I do a lot of backpacking trips by myself, and when I talk about this with people, they often look at me like I am crazy. Then in one way or another ask me what I am going to do if something were to go wrong? I haven’t had a lot go wrong, but this time I did.

The objective was to do the southern end of the Sinkyone Wilderness trail, which is an area just north of Fort Bragg along the Northern California coast. I did the northern end of this trail a month prior and this was going to be my trip to complete the whole thing. It is a little more than a four hour drive to the trailhead from my house. Once off Hwy 1, it is seven miles on a sketchy dirt road to get to where I will begin the hike. I get to where I think the trailhead is, get out of my car, pull up the digital map on my phone, and I notice that I passed it a little bit. So I get back in my car, go to start it to drive a little closer to it, and lo and behold, it doesn’t start. I am tens of miles from any cell service, so I know that if I can’t get my car to start down here, I am going to be in a real pickle. Not only that, but the road was so rough getting in here that I am not sure if a tow truck would even be willing to come down here. I had a feeling it was most likely my starter, so I decided that before I started trying to get help I would wait about twenty minutes and try again and see if it would start, so I do that a few times, and I still can’t get it to start. So as I am sitting there, letting the reality of my situation settle in, I think, “ok, I know there is a trick where you can hit on the starter and get it to start, so I’ll try to do that before I start calling for help.” Only problem is, I don’t know where the starter is, so I’m going to have to find someone that knows a little about cars. Luckily it was a Sunday, so there were quite a few people down here. I stop someone in a big Toyota Tundra who seemed to know quite a bit about cars and agreed to try to help me. We try to jump it just to make sure it is not the battery, doesn’t work, and he looks around a bit to see if he can find my starter. He can’t find it and just gives up and says, “sorry man, I’ve done all I can.” He drives off and now it is starting to seem more bleak. I had just gotten a satellite communicator a month prior and had hardly used it, and at this point, I think to myself, “well, I think it’s time to pull out my satellite communicator and see if my wife can try to get someone to help me.” I send her a message to call Sinkyone State park to see if they can get a Ranger out, and the message isn’t going through, so now I am starting to panic a little bit. I’m sitting in my car with my hood up, and another guy driving by in a Subaru sees me, stops and asks if I need help, I tell him what’s going on and he starts to try and figure out where the starter is to see if we can bang on it to get it to start. He finds it, it is at the very bottom of the car and we have to pull off this plastic covering at the bottom to get to it. We get it off, he bangs on it while I try to start it… nothing. I am thinking now, “well, I have done all I can to try to get my car to start, my messages to my wife aren’t going through, I don’t know what else to do now, how long am I going to be stuck down here before I finally get out.” The guy in the Subaru is super empathetic and says, “dang man, I was really hoping we could get it to start, if I had room in my car I would give you a ride out of here.” I’m thinking, “I have plenty of food and water to last me a while, my best option would be to get a park ranger or a police officer down here to try and find a tow truck that can get me and my car out of here.” So I tell him, “thanks for all your help, I’ll be alright, if you can just call the sinkyone state park or the police and let them know I’m down here that would be helpful.” He says, “Ok yeah for sure, as soon as I have cell service I’ll call them and let them know.” He leaves, and I am thinking, “I guess all I can do now is hope that guy gets a hold of the right people to get me out of here.” I look at my satellite communicator and it says, “unable to send message, make sure device has clear view of the sky.” So I put it on my roof, and then finally the message goes through, and I’m like, “aw thank God, finally some good news.”

I am finally able to communicate with my wife, and she is able to get a hold of the state park to send a Ranger to me. It takes about two hours until the Ranger comes, I tell her what has all unfolded, and she says, “there is one guy who is willing to come down here and get your car out, he is expensive, but he is the only guy in the area that will do it, and he also kind of does it at his own convenience.” The price tag didn’t bother me too much, I figured whatever tow truck that was willing to get me out of here was going to be expensive, I was just thankful there was someone willing. It’s starting to get kind of late on a Sunday, no mechanic shop is open right now anyway, I have the means to stay the night out here, so I tell the Park Ranger if she can see if the tow truck driver can come in the morning. She says, “yeah I can get service not too far away, I’m going to drive to where I can get cell service, call the tow truck driver and I’ll come back to tell you what he says. Try to stay in this area.” So she drives off, and I have to just sit and wait for her to come back. It takes about an hour for her to return, and she tells me, “I got a hold of the tow truck driver, he will come in the morning to get you, I will tell your wife what is happening and get her in contact with the driver, she will have to coordinate with him to find a mechanic shop in Fort Bragg to tow it to that hopefully has the soonest availability to fix your car.” I thank her, and I am ever so grateful we were able make it as far as we did. She drives off and that’s it for the day. Now it is time to make camp somewhere, try to get some sleep, and see what adventures await in the morning.

