In service
of Her

The year I turned 55, I wanted to step into elderhood with power and grace. I got the crazy idea to start by doing a 550 mile solo backpacking trip through Oregon and Washington on the PCT Now, it is summer 2025, and I am sitting in my tent, alone, on the eastern flank of the Olympic Mountains, where the rivers are steep and wild. I have spent so much time here that I feel welcomed, invited and safe. This river feels like a second home to me. Getting to this place of comfort, however, took time, conscious attention and effort. A small amount of my ⁠time in the wilderness is spent in the ⁠company of others, but the majority is spent solo. Conventional wisdom says never travel into the wilderness alone. Yet there are ⁠practices and equipment to lessen the ⁠risks that solo ⁠backpacking implies. (You can read more about some of what I have learned on this site.) Those risks will never be zero - you will need to decide ⁠if the benefits outweigh the risks. I can only tell you that something incredible happened for me ⁠in 2020, when I was called - ⁠alone - into the wilderness of Cascadia for 3 months. As I turned ⁠55, I felt for the first time some real fear around aging. My birthday prayers were to step into this last third of my life with grace and power. In a classic case of “be careful what you ask for”, Spirit’s answer to that prayer was for me to walk 550 miles and do it solo. I had been backpacking for decades, but the total ⁠of my wilderness solo nights could be counted on one hand. This was a crazy idea, way out⁠side my ⁠comfort zone. ⁠I had about 9 months (before next year's backpacking season started) to figure out ⁠how I was going to pull this off. There was a whole lot of “How”, physically and mentally, that went into preparing for this, which you can read about on this website. It's also important to talk about ⁠the “Why”. As a human in modernity, I was feeling a hunger for a deeper, more sustained connection with the natural world. My theory, which proved true, was there are levels of “dropping in” that are almost solely influenced by amount of time spent. I wanted to see what would happen, how my psyche ⁠would react, to 10 days in the woods barely ⁠speaking to another human. How about 20 days? W⁠hat would "I" be like at 40 or 60 days? As ⁠a social, gregarious, extrovert - I ⁠could barely imagine it. As a woman living in this culture, I was deeply influenced by all the ways it's “not OK” for me to be alone. Some of them are valid, but some of them I began to see as my own learned helplessness. Some, I decided to call bullshit on. I was going to roll the dice and live my life fully, doing exactly what I wanted. I would not live in fear of the statistically tiny chance of being attacked, hassled, or murdered by either a human or an animal in the backcountry. Or my general incompetence around fixing broken camping gear, carrying heavy weight for miles, or just staying sane after days all by myself. I needed to let go of all that and allow myself to dream into the Elder I Longed to Be. A 550-mile hike would give me a lot of time and space to think and dream big. And so I began that long, steamy love affair with this beautiful bit of Earth we call Cascadia. In service of Her...