On Hiking Alone

The parking lot on the Canadian border is empty. Subalpine fir trees, wet gray fog. I can’t see the Black Angus cattle near the road, but I can hear them, mournful in the mist, bound for slaughter come August.

It’s July in northwest Montana. I prop my foot against the side of my car, Henry, so I can lace my hiking boots. My shitty green Toyota Corolla has been the only constant in my life since leaving New Hampshire after college. An hour ago, I finished working the breakfast/lunch shift at a restaurant on the edge of Glacier National Park. There are seven hours of daylight left—it won’t be dark until nearly 10 p.m. There is enough time for a seventeen-mile hike.

I am fastest when I am alone. And I am usually alone.

A month ago, I moved from Texas to Montana for this job. During the day, I work and then I hike. At night, I lie on my mattress in the dark, listening to people outside in the moonlight as they crack beers, laugh, dance. They sound like they are having fun on the other side of my door, so close I can hear the wooden porch creak beneath their feet. But I can’t get there. I have never known why.

Anyway, I hike faster when I’m alone.

And I want to be alone.

I want to be alone, but another car pulls into the parking lot. Another person, just one person. This happens, sometimes, when you are hiking by yourself. Someone shows up and assumes you want company.

Please don’t let this be one of those times, I think, adjusting the straps on my backpack, unkinking the nozzle on my hydration pack, and taking a sip of lukewarm water. I make my way to the trailhead, hoping to start before the other hiker, to put a mile between us before they can catch up. My standard hiking speed is three miles per hour, which means that I can hike seventeen miles in 5.6 hours if I don’t take breaks, maybe 5.8 hours if I factor in two short breaks.

These are the calculations you make when you hike alone. This is what you learn about yourself.

Hey, a voice says, just as my feet hit the dirt. Hey, do you want to hike together?

*

My mother is always telling me she wants to drive the Pacific Coast Highway from south to north. She’s said it since I was a child, and I imagine even long before that, before I was born. When there’s a quiet dip in our phone call, or when I visit home and we’re sitting in the sunroom with a bottle of red wine at that certain melancholy point in the evening after the sun sets and after my father has gone to sleep, she sighs and says, You know what I’ve always wanted to do? She tells me it’s been her dream since she was a teenager, growing up in a sheltered New England household. My father won’t do it with her. My sister and I are too busy. So are her friends. At sixty-three, she’s starting to think she never will drive the Pacific Coast Highway.

So fly to California and rent a car, I tell her. You have the money. You have the time.

But it’s not about money or time. The problem is, she doesn’t want to do it alone.

I do not have this problem.

Here is my official statement on why I do most things alone: I am a lone wolf. I am comfortable with myself. I like myself. I have a rich interior life. I am independent. I am selfish. I am faster, more efficient on my own. I like to make the eight-hour drive from Las Vegas to Reno all in one go, stopping to photograph an old brothel in Mina and eat a burger in Hawthorne, listening to the music I like, staying at the hotel I want to stay at, watching the TV show I want to watch when I get there.

Here is another explanation: There is something about me that is fundamentally unlikeable. Something invisible to me that everyone else sees right away, like a bad haircut I think looks good.

As a freshman in college, I made myself go to every social event in my dorm, even though I didn’t want to go to any of them. It was uncomfortable at first, but soon enough I was with a big group of people eating frozen yogurt at the dining hall, with that same group of people on the quad, in the library, at music festivals, at frat parties, dancing around our dorm rooms in our underwear. A year later, the girl I felt closest to, a blonde business major named Abby, took me to a party in Boston. Drunk on Mike’s Hard Lemonades and waiting for the train, she turned to me and said, You know, I really didn’t like you when I first met you. I thought you were going to be the girl that’s just always around but no one wants her there.

Hmm, I said. That’s funny.

These are the calculations you make when you hike alone. This is what you learn about yourself. 

I remembered the first bar I’d ever been to in my life, a place that didn’t card in New York City. A guy came over to hit on my sister while I stood next to her, itchy in my too-short Forever 21 dress, smiling without teeth, trying to convey approachability. The guy jerked his thumb toward me and asked my sister, What’s her deal? I smiled bigger, as if a different facial expression could make them believe I belonged. My sister said, Oh, she’s just bad at being around people.

