Personal Narrative: Into The Wild

One warm august night my sister Ellie and I watched the film Into the Wild. The story of Chris

McCandless reconnecting with nature and going out on his own was profound to me. My mom was an avid hiker when she was younger and even climbed Mount Olympus, but as she’s gotten older and kids and life have taken over hiking hasn’t been much of priority. After the movie ended I told her I wanted to go on a short backpacking trip by myself before I had to go back to school and immediately my ten year old sister wanted to come with me. I agreed and we spent the next twenty four hours planning, packing and figuring out exactly where we were going. This was my first overnight hike alone and it was Ellie’s first real backpacking trip. I wanted

This was the first time when I realized I may have really pushed her into something she couldn’t do. But after a few minutes and some water, food and my best attempt at a pep talk we were back on the trail. Around noon after about three hours of hiking we came to a rocky clearing. We sat and ate some lunch. It was the first time had seen something other than forest for the last 12 hours and it gave us the motivation to keep going. We were close. Or so we thought. Brown 3

Ellie and I hiked on for two more grueling hours. The sun got hotter, the incline steeper and the breaks more frequent. After six hours of hiking we had finally reached Camp Tony. I felt such a wave of relief that we had made it and that we had decided to camp at the Greywolf. We sat at camp tony for a while, ate some snacks and then, with the end in sight started to the Slab Camp trailhead. We came to a point where the trail forked. Without seeing any signs leading us in a clear direction I decided to continue on going straight. After about half an hour of walking the trail turned into bush. Nervousness quickly turned into panic and I decided we would turn back and take the second fork. We reached the split in the trail