It had been 11 days since I took my first step south. I made rules: never look back, never calculate fractions of distance, only break for food every ten miles. No music until after 4 p.m. Tent before dinner. Always. I made conversation with day hikers and mountain bikers. The older men asked if I was solo, wondered how many weeks I was planning to take. They raised their eyebrows in disbelief. I hated that.

I relished in the fire of ripping skin from drained blisters, the ache of my ribcage against frozen alpine tundra at night. The world was raw and beautiful, and everything vibrated with vitality. I was alone.

His trail name was Road Dog. Road Dawg? Roaddog?

I met him in Twin Lakes, a little village flanked by Mt. Elbert and La Plata, shrouded in fine windblown silt and smoky violet. Fire season. Mile 165. I had rebraided my hair before entering the inn and wiped the dirt from my face with my shirtsleeve. My pack leaned against my chair. The early light made my black coffee shimmer.

From the table behind me came a voice, gravelly and lax, asking whether I was on the Colorado or the Continental Divide Trail. I turned to face the source.

Our discussion began ritualistically: talk of water sources, the welcome warming of the nights, and praise for the real food before us. When I spoke, I heard my own voice secondhand.

He had come from the south. Desert and cow shit in the water and sleeping through the heat of the day and hiking through dusk into darkness. He had crossed the worst of the snowpack before Creede, lived a lifetime in 64 days, and now was almost halfway from Mexico to Canada. He told me that when he reached the terminus, he would cut west through Oregon—homeward—as long as the weather held.

I mentioned the rip in my sleeping bag. He demanded to repair it and knelt on the floor between our tables as I looked on. His hair was sun-bleached ginger, gathered at the nape. His earlobes dangled, loosened by gauge scars. His enthusiastic responses to my questions were preluded by long and careful consideration, to the point of my slight discomfort. This gave our conversation a spastic rhythm, punctuated by the clatter of dishes and the whisper of nylon as he patched my bag’s gash with flesh-toned KT tape.

We spent the rest of the morning in front of the Twin Lakes General Store. Every half hour or so, a smudge appeared near the stream connecting the lakes, growing in size and clarity until a newcomer stood before us. First there was Big Maroon and his elderly blue heeler. Then Zamboni, who sported colorful beads in his long blond dreadlocks and spoke with a feminine musicality. All greeted Road Dog with familiarity and something akin to reverence.

Low whistles. “You’re a machine, man!”

Noticing my curiosity, Big Maroon explained that the San Juan snowpack had proved formidable. To substantiate this point, he pulled up his pant leg, revealing an impressive abrasion from a failed glissade on rough firn. Apparently, Road Dog had stayed behind for a week in Pie Town, New Mexico, for a pack repair. He had still managed to overtake Big Maroon, Zamboni, and the others (I wouldn’t intercept Big Cheese, Hummingbird, Obi-Wan, or Jackfruit for another 31 miles) in the Collegiates, and all this without an ice axe! He attributed his impressive daily mileage to the mushrooms he had harvested himself back home in Oregon. I suppose that’s the place for such things.

We shared the splintering table, stuffing our bags with instant coffee and peanut butter and minute rice and other treasures of the same caliber. The hands grasping at the clutter had coarse hair on their knuckles and thick, square fingernails. I realized at once that I was a girl among men. I realized, too, that we had hiked away from loneliness to chase solitude and had found others like ourselves, and that we were stalling to make company last.

When it was noon and the sun was hot, I continued south and Road Dog continued north.

I forded the stream between the lakes and climbed up Hope Pass and then down its other side and then up again and then on and on. He had gifted me a mantra: “Every mile is a blessing.” I whispered it to thin air when there was pain, and especially when there was joy.

Sophia McNamara fuels herself with instant coffee and peanut butter on the trail.