Adventures
First-person essays from the trail. These are the stories that don't compress into itineraries.
Essay
Going Solo
On solitude, navigation, and the questions that only surface when there is nowhere to project them.
The trail map showed four days of solitude between the trailhead and the road on the other side. No one would check in for me. No one was waiting at the car. I had bought the permit in March for a late August date, then spent five months convincing myself I didn't need a companion.
The morning I drove to the trailhead, I nearly turned back twice. Once at the gas station when a family in matching rain jackets asked where I was heading. Once at the parking lot, looking at the single set of footprints in the morning dust. I wasn't afraid of bears or weather or getting lost. I was afraid of what it would feel like to eat dinner alone with a view that seemed designed for sharing.
It didn't feel like that at all.
What it felt like, on day two, sitting above the clouds on a ledge I'd found by following a faint goat trail off the main route, was the closest I've come to the inside of my own mind. No performance. No compromise on pace or lunch spot or campsite elevation. No one to defer to or lead or be patient with. Just the questions that only surface when there is nowhere to project them.
I set up camp that second night at a lake that didn't have a name on my map. The inlet fell off a shelf above me in a narrow braid of white water. I filtered two liters, made rice, watched a marmot inspect my camp with professional detachment. Went to sleep when it got dark because there was no reason not to.
In the morning I lay in my bag and listened to the wind come off the ridge before the sun arrived. It was cold in a specific way that the body remembers — the kind that doesn't feel like danger, just like the world before insulation and central heating. I stayed in the bag until it was warm enough to dress without haste, then made coffee and sat looking at the lake until the light shifted.
Day three was hard. My knees were tired and I misjudged the elevation of a pass, arriving at the wrong saddle twice before finding the right one. I sat at the top for an hour eating trail mix and not caring about the time in a way that required no effort. That's what the trail does eventually, if you give it enough: the tyranny of the schedule runs out.
The question I get asked most when I mention solo trips is whether I get lonely. The honest answer is that I used to, until I stopped confusing solitude with loneliness. They share a geography but not a climate. One is an absence. The other is a kind of weather you can learn to read.
I went back two months later. Same permit office, different season, different lake. I've been going back ever since.
Short
The First Night Out
Nothing is guaranteed, and that is the point.
The first night out is always the same. You make camp later than planned, eat faster than you'd like, get into the tent before full dark because you're more tired than expected. Then you lie there completely awake, listening to the outside with the heightened attention of an animal in new territory.
A branch cracks. You assess it. Wind or elk or nothing — usually nothing. The tent walls ripple. You track each sound and categorize it and then let it go, the way you can't let go of the same sounds at home, where you expect silence. Here you don't expect silence. Here the world is supposed to have sounds at two in the morning.
By the third night you sleep through everything. By the last night you wake early and lie still, in no hurry, not ready for the walk back to the road.
Essay
What the Mountain Returns
On effort, altitude, and what the summit actually is.
There is a version of mountain travel that is about the summit, and a version that is about the approach. The summit is a coordinate, a photograph, a thing that can be confirmed. The approach is everything else: the first cold morning, the wrong-turn creek crossing, the hour you spent sitting on a boulder because your legs asked you to sit and there was nothing pressing in either direction.
I've started to think the summit is mostly valuable as a reason to do the approach. The view from the top is rarely the view you remember.
What I remember from the San Juans is a ridgeline two days in, late afternoon, where the shadow of the ridge itself fell across the valley in a line so clean it looked surveyed. The light in the west was that specific high-altitude gold that photographers spend careers trying to reproduce and that I have never seen replicated well. I sat in it for forty minutes. There was no summit in the vicinity and nothing worth noting in the guidebook. It was just one of the moments the mountains hand you without ceremony, in the middle of the days between the trailhead and the pass.
Reflection
The Weight of the Pack
Everything you carry is a decision. At some point in the trip, every decision becomes a conversation with yourself.