The next morning I wake up at sunrise, which is about 6am, make some coffee and reflect on the events of the trip thus far and what the rest of this adventure may look like. I anticipate the driver may be here around 8 or 9, so I want to make sure I am at my car around then with all my stuff packed up and ready to go. I spend all morning sitting around and wondering if and when this guy is going to show up. 9:00 rolls around, no sign of him yet. 10:00, no big deal yet, 11:00, then 12:00 rolls by and now I’m starting to worry. Left in the middle of nowhere with very little communication with the world, all I can do is sit, wait, and hope. Close to 1:00 he finally shows up. My first thought is, “oh thank God, he’s here.” My second thought is, “we will be at the mechanic shop so late now there is probably a very slim chance my car gets fixed today.” Albeit though, I am at least so thankful to finally be making it out of here with my car. Getting into the cab of that tow truck and starting the drive out was such a surreal feeling that I will never forget.

It is a two hour drive to the mechanic shop in Fort Bragg, so we end up getting there around 3:30 – 4. I say bye to the tow truck driver, tell him “thank you so much, I’m so glad I made it out of there,” then go talk to the mechanic, and he tells me what I am already suspecting, “we won’t be able to fix your car until the morning.” Which means, “its time for a new adventure of finding somewhere to sleep.” I have all my backpacking gear, so maybe I’ll just find a campground? Do I really want to spend money on a motel when this tow and repair is going to cost me an arm and a leg? I walk to a few campgrounds that were near the mechanic shop and the cheapest one I could find was 45 dollars, which seemed steep to me, so I decided to just keep walking. I spend my whole evening just walking around Fort Bragg looking for somewhere to sleep like a homeless person. Every time I walked into a store with my big ole backpack on with my sleeping bag hanging on the bottom, I felt like people were looking at me like, “who is this guy? Is he homeless? Some kind of drifter, vagabond?” It was a strange experience. After walking around for hours, I settled on a spot at a disc golf course close to the beach to spend the night. I spent my time here a little anxious that I was going to have the cops called on me and told I can’t camp here and get chased off, but luckily, none of that happened.

The next morning I woke up and decided I would make the most of my time here and walk around all the beaches of Fort Bragg. I had never been to this part of California so I was excited to see what the beaches were like here. As I am walking around the city, there was always a suspicion that maybe it wasn’t the starter that was the problem with my car and what if I end up having to spend another night here? So the whole time I am walking around the city and the beaches, I am thinking to myself, “ah man, if I end up having to stay another night here, I’m staying here for sure.” Living like a homeless person in the unknown of what my next couple days were going to be like became exciting, and I began to thrive in it. And the sights I got to see that day were amazing, I loved all the rocky, cliffy beaches that are in that part of the State. But that afternoon, I got the call from the mechanic shop that my car was done, and the adventure was coming to an end. I got my car, it started beautifully, and I decided to hit a couple waterfalls in the Redwoods near Fort Bragg that I had a found a while ago on my way home, and that was it.

So I didn’t have the adventure that I thought I was going to have, but I still had one. I heard the founder of Patagonia say in a documentary, “many people think of an adventure as taking a nice trip somewhere or having a fun experience in nature, but no, an adventure is when things go wrong.” I have never forgotten that quote, and I am always reluctant to use that word – adventure, because of it. The moment I went to turn my key and my car wouldn’t start, I thought to myself, “well I guess I am having a different kind of adventure.” Not knowing how or when I was going to make it out of the Sinkyone Wilderness, the uncertainty if anyone was really coming to get me, the unknown of how long I would be stuck in Fort Bragg, and where I was going sleep every night that I was there… that was an adventure. That was a trip I will never forget, and all the feelings that came with it that made it such a roller coaster of a ride will always be with me. My first couple days home, there was almost a longing to be back there, back in the thick of the unknown, for there is nothing like it.