Top of the world: Matt Burney perched on edge of Dark Canyon near Hite, Utah; Carl Hulit races his mountain bike, opposite, top; Burney, shoulder deep in Escalante River in Utah, bottom

© Andrew Gombert /epa/Corbis

Over fall break of his junior year, Chris Davis '06 went whitewater kayaking on the Narrows of Western North Carolina's Green River. He had just finished negotiating several of the river's Class Five rapids, including the infamous "Gorilla," when he figured he was home free. That's exactly the moment that Davis got into trouble. He tried to coast through a "piddly" Class Three and flipped his craft. His elbow shattered against a rock, forcing him to swim to safety with his single good arm.

Fundamentals of Risk

Davis' friend and classmate Carl Hulit suffered a similar misfortune. The experienced mountain biker was practicing his skills on a bike teeter-totter when he and his bike fell sideways. He landed awkwardly, breaking his C7 vertebra. "You're most likely to get hurt when you think you're least likely to get hurt," observes Hulit, who wore a neck brace for several weeks his senior year in visible testimony to this hard-learned principle. "You can spend a day ripping hard runs and then at the end of the day wipe out coming off a ski lift," he adds. When the brace came off, he returned to biking, alpine skiing, and his other passion, cyclocross racing. (This summer, he planned to take a National Outdoor Leadership School mountaineering course and work as a ranch hand in Colorado.)

While concerns about liability and costly insurance have put the skids to some of the most structured university daredevilry--the Duke skydiving club disbanded several years ago because of rising insurance requirements, according to Mike Forbes, director of club and intramural sports--there are plenty of students who still find dramatic ways on their own to push their personal envelopes.

Before they graduated in May, both Davis and Hulit were diehard members of Duke's Outing Club, a student outdoor-adventure club. They describe themselves as "adrenaline junkies." When they travel in Third World countries, they prefer to hitchhike and to stay in strangers' homes rather than hostels or hotels; they don't mind group undertakings but are often more comfortable going solo, even if--or perhaps because--being alone holds the promise of greater adventure. Davis even braves danger in his volunteer work: For two years, he's been a firefighter and EMT for the Parkwood Fire Department in Durham.

Davis and Hulit are what psychologists often refer to as "high-sensation seeking" personalities--an adventuresome lot who thrive on putting their bodies through difficult and even dangerous situations. Society calls them thrill-seekers. Whether it's a short-term thrill (the few seconds it takes to do a free-fall ride at an amusement park) or a months-long adventure (hiking the Appalachian Trail solo), the thrill-seeker is a marvel to the rest of us, who just can't understand why, for example, someone would jump out of a perfectly good airplane.

Though there has always been a subgroup of humans given to daredevilry (recall that in August 1914, Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton was able to recruit his Endurance crew with an ad promising, "SMALL WAGES, BITTER COLD, LONG MONTHS OF COMPLETE DARKNESS, CONSTANT DANGER, SAFE RETURN DOUBTFUL"), such behavior has perhaps never been so ubiquitous among people so young. Today's youth don't have to head to the South Pole for a sanctioned adventure; they need only seek out the nearest skateboarding, snowboarding, or motocross park. "Kids who are in their late teens and twenties do all kinds of things that we didn't do," says John Thompson, a professor of history at Duke. Thompson, a baseball scholar who has studied trends in other sports, grew up in the 1950s. He says that advances in technology and mass communications and more abundant and affordable travel options have all helped to steer thrill-seeking into the mainstream.

"Have you ever looked at an inline skate? For all that today's activities require of physical courage, they all require a certain degree of contemporary technology, too," Thompson observes. Mountain Dew commercials, not to mention a plethora of niche trade magazines, cable-television stations, and websites, have made it possible for young people to educate themselves about the latest thrill and "gain access to the places where they can do it," he says. World travel is no exception. In the 1960s, Thompson's wife was offered a rare treat: the opportunity to travel to Africa as a student. "Today," says Thompson, "thanks to cheap airline tickets, half of the kids in arts and sciences at Duke travel or study abroad."

The major television networks have capitalized on the public's fascination with thrill-seeking with successful, high-impact reality shows such as Fear Factor, The Amazing Race, and Survivor. Though simply viewing a TV show is enough vicarious danger for most people, the Outing Club daredevils snicker at such armchair adventure, arguing that the shows are overtly staged. "It gets [the participants] out of their comfort zones, but it's not dangerous," says Jessica Evans-Wall '08, who grew up kayaking white water in the Northwest and West Virginia.

The reality-show participants clearly do it for the big bucks, but these daredevils find themselves having to constantly explain their odd proclivities to the rest of us. "A lot of people don't understand why we do some of the things we do," Davis says. "They just don't get it."
Rick Hoyle certainly gets it. As a research professor in psychology and associate director of Duke's Center for Child and Family Policy, Hoyle has studied the thrill-seeking personality, in part, for help in crafting effective public-health messages aimed at this group drawn to risk. Hoyle says high-sensation seekers can embrace activities that are, by and large, positive (such as snowboarding and firefighting) or, by and large, negative (such as drug taking and reckless driving).