Ground Truth: Geology and the Origin of Type 2 Fun
地面真相：地质学与第二类乐趣的起源
- Ari Iaccarino
- Feb 6, 2024
- 10 min read
Every step took a herculean effort to breathe through as I slogged over hot boulders with no grip for my trail runners. The sun was shining hard on me in rural Maine as I slowly made my way down Hamlin Peak after 4,000+ feet of gain over six or seven miles. I had already climbed Knife Edge to get to Katahdin, the end (or beginning) of the Appalachian Trail, and by then I was out of swear words to shape the absolute misery I was experiencing with a fear of heights and what was perhaps heat exhaustion. In my head I was chanting, “Hiking lists are stupid. Hiking lists are stupid…”
My friend James Castignoli, an Appalachian Trail finisher and outdoor extraordinaire, looked at me grimly as he stayed by my side throughout my slow descent down Hamlin, a loop I should have been able to complete more quickly than I did.
“You’re definitely experiencing Type 3 Fun,” he said. I looked up at him and breathlessly replied, “I hate this.”
Four days previously on a different adventure, the sun found us west in the Adirondacks of New York. James had taught me something called the Fun Scale, a way to judge the quality of an adventure:
Type 1 — pleasurable to experience and reflect on.
Type 2 — unpleasant to experience but good to reflect on and might even provide growth.
Type 3 — unpleasant to experience and unpleasant to reflect on; little to no growth from the event.
The Adirondacks was my first backpacking trip, and it entailed over 20 miles and 7,200 feet of gain while hitting eight 4,000 footers. I had already completed the 48 4,000 Footers of New Hampshire without ever backpacking, and I had underestimated how heavy an electric toothbrush was over the more rugged mountains of New York State. While descending Saddleback Cliffs, a route that one should ascend instead, I had a minor panic attack while James and the others had a good laugh.
“You’re going to be alright,” he said. “You’re experiencing Type 2 fun.”
I chuckle to myself as well when I reflect on my first backpacking trip; I learned a lot and overall had a good time despite the humble pie I had to eat, which is why I’d label the trip Type 2 Fun.
However, four days later in Baxter State Park while descending Hamlin, I was in bad shape. I hadn’t given my body enough time to recover from the Adirondacks, and the heat plus my fear of heights made for Type 3: I don’t even like reflecting on the experience, and I don’t think I grew from it. In true New England fashion, my friends gave me a light ribbing and a Hamlin Peak magnet to remind me of the unpleasantness.
What type of person labels fun types?
Misery is generally how adventurers come to know the Fun Scale, and I was no exception.
But who was able to capture this human experience and invent the Fun Scale? What misery did they endure, and what wisdom brought them to this point?
I searched and found this article that discusses the Fun Scale. A guy named ‘Peter’ appears having taught it to the author, so I continued my search for Peter. From there I encountered a mouthful of a reference called The Climbing Dictionary: Mountaineering Slang, Terms, Neologisms & Lingo: an Illustrated Reference to More than 650 Words. I was not only able to find Peter’s last name (Haeussler) but also read the original person who coined the Fun Scale: Dr. Rainer Newberry.
The Alaskan climber/geologist Peter Haeussler borrowed the Fun Scale in 1993 from Dr. Rainer Newberry, a geology professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, learning of it while the two scrambled over a volcanogenic massive sulfide deposit on southeast Alaska’s Admiralty Island. Newberry had invented the Fun Scale while teaching a field geology class around 1985.
This brief explanation of the origin of the Fun Scale was intriguing. I had been an adjunct professor at Boston University, albeit in English to Speakers of Other Languages. I was intrigued in learning more about this educator who came to define the human adventure experience. However, several articles I found afterwards essentially said the same thing with no further explanation: the Fun Scale was invented by Dr. Newberry.
I figured there had to be more of a story behind the Fun Scale beyond its apparition in a geology field class, so I emailed the Geology Department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks to see if Dr. Newberry would be interested in telling me more. After receiving permission to talk to Dr. Newberry, we scheduled a video call to discuss how he invented the Fun Scale.
A geologist's story of the Fun Types
The chime of a Google meeting announced the beginning of our talk, and an older man with disheveled graying hair, a straight-lined mouth, and an academic’s beard showed on the screen.
“Hi there!” I said.
“Hello,” he responded.
“How’s life in Alaska?” I asked.
“Cold. Dark. Getting colder and darker.”
I liked to warm interviewees up with casual talk, but Dr. Newberry was just about the facts.
“How long have you been in Alaska?”