At mile twelve with a thirty-two pound pack, you are very aware of every object inside it. The extra pair of camp shoes. The book you brought because you thought you'd read at camp and haven't opened. The second stove fuel canister, insurance against a scenario that didn't materialize. The weight is not abstract. The weight is in your hips and your knees and the small of your back on the uphill sections.
There is a philosophy in the ultralight community that you should never take anything you haven't used on three previous trips. I understand the logic. I also understand that the version of yourself at the trailhead and the version at mile twenty are operating on different information, and the insurance items sometimes pay out in ways that are hard to predict from the parking lot.
What I have settled on is this: carry what you actually trust, not what the gear list tells you to trust. The distinction matters more than the ounces.
Guides
Practical knowledge for the field. Written to be read before the trip, not consulted during it.
Essential Guide
The Essential Guide to Backpacking Trip Planning
A start-to-finish framework for planning a multi-day wilderness trip — from choosing the route to the morning you leave the trailhead.
Part I — Choose the Right Trip
The most common planning mistake is choosing the trip first. You see a photograph — granite walls, a lake that appears to exist at the edge of the world — and the planning begins from there, bending to fit the destination rather than the reality of who is going.
Start instead with three honest questions. How many days are actually available? Not how many you'd like: how many are free, accounting for travel, recovery time, and a real night of sleep before returning to work. What is the fitness baseline of the least-fit person going? Not the average, not the strongest — the person whose knees are the weakest link determines the mileage ceiling. Third: what is the collective experience level? A group that has never filtered water should not be two days from the nearest trailhead on its first trip.
Once those three questions have real answers, the destination search can begin with appropriate parameters. A six-mile day across exposed granite above 11,000 feet is a different trip than six miles in a forested valley at 4,000 feet, even when the numbers are identical.
Part II — The Planning Window
Eight weeks out: Permit research. Most high-use wilderness areas in the US now require advance permits — many lottery-based, some first-come-first-served, some walk-up. Understand the permit structure for your target area before you fall in love with a specific route. Recreation.gov, the managing agency's website, and current-year trip reports are all necessary inputs. Trip reports from the prior season, same month but a different year, are often more reliable than official descriptions, which lag real conditions by years.
Four weeks out: Gear audit. This is not the time to take new gear into the field for the first time. New boots should have 50 miles on them. New shelter should be set up in the backyard, in the dark if possible, at least once. Any gear that hasn't been tested should be tested now, not on the trail where the consequence of failure is real.
Two weeks out: Food planning. Daily calorie targets for backpacking average 2,500–3,500 calories depending on elevation, exertion, and body weight. The error most planners make is choosing food by total weight without considering caloric density. Aim for 100+ calories per ounce for your carry. Do the math, not just the intuition. Being under-fueled at altitude on day three is a serious problem that starts as an annoyance on day one.
The week before: Logistics confirmation. Know exactly where you park and what the permit pickup process is. Have the paper permit if one is required — screenshots fail in dead zones. Store the emergency contact number for the managing agency offline on your phone.
Part III — What You're Actually Carrying
Base pack weight — everything except food, water, and fuel — should be under 20 pounds for most three-season backpacking. Under 15 lbs is achievable for experienced packers willing to make careful choices. Ultralight (sub-10 lbs base weight) is a legitimate goal but requires significant investment and some tolerance for reduced comfort in marginal conditions.
The big four items — shelter, sleeping bag or quilt, sleep pad, and pack — account for roughly 50–60% of base weight. Getting those four choices right matters more than obsessing over the weight of a toothbrush. The shelter question is the first real decision because it shapes everything downstream: pad shape, guy-line knowledge required, and your weather-risk tolerance.
The items most commonly under-carried: sun protection (hat, SPF 50+, quality eye protection), first aid specific to backcountry scenarios rather than a drugstore kit, navigation tools that don't depend on a cell signal, and a repair kit calibrated to the specific gear you're bringing. These categories weigh very little and are rarely the things that get tested. When they are tested, they matter completely.
