Three benefits of a hiking buddy:
- Another set of shoulders to carry the load.
- A conscience when you are about to do something needlessly stupid.
- Someone to outrun in case of a bear attack.

Things can very quickly go wrong in the wild. A buddy can do for you what no other piece of gear can: they can call for help when you are unable to do so. Aron Ralston and Bill Jeracki would still have their limbs had they decided that a buddy was an essential piece of gear.

And now, a cautionary tale:

Years ago when I was much younger and dumber, I went on a three-day, solo, ultralight hike in the Santiam Wilderness in Oregon. I think my pack weighed under 15 pounds, and that's counting food and fuel. The only flashlight I had was on my Swiss Army knife, which also happened to be my only sharp. For shelter I had a bivy-sack sewn from Tyvek and a space blanket for warmth. I think the heaviest piece of gear I carried was a water filter, because I'm too impatient to wait for tablets to do their work.

It was wonderful. I didn't see another human being for three whole days! I don't think I've ever felt quite as free and easy as I felt when that Oh-my-God-I-just-climbed-four-miles-in-one-hour feeling set in. It's amazing what you can do when you abandon sanity and charge head-long at the wild.

But when I arrived at Chimney Peak ahead of schedule, I decided to climb it. There was a trail most of the way up, but it got progressively more wild as I neared the top. On the way down, I lost the trail.

That area of the Santiam Wilderness is basically two halves of a large ravine leading down to the headwaters of the Santiam. By the time I was able to find a landmark after scrambling my way down the peak, I had completely separated myself from any reasonable hope of returning to the trail without some rope.

What followed was a day-long scramble following a tributary down into the ravine, slogging wet through the creek as I descended about 1500 feet over the space of about a mile. I camped at the river that night, completely exhausted.

On day two I waded several miles up the river, and then scrambled up the other side of the canyon only to find a critical bridge that I had intended to cross had been washed out by a storm earlier in the year.

Then I attempted to follow a deer trail over the mountain and quickly got rather hopelessly lost. With night approaching I stupidly began to run, hoping I could find a vantage point to get a bearing. I lost the light, and it was overcast, so with no other alternatives, I settled in on a ledge, made my peace with God about perhaps not getting home, and tried to get some rest in the rain.

That night my pack was visited by a large mammal with big teeth. I'm not certain it was a bear -- I just woke to a very loud, very mushy chewing of my rucksack. I grabbed the safety whistle on my neck and nearly hyperventilated while blasting it until those deep, moist sounds moved on down the hill before I drifted off to sleep again.

In the morning I woke to clear skies and found Chimney Peak mocking me from across the ravine. I took a bearing, picked my way across the hillside, and found the Forest Service road I had intended to walk out on. I actually arrived at my designated pick-up location well-ahead of my ride.

I wouldn't trade the experience that I had, especially considering that one of the imponderables that became crystal clear that night on the ledge was that I hadn't told my girlfriend that I loved her, and that I deeply wished I had. I later did, and today we're married. Given that I'd rather be with her than without her, I won't go it alone in the wild again without a buddy.

I know that I was both overconfident and under-prepared when I left for that trip. While I was an experienced hiker, my youth led me to accept some unnecessary risks. I deviated from my plan just over one hour into day one. I made increasingly foolish decisions until I had a clear-headed moment at daybreak on day three. Any number of times, particularly during the jaunt down the ravine, I could have fallen and knocked myself unconscious and been unable to get out of there. Even if I had been carrying proper gear, even if I had stayed on course, if something critical and debilitating had happened to me, I wouldn't have come home alive.