Well, I don't know where exactly in the country you are located but I have also found spelunking to be great deal of fun. It's infeasible on the east coast due to the outbreak of White Nose Syndrome among bats meaning they are under voluntary quarantine to prevent any further spread of the illness to other uninfected colonies since they are fairly sure spelunkers are spreading it when they go caving. If you are somewhere else or willing to drive somewhere else there are caves all over North America. I would of course not advise you go spelunking on your own as that is about as safe as ice skating on a partly frozen lake in April.
Barring that there is always hiking/backpacking or if you don't want to commit that much time there is always Urban Exploration and/or Urban Spelunking (exploring man made tunnels, drains and access shafts). One of my favorite forms of Urban Exploration is find places that are hidden in place sight in a town or small city and explore those places. People get so used to navigating via vehicle they stop thinking like pedestrians particularly if the area has roads ect. The human mind has a tenancy to gloss over "irrelevant" information so our mental maps of the world we live in are surprisingly inaccurate as we tend to retain only that information you use on a regular basis. There are places that you might drive by for years and never notice there is a clear trail there until you walk by it on foot. The trail in turn could lead to a patch of woods that your mind had edited out of your mental map of the area. Places like that are what I call forgotten places or places hiding in plain sight. There are some interesting things in places like that.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2012-05-09 07:14 pm (UTC)Barring that there is always hiking/backpacking or if you don't want to commit that much time there is always Urban Exploration and/or Urban Spelunking (exploring man made tunnels, drains and access shafts). One of my favorite forms of Urban Exploration is find places that are hidden in place sight in a town or small city and explore those places. People get so used to navigating via vehicle they stop thinking like pedestrians particularly if the area has roads ect. The human mind has a tenancy to gloss over "irrelevant" information so our mental maps of the world we live in are surprisingly inaccurate as we tend to retain only that information you use on a regular basis. There are places that you might drive by for years and never notice there is a clear trail there until you walk by it on foot. The trail in turn could lead to a patch of woods that your mind had edited out of your mental map of the area. Places like that are what I call forgotten places or places hiding in plain sight. There are some interesting things in places like that.