Alone but Not Lonely

It takes time to learn how to be alone without being lonely, But once you do, it’s called freedom.

I started hiking and backpacking alone when I was in my early twenties. I was working my first job as a Registered Nurse, so I had weekdays free when the trails were less crowded. My friends all had “normal” schedules or were having babies. I could either hike alone or not at all. It was an easy choice.

I admit that first trip was pretty frightening. I had taken an early trip up the Quilcene River in the Olympics and pitched my tent well below the snow line by the river. It was cold, and the wet wood from a winter of rain made it impossible to start a fire, so I crawled into my sleeping bag early, and listened to every twig that snapped and for some reason was afraid to get out of my tent in the morning, fearing, I suppose, that something would pounce on me.

Nothing did. In fact, in well over fifty years of solo hiking nothing has ever pounced on me, though there were of course things that scared me from time to time: watching a black bear drag my pack away in the middle of the night, hiking the precarious Knife’s Edge on the Pacific Crest Trail, tumbling into the rapids while fording a river in the Wind River Mountains.

The good news about fear is that it is instructive. It teaches us what to avoid, how to be tough and how to feel the fear and do it anyway. The fear dissipated rather quickly. The wonders of spending the evening sitting by the fire, reading a book by flashlight and listening to the river voices quickly overcame it. Whatever might happen, solo backpacking was worth it for those moments.

In those early years my trips typically were limited to just two to three nights. My pack was a manageable weight. I often studied maps when I was alone by the fire, pondering routes that would take me into the rugged interior of the Olympic Mountains. I longed to discover those places, but I would need more than two to three days to do so.

Over the years I saved up my days off to extend those trips to five days and then to six. When my first marriage ended my girls spent six weeks every summer with their dad, so I got a break from the demands of mothering. I was self-employed by then and could take off as much time as was affordable. I carefully budgeted so that I could allow for those long trips every summer. I was a young single mother trying to find my way in the world and on the trail.

I remember once seeing a doe with twin fawns browsing in a meadow while I watched quietly, taking in the scene, the stillness, the droning of insects, the feeling of the warm sun on my face. “I am alone like that,” I thought, “browsing through life, my twins by my side, finding a path and watching where it leads me.”

This path led me eventually to trips as long as two weeks. I was carrying a sixty-five pound pack on my small frame. I was exploring the Pasayten Wilderness, studying the maps. I was also creating a successful business, a satisfying career, making new friends whose values matched my own.

People would often ask me, “Don’t you get lonely out there all by yourself?” The question would always surprise me. I experienced a range of emotions on the trail, but loneliness was almost never one of them. I just felt satisfied in my own skin. It was a new experience for me that grew stronger over the years.

Backpacking alone helped me to overcome fears, test my strength, solve problems when things went wrong, take risks, explore the world and the trail and make my way back to that other life, the one that was filled with satisfying opportunities, evenings with my twin daughters playing Candyland, occasional dating, folk dancing on Friday nights, shaping the person I wanted to be and have become, alone and strong.