Designing Adventure Experiences with Chris Winter
How do you design adventure experiences for success? It is east to plan big adventures but getting them to be epic for the right reasons isn’t always as easy as it looks. This is especially true when we are building experiences to deliver to paying clients, our friends or family.
Designing experiences that have the right pacing of adventure, and the right flow, can be the differences between epic disaster or exceptional experience.
Joining us to explore what it takes to design the perfect adventure experience is Chris Winter. Chris is the owner or Big Mountain Adventures which offers mountain bike adventures in 14 countries around the world. Chris also teaches and guides steep skiing clinics for Extremely Canadian in Whistler, BC.
Chris shares some of his experiences and insights into how we can structure amazing adventure experiences that we are delivering to others. He also shares some very funny stories along the way.
Key Insights
Designing amazing adventure experiences requires us to:
Know our audience: Who are you actually building your experiences for? What are their needs, interests and capabilities?
Align expectations early: This means ensuring everyone knows what they are getting themselves into. This includes aligning goals, identifying risk tolerance, addressing needs and so on.
It has to be about them: There are experiences that guides, instructors and companies may want to deliver and there are experiences that people want to experience. These two things are not always the same thing. If you want to be successful, build experiences that people want to do.
Get the Right Pacing and challenge: We want to ease into it, build in the challenge in the middle and finish with flow. This allows people to warm up and then consolidate their experience at the end.
Remember the Purpose: The goal of adventure is to push ourselves outside our comfort zone. Adventure is important and sometimes we can forget why it is so valuable. Yes, adventure is often fun, but it serves a pretty important role in our lives. This makes the ability to deliver adventure a key life skill to have.
Guest Bio
Chris Winter is a former ski racer. Level IV CSIA ski instructor, level III high-performance ski coach, celebrated technical skier, sponsored big mountain skier featured in magazines and films. Currently teaching steep skiing clinics at Whistler Blackcomb for Extremely Canadian.
Chris is the Owner and Founder of Big Mountain Adventures. Chris founded Big Mountain Adventures in 2002. During this time, he has built his tour company into the leader in guided mountain bike travel featuring award-winning adventures in 14 countries. Check out their new eMTB trips!
Chris is also the owner of the Bralorne Adventure Lodge. Ready for a boutique mountain experience? Step out the door to spectacular wilderness & endless adventures…then recharge at our backyard spa.
In addition to operating adventure-based businesses, Chris has also created and developed Zero Ceiling. This is an innovative and respected registered non-profit that hosts disadvantaged youth to the slopes of Whistler Blackcomb. From local First Nations to street youth to youth from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, participants benefit from a day of snowboard lessons, or if chosen to participate in a year-long program that teaches them to become employees at Whistler Blackcomb and give them life-long life skills.
Guest Links
Big Mountain Adventures: https://www.ridebig.com
Bralorne Adventure Lodge: https://www.bralorneadventurelodge.com
Zero Ceiling: https://zeroceiling.org
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Episode Photo Credit: Eric Berger
Hi,I listened to your podcast tonight while cooking.I have a few story’s myself of experiences of a lifetime.
I have 20 years of teaching skiing with wb snow school.Ive had the pleasure to be mentored by chris and partner jeannie in privates.i have also been a quite with whistler eco tours for 3 seasons.
Looking back ,teaching a family of 4 on blackcomb stands out.
Family assured me they had skied earlier in season at lake Tahoe.
I explained stopping behind fences.me above,them below.as the dad stopped below me the daughter 10 yrs skied across his skis, son 7yrs also skiied across sisters skies and mom came behind fence plowed into allow us.i took my skies off and de tangled them.
Dad was furious lost temper with son.Bully.tears bad experience for all.
We skied to catskinner chair ,went up and in for lunch.
dad asked me can I deliver better experience .expectations that we ski togeather on more challenging runs.
Hard to do with split in family.
Son was priority.safety.
He complained,wanted refund.
I was called into talk with supervisor.
I needed more experience dealing with dads expectations.