A desert hike through Joshua Tree with high tech
Finding solitude in Joshua Tree National Park — albeit with a satellite phone, GPS unit and locator beacon. Call it ‘e-survival.’
“Whoso walketh in solitude, and inhabiteth the wood . . . into that forester shall pass . . . power and grace.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
But what if I snap my ankle? Or blow a cardiac gasket? Or fall or get stuck on a mountain where I can’t go up or down, what climbers call getting “cliffed out”? What then, Ralph Waldo? I won’t give a tinker’s damn about power and grace then. I’m going to be looking for that orange-and-white rescue whirligig in the sky. Swing low, sweet Stokes litter.
Going solo into the backcountry — or on a sailboat around Catalina, or on a mountain bike in Moab, Utah, for that matter — always implies a trade-off, the exchange of safety for reverie. Nearly always, the risk is worth it, and for all the reasons Emerson made a career of. To be alone in big-N nature is to challenge yourself, to calibrate yourself, to fully inhabit the body you were born with, to feel the chill of the absolute run up your spine.
But things can go very wrong. The patron saint of doomed solitary rapture is Chris McCandless, the subject of last year’s film “Into the Wild,” based on the Jon Krakauer book. In 1992, the smart and charismatic McCandless marched into the Alaskan bush desiring nothing more than to disconnect from civilization utterly, a transcendentalist Garbo wanting to be alone. He never walked out.
It’s my life’s ambition not to be the subject of a Krakauer book. I have kids, a wife, a cat who’d miss me terribly. But sometimes, I want to be alone too. Why? Because I have kids, a wife, a cat etc.