Someday I will learn not to put forty-five pounds into a backpack and then decide it is a fine idea to carry that backpack three thousand feet uphill. Someday I will learn that there is a substantial difference between being prepared and preparing to survive the collapse of civilization. Someday I will learn that whiskey weighs considerably more when you are carrying it up a mountain than it does when it is sitting comfortably on a shelf. Today is not that day.

I stood at the bottom of the trail with the pack strapped to my back, the shoulder straps already digging into me, and looked up toward where I intended to spend the next week or so. Three thousand feet of elevation separated me from camp, which doesn’t sound like much when you say it quickly. Mountains have a way of making numbers dishonest. Three thousand feet is nothing on paper. Three thousand feet while carrying forty-five pounds is another matter entirely.

A friend of mine had offered some excellent advice when I told him what I was planning. “You only got to do it once.”

That was true, of course. I only had to carry everything up there one time. I was planning to stay for a week, so once I got it there, I would not have to carry it again until I was ready to leave. It was a perfectly reasonable argument, except that my friend had not been standing there wearing forty-five pounds of camping gear while staring at a mountain.

I shifted the pack. “You only got to do it once,” I muttered.

Then I looked up the trail. “Unfortunately, once is going to take a while.”

I started walking. For the first few hundred yards I still possessed the optimism of a man who had not yet suffered enough to become realistic.

The trail climbed through the trees, winding back and forth across the mountainside. The air was cooler than it had been below, and the smell of pine, dust, and dry earth hung in the air.

The whole place had that quiet mountain feeling that makes you believe you have made an excellent decision. Then the trail got steeper, and I stopped for a moment to look at what I had gotten myself into.

I looked at the trail, then at the pack hanging off my shoulders, and finally back down the mountain at the distance I had already covered.

“All right,” I said to nobody in particular. “That seems unnecessarily steep.”

The mountain, having no interest whatsoever in my opinion, declined to apologize, so I adjusted the pack and kept going.

After a while, I stopped again and adjusted the straps. There is a particular point during a long climb when a person begins believing that somewhere inside the backpack there must be an object responsible for all the suffering. You start taking inventory.

Food was necessary, as was water, and the sleeping bag certainly wasn’t optional. Clothes were probably necessary, and cooking gear seemed sensible enough. The tools had a purpose, too, although I was beginning to question how much of that purpose I really needed.

Then I remembered the two bottles of whiskey. I paused for a moment.

Those two bottles had suddenly become philosophical questions. At the bottom of the mountain they had seemed like a perfectly sensible addition.

At the halfway point they had become evidence that I was an idiot. But I knew perfectly well that once I got to camp, got settled in, built a fire, and finally sat down after spending a week in the mountains, those same two bottles were going to look like the wisest things I had ever packed.

I continued climbing.

Eventually the human mind adapts to carrying an unreasonable amount of weight. The body does not, but the mind does. Your shoulders still hurt. Your legs still complain. Your back begins drafting a formal letter to management.

But eventually, you stop asking whether you should have brought all this stuff and accept that you are now a mule. I had decided some time ago that I was finished with cabins used and maintained by other people.

The last time I did that, I ended up sharing a cabin with two people who had decided that the best way to enjoy the mountains was to continue fighting with each other. They fought about everything.

They fought about food. They fought about sleeping arrangements. They fought about who had done what. They fought about things I couldn’t understand, and after a while they fought about things I didn’t particularly care to understand.

I tried ignoring them, but that didn’t work. I tried staying out of the way, but that didn’t work either.

By the second day I had reached a simple conclusion: sleeping in my truck on the side of the road was considerably more peaceful than sharing a cabin with two people who could not stand each other.

So I left.

There are moments when a person discovers that civilization is overrated. There are also moments when a person discovers that the wilderness, despite its bears, cliffs, unstable mines, cold nights, lack of plumbing, and general indifference toward human comfort, is preferable to two people who have decided they hate each other but refuse to go home.

This time I wanted my own place, with quiet. I wanted to wake up without hearing somebody arguing about coffee.

I wanted to sit outside in the evening and listen to the wind instead of listening to somebody explain, for the fourth time, why the other person was wrong. Most of all, I wanted to be alone.

By the time I finally reached camp, the forty-five-pound backpack had achieved the approximate weight of a small automobile. I dropped it on the ground, where it landed with a heavy thump.

I stood there breathing hard. “That,” I said, “was stupid.”

Nobody answered.

I looked at the pack. “But we’re here.”

That was the important thing. I had made it.

The cabin was exactly what I wanted. It was half-collapsed, but the floor was sound, quiet, isolated, and, most importantly, empty.

Nobody was waiting inside to argue with me. Nobody was going to tell me I was doing something wrong.

Nobody was going to complain about the temperature, the food, the sleeping arrangements, or the fact that somebody had used the last of the coffee. I unpacked slowly.

There was no reason to hurry. After carrying forty-five pounds up three thousand feet, I had earned the right to move at the speed of a glacier.

One of the first things I had to deal with was water. I had found some that needed filtering, as mountain water might look clean, but appearances can be deceptive. Mountain streams have a wonderful habit of looking like bottled water while carrying all sorts of things a person would rather not have.

I set up the filter and started working. Then I looked around.

There was wood to cut. Of course there was.

A cabin may provide shelter, but it does not provide free firewood. Nature has a rather clever subscription system.

You get the cabin, but every evening you have to renew your membership by cutting wood. I picked up the tools and headed out.

The work felt good after the hike. It was tiring, but it was a different kind of tired. Hiking with a heavy pack had been a slow accumulation of misery. Cutting wood was honest work. You swung the axe, the wood split, and you knew exactly what you had accomplished.

