Eventually, I went into the woods enough that I stopped being afraid

August 25, 2024 2:18 AM

I had spent countless nights in the woods consciously and subconsciously adjusting my relationship to danger: preparing for it, tempering it, overthinking it, underthinking it, ignoring it. But no matter how desensitized we had become, the more time spent in the woods, the more of a numbers game you play with injury, weather, wildlife, exposure. Just because you don’t recognize the danger, it doesn’t mean it’s not there. from Danger on the Divide by Maggie Slepian [Longreads]
posted by chavenet (22 comments total)

I really hate how much she beats herself up for not taking care of him. He always chose to ride ahead of her even though they would end the day together having done the same mileage, meaning that she didn't know anything about how he was feeling during the day (and he didn't know how she was feeling either). He had apparently been very ill for weeks and hadn't said a word to her. He certainly wasn't taking care of her or himself. She did the best she could with the information he allowed her to have.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:39 AM on August 25 [13 favorites]

7/5—67 miles. Out of the fucking Great Basin. Did the 19 miles to Atlantic City on fumes. We got lunch at the mercantile

reading this essay felt like going through an obstacle course. not in a bad way, more like "hmm...what's the great basin" *clicks internet* "oh, interesting, bristlecone pines can live 4,000 years [wiki]" off to learn about this tree, enjoy the bike ride
posted by HearHere at 5:13 AM on August 25 [1 favorite]

I really empathize with the author and I think everything she says is true, but the framing irks me. Yes, backcountry recreation has risks no matter what choices you make but it's clear from the story (and she acknowledges this!) that the biggest risk by far was their dishonest communication. A 4 mile day hike can be dangerous if you're having poor/dishonest communication with your partner. I feel like there was a "oooh the woods will eventually get you no matter what" vibe that grated on me. I'm not saying this just to be critical, she had a difficult experience and her anxieties around the sort of macho (for lack of a better word) backcountry attitudes are very common, human, and understandable. But I feel like the takeaway shouldn't be "oh the woods are risky but normies will be fine because it's being out in the backcountry that really makes things dangerous." Normies should work on honest communication too!
posted by Wretch729 at 5:37 AM on August 25 [8 favorites]

A large part of her problem was him.
posted by whatevernot at 5:39 AM on August 25 [11 favorites]

He always chose to ride ahead

This is (almost) always a selfish move. Especially in this do-it-together experience. I've been that guy who has more in the tank, who's always half-wheeling your partner, who's convinced that riding your own pace is the answer. But it's not. It's just being selfish. It's just putting your own pettiness above what you should know to be the right thing to do.

Pride. Individualism. Not knowing how to be a friend. This whole piece feels so lonely. So cold. I was bikepacking for 5 nights with 4 friends on the north shore of Lake Superior this summer. We rode no more than 80 kms (50 mi) a day. We rode together. We managed to find beer and burgers and good times everyday. Shout out to John from Minneapolis who backed his truck into our campsite on the last night and shared his beer with us.

I've wanted to do the Divide, have friends who've done more than half of it, but had to quit for physical reasons, as in this story. I don't know what I'm even trying to say right now, but I think it's about motivation. You have to know why you're doing it to know why you're keeping on. It has to be right. It has to keep you focused and alert. It has to keep you together - whether it's burgers and beers or bragging rights. (And probably being motivated by bragging rights isn't a good call.)
posted by kneecapped at 6:12 AM on August 25 [11 favorites]

A large part of her problem was him.

It's kind of heartbreaking that she can't see that.
posted by mhoye at 6:36 AM on August 25 [7 favorites]

The GDMBR is one of those bucket list things for me and I always enjoy reading about it so thanks for posting this chavenet! Even if in this case it wasn't a happy story, but struggling is part of it.

