What Hiking Alone Taught Me After 11,000 Miles with My Wife

Early this spring, during a fact-finding sprint up a storm-damaged section of the Appalachian Trail (AT), I had a comical epiphany about my backpacking life: Despite hiking 11,000 miles since 2019, or passing a solid quarter of the last six years of my life in a tent, I had only spent two nights ever without my wife, Tina, on trail. They were both disasters.

The first happened in Monson, Maine, the last town on our first northbound thru-hike of the AT. After a few beers at a hostel there, we’d gotten into some petty spat about whether or not I needed to buy new shoes for the remaining 120 miles. She reasonably worried it was too expensive for such a short haul, but I thought my battered trail runners would disintegrate amid the infamous Hundred-Mile Wilderness. I ceded the argument, stormed off solo, and spent a sleepless night in a shelter with a stranger I was convinced was a serial killer. Addled by my proximity to a murder on trail months earlier, I was wrong about him. I had been right, however, about the shoes; they soon split in half, leading to a broken toe.

The second was during the final month of the Continental Divide Trail, when we accidentally took alternate routes around a line of mountains walloped by an early snow. I had half the tent, and so did Tina; we shivered our way through a miserable night separately, until a satellite message reunited us for pizza 36 hours later. I wondered if I might die; I was, at points, convinced she already had. Hiking the country’s longest trails with the person I love has been a privilege and a pleasure. The exceptions have only reinforced that rule.

But the time had come, I reckoned, to test my own mettle, to go backpacking alone and see how few mistakes I might make. For a year, I’d wanted to leave the tin-capped Nevada capitol in Carson City, climb to the Sierra Nevada via a new municipal trail, circumnavigate Lake Tahoe on the famous 170-mile Tahoe Rim Trail, and return to Carson City, for 210 miles total. I wanted to do it in less than a week. I knew the task would require diligent daily pushes, since I’d need to average 30 miles in rather high country every day, and a week of decent summer weather, before the first snow started to fall. Since Tina’s job as a park ranger didn’t end until November began, I knew I needed to walk 12 hours each day with no company other than my own.

Friends often ask me about the tents I love, the virtues of sleeping bags versus quilts, and the best kind of pad for their body. I almost always demur, though, admitting that camping and camping gear are only side effects of the reason I hike: an addiction to physical exhaustion. Pitching a tent, rehydrating dry food, and climbing inside a tube of down are simply the things I must do to do the thing I want to do. Tina is the opposite, though, a total gearhead who will cut a jacket’s tag to save a sliver of a gram and a camping enthusiast who thinks a lot about how and where we pitch our two-person tent. After 11,000 miles of mostly wanting to throw my foam pad onto a patch of dirt and go to sleep, would I even know enough about camping to do it well?

Forgive the pride I felt on that first night, then, when I stood a few feet away from my tiny Gatewood Cape—an ingenious poncho that doubles as a tarp with room for one—and smiled. The pitch atop a cliff was perfect. The sun was sinking low over Tahoe’s California. And after a 28-mile start that was mostly uphill, I knew the breeze cutting through the trees would be like a shot of pure melatonin. Maybe I knew more than I thought I did?

Variations on that feeling came daily. On that second day, I pushed 34 miles, making one last summit with weary legs and driving my stakes into the sand just as the sky smeared to cotton candy. A pair of liminal introverts, Tina and I can often be so invested in our own dynamic on trail that we talk less to other people than maybe we should. I sometimes marvel that we’ve made some of our very best friends in the world on thru-hikes, but I sometimes think that we act as if we’ve reached capacity. That very hot second afternoon, though, I’d started a conversation with a stranger sitting alongside a stream. We swapped numbers before I pressed on. When was the last time I had done that?

On the third day, though, I felt a pang of homesickness, not for my actual house or my cats but for Tina and for the rest of the beloved weirdos that became our “trail family” long ago. The Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) and the Tahoe Rim overlap for 50 miles, meaning that I’d spend 48 hours on a section I’d already hiked while doing the PCT in 2021. Memories of those happy moments, like teaching a friend named Ezra the basic rules of football, twisted my stomach, reminding me that they weren’t here, that it was just me.

And when I hitched into South Lake Tahoe that afternoon for groceries, I left a pair of Adidas Dunamis sunglasses—after 42 years, the only pair of shades I’ve ever actually liked—in a trail angel’s cupholder. I could imagine Tina spotting them and handing them to me with a smile. An idiot check, where you look behind yourself to make sure you’re not leaving anything, works best if there are two of you. It also helps if one of you is not an idiot.

