The year was 2000. I spent Y2K with a group of friends I met in a hiking club in Atlanta, camped at Lake Hartwell, waiting to find out whether we were witnessing the dawn of a new era or the collapse of civilization as we knew it. January 1st rolled around. We were all still there. Nothing had happened.

Except something had. I had been bitten by the backpacking bug, and the obsession had only just begun.

Nearly every weekend that year had some version of an overnight trip planned and ready to execute. My new hiking buddies and I scoured trail guides with the devotion of people who had found religion, and every Friday afternoon we’d sit in Atlanta traffic… determined, slightly feral, heading back out into the wild no matter what the forecast said. “Winter Storm 2000,” as the local news station dramatically dubbed an epic ice and snow event, produced one of my more vivid early memories… three completely green hikers trudging through a winter wonderland, exchanging wide-eyed glances, wondering collectively what on earth we had gotten ourselves into. We survived. Barely. What we did not survive was a dry night… as rivers ran enthusiastically through our tent while we lay there in the dark, impatiently willing the sun to rise so we could scamper home and recover like the amateurs we absolutely were.

We immediately began planning the next trip.

Terrible conditions, it turns out, did not discourage me in the slightest. If anything, they lit something fierce. And a short time later, emboldened by a season of surviving my own bad decisions, I planned my very first solo backpacking trip.

I chose wisely, or at least wisely for me. An easy loop, just over eight miles, with a campsite tucked away, on a trail I had already day-hiked several times. The Gahuti Backcountry Trail at Fort Mountain State Park. Familiar enough to feel safe. Wild enough to matter. I had no idea that the girl who parked her car at that trailhead and the woman who walked back to it the following morning would be two entirely different people.

I was terrified.

Every sound after sundown was, without question, the opening scene of my demise. The crack of a branch. The rustle of something in the leaves. The ambient darkness doing exactly what darkness does when your imagination has been left entirely unsupervised. Was something out there? Was I going to become a cautionary tale? Did I pack everything I needed to survive a night alone in the middle of nowhere with no one within miles?

I did not sleep well.

What happened? Nothing. Absolutely, gloriously, anticlimactically nothing. The weather was perfect. Not a single creature showed even the faintest interest in making my acquaintance. I woke to sunshine and birdsong and the quiet, almost indignant realization that the forest had been perfectly safe all along. It was my own mind that had been the wilderness… loud, overgrown, and full of things that turned out not to be real, even in the slightest.

The fear didn’t disappear. It did, however, lose its authority.
Every night I spent outdoors after that, I carried a little more trust and a little less noise, until somewhere along the way, without a ceremony or a revelation or anyone handing me a certificate, I stopped being a woman who was afraid of the woods and became a woman the forest recognized. Not because I had found a guide or a mentor or taken a course that handed me the answers, but because I had earned it, slowly and imperfectly, through years of trial and error. (Mostly error, if I’m being totally honest.)

What I know now, standing on this side of nearly three decades in the backcountry, is that the fear was never really about the dark. It was about not knowing. And knowledge… real, hands-on, earned knowledge is the only thing that ever truly sets you free on the trail.

Fort Mountain State Park gave me my first taste of that freedom. And it still does.

If I had found a class like the one I am holding this May, I might have arrived at that freedom years sooner… with fewer rivers running through my tent and considerably more sleep. On May 9th at Fort Mountain State Park… the very place where this whole wild chapter of my life began… I am bringing together a small group of women for a full-day Backpacking Masterclass built on everything I wish someone had taught me. The hard-won wisdom, the gear knowledge, the safety skills, and the sacred understanding that the only thing standing between you and the woods is the belief that you are not yet ready.
You are. Come find out. LEARN MORE