About the only benefit I could see to Matt riding ahead is if he was setting up camp in the evening and taking it down in the morning to give Maggie more time to ride and even then they could ride together most of the day and he could just take off in the last hour or so and would still have more than enough time to at least get a good start to everything by the time she rolled in. I'm sure if he was doing that Maggie would have mentioned it in the article so yeah he's just being selfish and a bit weird.

My main riding buddy can't go as fast or far as me and when we ride together we do it at his pace, and I try to make sure he actually paces himself so that he doesn't use up his energy too soon. He feels bad about "slowing me down" but I've explained to him that I enjoy riding with him and I can and do go for solo rides at my pace and that we're not in a race so time/speed doesn't matter (and even when we are in a race I'm not going to win the thing and am just there to enjoy myself). About the most I'll get ahead of him is if we're going up a long hill I'll sometimes get to the top and then get my camera out to take some pictures or look for some berries on the side of the road, otherwise I'm beside him shouting motivational phrases. When I was in highschool I did a trip with friends and we would stop at the top of every big hill to regroup and have a snack if needed. No one wants to slow the group down but if we're stopping anyway it takes some of the pressure off whoever's at the back.

I did a solo bikepacking trip 2 weeks ago and the schedule was kind of like theirs, wake up early, spend the whole day riding with some small breaks, get into camp, crash, and do it again the next day. As I was doing it I was thinking about how to do another trip with either my buddy or family and one of the main things I figured was that the riding would be radically shorter, basically 5-6 hours including breaks and getting into camp early so that there's time to do stuff like go for a swim. So doing it party pace and not race pace. I get that in TFA they were going more at race pace but that should have been at Maggie's pace then not the "we're each doing our own race everyday" thing they were doing.

Also, with Matt getting both giardia and campylobacter it sounds like either his filter broke or he drank some unfiltered water. I wonder if they each took a filter or if they just shared one. One filter with tablets as backup would sound reasonable to me. Either way with only him getting it something was definitely up with his water system.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 7:56 AM on August 25 [10 favorites]

I feel like there was a "oooh the woods will eventually get you no matter what" vibe that grated on me.

Yeah, there are some risks that are statistically unlikely rolls of the dice (i.e. mountain lion attack) that you can't do much to prevent, at best you can be prepared to mitigate the damage the best you can (learn first aide, have an InReach, etc.). But this was a case of two people pushing their bodies to an extreme extend that was not sustainable. A key to staying safe is being emotionally ok/able to call it quits or adjust your expectations. Early on in the trip when the author was struggling to meet their mileage goals, they could have just accepted that they weren't going to finish the full trail instead of deciding to not to have days off.

Out of curiosity, I checked her Instagram. For this route, she provided updates to followers every 500 miles. The comments on her posts include:

"You are amazing ❤️" (when she admits to passing out from heat exhaustion)
"You guys are making good time!"
"You guys are crushing it."
"What a fun adventure." (this on her last post, before he's hospitalized)

She gets a bit into how she's worried how people will perceive what happened to them, given that outdoor adventure is their careers, but it seems like the pressure to produce content that is both hardcore but ultimately positive is part of the problem. I see that another Longreads piece by her is called "I nearly died drowning: This is what it's like to survive."
posted by coffeecat at 9:20 AM on August 25 [8 favorites]

Also, with Matt getting both giardia and campylobacter it sounds like either his filter broke or he drank some unfiltered water. I wonder if they each took a filter or if they just shared one. One filter with tablets as backup would sound reasonable to me. Either way with only him getting it something was definitely up with his water system.

I thought the same thing. Did she have their only filter? Was being ahead so important to him that he didn't take time to adequately treat his water?
posted by hydropsyche at 9:31 AM on August 25 [2 favorites]

I feel like this is one of those common situations where it's easy to conflate two aspects when it's important that they are distinct - sort of an individual morality versus public health situation.

