A lone backpacker has a responsibility to be careful

Page 1 - Lone backpacker has a responsibility to be careful

Page 2 - Retreating to Wilderness has a long History

Don't backpack alone, is the prevailing advice from backpacking books and government agencies. They say the risk is too great if you were injured or got lost with noone to go for help.

And they are right - the risk is there, and a person backpacking alone has a responsiblity to be very careful to avoid trouble.

But I think that something is lost in all this good advice. The hard fact is that good sense and good health may delay the inevitable, but will not change the fact that our lives our short and not one of us will ultimately survive.

The problem as I see is not how best to avoid death, but how to live well. For some that means backpacking into wilderness alone.

Time by one's self is underated as a quality for a healthy individual. In solitude you learn plenty about yourself and can discover a strength you were unaware of. Solitude can cause a turn in your philosophy towards a belief in the divinity in the universe. Going alone in wilderness seems to facilitate these changes, since you are away from the busy activity and diverting gadgets that fill a normal life.

Standing before the beauty of a mountain wilderness in solitude can make one feel as if they have stepped through the door of heaven and now have the opportunity to walk within it.

Solitude and lonliness are not the same thing - The beauty and peace and power of a wilderness is such that what you witness in nature in one day is life-filling, and the emptiness that characterizes lonliness drifts away. John Muir explained it this way:

The response of an individual to wild nature is much like that of music, or art - everyone it affected by it differently. Some people can sense a spirituality in wilderness. Linda Houghtaling Oyama is one of those people, and read what she wrote about it:

A few weeks ago I work at dawn on a perfectly still Wyoming August morning, and was cooking my morning coffee when I saw above the shaded forest that the sun had just cleared the horizon and was shining gold on the cliffs across the lake down below my camp.  I turned off the stove and ran down to the hill to see what the image of those cliffs looked like in the lake.

After checking the shoreline to be sure no Grizzlies were by the lakeside, I came upon the most wondrous sunrise reflection - the kind I have only seen before on still late summer mornings.

I had not seen another person in my three days of camping in the hills behind the lake, and had explored the high country up by the cliffs during the days. The morning lake reflection was the culmination of my backpacking trip alone to God's Country.

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