Part IV — The Mental Preparation
No standard planning guide discusses this, which is why it warrants a section. There is a version of the first day of a multi-day trip that is uncomfortable in ways that have nothing to do with gear or weather. Your body is doing something unfamiliar. You're sleeping in a bag on ground. The sounds outside are new. The distance back to the car is real in a different way than it was on the map.
This passes. It usually passes by the second morning. The preparation for it is knowing it's coming and that it has a trajectory. The people who struggle most are the ones who expected to feel immediately at ease and who interpret first-night discomfort as a signal that something is wrong.
What helps: do a single-night trip before any trip longer than two nights, regardless of prior experience level. The first night is always an adjustment. Make the adjustment when the stakes are low and the car is close.
Skills
Reading the Land Before You Arrive
How to extract useful information from a topographic map before your boots hit the trail.
Contour Intervals and What They Tell You
The contour interval — the elevation difference between each line on a topo map — is printed in the legend. On 7.5-minute USGS quads, the standard for trip planning, this is usually 40 feet. Each line you cross on the map represents 40 feet of vertical change. Count the lines between your camp and the pass you need to cross and multiply. That's your vert.
More useful than the math is learning to read the visual spacing. Closely spaced contour lines mean steep terrain; widely spaced means gentle. Lines crowded nearly on top of each other usually indicate a cliff — impassable, or requiring technical gear you almost certainly don't have. A V-shape in the contours pointing uphill usually means a drainage; pointing downhill usually indicates a ridge spur. These patterns become intuitive quickly, but they must first be learned deliberately, not in the field.
What the Map Won't Tell You
Trail condition. Whether the route described in last year's guidebook has been maintained. Whether the water source marked is seasonal or reliable. Whether the exposed ridge you're planning to traverse has afternoon thunderstorms three days out of five in July.
This is where trip reports fill the gap. The combination of a downloaded offline map (Gaia GPS or CalTopo), a paper USGS topo, and recent trip reports from the same month of a recent year is as close as you can get to knowing what you'll find. The homework doesn't replace going — it gets you there better prepared.
Skills
Weather Literacy for Ridge Travel
The weather signals worth knowing before you commit to an exposed route.
Reading the Afternoon
In the mountains of the American West, the most reliable weather threat in summer is afternoon convective thunderstorms — storms that build from clear morning skies into dangerous lightning and hail by early afternoon. The mechanism is thermal heating: the sun warms the mountain terrain, warm air rises, and at a certain altitude and humidity level, that moisture condenses into cumulus development that can escalate faster than it looks from below.
The practical rule at altitude: be off exposed ridges, summits, and above-treeline terrain by noon. In the San Juans and other high-range terrain, that means leaving camp by 5 or 6 AM to summit early, or accepting that certain routes are afternoon weather risks and planning accordingly. A Garmin inReach or SPOT beacon doesn't protect you from lightning — it just means someone can find you afterward.
Signs Worth Watching
Cumulus buildup that has vertical development (tall towers rather than flat clouds) by 10 AM is a warning. A sudden drop in wind, followed by a reversal of direction, often precedes frontal passage. The smell of rain on dry rock — petrichor — means precipitation has already begun somewhere nearby and is moving. Distant thunder is a ten-mile warning at minimum; it carries farther at altitude. Count the seconds between lightning and thunder, divide by five: that's the distance in miles. Under three miles, get low, get off the ridge, get away from isolated trees.
Principles
Leave No Trace: The Seven Principles in Practice
Not a rulebook. A way of paying attention.
Leave No Trace is often taught as a list of prohibitions. Don't cut switchbacks. Don't camp within 200 feet of water. Don't feed wildlife. These are useful, but they're downstream of the actual principle, which is: treat the wilderness as something that will exist after you, for people you will never meet, and make your decisions accordingly.
