After another hot Summer which followed the year in which we had no winter (literally, we had one cold month in October, then it was warm enough to wear shorts all Winter long), it rained.
That Thursday, it gushed rains, the promise of the gods we'd all been praying to for the better part of the last four years as drought went from sorta kinda to serious panic. This was the kind of drought in which you don't even get to legally water your lawn except two days a week, and they give you a fine if they catch you watering more. (Fuck your roses!) It had not yet reached the stage where it is today, where you really aren't allowed to water your lawn, as in the El Nino we all counted on, so far has been a huge small bust, and now there's real concern in the air that we might truly have to do something about it. (Can you imagine a life with no lawns?)
Anyway, last year in July after the first rain that Summer, I set out on my first ever solo adventure. The recent rain lent an air of hopefulness and a sense of foreboding. We'd all been warned of an enormous El Nino year, but the gushing inundation of water flooding our searingly dry drains was a long overdue and welcome sight. Having recently finished the best fiction I'd read in a long time,"Wild", about a girl who finds herself by solo hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, I too decided I was going to set out on some sort of wacky adventurous path.
I didn't want to do the Pacific Crest Trail, however, because face it. Now that the magnificent book has been made into a popular lame-ass horribly disjointed movie, throngs of young women (and men) were now rushing to do the PCT as an act of finding out who they really are. The once rarely touched landscape had become as clogged as some of their acne-laden pores. True. I had been compelled by "Wild" to go searching too, but I wanted to do something different--something more off the beaten path.--something that would scare the shit out of me. Something that felt more true.
My original plan was to re-do Andrew Skurka's Great Western Loop , so I set out to do regular weekend hikes to prepare myself for what lay ahead. Andrew Skurka "is most well known for his solo long-distance backpacking trips, notably the 4,700-mile 6-month Alaska-Yukon Expedition, the 6,875-mile 7-month Great Western Loop, and the 7,775-mile 11-month Sea-to-Sea Route. In total, he has backpacked, skied, and packrafted 30,000+ miles through many of the world’s most prized backcountry and wilderness areas—the equivalent of traveling 1.2 times around Earth’s equator! He is the author of The Ultimate Hiker’s Gear Guide: Tools & Tips to Hit the Trail and guides about 15 trips per year under his company."
I knew it was a long shot, but for some reason I am drawn to trying the world's most difficult things. (Hell, I started a CrossFit gym, didn't I?) The biggest hurdles to overcome would be training my ass off to mimic his blazingly fast hiking speed, ensuring I left at precisely the right time of year assuming the weather cooperated and preparing myself for the rigors of solo hiking for thousands of miles over a span of six months--alone. As I sit here writing this, I must admit, this still sounds like one cool-ass ride.
My life was in turmoil at the time. My long-term relationship had become deeply unsatisfying to me. I was desperately trying to stay sober, and I was going through seriously painful emotional upheaval everywhere. I started seeing a therapist for the first time in my life, and through her, I began to make sense of my very loud and pissed off inner voice that had been trapped inside.
My first adventure found me camping in a leaky tent in a torrential flash-flood-kinda rain, and as scared as I was about being eaten by a mountain lion, a snake or a coyote, I loved every freaking minute of it!
After that, I set out on solo adventures every few weeks continuing to purposefully scare and challenge myself.
I saw a dozen wild pigs and had a coyote howl just outside my tent while in Dallas. I got lost on a trail and spent 3 hours hiking back up a mountain an alternate way from Little Fish Fork. I've hiked Condor and Strawberry Peaks seeing nary another soul and only a trickle of water. I spent the night near the Bridge to Nowhere and hiked 20.4 miles in one day from Mt. Baden Powell to Buckhorn Campground including the last 6 miles alone in the dark.
I really didn't know what I was looking for, but I felt compelled to find it. Pushing the boundaries of what terrified me started to wake ME up.
In the meantime, I moved out from my long-term boyfriend, and started facing life solo for the first time in many years, living in a teeny garage apartment to save money and trying to make sense of my life.
One night on a whim, I decided to search "Living in the Wilderness" on the internet. I wound up on an unusual forum with loads of people looking to do just that. Most were kids, many were dreamers, and a few had actually done it. I wound up meeting a thirty-something dude with similar plans, and we just clicked. We both started planning and my life took on a joyeaux de vivre and an urgency I hadn't felt in years.
As a workaholic woman who dearly loves her craft, I had forgotten what it meant to have a hobby, a joy, a passion for something outside of work. Suddenly I was faced with the idea of living in the wilderness with a complete stranger whom I met on the internet, and I loved the audacity of it!
