SALT LAKE CITY — 2020. The numbers seemed full of promise as I lit off the extra-bright French sparklers my mother always insisted were the best at midnight of the new year.
‘Isolation’ wasn’t the word that I expected to define the next six months. I didn’t know that my roommate would become a precious source of human contact and that those few minutes checking out groceries, looking at the top third of a cashier’s face, would become the best part of my week.
I am, undoubtedly, one of the lucky ones in a pandemic that has sharply hit along class lines. I work from home, and still, I cried at least once a week. Friends and family members were getting laid off, or their small businesses were cratering. Others got sick with symptoms that seemed like COVID-19 but they couldn’t get tested. As I worked on stories about businesses across the West struggling to stay afloat, I heard the same fears expressed by my parents back in California over the phone.
I’d hoped that eventually things would go back to normal, or I’d somehow get used to living in a constant state of worry. With more time at home, I learned how to roast a whole chicken and, despite never having baked before in my life, made pies from scratch. I jogged, I started making my way through all of John McPhee’s books on geology, went on hikes in the canyons just outside of Salt Lake City, and, in true pandemic fashion, I started roller skating in a parking lot near my apartment.
Like so many Americans, instead of feeling better I just kept falling into a deeper depression.
So I decided I needed to take a trip, the only kind possible in a time when travel and human contact is fraught: a solo backpacking trip.
Because circles and loops have been infuriating as of late (I’d spent far too much time making them inside my apartment, shuffling my feet while my mind followed the same pattern), I decided it would be a thru hike, and chose the most iconic one that Utah has to offer: the Uinta Highline Trail.
The trail runs around 100 miles through the High Uintas Wilderness and Ashley National Forest. I’d never thru-hiked before, and I’d never spent more than a weekend backpacking alone.
I pulled out my map of the Uintas and highlighted the start of the Eastern terminus near Vernal. The trail ran across the entirety of one side of the map, and two thirds of the way across the other. I ran a highlighter across the trail and my stomach flopped.
80 miles was a long way to go.
I called Ella, a friend that lives in Vermont, who’d spent several summers working with Outward Bound, helping kids backpack through Colorado. She’d also thru-hiked the Long Trail, a 272-mile trail along the Green Mountains, alone. Even though Ella and I had backpacked in the Argentinian side of Patagonia together this past January, I wasn’t sure I was ready to hike 80 miles alone.
Ella assured me I could do it. My biggest issue would be trusting my own intuition, and the first night’s sleep would be the hardest, but then the fatigue would kick in and I’d sleep like a rock. Plus, she’d send me a sheet on what to do during lightning storms.
I made up my mind. I was going.
I wouldn’t just be hiking: I’d stop living my life through a screen, try to kick the social media addiction that had blossomed in lockdown. I’d leave my phone in my car because I wouldn’t have cell service anyway. I opted to bring a disposable camera for photos.
My family was less than thrilled and some friends asked if it was safe for a young woman to go out alone into the wilderness. It’s safe, I told them, or, well, pretty safe, and besides, sometimes we just have to live our lives. I’d bring pepper spray just in case.
So, in early August, I dropped my car at the Western terminus, where I’d end my hike, off of Mirror Lake Highway near Kamas. A friend picked me up and we drove 3 1⁄2 hours to the other end of the trail. The distance covered in those few hours would take me six days to walk.
On my first evening, I camped at the side of Whiterocks Lake in a small grove. There was a small rushing stream close by that looked good for filtering water and a small grove of trees that felt safe.
I set up my tent and then sat on top of my bear canister, a blue plastic tub about a foot tall, and waited for water to boil. I listened to the sound of water running over rock, the hiss of gas burning from my stove, and the occasional roll of thunder.
Suddenly I heard a crash. Something was thundering through the brush, large sticks snapping underfoot.
About 10 to 15 feet away, a moose stood in the clearing. We locked eyes. My chest felt like it was about to explode. For all my preparation, I’d forgotten to research what to do in the case of a moose encounter.
I accidentally banged my spoon on a rock and the moose ran away. I felt more afraid than awed.
I force-fed myself a dehydrated dinner, the altitude of about 10,000 feet already zapping my appetite, and crawled into my tent before the sun set. I wrote in my light blue notebook before passing out, trying to calm my nerves: “I am safe. I am warm. Tomorrow I am going to hike until my feet fall off.”
The next few days were physically and mentally challenging. I hiked what I thought was about 14 miles, then 20, and then I stopped counting. I didn’t bring any reliable way to keep track of my mileage, so I’d occasionally use a piece of string to try and approximate the distance on my paper map.
As the days passed, I started to smell, dirt stained my feet, blisters throbbed and small scratches appeared on my legs from falls over rock scrambles (coordination has never been a strong suit of mine).
I sang to myself, quickly realized that I didn’t actually know the lyrics to a single song. No matter, there wasn’t anyone else to complain about it. So I belted out the chorus, and only the chorus, of “Harvest Moon” over and over again.
The mornings were always best. The gentle early sun, the groups of mule deer crashing through the forests and the emptiness of the meadows stirred up something sentimental.
They were the reason I’d spent the past night trying to find a spot of the ground for my bruised hips to rest, trying to quell the rising panic that would accompany sounds that could be, but realistically weren’t, human steps.
The stretches between passing other hikers ranged between 10 hours to entire days. Sometimes I’d spot a tent far off on the horizon or down in a basin. “It’s another person,” I’d excitedly shout. Then, upon further inspection, the tent turned out to be a boulder with bright green moss clinging to it.
The world outside the mountains was finally beginning to lose its hold. My mind was set on one task: walking.
If I make it through, I thought, that has to mean something. Something about my ability to cope with the coming months, maybe years, of a pandemic. My roommate would move out the day I returned, which meant temporarily living alone, something I was dreading. If I can live out here, maybe I can live alone in a city.
On my last day, I woke up at 5:30 a.m. and started making phone calls in my head. I was giddy just thinking about spending half an hour listening to a human voice.
“Gooooood morning marmot,” I sang out as the sun slowly rose.
The marmot sat on the rock, unimpressed by my hollering.
Tucking my map into the waistband of my shorts I began the final assent, the light spreading out across the valley.
I reached Mirror Lake Highway at around 1 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 6. My car sat where I’d left it the past Saturday. I laughed, and felt the mania of accomplishment that had accompanied high school and college graduations. There was no one to meet me, and I wouldn’t get cell reception until I hit downtown Kamas, a 40-minute drive away.
I got in my car, pulled my phone out of the glove box, put on “Harvest Moon” (Neil Young’s voice was so much sweeter than my own), and drove away.
While many friends have since asked what I learned from my walk in the mountains, wondering if I had an epiphany, I’ve struggled to come up with anything meaningful. I’d felt myself disappear into a kind of thoughtless place, where making sense of the world stops mattering. You follow a line and move your feet.
You just exist and that’s enough.