How To Be Alone: an 800-mile hike on the Arizona Trail

by Nicole Antoinette

This is long-distance hiking, I think: hours of intense effort and physical discomfort followed by blissful moments of laying down and shoving salty snacks in your mouth.

And now I have nothing but unbelievable luxury in front of me: a hotel room all to myself for the entire night, a bag of gummy candy in my resupply box, a bathtub that’s practically big enough for me to swim laps in, and it feels, for the first time since I started this hike, that everything might be okay.

I wish I didn’t feel like this. I wish that hiking alone as a woman could be the same as hiking alone as a man, but it’s not. My first instinct during an interaction like this will always be one of wariness and fear.

It’s disorienting at first, and I’m acutely aware of how clean they smell, the scent of soap and detergent almost gagging me as they walk by.

Thru-hiking is nothing more than day after day of selecting between varying levels of discomfort,

So I walk to the pit toilet (toilet!), dump my trash in the small trash can (trash can!), drop my pack at a picnic table (picnic table!), and carry all four of my water bottles over to the pump. WATER. Water that does not need to be filtered! Water that is free from cow feces!

It's really the simple things when you are hiking.

a solo hike isn’t really a solo hike at all.

As I hike out, pack heavy again with a full water supply, I realize that I’ve come to find this water weight sort of comforting. It’s heavy, sure, but it’s the heaviness of knowing you won’t die from dehydration any time soon, and that’s a heaviness I can appreciate.

I fucking hiked here