I thought of the karate lessons I’d taken at thirteen, the room with benches where we’d gathered before class. I sat alone while everyone else chatted together. I could never figure out how to enter the conversation. What are the first questions you ask people? And where do you go after you get the answers? One day, the head instructor, a guy with a mustache who we called Mr. G, brought me into a little office. Dust and trophies. He put on his camp-counselor face.

I just wanted to check on you, he said. You seem unhappy.

I’m not, I told him.

Well, he said. You’re not fitting in.

He waited for me to say something else, and when I didn’t, he dismissed me, disappointed. It annoyed him that I stood apart from everyone else, I realized. It bothered him more than it bothered me.

Abby the blonde business major would repeat her always around but no one wants you there point several times during college. She brought it up at parties, like it was a silly joke we were both in on, and I faked a laugh every time. Since then, other people have said versions of this to me: You make a strange first impression. You’re hard to get to know.

At a certain point, you start to realize it’s easier to not be around at all.

And there’s pleasure in being alone.

A sunrise hike in Anza-Borrego, bighorn sheep eating bright yellow desert dandelions beside the trail. Afterward, a big greasy cheeseburger at a diner, looking like shit and not giving a fuck.

A red-eye flight to El Paso. A two-hour drive through the Chihuahuan Desert. Climbing the tallest mountain in Texas, making it back to the car just as the sky cracks open with purple lightning.

A canyon in Death Valley. Limestone polished smooth by last year’s floods. Afraid of falling but deciding to climb anyway. Face pressed against the rock, heart beating, hands trembling. Making it to the top. The sandstone orange, warm in the sun.

*

After college, I moved to Boulder, Colorado.

I arrived after midnight when the town was quiet, descended the stairs to the basement apartment I’d rented, and fell asleep on the floor. When I woke I went outside and realized how little the sunbaked foothills resembled the snowy mountains on the Coors Light can. There was also something else that occurred to me: I had no one to talk to.

Despite the lousy first impression I’d made as an undergraduate, I’d ended up with a very close group of friends. Senior year of college, we’d lived together in a duplex house—girls on one side, guys on the other—always leaving the door unlocked so we could go back and forth. We cooked meals together, fell asleep in each others’ beds, biked to a nearby bridge and dove into the Lamprey River, climbed the hill behind our house to dance to live bluegrass at a bar in an old stone church. When my friend’s boyfriend broke up with her, I got down on the hardwood floor and held her, instinctively. I thought I hated touching other people. I forgot, during those years, how rare that kind of closeness is—at least for me.

Boulder was also a college town, but it was not my college town. I got a job at Dairy Queen. My coworkers were high school burnouts who asked me to buy them liquor. I wanted them to like me, so I pedaled to the liquor store on my break and returned with Cuervo. I got another job at a bakery that stayed open until two in the morning. I did prep work, scooping frozen spoonfuls of sugar-cookie dough onto baking trays while drunken college students ordered gluten-free cupcakes from the counter, their eyes glossy and cheeks red, their arms around each other as they took photos, collapsing in laughter. How was it possible that my own nights out with friends—cold, clear Fridays, shots of Goldschläger on someone’s deck, greasy pizza slices beneath fluorescent lights, arms linked on the walk home—were gone? I wanted to climb back into a top bunk in a dorm room somewhere, gossiping with a roommate until her snores rose up from the bed beneath me.

At a certain point, you start to realize it’s easier to not be around at all. 

I tried. I put myself in places where I might meet people: coffee shops, bars, the college campus. Close relationships were all around me—friends eating tacos on sunny patios, floating in tubes down the river—but I couldn’t ingratiate myself. I retreated to my basement apartment, where the only window was at eye level with the parking lot. I studied people’s feet as they came and went, came and went, came and went. I sat on the floor and watched sitcom reruns on Netflix, walked to Chipotle and got a chicken burrito, returned home and watched more sitcom reruns, realizing that all sitcoms were the same premise: a group of friends in a coffee shop or a bar, recounting the adventures they’d had together, new adventures they would have together occurring later in the episode.

When the sun went down, the window facing the parking lot went dark, and I made cocktails using alcohol the previous tenant had left behind: blue curaçao, Sour Apple Pucker, cheap vodka. It would have been funny and a little bit ironic with friends—cocktail hour, we would have joked, tossing back neon-colored shots.

