Alone in the wilderness: A case against radical self-reliance

November 15, 2024

On July 14, 2024, I got on a train headed from Albany, NY to Charlottesville, VA. Then I endeavored to walk home. I followed the Appalachian trail for two months and approximately six-hundred and fifty miles. I carried around forty-five pounds of stuff, ate about a pound of ibuprofen, seriously considered quitting nearly seven times, and used up well over a foot of blister tape. The walk was challenging, ordinary, and devastatingly beautiful at turns and I enjoyed it very much. 

When I tell people about hiking the Appalachian trail, they’re often surprised to hear I hiked solo. And aside from the casual misogyny and transmisogyny that underlie the assumption that I was unsafe hiking alone (that’s a whole other essay), I can tell you I was never alone. I was always supported by people and nature that necessarily support the entire structure of long distance hiking. 

First of all, as many hikers will tell you, the Appalachian trail is a “social” trail. After two months on the trail, I was alone in a shelter maybe half a dozen times and while I was often hiking alone, I talked to people along the trail at snack breaks, at road crossings, or just watching the view from a summit every single day. There are towns to resupply and eat pizza at least every five days along the trail and often every three (in New York I passed a deli on the trail every single day). And even beyond the common occurrence of towns and fellow hikers, I relied heavily on the invisible presence of others. 

Many people on the Appalachian trail use the phrase radical self reliance in regards to being alone on the trail. Sometimes self reliance has to do with the Leave No Trace Principle, “plan ahead and prepare.”  When I hiked the Appalachian trail I knew my route in advance, I knew when my next food stop was and always had at least two ways to clean drinking water. I was determined to not get lost and dehydrate to death. Obviously, I wanted to take care of myself on the trail but I also wanted to make sure I didn’t need a rescue. Wilderness rescue workers do an incredibly dangerous and challenging job and it’s my responsibility as a hiker to minimize the risks of that job. I would argue planning and preparing depends on interconnectedness, not self-reliance.

When I was hiking through Pennsylvania, water was extremely scarce. It was a dry August and many of the springs and brooks had dried up, leaving up to eleven miles between running water stops. The community around the trail in Pennsylvania is an incredibly kind and generous one, and they leave, “water caches,” or gallons of drinking water stored in coolers, along places where the trail intersects with roadways. On the other hand, there was one person living along the trail in Pennsylvania who would find the water caches near him and slash them open, draining all the drinking water into the ground. He claimed hikers should be “self-reliant” and prepared for these long, dry stretches, and willing to carry more water, to hike further with more weight. For him and others like him, “self-reliance” meant hiking alone. 

In Pennsylvania I absolutely depended on generous water caches that the trail community left at road crossings, not to mention the circulated reports of which springs were running and which were dry. I was prepared–not by being self-reliant–but by relying on the intel and infrastructure of those who had hiked before me and the robust community of those who care for the trail. Water aside, I couldn’t have fed myself without supermarket food stops–I can identify some wild edibles but hardly enough to forage for the calorie-rich diet that fourteen (or more) miles of walking every day requires. In Northern Virginia a generous hiker even lent me five dollars for laundry. All along the trail, thanks to human infrastructure, kindness, and generosity, I survived and thrived.

Beyond my human connections, I was inexorably connected to nature. Starting with the air I breathed-made and cleaned by the photosynthetic bodies of plants-every step I took on the trail depended on nature. But even back at work, in an office, I still breathe in what plants breathe out. Even in my front yard in South Hadley, squirrels scamper and grass springs out of the ground. I’ve never been separate from nature and neither have you.

In one of my favorite interviews, Dr Kim Tallbear, indigenous professor and activist, says that no one is ever really single: “even if I’m not seeing somebody, no, I don’t live alone in this world. I have all kinds of relations and meaningful relationships.” Tallbear talks about her relationships, both with her community, her human neighbors and friends but also her relationships with the more-than-human world, plants, animals, and other things that we don’t have the nerve to call people in our colonizer language.

If we delve a little deeper into the idea of solitude in nature, the insidious rhetoric of colonialism starts to reveal itself. The idea that humans go into the “wilderness” to be “alone” is a relatively new concept, one that depends on the separation of humans and nature in the first place, an idea that served colonizer Europeans as they stripped and genocided Indigenous peoples of the North American continent in order to claim the “unoccupied” land.

I was never alone on the Appalachian trail. The cicadas and katydids sung me to sleep every night. Deer browsed along the trail and red efts scamped under foot (sometimes so many that I worried about squishing them). I learned how to be a better hiker from the hikers around me. So was I alone on the Appalachian Trail? No, not for a moment. And I am so grateful for all the human and more-than-human people who helped support me along my hike.

Monya Relles (they/them) is an educator at the Hitchcock Center for the Environment with a passion for environmental justice. In their free time they can be found hiking, dancing, or playing off-key ukulele at the Connecticut River, much to the mortification of people who pass by.

Earth Matters has been a project of the Hitchcock Center for the Environment for 15 years. HCE’s mission is to educate and to inspire action for a healthy planet. Our Living Building and trails are open to all at 845 West St. in Amherst. To learn more, visit hitchcockcenter.org.

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