Zach Fackrell has explored the British Virgin Islands several times. Photo by Zach Fackrell

Zach Fackrell attempted to follow the usual career path of a photographer. In his early 20s he started building a wedding- and event-photography business near his home in Salt Lake City, Utah. He’d spend his free time camping in the mountains and taking off on the occasional overseas adventure, but every time he returned home, he felt the itch to get back out there.

Once based exclusively in Utah, he's now on the road more often than he's home. Photo by Josh Sutton

That feeling has come to define him. As he approaches 30, he has carved out a life in constant pursuit of new experiences. He funds his adventures by capturing photos and videos of exotic destinations for travel and lifestyle companies—and by using those jobs to find personal adventures: a day off in Australia dedicated to scuba diving or a skydive between assignments in Switzerland. He particularly loves being underwater, where every experience seems new.

Fackrell is what experts define as an experience-seeker. All four subtypes on the Sensation-Seeking scale show elements of each – an experience-seeker is often also susceptible to boredom, too; those in the disinhibition subtype often also crave adventure—but for Fackrell the need for new experiences is paramount.

Fackrell is happiest in the water, where he never knows what to expect. Photo by Zach Fackrell

During a day off during a work trip to Fiji, Fackrell went diving with a group of friends. A local guide steered them to an amphitheater of coral, then hovered in the center with a bin full of chum. Soon enough, the sharks arrived.

It was a risky situation, but risk is not what defined the thrill for Fackrell: It was having the experience for the first time, a synching of mind and body that happens for him when he encounters something entirely new.

“It was anticipation, the anxiousness—I knew this was going to be an amazing moment. It wasn’t a hesitation or a fear,” he says. “I was stoked and ready for it. You are aware that what you’re experiencing is going to be an incredible memory forever.”

The following year in Fiji, Fackrell scheduled a scuba trip in a feeding zone known for tiger sharks. “It was kind of murky,” he says. “We didn’t have super-clear visibility, but the instructor tapped on his tank to show us where it was.” “It” was a 19-foot tiger shark, swimming right beside them. His only thought, he says, was, “Finally, we’re seeing it.”

This April he spent five days on safari in Kenya and hiked through Patagonia. In Australia he came face-to-face in with a species of bug once thought to be extinct. Holding the bug wasn’t enough—Fackrell put it on his face and let it crawl into his ear.

“I have been blessed to travel a ton,” he says, listing a few of the 45 countries he’s visited. “It’s something about a new place. When you’re on a trip and everything is new from the moment you wake up … every second of that day is new. That’s something that I’ve identified that I really like. Not having a routine, not knowing what’s going to come next.”

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The toe of the glacier on Volcan Cayambe, Ecuador Photo by Michael Freedman

Clint Kugler has been seeking out adventures for as long as he can remember. “The first time I went scuba diving in the ocean,” he says, “I plunged underwater, and I realized I wasn’t going back up for the next minute or two. There was a rush there. I remember a very visceral response.”

It wasn’t so much the act of scuba diving that gave him the rush, he says. Instead, it was the understanding of where he was. “Everything you know about how your body relates to the environment has changed,” he says. “We’re not supposed to stay underwater like that.”

Clint Kugler and his party on the Volcan Cayambe expedition Photo by Bob Strode

What started in the depths of the ocean has since taken him to the highest peaks in the world, all in an attempt to recapture that feeling. Kugler, 28, is a hedge-fund analyst based in New York. Most of his days are dedicated to researching investment opportunities for the fund, a job that he says satisfies his deep curiosity. In his free time, though, he’s as far from an office as possible. His most recent adventure took him to the top of Volcan Cayambe in Ecuador. “There are times when I’m climbing I think the same thing: Human beings aren’t supposed to be here,” he says.

Kugler is what researchers identify as a thrill- and adventure-seeking subtype on the Sensation-Seeking Scale. Thrill- and adventure-seekers need the kind of physical activity that leads to a sense of exhilaration. They don’t necessarily need these thrills on a daily basis, but there is an undeniable need to experience them when possible.

On Cayambe, his team started its summit-day climb around midnight in order to get ahead of the other teams. He lost sight of their headlamps at around 17,000 feet. “I looked back and realized there were no birds, no plants. There were no mountain goats. It was just snow and ice and glacier,” he says. “That is really disorienting.” Disorientation is part of what produces a thrill. The rest is about prevailing through it and surviving.

When Kugler’s team reached the summit, he had not yet reached peak thrill. The summit is always amazing, he says, but he spends only 20 or 30 minutes at the top. The real work for him—and and therefore the adventure, the thrill—comes on the way down.

“Everybody assumes that going up is the hardest, but descending is where I’ve had more tricky moments and close calls,” he says. By the time he starts descending, he’s been awake for 24-36 hours. He’s tired, the downhill slope adds to the level of difficulty, and the sun has started to melt the ice under his feet: “Ice that’s really solid at 3 a.m. is more slippery or wet at 10 or 11 a.m.”

Kugler says his favorite part of any climb is the descent. Photos by Michael Freedman (left) and Dana Marie Buchanan (right)

If there’s a crevasse that’s too big to circumvent or jump across, he stretches a ladder across it. “The first time I walked across a ladder on a crevasse, there was a sensation where I was hyperaware,” he says. “If you follow the process and do something well and master the skill, you’re able to enjoy that activity, get those thrills, see a new part of the world, and do it safely.”

Next up for Kugler is the Matterhorn, in the Alps between Switzerland and Italy. He’s focusing on that climb over the classic Mt. Everest, he says, because the Matterhorn requires more technical ability than expedition-survival skills. “I’m not just constantly looking for a risk or to do something dangerous,” he says. “But when you’re up there, you’re really proud of the fact that you can do exciting and daring things at the same time.”