All this stuff about whether they communicated well, whether he should have biked with her, etc - that's individual morality. Up to a point we can't know - for all we know, their communication was more about her issues than his, or one of them recently lost a parent, or or or...Maybe he got giardia not because of them failing to communicate but because of bad luck. All that it's possible to say is, "you are safer when you communicate well and plan your trip to support each participant".

Separately, it's probably a bad idea to go out into remote areas without a way to communicate for help. Appendicitis or an infected blister or a hitherto unknown heart problem or, god knows, a bear attack don't care if you're a good communicator. You can't guarantee that you'll be communicating well with your partner, but you can virtually guarantee that you can communicate for help in an emergency. Material preparations backstop the interpersonal stuff.

Lastly, if I personally had a truck in the woods and there were two unknown adults and one of them was desperately sick, I would leave my family and gear with the other adult and drive the sick one out, then return. That would be horribly unpleasant, I grant you, but I can't imagine someone coming to me and saying "my partner is really sick, we have no way to bike out, can you give us a ride" and just saying no.
posted by Frowner at 9:44 AM on August 25 [11 favorites]

I used to do a bunch of ultramarathon riding, and remember doing a 1000k on Vancouver Island riding from Victoria to Port Hardy and back. There were three of us on the ride, but one, Ken, was a ferociously strong rider and left us behind within minutes of starting off. I wound up spending most of it with this retired British police officer, B, but also right before setting out I had some upset going on with my stomach. At first, I thought it was just nerves and would settle down but over time it kept getting worse and worse. I remember, on our first night, B and I split a hotel room in Woss, and when I woke up with more stomach cramps, I told B to leave without me. I wanted to DNF the ride and abandon, but then came the question of how I'd get back to civilization. There were no buses that I knew of. No taxis. I'd have to ride my bike anyway, and if I had to ride my bike, I might as well continue the journey. I don't know why that made sense, but it did.

Eventually I caught up to B just before Port McNeill. He had gotten a flat tire and was just finishing repairing it, and he said that he was glad that I was continuing. It gets awful lonely on rides like this. My stomach started getting better, and I could start eating for real again. Eventually, we made it to Port Hardy and turned around and headed 500km south back to Victoria. There was a tailwind and I felt like I had turned a corner.

There's a beauty in being in a place this remote. With no city lights and few cars, the nighttime landscape was glowing and magical. Shooting stars flared across the sky and the Milky Way would glow overhead. We got delayed by a herd of elk the size of horses crossing the highway like a freight train of hooves and horns.

However, B, kept getting flats, and while it was frustrating, I stuck with him because he waited for me after Woss; and while it was tempting to leave him behind -- particularly when he got a flat all of five miles away from the end of the ride, I realized that getting in earlier wouldn't make a difference. This wasn't a race. There's no prize for finishing early. Might as well finish together.

This is all to say, that I have a lot of sympathy for the folks on this ride. It's so easy to think that you could just power through stomach issues, and it does have a certain ambiguity around whether it's a temporary thing that trips you up or a sign of something worse. and it's also hard to tear oneself away from the beauty of the wilderness.

---

A few years later, a rock climber friend once said to me, "you're always 5 sketchy choices away from getting yourself killed, and your first sketchy choice is to go rock climbing." That's partially based on the way that so many rock climbing accidents aren't about one stupid choice or unlucky moment; but about multiple small manageable risks building up into a situations that exposes you into real peril.

1. you choose to go bikepacking
2. you choose to leave your satphone behind
3. you choose to persist despite having some digestive issues
4. you continue with this choice as the digestive issues linger and cause real starvation and dehydration in you
5. you choose to go on into a remote area with little support

ok, now you're very likely to die.

And the thing that I find valuable with this sort of budgeting is that when I plan a trip, it makes me consider how I can only take on/manage 3 risky things. ("Do I go alone or with friends?" "Do we go when the weather is unstable?" "Do we camp somewhere that is more than a day's travel from civilzation?) and if that prevents me from planning the trip that I want, then I have to take one of those risks off the table. And, if a new problem arises (injury, digestion, poor trail conditions, etc.) then I can only afford to handle one of those complications and need to adapt my plan to take other risks off the table or opt for abandoning the trip.

