Alone in the Goat Rocks

A story about the beauty of doing biggish things all by ourselves.

My car was tipping and rocking like a county fair ride as it struggled around the steep ditches, gaping potholes, and monster rocks that had turned the forest road into a car-bucking obstacle course.

My shoulders tensed up to my earlobes and my hands tightened to a death grip on my steering wheel as I tried to navigate the dicey stretch of road. I now knew why no one started at this trailhead.

My car started to careen sideways again, I could picture my window kissing the ground. I let out a loud “FUCK.”

I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t drive another foot on this godforsaken road.

“But this is what you came here for, Emily,” I taunted myself, with a maniacal chuckle.

I was on my way to the Goat Rocks Wilderness for a solo backpacking trek – where I hoped to have a trip full of moments that would build my confidence and love for traveling alone in the mountains – and here I was, finding an invitation to mine some of that self-reliance, before I even got to the trailhead.

I stopped my car and opened the door to assess the situation. The road was absolute horse dung for as far as I could see. And it was impossible to turn around. There was no easy way out of here. I would normally make my boyfriend drive this – or maybe just wait for a kind stranger to take pity on me – and take the wheel from me.

But, it was just me out here.

I remembered something my friend Danielle’s pacer told her when her 140-mile run got real crappy and she didn’t want to move another step.

“No one’s coming to get you, Danielle.”

It was such a brutally harsh, but beautifully real, truth – that sometimes it’s all up to us to find whatever it is we need to keep going through the toughest of shit: grit, strength, perseverance, encouragement, the courage to drive over a scary forest road.

And that’s exactly what I wanted out of this weekend. A few days that would ask me to get myself through whatever might pop up. How kind of the universe to gift that to me so early in the trip.

I got back in my car, gave myself a pep talk, and feathered the gas pedal.

No one was coming to get me and so I was going to have to get myself out of this predicament – and to a different trailhead.

It’s become a bit of an annual ritual to embark on something fairly sizable by myself each summer. A 50-mile run around the Three Sisters, a 40-mile loop of Mount Hood, a big trek through the Olympic Mountains.

I find that it’s really empowering to do bigger things in the backcountry alone – to ask myself to provide everything I need to get through it – whether that’s navigational skills or safety knowhow, or trailside pep talks or friendly reminders to eat more gummy worms, or Taylor Swift singalongs when the sun sets and I want to let the big predators in the woods know that I taste very offkey.

I have not always been the most self-sufficient individual. My sense of direction used to be so poor that I ended up in the wrong state on multiple road trips gone wildly-off-course. I’ve assembled pieces of furniture so backwards they’re practically unusable. And I almost took my dog Brutus to the emergency vet when I saw his penis for the first time.

It was trail running that really inspired me to improve my ability to fend for myself – especially in wild places, because I didn’t want to always have to rely on others to do this thing I really love to do.

It’s been freeing to learn how to count on myself in the mountains.

And it feels really special to be able to hang out with myself through everything that happens during such a big adventure. To celebrate the highs with myself and to pull myself out of the lows. To be alone with myself – and alone with the wilderness, where I can immerse myself in wild places with nothing to distract me from everything that surrounds me.

I remembered how much I appreciate this kind of solo adventure when I climbed Broken Top earlier this summer. Because it’s not a dog-friendly summit and we had Dilly in tow, Ian and I had to swap turns on the spiciest stretch of the mountain. When it was my turn, I quickly disappeared from eye-and-ear-shot of Ian and was left to finish the climb to the top by myself – over some extra-rattling terrain.

All of my other technical and scrambly summits have been in the company of much more experienced climbers. They’ve told me which route to take and which rocks to grab – sometimes talking me through each-and-every move and sometimes even grabbing a hand or a foot and shoving it somewhere stable for me. They’ve kept me calm and kept me moving with constant encouragement. Reassuring me that I can do it when I start whimpering about how scared I am.

While I was all by myself on Broken Top, I had to do all of that for myself. I had to pick my own route. I had to choose my own holds and place my own feet. And when shit got really scary and I started to freak out – I had to turn to myself for reassurance I could do it, instead of outsourcing that duty to my encouraging friends.

 And when I made it to the top – and then back down – it felt really good to look back and appreciate that I was my own best cheerleader. And it was really empowering to appreciate that I was capable of leading myself through something that was a little big for me.  