“Since ‘82, so going on 40 years.”
“Where are you from originally?”
“I was born in Kansas.”
“Ah, a fellow midwesterner!” (I was born in Iowa).
“Not really. My father worked for the federal government and got transferred successively east. So, I wound up going to high school in the DC area and then to MIT for college.”
I could see why there hadn’t been much written about Dr. Newberry’s invention of the Fun Scale. He wasn’t particularly verbose, and interestingly, he wasn’t portraying the gregarious personality I imagined someone having invented the Fun Scale would have had.
“Did you do outdoor stuff while in college?”
“Maybe? I was a nerd though.”
I figured I had some conversational license to jump more to the point, and I asked Dr. Newberry if I could read the quote from The Climbing Dictionary and have him expand on how he created the Fun Scale.
He explained that during the 80s, geology entailed investigating on the ground outdoors rather than using drones or remote sensing. “Actually physically on the rocks, breaking them open, looking at them, trying to say what they meant, and then mapping that. In Alaska things are covered by snow nine months of the year or more,” Newberry explained.
“So we had a very, very narrow window of opportunity to go out and work on the rocks and also to teach students about them. Geology classes in the lower 48, like Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Wyoming have warm, dry summers, whereas in Alaska summers could be really rainy, even snowy, so it could be unpleasant.”
He went on to describe how these Alaskan summers created tough conditions for undergraduate students trying to study geology, and that if you want students to continue taking geology classes in Alaska, then you have to make it feel like they’re walking away with learning that’s worthwhile, maybe even fun once they reflect on the experience.
By this time both of our faces were ghostly lit by our computer screens as it was well past dark in Boston and Fairbanks. However, his candor began to warm up, so I continued asking him how he met the climber Peter Haeussler and came to bestow the Fun Scale. He told me that the geology field classes happened every other summer, so in the off summers he works with the United States Geologic Survey (USGS).
Newberry described how the USGS sends geologists like him on day trips that entail being dropped off by a helicopter close (or as close as possible) to the study site and getting as much as possible done in the day before returning to the helicopter.
“These trips are not, for example, taking a week-hike on the Appalachian Trail. They're really concentrated periods of intense geologic activity, but depending on the terrain and the weather and whatnot, the focus can kind of shift to just surviving.”
He continued describing the “trip” where he told Peter about the Fun Classes.
“We had this adventure, and it was pretty hairy. It was just really cliffy. And Peter's, you know, I wouldn't say a professional climber, but Peter's, definitely a climber, and I'm not. Part of his role was just to keep me from doing anything really stupid.”
“So you were just in survival mode on this USGS trip?”
“Yeah. I’m not a great person on steep terrain.” I instantly empathized with his statement.
“Was the weather tough?”
“I think the weather was fine. The heights were just frankly terrifying for me.”
I was trying to see if there was more drama, more specifics, maybe a moment where Newberry’s foot slipped, Peter grabbed him heroically, anything, but Newberry wasn’t one to embellish.
“So, it was on this trip you told Peter you were experiencing Type 2 fun?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“What was Peter’s reaction?”
“I don’t recall it being memorable.”
“But it was for him, apparently.”
“Apparently, yes.”
“Yeah,” I said, and there was a pause that maybe was too long for my East Coast sensibilities but might have just been right for someone in Fairbanks. I think he could tell I was looking for more of an adventure story. Afterall, he was the guy who invented the Fun Scale.
“You know, I’ve sprung that terminology on lots of people over the decades,” Newberry said after a few moments.
Then and there I realized I might know more about the phrase’s usage across the outdoor sphere than the guy who invented it. I decided to tell Newberry the funnel I went down to find out more about the Fun Scale, how Kelly Cordes, the writer of the first link above, learned about it from Peter, and after each explanation he replied, “Okay” or
“Interesting.”
“And then my friend James told me he learned about the Fun Scale from Andrew Skurka, a famous guide out west.” Newberry’s face slowly turned into a smile when I told him his phrase had been used in presentations and elsewhere, and he finally volunteered a “Wow.”
I was feeling a mix of exasperation combined with resignation, so I decided to be blunt around how I was feeling.
“It's interesting to talk to you. I guess, I'm so into myself that if people were using a term I came up with, I would be researching everyone who was employing it.” Newberry smiled and gave a small chuckle.
The man was just living his life, doing geology, being involved in his community, and not particularly concerned with the wider use of the Fun Scale. It was an incredibly simultaneous display of humility and confidence.