Aside from losing a second pair of drug-store sunglasses, though, that was the worst thing that happened in 210 miles. Each day as I walked, I’d prepare a mental checklist for camping that night. Look for deadfall before pitching the Gatewood Cape, so as best to avoid being impaled by the top half of a tree. Pull out all of the food I’d tucked into assorted pockets during the day and put it into the bear can, locked and stowed far away from the tent. Set an alarm and stuff the phone in your backpack, so you wake up when it’s time to hike.

I did all of this, and I made it back to Carson City and my hotel room inside a smoky casino in a little more than six days, 16 hours faster than I expected. I had pushed toward the 40-mile mark that final night, sneaking into a reserved but empty National Forest Service campsite long after dark and splitting an hour before dawn, images of the food that awaited me in Carson City dancing in my head. Hiking in the dark, I’d laughed when I thought about Tina, who certainly would have told me that a few tacos in town, or maybe even Domino’s delivery, wasn’t worth this late-night, early-morning effort. After having the tacos, I can say she would have been right. (If you’re in Carson City, though, this is the spot, an actually incredible Indonesian diner in yet another casino.)

Before I left for Nevada, I wondered if a solo thru-hike might change my perception of thru-hikes in general. Long-distance hiking is, to some extent, enduring misery; having some company with whom to share that misery is a cliché for a reason. Would I get overwhelmed by the drudgery of it all, by walking from before sunrise until after sundown without saying a word to another human? Or would I be so into the freedom of it all, the absolute sense that I could do whatever I wanted, that I’d only want to go it alone in the future?

Neither happened. They are two very different activities, depending on different forms of self-reliance and perseverance. I was glad to know I made the right decisions alone, that I pushed my pace enough to make the loop that I have since dubbed the “Carson City Lasso.” Sure, I could do it again. But I also look forward to November, when Tina’s job is over and the American South begins to cool. We’ll head to a new trail and maybe revert to our old ways—me losing things in a stranger’s car and her saying, “Hey, don’t forget that.”

5 Lessons for Backpacking Solo

1. Know Your Kit

When you’re hiking long distances, there is little room for redundancy in your backpack—the lower your kit’s weight, the less strain on your body, the more miles you can comfortably make. But being on trail with someone offers some version of backup, a safety net of supplies should you lose a spoon or tent stake. That resource is obviously gone when you’re alone. The night before I left Carson City, I unpacked my entire bag, methodically considered everything I’d need each day, and went to bed satisfied that it would be on my back come morning.

2. Have a Project

One of the absolute joys of long-distance backpacking is silence, or an escape from the onslaught of incessant inputs that constitute modern life. If you don’t have cell-phone service for four days, you don’t have access to the world’s chatter for four days. You’ll learn something about yourself, about the way you think, about what you might want to change in your life. But, to be honest, you’ll also get bored, especially if there’s no pal for occasional banter to break up that space. Plan accordingly. Download a band’s entire catalogue. Buy the audiobook version of some tome so long you would never read it. Learn the names of the plants where you’ll be hiking, and become an autodidact expert at spotting them. Just give yourself anything else to do as you walk.

3. Talk to Strangers

Whether you’re walking with your partner or the friends that may form your trail family, you tend to create a little bubble around yourself on long hikes, existing inside a pocket of inside jokes and you-had-to-be-there stories. New folks you encounter can struggle to enter your scene, especially as mileage gets bigger and your focus intensifies. Late in thru-hikes, I’ve totally passed people with little more than a nod. On the first day of this adventure, I noticed my learned propensity and decided to address it, to talk to most everyone I saw. On the second day, I met someone who lives just a few miles away from me in Colorado and loves to climb our backyard mountains, too. We made tentative plans to hang out, and I relearned a simple lesson—slow down enough to say hey.

4. Have a Plan, but Enjoy the Flexibility

If you’re going into the woods by yourself, give someone who is not only responsible but also cares about your well-being a general schedule—when and where you’re going in, when and where you’re coming out, a few important milestones where you might be able to check in. Accidents happen outside, and someone else realizing you’re overdue can actually save your life. But you’re on your own, so you can split the miles up however you’d like. That was my favorite part of this individual outing, knowing that, if I found a campsite I loved 26 miles into the day, I could wake up an hour earlier the next day and make up the difference with 34. It was truly a chance to live that old backpacking adage: hike your own hike.

5. Hike Somewhere New

I love revisiting places, to aim for a deeper understanding than the “I visited, I saw, I moved on” ethic of checklist travel. But I felt the most dreadfully lonely during the 50 miles I’d already hiked with my wife and friends, less able to enjoy the newness of this experience than the nostalgia for the jokes we’d shared years earlier. I longed for their company in a way that pulled me out of the present. The moment I stepped back onto trail I’d never trod, that feeling vanished. So go somewhere without existing emotional attachments, and make new ones.