Most of the visible LNT failures in high-use areas come from inattention rather than bad faith. People who don't understand why the 200-foot riparian buffer exists treat it as arbitrary and ignore it when inconvenient. People who understand why the switchbacks are built the way they are don't cut them.
The seven principles: plan ahead and prepare; travel and camp on durable surfaces; dispose of waste properly; leave what you find; minimize campfire impacts; respect wildlife; be considerate of other visitors. Each is worth reading the full LNT.org guidance on. The organization publishes detailed, habitat-specific guidance that goes far beyond the bumper-sticker version, and it's worth the hour.
Trails
Route profiles, honest difficulty ratings, and field notes on conditions. No superlatives — just useful information.
Enchantments Basin Traverse
Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest — Washington
The most sought-after permit in the Pacific Northwest for good reason. The upper Enchantments — a high alpine basin studded with larches that turn gold in late September — justify the competitive lottery. The full traverse drops 4,000 feet from the upper to lower zones and finishes at Icicle Creek. Difficulty comes from sustained elevation and a rough, often snowbound approach; not technical, but demanding. Day hikers consistently underestimate the mileage. Plan for at least three nights. The larches in late September are the reason people apply for this permit year after year.
Chisos Mountains Circuit
Big Bend National Park — Texas
Big Bend is consistently underrated and often empty by the standards of western parks. The Chisos are a sky-island range rising from the Chihuahuan Desert — the transition from hot lowland scrub to cool pine forest happens over a few hundred vertical feet and is consistently disorienting in the best possible way. Water is scarce and must be carried to a careful plan; most sources are seasonal. Night skies in this park are among the darkest in the continental US. Go in winter when the desert is navigable and the Chisos nights are cold but not frozen.
Lost Coast Trail
King Range National Conservation Area — California
The Lost Coast is the longest undeveloped stretch of coastline in the contiguous US — too remote and geologically unstable for Highway 1 to follow. The trail runs on beach and bluff for 25 miles with several mandatory impassable-at-high-tide sections that require careful tidal planning before each day. The difficulty is not elevation but logistics: shuttles, tides, and the relentless wet sand that punishes feet and ankles. Carry printed tide tables. They are not optional — this is one item where the phone backup is genuinely insufficient.
Weminuche Wilderness Traverse
San Juan Mountains, San Juan National Forest — Colorado
Colorado's largest designated wilderness. The full traverse stays above 11,000 feet for most of its length, which means altitude acclimatization matters, afternoon lightning is a real variable to plan around, and snow crossings persist into September. Most people section it across multiple trips. The Needle Mountains section, accessible via the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, is particularly striking and remote. The weather rule in the San Juans is non-negotiable: be off exposed ridges by noon in summer.
Roan Highlands — AT Section
Pisgah & Cherokee National Forests — Tennessee / North Carolina
The Roan Highlands offer the most sustained above-treeline walking on the entire Appalachian Trail — rare in the southern Appalachians, where forest otherwise dominates. The grassy balds are wind-exposed and disorienting in fog in a way that surprises people accustomed to forested ridge walking. June brings the rhododendron bloom on Roan Mountain itself. Shelters on this section are well-maintained, water sources reliable, and the navigation straightforward. A good first multi-day section for someone building toward longer AT travel or western routes.
Wonderland Trail
Mount Rainier National Park — Washington
The complete circumnavigation of Mount Rainier on a single, continuous trail. The 22,000 feet of cumulative elevation change is relentless — the trail crosses numerous deep river valleys and ridges as it circles the mountain, with almost no flat walking. Most parties take 10–14 days. The permit system requires reserving specific campsites, which means careful planning of daily mileage in advance. Weather around Rainier is notoriously changeable; going in late July or August maximizes the window between snowmelt and the early September shoulder. The route around a live, glaciated stratovolcano is its own kind of extraordinary.
Gear Notes
Equipment that has been tested in the field, not in a warehouse. Honest notes on what works, what doesn't, and what earns a permanent place in the pack.
