Colin Mortlock Travels Alone "Beyond Adventure" Preferring The Company Of Flowers To That of Any Social Movement Beyond Adventure (2001) 125 pages By Colin Mortlock Published by Cicerone Press, Milnthorpe, Cumbria, England ISBN 1-85284-332-2 See also the publishers web-site at WWW.cicerone.co.uk E-Mail contact at info@cicerone.demon.co.uk Colin Mortlock has now written three books over thirty years. The first booklet was called "Adventure Education" written in 1973/8. The second and most famous book was called "Adventure Alternative" written in 1984 and this latest book "Beyond Adventure" was published during the final weeks of 2001. These three books show a certain movement which is, for this reviewer, quite significant and this latest book becomes an important historical document. This latest book will, I think, be best seen by future students as one good example of the changes that have come about in the various forms of an Outdoor Adventure Education and the many serious dissatisfactions that have, for many, accompanied those changes. This book is also a very personal story of the life-longjourney of one man who has been a very important person in this area of work. Colin Mortlock, it must be remembered, has left many marks on this field of work in many different countries around the world. For over 40 years Mortlock, born in 1935 in the UK, has been active and respected for his work that was quite often seriously different and sometimes even quite radical. This latest book serves well for the student to help situate an historical movement at work although it must be said that this book is not an historical book as such. The first book from 1973 (Adventure Education) was a book of both hope and promise. It was quite full of helpful hints at combining what is called adventure activities (climbing, kayaking and so on) with education as it was practised in schools and official organisations. Safety matters were written upon and opened up and there were also matters of political kinds opened up so that Adventure Education could work well at both local and national levels. It can be said that this book showed a clear hope and an energy which was slowly moving with an organisational movement in the working practices of the real world outside of any book. At the same time this book began to lay the groundwork for what others, like Simon Priest, would come to call the "adventure paradigm" attached to safety and risk and "mis-adventure". The main point here is that in 1973 Colin Mortlock displayed both hope and organisational energy in the real world.1 By 1984, when the "Adventure Alternative" was written and published, many of the things that the 1973 book suggested and outlined had come to be tested and tried out. Many projects had found a firm footing and there was a powerful beginning made for teacher training courses, at degree levels, as evidenced by Charlotte Mason College in Ambleside, UK, where Mortlock was a leading-light. There had been outdoor centres thriving in the UK and there was already a huge and hot debate about the "Outdoor Industry" and the "Diploma Disease". By 1984 Mortlock made a stand to inform his readers about the basic underlying philosophy that he saw to be important to this work and here the "Adventure Alternative" made another mark in this work internationally. Mortlock was important.2 While much of the 1973 book was seemingly "coming true" there was something, it seemed still, not going quite right. Something of the basic philosophy was being ignored or at least forgotten and missed. The book in 1984 firmly displayed Mortlock in a way that most people today will remember him. That is through the intermingling triad of the "self" and the "other" and the "environment" as they attached themselves to a humanistic approach and to a much needed better world and, to education, in general. In this 1984 condition Mortlock remained with hope and he remained with a sense of political action. …