After a while, I had a decent pile stacked near the cabin.

I sat down and looked around.

This was why I had come.

The mountain was quiet. The trees moved in the breeze, and nobody was arguing, shouting, or demanding anything from me.

I could hear myself think. That can be dangerous, but in this case it was pleasant.

I had also wanted to go back to the upper mines. I had been there the day before, but I hadn’t really done anything. I had gone up there, looked around, and returned without accomplishing much.

The main problem was that I hadn’t brought my hand-held pickaxe. It was an unfortunate oversight considering that I had gone to the old mine specifically to look at rocks.

It was like going fishing without a fishing pole. So I decided I would go back to the cabin and wait until the following day.

Most of the mines in the area were difficult to reach, and many of them were unstable. That meant I had no intention of wandering into every hole I found in the mountain.

Curiosity is useful; it is also why humans have warning labels. I have no interest in becoming the subject of a future safety lecture.

The next morning I gathered my tools and headed toward the upper mines. Without the forty-five-pound backpack, the mountain felt entirely different. My legs were still aware that I had climbed three thousand feet the previous day, but at least I wasn’t carrying half the contents of a hardware store.

The trail wound through the trees. In places it was easy to follow. In others it disappeared beneath rocks, branches, and loose soil.

The higher I climbed, the more isolated everything became. Now and then I stopped and looked back.

The country opened up below me in layers of ridges and valleys. Roads became thin lines. Buildings became dots. Everything looked peaceful from up there.

It is amazing how peaceful the world can look when you are too far away to hear anybody complaining.

Eventually I reached the upper mine workings. The first entrance was little more than a dark opening in the rock.

I stopped several feet away and looked inside. Nothing moved.

“That’s encouraging,” I said.

I took a step closer. Then another. I examined the ceiling and the walls.

The old workings had been there a long time. Timber had deteriorated. Rock had shifted. Parts of the entrance had collapsed. The mountain was slowly taking back what the miners had taken from it.

I decided I didn’t need to go inside. There are certain arguments a person cannot win.

You cannot argue with gravity, negotiate with falling rock, and you certainly cannot convince an unstable mine that you are merely visiting. I stayed outside and examined the exposed rock around the entrance instead.

Veins were running through it, cracks and fractures, and pieces of stone scattered across the ground. I picked up several fragments and turned them over in my hand.

Maybe something was interesting there, and maybe there wasn’t. That was part of the fun. I moved farther along the slope and found another old working, and this one was even harder to reach.

The trail disappeared completely in places. I had to pick my way across loose ground and around fallen timber. More than once I wondered whether I was actually investigating an old mine or simply inventing new ways to fall down a mountain.

When I finally reached the entrance, I stood there looking inside. The darkness seemed deeper than it had any business being. I examined the ground, then the ceiling, and finally my own common sense. My common sense won. “Absolutely not,” I said, and stepped back.

There was no reason to risk going inside when I could investigate the exposed rock outside. The mountain wasn’t going anywhere, and neither was I, if I continued making sensible decisions.

I took out the pickaxe. Now I was finally equipped for what I had come to do. I worked on some exposed rock near the entrance, breaking off small pieces and examining them. Nothing obvious. I struck again, and another piece came loose, but still nothing. I kept working. Rock does not surrender its secrets simply because you ask nicely.

The work was slow, but there was something satisfying about it. The mountain had been sitting there for thousands, perhaps millions, of years. I wasn’t going to uncover everything in an afternoon.

Eventually I sat down on a rock and looked back toward camp.

It was barely visible through the trees.

I thought about the previous day.

I had carried forty-five pounds three thousand feet up a mountain so I could spend the next several days cutting wood, filtering water, exploring old mines, and looking at rocks.

I laughed. “Well,” I said, “apparently this is what we’ve decided to do with our lives.”

The mountain remained silent. I pulled one of the rock samples from my pocket and turned it over. Maybe it was worthless, and maybe it wasn’t. That was enough. I put it back in my pocket and stood up.

The sun was beginning to drop lower, and I still had to make my way back to camp. There would be more wood to cut. There would be dinner to make. There would be water to filter. And there would, eventually, be the two bottles of whiskey waiting in the cabin.

I started down the trail. My legs were tired, my shoulders were still sore from the day before, and my hands were dusty, but I was smiling. This was the part I had been looking forward to—not finding gold or silver, and certainly not proving anything, but simply being somewhere quiet for a while.

There is something about getting away from everything that reminds a person how much unnecessary noise he has learned to tolerate. Down below, there were roads and traffic and telephones and people arguing about things that seemed very important until you couldn’t hear them anymore.

Up here there was wind, trees, old mines disappearing into the mountainside, and a cabin waiting at the end of the trail. There were also two bottles of whiskey that I had been foolish enough to carry three thousand feet uphill.

I knew I was enjoying them, but I also knew that when it came time to leave, I would have to carry the empty bottles back down. I stopped on the trail and thought about that for a moment.

“Well,” I said, “that’s tomorrow’s problem.”

Then I continued toward camp.

Someday I will learn to pack lighter. Someday I will learn that forty-five pounds at my age is too much, now.

Someday I will learn that two bottles of whiskey are probably one bottle more than any sensible man should carry three thousand feet uphill. But someday is not today; besides, I’m sure I’ll forget the struggle by the next trek.

Today I had a mountain, a half-fallen cabin, a pile of wood, some water, an old mine, a pickaxe, and a pocket full of rocks that might be worthless or might be interesting. And, for the moment, it was plenty.