Solo Adventuring
As I make my lists, collect and organize gear for Wyoming, the road trip commences Sunday afternoon, I can’t help but reflect on the significance of past solo adventures on my present reality.
It was the summer of 2015, I packed up my black F-150, quite the piece ’o’ shit I might add, and headed west for 16 days solo, no real plan other than I was headed in the general direction of the huckleberry bear claws at the Mercantile & Bakery, Polebridge, Montana. That trip cemented what I knew about myself, tough truths, fear, insecurity, what I was, more importantly what I wasn’t, and who I thought I wanted to be. That trip took me to places, to meet people, and to do things, which only existed in my dreams up to that point, The Black Hills, Missoula, the Flathead Indian Reservation, Glacier National Park, Bozeman, the Madison River Valley and Ennis, Montana, a place that would eventually become home for a time, and finally to West Yellowstone and Yellowstone National park before working my back to Indiana. These photos, from that trip, represent my first real attempt at mountain landscape photography with my Nikon Coolpix camera.
5000 miles on the odometer later, I had driven that piece ’o’ shit F150 further than I ever imagined possible in 16 days, kayaked glacier fed lakes, slept under the stars of the Milky Way, caught my first trout on a fly rod, tackled grizzly country with reckless abandon, and dreamed of a day I could call this my home. It felt so far away, completely unattainable, like human beings dreaming of visiting another galaxy or something of similar absurdity. It certainty wasn’t a straight line to get there, full of wrong turns and bad directions, but 6 years later I would make that dream a reality, and live it out to the fullest. That trip was a first of its kind for me, profoundly transformative, and without it I am certain I never would have lived in Montana, and would not be writing these words or shooting photos.
This trip west will take me to the mountains and high desert country of Wyoming, where I have an elk tag, the purpose of the trip, but it is so much more than that. This is one of those adventures that doesn’t have a clear destination, head west in The Van to the mountains, beyond that I only have a short list of places where I intend to begin my search, near Sundance. It is the uncertainly of destination and its unknown but certain endpoint that makes an adventure of this sort so powerful for the self.
My only real certainty, is that upon return, I will be a different version of my current self, and that is more than enough reason to go.
To anyone out there still listening to my psychedelic hippy logic, I say be bold, take a chance, take some risks, whatever that means for you, make room in your life for solo adventures, big and small.
How can we possibly know our real “self”, if we never push out of our own self imposed boundaries.
