Art Loeb Trail, Pisgah National Forest, Dec 2022

What was I thinking? I had never done this before. I had backpacked once as a kid, when the camp counselors carried most of the gear and cooked our meals. On my one backpacking trip as an adult, I refused to bring my heavy sleeping bag and spent the night shivering under a damp beach towel. 

Experience was not on my side. Nonetheless, there I was, heading out on my first multi-night trip ever. And I was doing it alone. 

It was early December. The forecast called for rain all four days. I didn’t understand then how dangerous the cold and wet combination can be, like I do now. That’s an annoying conundrum of life, though: you need experience to gain knowledge, yet we’re told not to jump into an experience without first knowing what we’re doing. 

Did I know? I knew that what I was taking on would be hard. That was part of my motivation — to challenge myself and grow my skills. But there was no way I could have known how hard, or what kind of challenges I would face, without going out and living it.

I gritted my teeth into a smile and hoped for the best. Inwardly, I prayed that I could survive the worst. 

My dad dropped me off at the trailhead amidst a steady trickle of rain. Within my first two hours on trail, I passed a young couple around my age. It was around 1pm, but they had set up their tent and were boiling water for dehydrated meals. 

“Hi! Are yall getting a late start to the day?” I asked, trying to make friendly conversation. 

“No, we’re done for the day,” the woman rebuffed.

I have no idea what these people went through, or why they chose to stop so close to the trailhead, but our stilted interaction seemed to cast an omen over the rest of my trip. I would not see another human for the next forty-eight hours. 

After a relatively uneventful first night on trail, I woke up to a sliver of sunrise smoldering through a break in the clouds. “Maybe it’ll clear!” I thought.

Wrong. The clouds soon knitted across the sky and shut out all sunlight. I could almost feel the grey dome close in on me. It weighed down on my shoulders and feet, forcing me to labor more with every step. 

The trail wound up towards the exposed, high Balsam ridge, and the rain seemed to start the moment I stepped beyond the treeline. I was in the cloud, now. I could see only a few feet ahead of me before my path disappeared in a thick, white wall. Rain pounded against my hood. With nothing overhead to shelter me, my rain gear almost immediately soaked through. 

Panic tightened in my throat. I felt the urge to glance around, as if to find somebody to help me or some magic escape route. But I knew there was nothing. I was by myself in a wilderness that stretched for miles in every direction. No one else was out hiking on a day like today. I realized I was truly alone, maybe for the first time in my life. And, not a beat later, I realized there was nothing I could do but keep walking. 

The storm grew into an all-out battle. I could hear nothing but the drumming slap! slap! slap! of the rain as it pummeled everything. My shoulders tightened as I hunched over and braced against it. I hiked faster. The trail became a chute of water rushing down from the high peaks and flooded my feet in an icy stream. Shrubs growing over the sides of the trail snagged my shoulders as I passed and flung water into my face. Peeved, I thrashed back and barreled through as fast as I could, only to lose my footing and land in a wet heap. Oof. My hip throbbed, along with my freshly bruised ego. I laid there in the mud for a moment and let my pitiful state sink in. 

Eventually I hoisted myself up and huddled under the bushes to eat my lunch: a wet jerky stick and some soggy peanuts. Everything was wet — every single part of me, and each thing I grabbed for with my grubby, pruned fingers. I couldn’t fight the rain anymore; clearly, it had won.