Outervention: Costa Rica
Lexi's Journey Of A Lifetime
out·er·ven·tion: [n] the act of escaping to the outdoors to find balance and extinguish burnout.
Has Your 9-5 Become 24/7? Escape with Backcountry on an Outervention. We’re bringing customers on a journey of a lifetime to far-flung destinations. In Costa Rica, we hiked through jungles wrapped in dense fog, surfed world-class breaks, and explored and learned from the locals. We want to inspire you to reconnect with the life you want, find solace in the outdoors, and explore like never before. Stay tuned to see where we go next.
Getting Away From The Grind
There’s an elephant in the room: waking up an hour early to catch up on work, checking your email on a Saturday afternoon, staying late to get it done. The 24/7 rise and grind. But what if you had the chance to escape? To hit the reset button and reconnect with nature? Would you take it?
Lexi grew up in Salt Lake City, but she was born in O’ahu, and no matter how much she’s fallen in love with the seasons and mountains of Utah, she still feels a deep connection to her island home. “I’m an ocean child. It calls to me daily.” She told us about the magnetic pull the ocean has on her and how it’s connected to her emotions: “There’s highs, there’s lows, there’s ups, there’s downs. Just as the ocean ebbs and flows.”
She also felt as though she missed out on an essential part of life on O’ahu—surfing. “It’s so much more than a sport. It’s not that I never learned how to surf, it was that I never learned how to have this spiritual connection through the board, through the ocean, through something that’s been passed down for generations.”
In Costa Rica, we set out to change that.
A New Perspective
Lexi is a self-proclaimed workaholic who equates success with productivity and finds it difficult to turn off that constant pressure to be doing something. This is a feeling that a lot of people can empathize with, particularly when they care about their work.
As a film producer, Lexi works with marginalized communities, people of color, and the Indigenous population. “I love shining a light on who these people are, their story, their unique personalities, perspectives, and cultures.” Because she cares so much, she often time prioritzies work over her own mental health.
“I love shining a light on who these people are, their story, their unique personalities, perspectives, and cultures.”
When her Backcountry Gearhead, Spencer, heard about this imbalance in her life, he had the perfect answer: An Outervention to Costa Rica. A trip that would allow her to reconnect with her ocean roots and find a new perspective. When a spot opened up, he called her immediately.
Pura Vida
Costa Rica has a national philosophy called Pura Vida, which translates roughly to “pure life.” It’s about slowing down and being present with every moment of every day—a big shift from the constant burnout of the “neverending rat race where there’s no way to ever reach a goal” Lexi told us.
Here at Backcountry, we’re intimately aware of the power of nature to help us capture Pura Vida. There’s a reason we head to the mountains when we’re looking to relax and reenergize, why we find ourselves spending our weekends in the forest, our mornings at the beach, and pedaling singletrack on our lunch breaks.
“Being in nature teaches me to be more compassionate with myself.”
For Lexi, being in nature means being focused on this specific moment in time, which allows her to clear her mind of everything else going on in her life.
This is the power of Outervention.
On The Waves & In The Jungle
There’s nothing quite like the vibrant pulse of life in the Costa Rican jungle. As one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, the vibrancy of life is palpable from dawn to dusk—howler monkey calls echo through the trees, millions of bugs buzz, and you can watch any number of animals and birds from the comfort of your hammock.
It was in the jungle Lexi connected with her passion for gardening and plants while she learned about the ecosystem with a local Naturalist. “Everything has a place, a role, a purpose,” she says.
On the coast, every sunset is greeted with a mist from the jungle, which wrapped the crew up at the end of long days in the surf. “The surf out here is hard. It’s messy. I spent a lot of time fighting the current.” While the crew was greeted with less-than-favorable conditions on the trip, Lexi persisted. “The ocean is the ultimate teacher. It reminds you to be humble, be willing, be persistent, go with the flow, take whatever it is that comes towards you.”
Sometimes the hardest part is showing up, and Lexi believes this step is just as valuable as the experiences that come after. “It takes the willingness to be persistent and to try and fail and try and fail over and over,” she says.
“The ocean is the ultimate teacher. It reminds you to be humble, be willing,
be persistent, go with the flow, take whatever it is that comes towards you.”
Life can be as messy as the Costa Rican surf, and it takes trial and error to figure out what works for each of us. Lexi says it’s “being willing to say, I don’t know how to do this, but I’m going to try and try and try again because life isn’t perfect, and that’s okay. It’s the imperfections of life that make it interesting.”
Don’t Just Survive–Thrive
When was the last time you felt truly present? Lexi was able to slow her life down while bumping down dirt roads through the jungle. On a shortboard in the surf, she found balance even when she was tumbling into the waves. Swimming through the crisp pool of a waterfall, the jungle lush around her, she rekindled her connection to the most essential part of her being.
“If you’re running on fumes, you’re not whole. You’re just surviving. You’re not thriving,” Lexi says. So what will you do next? How are you going to show up and slow down this week? This month? This year?
Maybe it’s time for your own Outervention.
Glynis is a writer at Backcountry, and when she’s not keying in copy about everything outdoors, she’s swinging from a hammock or hiking with her cat, Sid.