Juan Martín is two parts mountain guide, three parts businessman and every bit Mendocino.  Hardly the gruff-and-scruff mountain guide of my imagination, Juan is the refined Argentine gaucho of the modern age.

“I was born in the Uco Valley, in the open countryside.
Born and raised between the horses and the cows, it was only natural that I spend my life outdoors.”

As a young boy, he learned to scale the Andean foothills shortly after he learned to walk, but his life’s path would take him away from the desert plains, the South American peaks and away from the landscape he loved.

Seventeen years he would work in the business world, learning to survive in a landscape riddled with cubicles and climbing his way up a corporate ladder.  But Juan noticed that what seemed like success felt like suffocation.  And when life in a cubicle manifested itself into a slew of health problems, he decided that something needed to change.

Shortly thereafter, he sold his company and changed his setting.  Having first encountered Argentina Mountain as a client wanting to summit Aconcagua, Juan Martín walked into headquarters a second time – this time as a business partner.  The new position was the perfect marriage between what he knew – business – and who he was – gaucho.

This life step, and every step in an arduous climb up a mountain, is part of what Juan recognizes as life’s adventures.

The Nature of Adventure

“There are different degrees of adventures.  What is an adventure for one person isn’t for the next.”

Juan believes that most people live their lives in controlled, familiar environments.  They go from their temperature-controlled houses, to their temperature-controlled cars, to their temperature-controlled offices; all the while rarely coming into contact with the environment.  People wake up at the same time every day, eat the same thing and, more or less, know what to expect in each and every twenty-four hour dose of life.

“But when you take people outdoors, they begin to feel the cold and the heat, they have to actually respond to the natural elements all around them.  That’s an adventure: when you leave all that routine and comfort behind, and when begin to actually integrate with the natural environment.”

This integration doesn’t however, come naturally to everyone.   That’s where the role of the mountain guide comes in.  The guide must meet each client at his own unique skill level, and navigate his own unique emotional response to living without the comforts of normal life.

“In many ways, as a guide, you are teaching people how to walk,” says Juan.  “People are used to walking on flat, stable ground.  Now we’re teaching them to climb: to step on rocks that might slip out from underneath them, to hike up steep inclines, to stand on ice and find their footing.”

And even the shakiest of climbers, even the most unseasoned outdoorsman, eventually finds his footing.

As most people struggle to find their stride in the raw natural settings, fear is often the most challenging obstacle.  “There are two kinds of risk,” explains Juan Martín, “Real risk – based on the natural environment and the technical difficulty of the activity, and perceived risk – how people experience the environment and imagine the danger.”

Though the level of real risk is almost always minimal, with the exception of the Aconcagua summit, people are often at the mercy of highly active imaginations that magnify even the smallest sliver of danger.  But as the trip progresses and each client learns to walk, they also learn to mitigate their own fears.

On the longer excursions, when clients spend days out in the wilderness, the transformations they undergo are often quite profound and apparent.  Standing atop the summit of Aconcagua, or the Tupungato Volcano, something shifts inside.

“They usually cry or become very emotional.  It’s surreal to them – what they’ve accomplished.  The next day they wake up and you see how their faces change when they realize what they’ve just done.”

It’s all a part of the integration: peeling away the layers of comfort, the levels of routine that make life less authentic, less in-touch with not only the natural world, but the nature of each person.

“People need silence,” says Juan.  “Sometimes you’ll see someone staring off at the setting and just by looking at them, you know that they don’t want to speak.  That’s the power of the outdoors.”

But it’s not just about knowing yourself, it’s about knowing the place.  According to Juan, Argentina Mountain has a unique mission: creating personalized adventure experiences that explore the setting.

“We always try to use the outdoors as a vehicle to show the real life of the place: how the gauchos used to live, what they ate, what their customs were, how people really lived.  That’s the real life of the place.”

Interested in adventuring in Argentina?