WHEN 32-YEAR-OLD Robby Huang, a freelance videographer and Zumba instructor in Indianapolis, showed his brother the pilot for a planned YouTube series chronicling his backpacking trips, Huang’s brother said, “Great, but are you sure people are going to want to watch you just out walking?” Four years later, Adventure Archives has 38,000 subscribers who tune in for hourlong videos of Huang and his cousins Bryan and Andrew Lin walking, driving to trailheads, consulting maps, hanging hammocks, cooking, eating, and now and again waxing romantic about nature and solitude—all in high-def 4K resolution with a kind of spa-jazz soundtrack.
Adventure Archives is part of a socialmedia- era version of outdoor programming you might call normcore bushcraft—regular people broadcasting their decidedly unextreme outdoorsy exploits. And millions of people are watching, further proof that…
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Outside (Digital) - 1 Issue, September 2017