains reinjects some of that uncertainty—the possibility of prediction error—into the experience. By necessity, our first camping spot along the Long Range Traverse was nowhere near any of the spots we'd read about or scouted. There was no source of water nearby, so I had to bushwhack back down the slope for ten minutes until I found a little rivulet that was clear and deep enough to fill our bottles. We had to scour far and wide to find rocks to hold our tent down in the wind, because no prior campers had left a convenient pile. These added challenges were inconvenient, but they also reinforced our sense that we were discovering this world afresh rather than simply following a well-trodden conveyor belt past some prepackaged scenic viewpoints—an illusion, perhaps, but an engaging one.

Is a hike through a national park really "exploring"? One view is that true exploring involves venturing into territory where no human has preceded you: if there are footprints, you're not exploring. Alternatively, you could argue that exploring is simply another word for trying something new: if the TV show you're watching gets boring and you change the channel, you're exploring what else is on the airwaves. Neither of these definitions really captures what the concept means to me. The Latin word explorare meant to reconnoiter, inspect, or investigate. It was formed from ex (from or out of) and plore (to wail or lament); the original meaning is thought to have been "to scout the hunting area for game by means of shouting." That's not quite what I mean either, but there's the kernel of something important there: you're seeking information rather than just novelty.

Meaningful exploration, I will argue, involves making an active choice to pursue a course that requires effort and carries the risk of failure—what the mythologist Joseph Campbell called "a bold beginning of uncertain outcome." Most importantly, it requires the embrace of uncertainty, not as a necessary evil to be tolerated but as the primary attraction. If you're given a choice between being shot or being banished into the jungle, you choose the jungle to maximize your odds of survival. Exploring, by contrast, is heading into the jungle when your alternative is being an accountant. The stakes may be great or small, and the undiscovered country may be literal or metaphorical, but by choosing the uncertain option you're seizing an opportunity to learn about the world. It might even be the murky boundaries of your own capacities and limits that you're seeking to discover—a goal that maps nicely onto endeavors like running a marathon ("the great suburban Everest," as London Marathon founder Chris Brasher put it) or hiking in a national park.

 

We did, in fact, make it to the end of the Long Range Traverse, more or less on schedule and with a few scraps of food left in our packs. Compromises were made. We skipped a side trip up to the peak of Gros Morne Mountain. And starting on the second day, I began to rely increasingly on the GPS waypoints I'd loaded onto my phone from the Parks Canada site. My original intention was to have them available as a safeguard if we became unsure of our position. Instead, I ended up hiking most of the way with my phone in my hand, using the digital topo map and waypoints to guide us in real time. Something was lost in the process, and I knew it. But our margin of safety—and the kids' tolerance—had worn too thin to risk any long detours or backtracks.