这个人只是过着自己的生活，做地质学，参与社区活动，并不特别关心“乐趣等级”的更广泛应用。这是一种极其同时展现出的谦逊与自信。
I continued, asking, “Why do you feel like the fun scale has taken off in the outdoor community? What is it about the outdoor community you think that really gravitates towards this growth of the term Type 2 and the Fun Scale?”
我继续问道：“你为什么觉得户外社区中‘乐趣等级’这个概念突然流行起来了？你认为户外社区中有什么特别的地方，真正促使了‘第二类乐趣’和‘乐趣等级’这一术语的兴起？”
“I don't know. Well, I had mini traverses this summer [2021] working with the USGS that were just really painful, like really, really, really, really thick brush combined with lots of downed trees. When we have a forest fire here, the trees don't burn up — they just fall over. So we had to climb over tree after tree, after tree after tree. It was exhausting, and yet, I can look back at it now and go, ‘Oh yeah, that was Type 2 fun.’ It's a way to sort of, I don't know, to laugh at yourself while you're doing something unpleasant.”
“我不知道。嗯，今年夏天[2021 年]我和美国地质调查局一起做了一些小范围的穿越，那真是非常痛苦，真的，真的，真的，真的都是浓密的灌木丛，加上很多倒下的树木。这里发生森林火灾时，树木不会烧尽——它们只是倒下了。所以我们不得不一棵又一棵地爬过倒下的树。那真是累死人了，但现在回想起来，我会说，‘哦，那就是第二类乐趣。’这是一种方式，某种程度上，我不知道，就是在做不愉快的事情时自嘲一番。”
“So Type 2 fun is essentially how you face externalities? The outdoors is essentially providing lots of unknowns and externalities that are basically out of your control except for being able to react to them?” I asked.
“所以，第二类乐趣本质上是你如何面对外部因素？户外活动本质上提供了许多未知和外部因素，这些基本上超出了你的控制范围，除了能够对它们做出反应？”我问道。
“Precisely,” he replied.
“正是如此，”他回答道。
I had already told him how people were using this term widely in the outdoors beyond climbing, and I had also seen people in the corporate sphere adopt the Fun Scale as well in feel-good marketing posts. I asked him why he thought that was.
我已经告诉过他，人们在户外活动中广泛使用这个术语，超出了攀岩的范畴，我也见过企业界的人在积极营销的帖子中采用“乐趣等级”。我问他为什么会这样。
“You know, I think that's just sort of a facet of life. A lot of what we do just isn't real fun, but it needs to be done, and you can either laugh at yourself or you can whine about it. I think laughing at yourself is much more healthy than whining.”
“你知道，我觉得这只是生活的一个方面。我们做的很多事情其实并不真正有趣，但它们必须完成，你可以选择嘲笑自己，也可以选择抱怨。我觉得嘲笑自己比抱怨要健康得多。”
Rather than focusing on creating a detailed story around how the Fun Scale came to be, I let the man speak about what he was passionate about: geology. And in doing so, I got a better idea of how the creation of the Fun Scale wasn’t a moment but rather a lifestyle Dr. Newberry allowed himself to experience and teach to others.
我没有专注于围绕“乐趣等级”是如何诞生的编织一个详细的故事，而是让这位先生谈论他热衷的东西：地质学。通过这样做，我更清楚地了解到，“乐趣等级”的诞生不是某一瞬间的灵感，而是 Newberry 博士允许自己去体验并教导他人的一种生活方式。
“The key thing is that the knowledge base in Alaska is really poor relative to the rest of the United States, both because a lot of Alaska is really inaccessible, and because the population density is low. I mean, these places we go are, gosh, 50, 100, 200 miles from the nearest community. There's a good chance no one has been on the ground there before. And things are vegetation covered. So you can't just take pictures from the air and figure out what's going on.”
“关键是，相较于美国其他地区，阿拉斯加的知识基础真的很薄弱，这既因为阿拉斯加很多地方极难到达，也因为人口密度很低。我的意思是，我们去的这些地方，天哪，离最近的社区有 50、100、200 英里。很有可能那里以前没人踏足过。而且这些地方被植被覆盖着，所以你不能仅仅通过空中拍照就弄清楚那里的情况。”
He became more animated as he spoke, reflecting on the adventure of his work.
他说话时变得更加生动，回想起他工作的冒险经历。
纽伯里博士（右图）在新墨西哥州研究矿物学。图片由劳伦斯·D·迈纳特提供。
“You actually have to be on the ground, and so the way it works is you're working with a team of geologists somewhere between four and maybe eight people. And usually there's a person in charge who's assigning the traverse and says, ‘Okay, you're gonna go walk this ridge, you're gonna walk that ridge,’ and you don't know until you actually get out there whether it's gonna be a really painful traverse or fairly pleasant; you just have no way of knowing. It's all luck of the draw. You can be on a perfectly decent trail that goes to shit, or you could be starting in something really awful and suddenly a trail shows up.”
