The Road to Friendship By Finn Lester-Niles and Griffin DeMatteo (OA, Hante, and Camp)
Finn Lester-Niles (OA, Hante, Camp) and Griffin DeMatteo (OA, Hante, Camp) at the start of their bike trek in Bar Harbor, ME, 2018.
“So how did you two meet?” We always share a brief awkward laugh before attempting to answer this one. It is daunting trying to explain to anyone the depths of our 10 year friendship, but especially so to someone we’ve just met. People who don’t know what we mean when we say, “We’ve done three Added Adventures, three Hantes and gone to The Outdoor Academy together.” It’s hard to explain. Even we sometimes forget the complexities of our relationship; the things we’ve been through together. The bands we’ve been in, the mountains we have hiked, the closest of mentors we’ve had who always see us as a unit - it can be a lot to keep track of. But we’ll try to lay out how we got to be at a stranger’s dinner table, halfway across the country, touring coast to coast on our bicycles. The two of us met in Cabin Nine, when we were both eight. Finn was from North Carolina and Griffin was from New York. We can’t say the dynamic of our friendship has changed much since then. We still find our most profound pleasures in light hearted mischief and adventuring (and still bicker about things that can be solved on Wikipedia in a matter of seconds). When we were 11, we set out on our biggest adventure to date: floating down the French Broad River on a wooden raft, Huck-Finn style. It was there that we first witnessed the problem-solving skills necessary for a successful expedition. One morning we awoke to our group gear floating into the middle of the river, and our instructors heroically swimming out to retrieve it. Another night, when we didn’t make it to
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our destination in time, we had to pull over and ask for permission to camp in a tomato field. At the time, we found all of that to be pretty amusing. The next summer, we went on a week-long mountain biking trip in western North Carolina. It was on that Added Adventure that we were first introduced to the idea of expedition behavior: a series of principles outlining the habits of a responsible group member. The trip was physically, and sometimes emotionally, challenging but it taught us a lot about perseverance and putting the needs of a group over our own; something we still work on to this day. This was also our first big bicycling adventure, and would serve as the catalyst for our future of adventuring on two wheels. Finn Lester-Niles(OA, Hante, Camp) and Griffin DeMatteo(OA, Hante, Camp) on the Mountain Biking Added Adventure in 2012.
The summer before entering high school we went on our first Hante, Hante Rocks and Rivers, during which we had some hands-on experience with problem solving. We had to figure out how to keep up group morale when we got lost at the base of Black Balsam and we had to act quickly to put out a