Yes, of course, it is possible to get killed by making one risky choice. You could get in a car accident on the way to the trail. You could injure yourself pretty badly. The 5 sketchy choices aren't a guarantee against doing dumb shit, but it is a good framework for managing all of those small risk tradeoffs, and either knowing when to stop or to recognize when you really did wave away most of your safety net and if stuff goes south on you now, it's going to go south in a really terrible way.
posted by bl1nk at 10:21 AM on August 25 [24 favorites]

I didn’t know there was a living exemplar of “what kind of asshole leaves his romantic and adventure travel partner alone in the dust in the wilderness day after day instead of sharing the journey together” but I guess humanity is more varied than I thought.
posted by seanmpuckett at 12:55 PM on August 25 [6 favorites]

I won’t ever date someone who even walks slightly ahead of me anymore (I’ve always thought it was rude as hell but for some reason put up with it a number of times?). I can’t fathom. This is a worthwhile story to tell for this level of danger but it is really not her fault and it’s heartbreaking to get the impression that she thinks so.
posted by jeweled accumulation at 4:32 PM on August 25 [6 favorites]

Endurance sports are really popular nowadays, and one thing folks should remember is that those sports are catabolic, vs anabolic. A few years ago, I saw some blogpost about health effects of through hiking and it was all bad -- not just muscle loss but also some other health indicators foudn in bloodwork. I'm not saying don't do it, I'm saying folks need to be adequately prepared for the downside health impacts.

Seconding all the other folks saying that the her partner was a huge part of the problem. I don't understand why he insisted on going ahead.
posted by wuwei at 4:47 PM on August 25 [1 favorite]

Are the people in this thread who think Mike is an asshole for biking in front of her bikers? I know with running some paces are uncomfortable even though going a bit faster or slower is fine, I feel like biking could be similar?
posted by hermanubis at 5:24 PM on August 25 [1 favorite]

Yes. Pedalling harder unloads your arms so you can lean farther forward with less upper body strain/stress. Nevertheless, you can adjust your seat position fore/aft until your are comfortable for the pace you want. I guess for some assholes, it would sure suck to have to sit two centimetres farther forward and slightly more upright just so you could trivially keep pace with your friend/lover for the weeks it takes to travel through the rugged terrain far from civilization, all alone except for what you two carry.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:31 PM on August 25 [2 favorites]

Bikes used on rides like this have an extensive set of gears. Given a target speed, there is a gear that will allow the rider to match any chosen level of effort to achieve it. Similarly for cadence. I guess a person might insist on a certain cadence and power output, but that really feels like race training territory to me. And partner / group bikepacking is, or at least imo should be, very different from race training.

You don't have to be at an elite performance level to experience a mismatch in preferred pace. I would guess most Americans experience that at some point in their lives. Take away the bicycle specific and just about everybody has. Heck, my wife and I compromise on both our running and our bicycling pace every time we do either together. Because we're together.
posted by dbx at 5:45 PM on August 25 [2 favorites]

Is it really not the standard protocol in bikepacking that you only go as fast as the slowest team member? I'm only basing this on the one semi-serious mountain walk I did years ago - but the most experienced and fittest person in the group walked behind or within sight of the slowest member of the party the whole trip. (As I was usually the slowest member of the party, and I didn't much like the most experienced guy, this was kind of frustrating - but years later I remember it, and respect him for it, especially as he would have been, at his own pace, running up the mountain.)
posted by happyfrog at 1:46 AM on August 26 [3 favorites]

in my experience, one case where cycling groups tend to get broken up is with ascents. Yes, you could adjust your gears to keep pace with slower members of the group, but you're sacrificing a lot of efficiency in order to do that. Plus there can be cases where you're both completely bottomed out with your gear range and pedaling at the lowest possible gear up a climb and the person with longest legs will inevitably pull ahead and away. With hiking you can take micro-rests on a climb to stay behind the slowest member of a pace line, but that doesn't really work in cycling.