He’ll get to Everest, he says, and many other peaks after that. For people like Kugler, life is all about adventure, whether it’s deep in the ocean or on top of the world.

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James Lee heads to New Jersey's Lake Hopatcong on most summer weekeneds. Photo by Mat Rick

For James Lee, “Every hour is different. I don't know what city I'm going to be in, I don't know what airport I'm going to be in, and I'm always dealing with different people and different personalities.”

He made his life this way. Lee recognized early on that he is highly susceptible to boredom. He pursued a career in investment banking because he wanted a life of constant change. Over the last decade, it’s more than delivered on this need—and yet Lee still finds himself seeking additional distractions at every free moment.

Wakeboarding is the latest in Lee's long line of hobbies. Photo by Mat Rick

Lee is classified as a “boredom susceptibility subtype” on the Sensation-Seeking Scale, which experts developed from a personality test. Those in this category pursue novelty in any and every form.

Early in Lee’s life it was martial arts, skateboarding, and skiing. To overcome his fear of heights, he’d climb onto the roof of his family’s one-story house and stare out over the edge. He started a breakdancing club while studying at Harvard University, for the challenge of the dance and the novelty of performing.

Now that he’s in his 30s, it’s wakeboarding. “It was really hard [at first],” he says. “After three or four tries, by the time I was able to finally get up on top of the water, that was the coolest sensation ever.”

The exhilaration came not from the physical effort required to stay upright, he says, but from seeing and experiencing the world in a new way—and in this case, being pulled by a boat at 40 miles per hour.

“There’s something to be said for being on top of something fluid, like water,” Lee says. “It’s kind of like skydiving for the first time. Your brain doesn’t know how to process what you’re looking at down there.”

Now that he’s mastered the art of standing up on the board, he’s setting his sights on catching major air. He can jump a bit now, he says, but he wants to make the 8- to 10-foot leaps that professionals can do.

“It involves not being afraid when you approach the wake,” he says. “When you don’t land right, it’s the equivalent of hitting a bunch of bricks. There’s an element of fear there that makes it so much better when you land.”

Lee's goal is to someday catch major air. Photo by Mat Rick

The landing, for Lee, is thrilling. It’s this feeling, and the feeling evoked by similar pursuits and constant work travel, that saves him from ever-looming boredom.

“The concept of time standing still happens in those split seconds when you land that ridiculous jump or even when you’re skiing when you jump off of a cliff and you clear it and you’re not hurt,” he says. “Nothing else in the world matters more than what you are doing in that second.”

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Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park, Madagascar. Photo by National Geographic

Writing for National Geographic takes 41-year-old Neil Shea to distant, wildly divergent places: caves under the Mexican desert full of crystals the size of buses; the edges of the North Pole, where polar bears still roam amongst shattering sea ice; the war zones of the Middle East. That variety affords him the same thrills that others seek, but for Shea the payoff comes from the people he meets in these remote destinations.

“I started out, like a lot of us do, thinking that I just wanted to have fun adventures and write about them,” Shea says. “Pretty quickly, I realized that was fun and thrilling, but it was not actually deeply satisfying. It was something that was sort of like a flash, and then it was over. It was good, but I wanted some kind of a deeper meaning to the work.”

Shea meets with local residents while reporting in Kenya’s Lake Turkana region. Photo by National Geographic

He has found that meaning in the conversations he has with people he would otherwise likely never have the chance to meet, as well as in sharing their stories with the world and seeing the response.

“Many stories have been told before—at least in part—so we’re always looking for new or better ways to tell them,” he says. “When you find that way, maybe that person you interview, when you find a new way to reveal something amazing to people, that is also an incredible thrill.”

Shea is what researchers identify as the “disinhibition subtype” on the Sensation-Seeking Scale. Those in this subtype pursue unique forms of social engagement, like the interviews that Shea conducts around the world.

Shea has found that drawing helps root his subjects more deeply in his mind. These are his sketches from a reporting trip to Ethiopia and Kenya. Photo by National Geographic

“When I have a really great interview with a scientist or an explorer or a military expert, when I learn something new, I feel completely energized,” he says. “It’s thrilling. I’m seeing the world again with fresh eyes.”

In 2010, he spent about three months living among tribes in the deep bush of Ethiopia. Eventually, he became a familiar presence, and the locals opened up to him. One was a medicine man.

“He was sort of a spiritual medium in the village, and one of his jobs was to protect the people from crocodiles in the river,” Shea recalls. “It was a serious job, since river water was needed daily for cooking. Every full moon, he would perform a ritual in which he spoke to the crocodiles and magically sort of showed them that this territory was for humans only.”

The man took Shea to the riverbank, cut boughs from a young tree, did a chant, spoke to the crocodiles, and laid the boughs in the river. He told Shea that no one had ever been taken by a crocodile at that part of the riverbank. He also said he had never shown this ritual to anyone before.

For Shea, the moment was magical, about far more than the personal connection. It was, he says, getting a seat at the edge of a human drama—and then enjoying the thrill of giving it to the world.

In 2005 he reported his first Iraq war story for National Geographic, and it hit a chord with readers, especially the ones he wrote about. Soldiers and Marines wrote to say he had captured their experience and got the story right, and readers thanked him for giving them a new insight into what the war was like. “We felt as though we had really connected with our audience and given them something meaningful,” he says.

Shea continues to pursue opportunities to meet others around the world. Whether he’s interviewing people in the Paris underground or teaching a writing course in Tennessee, the ultimate thrill for Shea is about removing barriers, in himself and between himself and others, so he can connect to the world through their stories.

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