The Search for Solitude: A Decade of Solo Backpacking
When I was a young adult, I used to go backpacking alone for a 9-day week every summer. Sometimes I’d plan a route beforehand, “I’m going to start at X trailhead and make a 30 mile curve and come out at Y.” But sometimes I’d just look at large map of the Sierras, point at a roadless area, and say to myself, “I’m going there,” then hitchhike until I got in the general vicinity, and when the car crossed a stream, I’d say to the driver, “this’ll do, I’ll get out here.” Naturally, this caused some alarm, but I was an adult and they couldn’t stop me.
It wasn’t all that challenging, to be honest. Deer always come down to the stream to drink, so it was usually only minutes of following the stream uphill before I found a deer trail, which would lead me in less than an hour to a nice flat place to sleep, far enough from the road that I couldn’t hear the cars. Usually.
One time, I had just gotten settled, when I heard what sounded like 100 motorcycles. I hiked for 10 minutes up to the top of the ridge, and on the other side I saw, about halfway down the hill, what looked like a Harley Davidson convention. There may not have been 100 hogs, but there definitely were many dozens, and they were having a loud, rowdy party that Saturday night. I sighed, and walked back down my side of the hill to my sleeping bag. The next day I hiked two ridges further away and had a peaceful week after that.
I was always fine in the woods, having spent more than a decade’s worth of summers playing in the woods at Lake Tahoe growing up, and I knew how to hang my food so bears couldn’t get it, and proper poop disposal, and so on. I also knew to rinse my teeth and face really well with clear water — bears have been known to lick faces because of the scents of lotion or toothpaste.
But one night a black bear did come snuffling around pretty close by. I said, “Hey, brother bear, the food’s over there. You can have it all, just please don’t bite me.” He didn’t take any. I guess he appreciated the neighborly gesture.
Hikers in the Sierras sometimes wear jingle bells tied into the laces of their boots or carry pepper spray to warn off the bears. Do you know how to tell the difference between a black bear and a grizzly bear? Grizzly bear poop has little metal bits in it and smells of pepper.
I always brought a couple of notebooks along, and I usually had a pleasant, peaceful week of self-reflection and poetry writing on my own.
One day, I was sitting on a nice warm rock beside a lake, writing with my notebook on my knee, in a quiet isolated spot I had hiked in about 3 hours to reach. All of a sudden, a young woman walked past me without a pack, said “hi,” and kept on walking. Maybe ten minutes later another one walked by. After a quarter of an hour there was another one. I asked the third one if she knew the other two.
“Oh, yes, we’re all here to do a vision quest. We each have to find a good spot where we can’t see the others, and then we won’t leave it for three days except to check in with our leader once a day to prove we’re ok.”
“And, how many of you are there?”
“About 20.”
For cryin’ out loud! You gotta be kiddin’ me! Of course I didn’t say that. I probably said something like, “I hope you meet a nice spirit animal.” But sheesh! I worked so hard to find a place away from everyone!
That time I stayed where I was, because I had already picked the best spot on the lake, and they were gonna be quiet once they all got settled. No problem. Now and then, I could see a momentary flash of the red or orange of someone’s shirt or jacket when the wind moved the leaves, and I waved at them every day as they walked by for their check-ins, smiling, knowing they’d be gone soon and I’d have six days of the lake all to myself.
I never got into any real trouble on my forays into the wilderness. Once I slipped down a snow-covered hill about the height of a three-storey house, but otherwise it was just the usual scratches from bushes and the odd blister.
I enjoyed those solo backpacking trips for a full decade, from the year I left home for the first time until I moved to England ten years later. When I returned to the States a year later, I had gotten interested in women’s nature trips, so I did all-female canoe trips down the Green River and llama trips in Oregon and joined adventure groups in Mexico. I didn’t do any more solo wilderness trips after that. I became more social and less cavalier about my own safety.
But I still make lots of time to sit alone in nature, because that is the wellspring of all my creativity. And even on the edge of cities I’ve been privileged to meet bobcats, cormorants, giant bullfrogs, and plenty of bats. Nature is everywhere, and always welcomes a quiet heart.