We started planning immediately, conversing back and forth via spreadsheets and Google Drive. We shared You Tube videos on building shelters with subterranean heating systems, videos on animal skinning and stories of bears, He turned me onto Survival Lilly and I turned him onto Sigma III Survival School. We both watched countless videos and discussed their unique challenges and virtues.
I spent Friday nights figuring out the weight of every piece of equipment on our list of items we planned to take, becoming obsessed with this idea and in love with everything about it. For a long time I told no one, because I knew it was pretty far-fetched, and also because I needed to make sure my compadre-in-arms was going to stick around for the ride. As crazy as this adventure sounded, no one but a fool would go out on something like this for the first time alone. My Mom made me make sure he wasn't a stalker. (He's not. He's clean as a whistle, loves his Mom, and is a seriously nice guy.) I told him I wasn't looking for a boyfriend, we've got 20 years between us, and neither of us gives a damn about any or all of that.
Well here we are six months later, and we're both still raring to go. We speak by telephone or chat online regularly (as who wants to commit to living in the wilderness with someone you can't stand), continually run "what if" scenarios by each other, plan for things like hunting permits and seasons, study edible plants, figure out ways to keep our food away from bears, and drill each other on what to do in case of hypothermia. Happily, we both work very hard, and we seem to get along just fine.
The fact that what we are going to attempt is life-threatening lends a unique intensity to our plans. Seriously, we both leave no stone unturned when it comes to ensuring we are prepared for our journey, as we are both aware a mistake could seriously cost us our lives. We're going to be in the northern hemisphere, for god's sake through late Summer, all of Fall and early Winter. It will likely freaking snow.
Since then, each weekend I set a goal. From getting my hunting license to taking multiple wild-edibles classes to building an all-night fire to studying navigation, to target practice with my rifle, not a weekend has gone by since then in which I wasn't fully engrossed in learning something to ensure our success.
My original plan was six months. Now it's five. I'm attending Sigma III Survival School's 40-Day Instructor program in April, where our final test is 5 days alone with nothing but a knife. I figure if I include that, it's still 6 months total to challenge myself with my new survival-skills-for-life. As hard as I'm studying, I'm just not willing to put my ass on the line without seriously investing in the knowledge to succeed, and Sigma III's program is the most comprehensive I've found anywhere.
I don't know what compelled me to this point, but I do wonder sometimes if we aren't guided by some mysterious voice to a particular path. The fact that I found such an excellent colleague lends credence to that.
As I set out today to practice my topographical map-reading, animal tracking and wild edible identification skills, I came across not one, but two piles of what clearly appeared to be mountain lion scat. I pushed the toe of my shoe into one. The telltale signs of animal fur along with the 5" length and 3/4" girth lending credibility to my observation. I found another pile not an eighth of a mile further, so I decided to look for tracks.
Sure enough, there were clear tracks leading off into a side wash, so I decided to follow them for a while. It was fascinating to note how much we miss if we don't learn to read the signs.
Mark Elbroch's book, "Mammal Tracking and Sign" with its amazing photos of tracks of nearly every animal one might come across in the wilderness along with numerous photos of their scat, seemed to lend authority to my thoughts, but I'm far from an expert here.
This cat was big. The length from the hind foot to the next hind foot was nearly 4 feet long, and the paw prints were roughly 3.5" wide. Knowing from the multiple stories I've read that cats rarely kill humans and flee from nearly anyone who fights back, I pulled out my machete just in case. After following the tracks for about 150 meters, I stopped, as they lead up a crevice which would've been hard for me to climb. Add to that the fact that I didn't really want to rustle this thing into a confrontation, and I decided to turn around.
When I first got sober, I joined a group called HSM (www.hellosundaymorning.org). A woman there, whom I befriended, supported my adventures and my stories. She christened me with the moniker "Woman Who Walks with Mountain Lions" after I shared the story of my first adventure there and how afraid I was of being eaten by one.
It's amazing how far I have come.
I used to walk slowly on every trail looking at every cranny in a mountain's face fearful I might be attacked at any moment. Now I know I'll never see one coming anyway, so I don't even bother. But I have to admit, much like running into an artist or someone you're really crazy about, I still think it would be really cool to get a live glimpse of something that I truly admire.
Mountain lions represent much of what in the wilderness draws me--a sense of danger, a sense of the unknown and a sense of adventure. Here's to living a large and daring life full of mountain lions to set your imagination on fire.
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