It’s Time You Tried Extreme Picnicking

Do you do sports outside, but maybe would like to do new sports outside? Have you tried bikepacking, SUP-ing, SUP yoga-ing, slackline yoga-ing, fat bicycling, powder surfing, and wondered,

What is next for me?

Let me respond to your question with another question: Have you done Extreme Picnicking?

What is Extreme Picnicking, you ask, and I will tell you using sentences instead of asking more questions. Extreme Picnicking is eating in extreme environments. Extreme environments being places without walls, without napkins, sometimes without chairs. If you are rock climbing, whitewater kayaking, hiking, mountain biking, ice climbing, backcountry skiing—or doing any of that other shit you adrenaline junkies and nature freaks are into—and you have snacks with you, and you eat those snacks, you are Extreme Picnicking.

You do not have to be actively eating while doing these things—pulling an egg salad sandwich out of your pocket while hanging from a jug 300 feet off the deck, pouring a bowl of popcorn into your mouth as you huck your shit off a 40-foot cliff, or deftly eating a popsicle with one hand as you push one oar on a raft in a Class 4 rapid—you just have to eat while you’re in that environment. Of course, you can do any of those things while you’re eating, because that would be rad as hell. Especially the popcorn one. But you don’t have to: XTREME Picnicking is just about the setting: mountains, whitewater, trails. And shoving food in your face while you’re there.

Extreme Picnicking does not have its own magazine, has not been featured in a Red Bull video edit, and has no professional practitioners (as of right now). I would like to claim that this weblog post is the first time the phrase Extreme Picnicking has been capitalized, but it’s not. Extreme Picnicking has been mentioned casually on the Internet, and does have a Facebook page—but it hasn’t been updated in a while. The Instagram hashtag #extremepicnicking has fewer than 100 posts right now. You may have Extreme Picnicked in the past, and not known it—chances are, if you eat food and do sports outside, you probably have. If you have ever been on a multi-day whitewater raft trip, you definitely have. So congratulations, you badass. Go ahead and add “XTREME Picnicking” to your online dating profile. At the top.

If you’ve Extreme Picnicked, you know the singular feeling of simultaneously inhaling leftover pizza and the million-dollar views from the top of a mountain, or shoveling leftover Chinese food into your mouth and washing it down with a few pulls from your Camelbak reservoir hose on the side of a trail. If you haven’t tried Extreme Picnicking, consider adding it to your repertoire. When your friend or significant other is lukewarm about the things you normally do on the weekends, it can spice things up.

You: Hey Significant Other, wanna go rock climbing again this weekend?
Significant Other: …
You: Or … we could go EXTREME Picnicking!
Significant Other: That sounds GREAT!
You: … while we’re rock climbing!
Significant Other: Awesome! I’ll make Denver omelettes!

As a sport, Extreme Picnicking is wide-open. There are no rules, no scale of difficulty, no history, and no record of official things like The First All-Female Ascent of the Dawn Wall While Hauling a Thanksgiving Turkey and a Keg of Amstel Light. Chapters of the book of Extreme Picnicking have yet to be written. You, too, can be a part of a movement. Get a partner and a sandwich (or a box of Pop-Tarts) and have an adventure this weekend.

-Brendan