Somewhere near Aberdeen, on the longest day of a five-thousand-mile run around the coast of Britain, Elise Downing met a man on a bicycle. His name was Christopher and he was a New Zealander over visiting his daughter in Scotland. He asked what she was doing. She told him. Christopher then cycled alongside her for the next 25 miles, singing sea shanties.
"It was a lot of sea shanties," she says. "But it was such a great day."
Without Christopher, that day would have been 40 miles of not-very-exciting trail that she would barely remember. With him, it is one of the sharpest memories she has from the whole trip. This is, in miniature, what solo adventures do: they make you available for the Christopher encounters in a way that being with other people, somehow, doesn't quite.
Elise and Kirsty Reade make an interesting pair to talk about solo adventuring, partly because their personalities sit in slightly different places on the spectrum of solitude — Kirsty's idea of the perfect evening on trail is a meal alone, reading a book, in bed by nine o'clock, and she describes this without apology — and partly because their entry points were so different. Kirsty started with cautious days out in familiar hills, building navigation skills, once sitting behind a rock in bad weather to cry before getting her compass out and solving it herself. Elise started by running around the coast of Britain with essentially no adventuring experience, because it didn't occur to her to ask someone else to come, because she didn't know how she would explain it to anyone.
Both of them arrive, from very different directions, at the same conclusion: that doing something entirely by yourself produces a particular kind of satisfaction that is not available any other way.
"The buck stops with you," Kirsty says. "You're never relying on somebody else to pull you along."
The Axe Murderer Problem
Before we get to the satisfaction, there is the fear. Both Elise and Kirsty talk about axe murderers, with the specific exasperation of people who know perfectly well the fear is irrational and experience it anyway. This turns out to be the right response. Kirsty references research by a runner called Keri Wallace, who looked into why people — especially women — are afraid of moving alone in the dark and concluded that the fear itself is entirely appropriate: it is the evolutionary survival instinct doing exactly its job. The problem is not having the fear. The problem is treating it as information rather than as overwhelming noise distracts you from the things that are actually dangerous.
The things that are actually dangerous, both of them agree, are navigation, weather, injury in remote terrain, and the consequences of overcommitting to a route when your body says otherwise. Elise's father, when people asked if he worried about her on the coast run, said he was far more worried about her walking home from the pub in the city. She found this, and still finds it, genuinely useful insight for putting her fears into perspective.
Her other risk management is blunter: she is very clumsy, falls over regularly, and has simply calibrated her solo trips accordingly. Technical terrain, remote ridge, no phone signal — she is more cautious than she would be with a partner. She has turned around on runs where she'd rather not.
"You get into trouble," she says, "when you're not willing to give up on something when it starts to feel dangerous."
She uses the balance beam analogy. The same balance beam that is trivial in a children's playground becomes impossible over the Grand Canyon. The action is the same. The consequence isn't. This is the framework: not just can I do this, but what happens if I can't, and where am I?
They both text someone before they go out. Elise texts her dad — the estimated return time, the get-worried time, what to do if she hasn't been in touch by then. Kirsty does the same. They both carry a map and compass regardless of whether they intend to use them, partly for navigation and partly, Elise admits, because if mountain rescue comes for you, you don't want them to find you without one.
Neither of them loves multi-day trips that require camping, for the same reason: heavy bags. Elise will camp if she has to and quite enjoys it; Kirsty would rather not. Both of them prefer hostels, bunkhouses, mountain huts, pubs with rooms — the infrastructure of the trail that keeps the pack light and puts a ceiling on how miserable a bad evening can be.
The only time Elise feels lonely is at the end of the day, when everyone else is chatting and she is sitting in the pub or the hostel dining room alone. During the day, doing the thing — not even a little bit. It is only the contrast that creates the feeling.
What It Actually Gives You
Kirsty completed all the Far Eastern Wainwrights alone one weekend — planned it herself, navigated herself, managed all the logistics — and has vivid memories of the whole thing. A few months later she did the Northern Wainwrights with friends, which was equally enjoyable, but the memories are less precise. She thinks this is because when you share the planning, the navigation, the problem-solving, each individual moment registers less intensely. When it's only you, every decision is yours, and that sharpens the whole experience.
Elise puts it differently. There is a moment at the end of a long day or a multi-day route — specifically, she says, when you can see the final summit and then come down from it to a pub or a café — when the feeling of having done it, alone, is unlike anything else she's found. She is reluctant to describe it in terms of reward because she doesn't believe in earning food or rest. But there is something at the end of a hard solo day, she says, where you sit down with a meal and think: I did it. And I didn't think I could. And that makes this taste amazing.
She experienced this over and over during her 5,000 mile run, although she is quick to add that nowadays it's much more a day out here and there, and she hasn't done anything like the coast run since. The principle is the same though. The Christopher encounters are available at any scale.
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For anyone thinking about doing their first solo trip, both of them say the same thing: keep one variable unfamiliar at a time. If going alone is already the stretch, don't also make the terrain unfamiliar and the distance ambitious and the navigation complex. Build slowly. Take a route you know a bit, in terrain that's comfortable, over a distance that doesn't feel frightening. Discover that it was fine. Then change one thing.
The summit, the descent, the pub at the bottom. That sequence is available sooner than people think - you can find it after just a few hours out.
