Encountering Heidi

Abstract

403 LILIAN M. JONAS lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, and is the proprietor of a small environmental and outdoor recreation consulting business. She is an active river runner and used her experience to write her dissertation, which is an ethnography detailing the daily lives of river runners on extended river trips. Her current interests include integrating qualitative methods and sociological theory, specifically symbolic interactionism, with recreation research that can used by managers to study wilderness experiences. WILLIAM P. STEWART teaches and conducts research in the University of Illinois's Environmental Studies Program. His research is focused on individual-and community-based meanings connected to parks and protected areas to understand relationships between people and environments and to facilitate managerial decisions. KEVIN W. LARKIN is an assistant professor of natural resource recreation at Virginia Tech and teaches outdoor recreation management and planning. His areas of interest include community relations to natural resources, social construction of landscape change, identity development through recreation experiences, and interpretive social methods. "The audience thus both encouraged the actors to engage in the activity and ratified the adventurer identities that emerged from experience."