Reference
The Ten Essentials, Revisited
The classic list — which dates to the 1930s and The Mountaineers — assessed with some field-earned nuance.
The modern version of the Ten Essentials is organized by systems rather than specific items. Here's the list with notes on what actually matters in each category and where common errors are made.
Navigation
Map and compass remain essential even with GPS. A downloaded offline map (Gaia GPS or CalTopo) on a charged phone, combined with a printed USGS topo and a functioning compass, covers nearly every scenario. The compass is for when both digital options fail. Know how to use all three before you need them — on the trail is not the time to learn declination adjustment.
Sun Protection
SPF 50+ sunscreen, UV-blocking sunglasses (not fashion sunglasses — the UV blocking is the only spec that matters), and a hat with meaningful brim coverage. UV exposure increases roughly 4% per 1,000 feet of elevation. At 12,000 feet you are receiving close to 50% more UV than at sea level. Most sunburns in the backcountry happen on overcast days when people skip the SPF.
Insulation
Extra layers beyond what you're wearing, calibrated to the realistic temperature range for your area and season — not the forecast temperature, the range. Mountain weather routinely delivers 30°F swings in a single day. The failure mode is planning for the predicted midday temperature and being caught underdressed when the clouds come in at 4 PM.
Illumination
A headlamp — not a hand-held flashlight, you need both hands free — with fresh batteries or a recently-charged battery. Bring a spare set on any trip longer than one night. The night it's most critical is the night the main battery dies. The Black Diamond Spot and Petzl Actik are workhorses that have earned their reputation; both are worth carrying over lighter, less reliable alternatives.
First Aid
Not the drugstore kit with mostly bandages. A backcountry kit addresses blisters, wound closure, improvised splinting, allergic reaction if there's any relevant history, and pain management across 24–72 hours minimum. Wilderness First Aid (WFA) is a weekend well spent. Wilderness First Responder (WFR) is the right credential if you spend more than two weeks per year in the backcountry or if you go with less-experienced groups.
Fire
Waterproof matches plus a lighter plus a wax-based fire starter is a redundant system for a reason. The scenario where you genuinely need fire to survive is the scenario where everything else has already gone wrong. In fire-restricted areas — which includes most of the western backcountry from July through September — know the specific restrictions before you go. Stove-only camping is often required above certain elevations.
Repair Tools & Knife
A folding knife with a locking blade. Duct tape wrapped around a small card or your water bottle (not a full roll). Tent pole repair sleeves matched to your pole diameter. The specific repair kit depends on your specific gear — think through what would fail in the field and what you'd need to keep it functional for two more days. A custom kit weighs almost nothing and solves real problems.
Nutrition
Extra food beyond your planned consumption — one additional day's calories as minimum buffer. Not because you plan to be out an extra day but because caloric needs in the field often exceed estimates, and under-fueled hikers make poor decisions. Caloric density is the variable most people get wrong: aim for 100+ calories per ounce across most of your food carry. Nuts, nut butter, olive oil added to meals, and full-fat freeze-dried options get you there.
Hydration
Water filtration or chemical treatment, plus enough carrying capacity to reach your next reliable water source with a buffer. Minimum 2 liters of capacity; 3–4 liters if your route has uncertain water or significant dry stretches. A Sawyer Squeeze weighs around 3 ounces and is a viable primary filter for most three-season conditions. Carry iodine or Aquatabs as a zero-weight chemical backup on any trip longer than two nights.
Emergency Shelter
A lightweight emergency bivy or quality reflective space blanket. At 2–4 ounces, this has the best weight-to-importance ratio in the pack. The scenario where you need it is precisely the scenario where someone can no longer keep moving under their own power. The SOL Escape Bivy (3.8 oz) retains body heat effectively and withstands serious wind; it's the item in the pack you hope to never open.
