To take the wilderness as a wholly different environment from the civilized world - if one has been living most of one's life in the civilized world - a given end for venturing into the wilderness can be a good way to order one's experience and learning, and drive one's activities.
In any new environment, lack of experience makes for a chaotic and bewildering field for one's perception. A given end, say to get to the top of a ridge, to collect food or fuel, or even ascend a mountain, gives shape to one's activity and orders and focuses the necessary tree of skills and knowledge required to traverse whatever gap needs to be crossed to reach the end.
The more power the end has for the individual - whether established via one's own personal situation like hunger, or through collective means such as through esteem - the more motivation there is to drive one through regions of resistance and difficulty, learning more in the process.
Like a mountain orders the life on its slopes and contours, the end orders and organizes the experience. Of course ends can be just as calamitous for some parties as it is constructive for others. The romantic idea of ascending a mountain could lead to the ruin of a party, say via exposure and hypothermia or burial by avalanche, just as it could lead to social accolades and the building up of important living skills and character traits.
And then there are uses for abandoning ends completely, or at least well-worn and habitual ends, which through their collectively established desirability and their pathways of least resistance, carve grooves and ruts which constrict the range of activity and experience, and which themselves alter the landscape in which activity and experience is possible.
For example, you could be venturing into the wilderness daily to cut down trees and gather commercially viable timber - many of these places themselves aren't exactly wilderness any longer but that's another issue - and never leave your caravan of air conditioned trucks and saw-mounted tractors, and thus never see any situation that is different than your daily social and labor relations, which themselves are affecting profound changes on the surrounding lands and the people themselves.
The general end of "venturing into the wilderness to let it all go" by abandoning ends altogether could be useful for happening upon experiences and realizations by chance and surprise, which is something else altogether.
Countless cultures have happened upon the wisdom made possible by immersion into the wilderness, which tends to break apart habitual patterns of thought and psychic defenses, oftentimes renewing the meaning of cherished traditional ends that are in constant danger of semantic drift, the further one moves away from their roots.
As always, it is the case that one has to choose - if possible - what one really wants.