On days off, I went to the library and sat there alone. On nights I worked, I rode my bike home from the Dairy Queen or the bakery, all the way downhill, a stolen cup of soft serve or box of cookies in my basket.

It hurt to look at the people I passed by, to hear them laugh, to stand outside of the jokes they shared with each other. When I couldn’t do it anymore, couldn’t take the sitcom laugh tracks, the foil-wrapped burrito dinners on my used mattress, the sneakers and high heels and ballet flats and hiking boots coming and going, the constant ache that I was alone, alone, alone, I opened up my computer. I typed in Craigslist. I placed an ad.

22-YEAR-OLD WOMAN SEEKS FRIENDS

Hi! I’m a recent college graduate from the East Coast who doesn’t know anyone in Boulder. I am looking for female friends for nights out, hiking, and other adventures.

I imagined what someone—anyone—would have said if someone/anyone would have been there: Craigslist, really? Hope you like dick pics. People are going to start offering you money for your used panties or ask if they can clean your apartment naked. You’re going to get murdered.

These were the kinds of Craigslist ads my friends and I had laughed over in college. Who were these sad people, we wondered, who wrote about missed connections at Dunkin’ Donuts, begged strangers to come over so they could watch Lord of the Rings and hug?

But my desperation had become a tangible thing. My loneliness, a balloon inside of me, slowly inflating.

The emails came in quickly.

I never respond to ads on Craigslist but yours seemed cool

21 and transferred to CU Boulder and don’t know ppl

I know you said female friends but if you want a platonic male friend I would like to be friends

Would love to hit up happy hour or go for a hike sometime

Each email another person, just as isolated as me. I imagined us all, in our separate apartments, in the dark with our computers, scrolling the internet in search of each other.

I met up with a few of them. A girl named Melanie who liked mani-pedis, her fiancé, and the breadsticks at Olive Garden. A girl named Julia who was renting a room at a sorority but wasn’t actually in the sorority, which caused the girls in the house to ignore her. We were nervous around each other, trying to fit the puzzle pieces together, trying to skip to the part where we would text when we saw things that reminded us of each other, where we would want to watch bad movies on hungover Sunday mornings. It made me uneasy—this circling around each other, trying to figure out if we could be friends. I wasn’t sure what possibility scared me more: rejection or intimacy.

I felt better when I was alone on my bicycle, flying down Twenty-Eighth Street on a warm July evening, hitting green lights all the way to Canyon Boulevard. Camping in Rocky Mountain National Park, elk bugling in the meadow at dawn.

How long does it take to become friends with someone, I asked the internet. The answer was about fifty hours for a casual friendship and at least two hundred hours for a close friendship.

The emails were still coming in, but I deleted the Craigslist ad. I moved to California.

I just didn’t like Boulder, I tell myself now. I didn’t fit in with the people there.

The truth is, I couldn’t put in the time.

California is where I began working seasonal gigs, mostly in the national parks. Death Valley. Yellowstone. Back to Death Valley. Glacier. Back to Death Valley again. A ski resort in Telluride. Big Bend. Back to Glacier. The lifestyle encourages you to be alone: When you move around a lot, you need to be able to fit all of your belongings into your car. Another person’s shit complicates that.

In the national parks, they tell you never to hike alone. And by “you” I mean you. As in you, the visitor.

Me, I hiked alone all the time. Unlike the tourists who climbed up mountains they couldn’t get down from or wandered barefoot with no water into vast expanses of burning sand dunes, I knew what I was doing. I knew to yell hey bear hey bear hey bear every ten minutes in Glacier to avoid surprising grizzlies. I knew to tread lightly around steam escaping from the ground in Yellowstone, because that park is one big fucking supervolcano. I knew where to safely cross the Rio Grande in Big Bend. I knew where to find water in Death Valley.

But still, when I hiked alone and encountered other groups of people, they expressed concern. Not for my safety, but for my lack of company.

There’s pleasure in being alone. 

One Thanksgiving in Big Bend, I hiked a sixteen-mile loop in the Chisos Mountains alone. I trekked through a forest of juniper trees, stepping over tarantulas along the way, skirting cliffs that plunged down into Mexico. I climbed to the summit of Emory Peak, sloshed through arroyos in Boot Canyon.

Each group I passed said some version of the same thing:

All by yourself, huh?

Have a little lunch with us. We’ve got an extra sandwich.