“你实际上必须亲临现场，情况是这样的：你会和一个由四到八人组成的地质学家团队一起工作。通常会有一个负责人分配路线，他会说，‘好，你去走这条山脊，你去走那条山脊，’而你直到真正出发后才知道这次穿越是会非常痛苦还是相当愉快；你根本无法预知。这全靠运气。你可能走在一条本来很不错的小径上，结果变得糟糕透顶；或者你一开始就在非常糟糕的地形中，突然出现一条小径。”
I asked, “So it’s important to keep a sense of ‘We’re going to get through this’?”
我问：“所以保持‘我们一定能挺过去’的心态很重要吗？”
“Exactly — yeah.” “没错——是的。”
Throughout our conversation I got the feeling that Type 2 Fun wasn’t just something Newberry did when reflecting on life; he used it while in the muck, climbing trees, and hoping to God to avoid bears. His mind lived in three places at the same time: the moment, the future, and the future’s considering the moment.
在我们的谈话中，我感觉到 Type 2 Fun 不仅仅是 Newberry 在反思生活时所做的事情；他在泥泞中、爬树时，以及祈求上帝避开熊的时候都在使用它。他的思维同时存在于三个时空：当下、未来，以及未来中回顾当下的自己。
Dr. Newberry began winding down the stories of geological exploration, but I hadn’t asked how he had gotten into geology in the first place. Knowing seemed relevant since it was geology, not mountain climbing itself, that birthed the Fun Scale.
纽伯里博士开始结束他的地质探险故事，但我还没问他最初是如何进入地质学领域的。了解这一点似乎很重要，因为正是地质学，而非登山本身，孕育了乐趣尺度。
He laughed a little when I asked, and he said, “Boy, it's a little embarrassing. I knew I wanted to be a mathematician, so when I went to MIT in the early 70s, they assigned us advisors using a computing dating routine. Back then anything involving computer programs was thought to be really, well, ‘high tech.’ So I was assigned a freshman advisor who was a geologist, and I thought, ‘Oh, well gosh, they must know something about me that I don't know!’”
当我问起时，他轻笑了一下，说：“哎呀，这有点尴尬。我知道自己想成为一名数学家，所以 70 年代初我去 MIT 时，他们用计算机约会程序给我们分配导师。那时候，任何涉及计算机程序的东西都被认为非常‘高科技’。于是我被分配了一个地质学导师，我心想，‘哎呀，他们一定知道我不知道的什么事情！’”
Dr. Newberry eventually majored in both chemistry and geology, but he admitted that he never would have gotten involved in the field if he hadn’t been assigned a geologist as his freshman advisor.
纽伯里博士最终主修了化学和地质学，但他承认，如果不是被分配了一个地质学导师作为新生导师，他根本不会涉足这个领域。
I decided to end on that note. Afterall, and maybe appropriately based on Dr. Newberry’s speciality, there’s no point in squeezing water from a stone. Rather, the story of how he came up with the Fun Scale was more of a steady stream of experiences synthesized between years of traversing rock, tree, and study.
我决定就此打住。毕竟，也许正如纽伯里博士的专业所示，石头里挤不出水来。相反，他创立“乐趣等级”的故事，更像是多年穿越岩石、树林和研究之间不断积累的经验汇聚而成的涓涓细流。
“Thanks for the interview, Dr. Newberry.”
“谢谢您的采访，纽伯里博士。”
“You got it. Have a good one.”
“不客气，祝你一切顺利。”
Since that interview I’ve embraced Dr. Newberry’s version of the Fun Scale. Whether it’s been sleeping in the shadow of Mt. Washington on a freezing October night, hiking 26 miles to the Bridge of the Gods on the Pacific Crest Trail, or returning to the Adirondacks to summit viewless and wooded summits, I chanted to myself, “Type 2 Fun. Type 2 Fun…”
自那次采访以来，我一直接受纽伯里博士的乐趣等级版本。无论是在十月寒冷的夜晚睡在华盛顿山的阴影下，还是徒步 26 英里到达太平洋山脊步道上的神桥，亦或是回到阿迪朗达克山脉攀登无景且被树林覆盖的山顶，我都在心里默念：“二类乐趣，二类乐趣……”
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