Philosophy
What Earns a Permanent Place in the Pack
Not a product list. A way of thinking about gear selection after the honeymoon phase of new equipment.
After enough trips, you start to notice two things: the gear you've never used and the gear you can't leave home without. The items that earn a permanent place usually share two qualities. They perform reliably in exactly the conditions where everything else is failing. And they have become invisible — you trust them enough to stop thinking about them.
The things that leave the pack permanently are usually the things that demanded too much attention. The stove that requires a specific technique in cold weather. The rain jacket that works until it doesn't. The boots that are right for 60% of conditions but wrong enough for the other 40% that you spend energy managing them on the trail.
Gear selection is ultimately a question of what you can afford not to think about. The lighter the cognitive load, the more attention available for the things that actually matter: route-finding, weather reading, the quality of the hour before sunset.
The most useful advice I can offer: buy gear with a genuine return policy and test it hard before the window closes. Most gear failures reveal themselves quickly under real use. The failures that only reveal themselves on day three of a four-day trip are the expensive lessons — but they're still lessons, and they simplify every future packing decision.
Technical Note
On Water Filtration: What the Labels Don't Say
The difference between filtering and purifying — and when it actually matters.
Most backpackers know they need to treat water in the backcountry. Fewer know the distinction between a filter and a purifier, which matters in specific situations. A filter removes protozoa — Giardia, Cryptosporidium — and bacteria. A purifier does those things and also neutralizes viruses. In most North American backcountry, where contamination risk comes primarily from other campers and pack animals upstream, a quality filter is sufficient. In areas with heavy international visitation or when traveling outside North America, purification becomes more important.
Current field assessment: the Sawyer Squeeze represents the best weight-to-reliability ratio available for three-season conditions at 3.1 ounces. The MSR Guardian Purifier is the choice when full-spectrum protection is required and you're not counting ounces. Chemical treatment — Aquatabs or sodium dichloroisocyanurate tablets — is a viable backup that adds negligible weight and handles virus risk reliably. On any trip longer than two nights, carry one of the filter or purifier options as your primary system and chemical treatment as backup. The redundancy costs less than two ounces.
Gear Note
Sleeping Systems: The Decision That Shapes Everything
The single gear choice with the most downstream consequences.
Sleep quality in the backcountry determines nearly everything else about the experience. An underdressed sleeper is cold, sleeps poorly, wakes exhausted, and makes poor decisions on trail. An overbuilt sleep system costs weight that compounds over miles. Getting this right matters more than almost any other gear decision.
The two variables that matter most: temperature rating and insulation type. Temperature ratings on sleeping bags are now regulated by the EN/ISO 13537 standard, which means a 30°F bag from a reputable manufacturer actually delivers 30°F performance — though the standard tests a "comfort" temperature and a "lower limit," and those numbers are not the same thing. Match the comfort rating to the coldest expected temperature at your sleeping elevation, not the ambient trail temperature. High camps are colder than you plan for.
Down insulation is warmer by weight, compresses better, and lasts longer than synthetic if kept dry. Wet down loses most of its insulating value, which is a real risk in the Cascades, the Southeast, and any alpine environment with unpredictable precipitation. Treated down (hydrophobic) is a meaningful compromise — not impervious to water but significantly more resilient than untreated. Synthetic insulation is heavier and bulkier for equivalent warmth but retains some insulating value when wet and costs significantly less. For most three-season western conditions, treated down is the correct choice. For the Cascades, the Southeast, or anyone who doesn't want to manage moisture risk, synthetic is the more reliable option.
Field Notes
Short dispatches from the trail. Written in the moment, or as close to it as the weather allowed.
Cold front moving in from the north. The usual afternoon clouds burned off by noon but came back angrier by three. By the time camp was set, the temperature had dropped fifteen degrees. Ate dinner with gloves on. The sky at dusk was the color of old pewter, that specific shade that means business.