I get why people are upset at the guy, but I don't know the terrain, so I hesitate to cast judgement on this particular part of the behavior. You should make an effort to stick together on endurance rides like this, if only to talk and keep isolation at bay, but in my experience, there are still significant periods of solitude that come up when going through mountainous terrain. The fact that she describes Matt waiting for her before making a navigation turn is good behavior, though.
posted by bl1nk at 4:18 AM on August 26 [1 favorite]

I’ve know people to say, “I’m so sorry, this is all my fault,” when they mean the opposite. The subtext is, “The only way one could construe this as my fault is through a very flimsy contortion, so please own up to it.”

I do wonder if there’s an element of that in the framing of this story. Of course you’re going to be as charitable as possible, but the facts are plain.
posted by lostburner at 11:17 AM on August 26 [1 favorite]

In long distance backpacking, it not at all unusual for people to hike separately from their hiking partner, only meeting up at the end of the day. I've even seen it happen with couples who are sharing gear, which may sound crazy, because what if you don't manage to meet up, but it still happens, and if gear isn't being shared and the hiking partner isn't someone you are dating, you might not even worry too much if they don't manage to make it to camp that night. You can always meet up in town, hiking with someone else can be intense, people might want some solitude, and the trail is long. I've seen multiple "how to thruhike" guides mention this as something you talk about with your partner *before* the trip, because managing expectations is important to remaining friends. It's one way a long distance trip on an established trail might differ from a shorter trip, guided trip, or full on wilderness expedition.

Both of these people are experienced at long distance trips, so I wouldn't immediately leap to "OMG, what a selfish jerk" when he rides on ahead. "What do we do if our cycling rate is different?" is very likely something was discussed during trip planning, and even though she felt pressure to go faster and it may have affected their communication, that may be more of a "how can we manage the stress of long distance cycling better next time?" sort of situation than a "what an asshole" situation.

Not carrying an inreach when they had one seems like the primary mistake here, and I love, love, love that the guy who helped them used his to rescue someone else. Based on what I've heard hikers say, it is much more common to rescue someone else than yourself when you have one. (I carry one for the tracking, and also because the ability to book motels and arrange rides from anywhere is astoundingly useful. Rescue is way down on the list.)
posted by surlyben at 12:00 PM on August 26 [3 favorites]

"OMG, what a selfish jerk"

Ms kneecapped and I ride and hike and xc ski together quite regularly and on shorter one or two hour outings on known trails, being alone and going our own pace is absolutely good for us - not selfish and good for training. But when you're out for the day, or for a few nights, or more, I've come to accept that the risk-reward ratio of riding your own pace vs riding a pace everyone can keep just doesn't make sense for safety: physical. mechanical, and emotional.

One of you will have a problem on the trail, and when you're alone with a problem things get amplified fast - in all the ways. When you're together you also have to work on the mental/emotional space you're building together, and it's in your own interest to keep each other from feeling crappy, or to notice that one of you is having a string of rough days. That's good work. It is hard, for sure, but there's a better chance you're both aware of what's going well and what isn't, if you stay together.

I've ridden away from a close friend who said he was turning around because he was too sick to continue. He insisted I go on and finish the loop (northern Ontario logging roads, about 180 kms) and meet him back at a motel in the town we started in. I had a miserable and weird and lonely and vulnerable day on my bike. It all worked out, but I feel shitty about it in just about every way, except for the Strava map. And frankly, that's cold comfort. I should have turned around and spent the day with him watching TV in the motel.

So yeah, bring the sat-phone, but also, take care of one another.
posted by kneecapped at 12:55 PM on August 26 [4 favorites]