This summer, a biggish thing I wanted to do was go backpacking alone. I’m still relatively new to backpacking – it wasn’t long ago that I was texting my friend Gretchen to ask her all of the questions I was too embarrassed to ask others before my first trip into the mountains with a pack on my back.

“What kind of cheese is backpacking cheese? How many shirts do you bring? How do I attach a bag of chips to my pack?”

And, even more of a hurdle than my relative newness, is that I’m rather terrified of spending the night in the backcountry alone.

I have a pretty overpowering fear of cougars that haunts me when I’m in the mountains alone. When I think about sleeping outside by myself, I picture a ferocious cougar circling my tent and thinking about which limb he wants to maim first when I get out to pee.

And I also hold onto a bit of trauma from waking up in the middle of the night to a bunch of dudes creeping through our campsite and trying to steal our stuff in the Olympic National Forest. After they peeled into the night, I lay sleepless, blinking at the mesh above me, thinking about strange men walking over me while I slept.

So, between large felines and campsite creeps, I feel rather vulnerable when I’m alone and sleeping in a shelter that could be sliced open with a baby’s rattle.

But I love being alone in the backcountry. And I want to be able to enjoy that with fewer fears or doubts about what I can do when it’s just me out there.

So that’s why I was heading into Goat Rocks with a pack full of extra sharp cheddar and my full stick of butter – hoping to leave feeling better about being out there by myself.

The Goat Rocks Wilderness has been on my list of places to frolic forever – and it took me about 3.5 steps to feel excited I was finally checking it off that list. And that I was doing it for myself, by myself.

Or, by-myself-with-an-asterisk, since I had Dilly with me. But Dilly is pretty useless for tasks like finding good water sources and managing unexpected weather – he much prefers hunting fresh livestock poop and cannonballing in lakes – so I trusted that I’d still get a solid taste of backpacking solo with him bounding down the trail in front of me.

I crested the first ridge and walked into a meadow flushing crimson with the first hints of fall. Mount Adams was poking out above the trees behind me, looking all regal with her glaciated slopes. And glimpses of the jagged peaks of the Goat Rocks Wilderness teased me from the next ridge over.

We wandered from ridge to valley to ridge again – and it just felt so good to be out there. We stopped for lots of good snack breaks. We chatted with new hiker friends. And we found a campsite on our first night in a meadow gazing out on Mount Adams and tucked beneath a bowl of craggy mountains.

I yanked my little blue tent bag out of my pack and dumped the contents on the ground so I could set up our home for the night.

“Whoops,” I said, shaking my head at the pile.

The tent is courtesy of the REI clearance rack and it was deeply discounted because someone returned it without the poles or the adaptor you need to set it up with hiking poles. So, we’ve jury-rigged a system that works – but I’d left one of the key makeshift parts at home.

“It’s cool, I’ve got this,” I told Dilly, who ignored me to scamper after something smelly.

And with the help of some rocks and a little improvisation with my hiking poles, I got that tent pitched.

“See Emily,” I said. “You can do this.”

And most of the trek around the Goat Rocks offered more of that comforting reassurance and encouragement. I could do it. And I loved doing it even more than I thought I would.

On our second night, we found a camp spot that was even more secluded, but just as stunning as our first night.

We had our own private mountain goat show on a rocky slope above our campsite and I watched Lil’ Billy four-stepping steep scree while I boiled macaroni noodles.

As I scanned the basin that surrounded us, I was flooded with gratitude for how amazing it felt to be in that place, in that moment. There were no other humans in sight and the only sound was the wind whipping over the mountains. I felt spoiled by wilderness. And excited to savor the joy of being out there, with myself and everything beautiful that surrounded me.

As the sun started to sink and the sky got darker, I got into my tent and thoughts of cougars snuck into my head, as always. I knew I would lie awake later that night, afraid to get out and pee, heart racing at any sound outside the thin walls. I knew I’d scan the pitch black for glowing eyes.

I slid into my sleeping bag and whispered some encouragement to myself.

“You’re okay, Emily.”

And I was. I was way better than okay. I knew I could get myself through a night of snapping twigs and thoughts of big cats. Just like I’d gotten myself through lots of other things in the mountains. And I knew I’d wake up in that magical basin in the morning, feeling more gratitude to be in that place, in that moment, on another biggish solo trek that gave me exactly what I was looking for. More confidence and more excitement to be out there, doing a thing I love, all by myself(*).

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