Come and join us. You don’t have to hike alone.

No, thanks, I told them again and again. I said it quickly over my shoulder, hiking three miles per hour—no, faster—avoiding their eyes. I never considered that if I stopped and had lunch with them or slowed down and met their pace I might get to know them. Not like two hundred-hours get to know them, not even fifty. But something. Something that I might look back on and think, That was the day I met the nice family from Houston, that was the recently engaged couple who told me how they got together, that was the woman who gave me her email address and said if you’re ever in Brooklyn you’ve got a place to stay.

But no. I said no thanks and kept moving.

*

At the parking lot in Montana on the Canadian border, the July sun burns off the fog. I can see the cows in the road now, headed north in silence.

I think you and I have the same idea, the hiker says.

He is tall and nondescript like all people are nondescript when you refuse to commit them to memory. Twenty-five or maybe thirty-five. Trekking poles and a decent backpack.

He asks me where I’m hiking to, and I tell him that I’m taking the Belly River Trail to Bear Mountain Overlook. He says he’s taking that same trail to Elizabeth Lake, asks me if I want to hike together until our paths diverge. He’s caught me when I’m standing still, without an excuse, so I say sure, hoping I can hike fast enough to lose him, but we move at the same speed.

Small talk at first. Where we’re from, what we do for work. But you run through that shit fast when it’s just you and one other person in the wilderness. He is going through a breakup, he tells me. He still loves her and he’s hopeful they’ll be together again soon. This trip to Glacier is a way to consider what he might do differently if they try again. Or maybe it’s a distraction from accepting that it’s really over. He doesn’t know.

I walk in front of him, and even though he is just behind me, we rarely turn to face each other, rarely make eye contact. It makes it easier to tell him everything I end up telling him. That I’m a fraud. That I am not a lone wolf, but merely someone who can’t connect with people. That sometimes I am so lonely I can actually feel my heart physically hurting, like it’s made of something solid that is cracking. Like it’s made of water that is expanding, not because it is full but because it is freezing.

When we reach the junction that’s supposed to separate us, he decides instead to keep going with me.

We take the spur trail to the overlook, and at the top, we sit, eating potato chips, almonds, carrots, looking at the valley below. This part of the park is special to me, I tell him, because there are no roads going in or out. There are no hotels or restaurants.

No people, he adds.

Right, I say.

He asks me why that’s special to me and I shrug, say I don’t know, even though I think we both know what the answer is.

We talk less on the way back, hiking in comfortable silence. It’s dusk when we arrive back at the parking lot. He tells me where he’s staying, says he’s going to the bar at his hotel to see live music later tonight. We’ve spent like seven hours together; it only makes sense to keep hanging out.

I fumble around for my keys in the bottom of my backpack.

I’ll try to make it, I tell him.

I drive home and shower, eat a cold slice of pizza from the minifridge in my room. For a moment, I consider going, wonder what it would be like if I did. But what comes next? Do we stay in touch? Do we become best friends? When he gets back together with his ex-girlfriend? Do I go to his wedding? If I get married, does he come to mine? Or does he get to know me a little better and discover something so repellent it invalidates the experience of hiking those seventeen miles together?

Not knowing is easier, I decide.

Later, I will post a photo on Instagram of me smiling in my teal North Face jacket, the rippling surface of Cosley Lake behind and below me. I will caption it some guy took this and I will wish that I had written his name instead, because I will not remember it. I do not remember it. And I will wish that I had at least written something less dismissive, because when you go on a seventeen-mile hike in the Montana wilderness with a stranger, how can he be some guy? Some guy is the person who bumps your grocery cart with his grocery cart. Some guy is not the person who tells you about the love of his life as you part the hip-deep grass of a meadow together. Some guy is not the person standing beside you beneath the perfectly square face of Chief Mountain, listening and nodding as you tell him that the first time you saw that mountain, you cried. You cried because this is the most spiritual part of Glacier National Park, and you are not a spiritual person, but the quivering leaves of the aspen trees and the darting white-tailed deer make you very much wish you had a religion.

On the next hike, a mystic white mountain goat appears, a phantom on a cliffside. Marble-black eyes fixed on me. Face like a wizard. It’s there and then it’s not.

I feel a desire to tell someone about it. I feel the absence of another person, just for a second.

And then it’s gone.

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