In the morning everything was frosted but the sun came fast and by nine it was warm enough to sit without a jacket. Three mule deer in the basin below camp, moving slowly through the sage. These are the days worth the planning — the ones where the season turns while you're watching.
The desert in March is a different world than August. Temperatures in the high 60s. Poppies and brittlebush in bloom at lower elevations. The smell of creosote after last night's rain. Everything looks alive in a way the desert earns precisely because it so rarely looks this way.
Water is running in drainages that are dry nine months a year. Two red-tailed hawks working a thermal above the ridge. Made camp at a dry wash that had two inches of moving water in it. Fell asleep to coyotes, woke up to nothing. The silence of desert mornings is its own kind of loudness.
Day four. Left camp at 5:30 to beat the afternoon clouds. The pass was covered in old snow on the north side — solid enough to walk without postholing once you found the right line across the upper third. Took two hours to gain 1,200 feet in that condition. The other side dropped into a valley I had been looking at on the map since February.
There is a specific moment in a trip where the map becomes the territory and the territory is better than the map. This was one of those. The valley floor held a lake that appeared to fill as I watched, the snowmelt running in at the inlet in a steady braid. Three other camps visible, far enough apart that each had its own quiet.
Rain since yesterday, which in the Cascades in November is not weather, it is climate. Packed camp in the rain and walked eight miles in the rain and ate lunch in the rain under a large western cedar that reduced it somewhat. The trail was a river in the lower sections. Navigation entirely by map and compass — visibility under two hundred feet for most of the morning.
Reached the car at 3 PM with two hours of light left. Changed clothes in the parking lot. Ate the snacks I'd been rationing all day. Sat there with the engine running and the heat on, the window fogging from inside. Rain on the roof. It was an objectively uncomfortable two days and I was not ready for it to be over.
The balds in April before the crowds arrive. Fog on the highest points, which sounds like a problem until you're in it. The grass is still short from winter and the color is that particular green that grass makes when it has just resumed being grass. No leaves on the trees yet at this elevation — you can see the ridge structure clearly, the kind of visibility that disappears entirely by June.
Met two southbound section-hikers at a spring. We talked for ten minutes, exchanged notes on what was ahead for each of us. Information traded briefly, and then everyone moves on, each carrying something the other knew. This is one of the small economies of trail culture.
Last day of summer by the calendar, though you wouldn't know it here. Warm, dry, smoke somewhere on the western horizon. The granite holds the day's heat into evening. Swimming at 9,600 feet at six in the afternoon is a specific experience — the water is cold enough that the sunlight afterward feels genuinely earned.
Tomorrow is the walk out. The trail drops 4,500 feet over nine miles and ends at a road. Tonight I am sitting on a flat piece of granite above the water watching the alpenglow come on the peaks to the east. There is nowhere else I'm supposed to be. This exact feeling is the reason for all of it.
Not glamorous. Humid, green, and the trail is technical in a low-elevation way — roots and rocks and creek crossings every half mile. The wildflowers in this season are remarkable, if you stop looking for dramatic terrain and start looking at what's at eye level and below. Found a cluster of wild ginger in the understory that I've never seen so dense.
The Ozarks don't get written about. The Appalachians get written about. The Rockies get written about. This trail has been here since 1981, largely hand-built by volunteers, and you can walk fifty miles of it without seeing a permit kiosk or a parking lot fee structure. That absence is its own kind of wilderness.
The park closes to backcountry camping between Christmas and New Year's some years, depending on staffing. This year it didn't. The Guadalupes in late December: cold at night, warm midday, the sky an absurd blue that this latitude and altitude produces. The park receives fewer visitors than almost any other unit in the National Park System. The trails feel genuinely remote in a way that's hard to achieve in the West anymore.
El Capitan from the south ridge at sunset. The light in the Chihuahuan Desert in late afternoon, hitting the ochre rock, is the kind of thing you have to see to understand why people live in places without winters. I've been to fancier wilderness. I keep thinking about this one.
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