It was still pitch black when the rock formations began to rise up on either side of the freeway. Shapes I could barely make out through the windshield. I had been driving since 5:00am, a coffee I made at the Airbnb in the cupholder, blasting my favorite tunes. And then it hit me. It actually hit me, tears and everything.

I made it.

Months of saving, planning, trial camping trips, and lying awake running through everything that could go wrong, here I was — alone, in a rental Nissan Sentra, driving straight into Zion like I knew exactly what I was doing.

I didn’t. Not even a little.

Dad

My dad is the reason I keep going back to the desert.

Not in a way I could you have told you twenty years ago — back then I was in so much denial that I refused to believe that he had any influence on me. But somewhere between planning my first solo road trip to Utah in 2017 and every trip that followed, I started to understand something about what he’d been trying to show us all long.

He used to cram the four of us into a Ford Windstar — a minivan they don’t even make anymore — and drive us across the American Southwest for an entire month. My sister and I wearing matching outfits in the backseat, contributing absolutely nothing useful. My dad planned everything: the routes, the parks, the motels, all of it. I didn’t know how to appreciate the outdoors back then. Red rocks were just rocks. Sandstone was just rocks too.

My dad would pull out at every visitor center like it was a sacred ritual. I’d browse the gift shop, counting the minutes until we could get back into the car.

Now I plan a solo trip for one and feel the weight of it. I have no idea how he did with four of us, year after year, and made it look like the most natural thing in the world. Going back as an adult and actually meaning it was the closest I could get to telling him that it stuck.

That I finally get it.

Going Alone

I’ve been solo road trips since 2018, and I usually try to visit the same places. I’m not quite sure why — or maybe I am, and I just needed enough trips to finally admit it.

There’s something people don’t tell you about traveling alone, which is that the first you do is fill all the silence. In 2018, I built an itinerary ambitious to hit five national parks in just 10 days. I stopped at every visitor center and asked, “if I only have time for one hike, what would you recommend?” I gathered data and off I went. Bryce Canyon got one hike and not much else before I was back in the car. The same happened at Canyonlands and Capitol Reef. I was moving so fast I barely let myself land anywhere. I had fun but looking back, I think I was afraid that if I slowed down, I’d have to actually feel how alone I was.

I was not in hiking shape when I marched up Observation Point at Zion, but I marched on anyway. My legs were jello by the end. It was wonderful. My heart was full. And somewhere on the top, looking down at Angel’s Landing looking small below me, I thought — this is why. This is why my dad kept stopping at visitor centers.

In 2020, I took another trip to the Southwest. I had company for the first half — my friend Saiwa reached out wanting to do a road trip down to Utah, and so we went, splitting the decision-making. The itinerary looked a lot like 2018 but the energy was looser. Less checklist, more wandering, I let Google Maps take the wheel and it routed us north through Oregon just to see the Painted Hills, and we hit the road once again, hitting familiar towns and cities.

Then in Phoenix, Saiwa flew out to LA and the trip quietly became mine again. The car got quiet. I kept driving.

I’ve wondered, across all these trips, whether I was running from something rather toward it. Maybe I was intentionally running away and the silence was more comforting than having to deal with all the noise back home — literal or metaphorical. But I’ve also come to think that running toward silence is its own valid thing. Not the same as running away. More like deliberately choosing to go somewhere the noise can’t follow.

Strangers

Solo travel doesn’t mean lonely. And I had to learn that.

At Zebra Canyon in Grand Staircase-Escalante, the slot narrowed down to barely shoulder-width. The sandstone was so smooth and water-worn that there was nothing to grab onto, just friction and hope. I felt genuinely intimidated by this rope section that appeared in the middle section of the hike. Two women caught up behind me and we were talking about how we would tackle this section. Then an older man showed up who hiked the canyon often and knew exactly where the rock held and where it didn’t. He helped all three of us through.

We finished the rest of the loop together, the kind of easy trail conversation you only have with someone you’ll probably never see again. No contact information exchanged. No social media exchanged. Just memory.

On my last day in Utah that trip, I hiked the Devil’s Garden Loop before the long drive back to Seattle. Somewhere past the maintained trail, the path dissolved into open slickrock, and I found myself standing next to a guy who looked just as unsure as I was about which direction the loop continued. His name was Gus and he was based in Colorado. We figured it out together. When we finally closed the loop, he pulled two IPAs out of his pack and handed me one like it was the most sacred thing ever.

Nothing beats a trail beer.

I think about those people sometimes — Gus, the two women, the older local at Zebra Canyon, the ranger at Zion National Park who redirected me to Observation without me even asking the right question. Every trip, someone showed up at exactly the moment I needed a push in a direction I wouldn’t have found myself.

Strangers are generous in the desert in a way that’s harder to find back home in Seattle. Maybe it’s because everyone out there chose to be there.

Silence

The lesson took a few trips to fully learn.

In 2020, I returned to Joshua Tree to do a short backpacking trip. The Juniper Flats Trail to be exact. The real goal of this trip was to sleep under a Joshua tree, under the dark sky the park is famous for. I pitched the tent with the rainfly off on a tip from my friend Elena: being able to see what was actually out there, she said, would do more for the fear than blocking it out ever would.

She was right.

Watching a Joshua tree’s silhouette against the stars instead of just hearing the dark turned terrified into just slightly nervous. I’d stop trying to block out the silence and just looked at it directly. That felt like something.

By 2022, I needed the silence more urgently. I’d told someone how I felt after months of letting myself hope, and the answer wasn’t what I wanted — it wasn’t exactly heartbreak, more a particular kind of disappointment that’s become a familiar shape since then. Underneath that, something heavier happened: I’d just been laid off from a UX job I’d actually loved, with no warning. Life had other plans.

So I packed the car and drove south. This time with Tex — my German Shorthaired Pointer mix, in the passenger seat. His first road trip. He took to it immediately, nose out the window, completely unbothered by the long stretches of highway and wind, like he’d been waiting for someone to finally take him to the desert.

The drive itself pushed back. On the way to Klamath Falls — my first stop of the road trip, I hit snow, not whiteout conditions exactly, but enough that I had to pull over and put chains on. It happened again coming through the Modoc National Forest near Susanville, the road getting icy and the light going flat and the kind of quiet that makes you very aware of every decision you’re making. I got through both. I’m not sure I would’ve believed I could do all of this before I had to.

That’s something solo travel does that I didn’t expect, or maybe I did — it puts you in situations where you have to be the competent one, because there’s nobody else in the car. No one to blame if it goes wrong. No one to hand it off to. Just you, the road, and whatever you can figure out.

Snow Canyon and Valley of Fire were both state parks that weren’t on my dad’s old route — new red rock, new trails, nothing inherited this time, just me and my dog figuring out a corner of the desert on our own terms. I woke up one morning to frost feathered across the windshield. I honestly felt kind of dumb. I was the only one tent camping in the campground and the temperatures dropped to the low 20s that night.

Before I started the drive home, I sat on a ledge with my feet hanging over a valley after completing a hike at Snow Canyon State Park. I didn’t care too much what had just happened back home. And that turned out to be exactly the point. Standing in those parks, dwarfed by sandstone that had been there for millions of years before any of it — the job, the disappointment, any of it — made me feel impossibly small.

In a good way.

The kind of small that puts things back into scale instead of making you feel like you’re disappearing even though sometimes I felt like disappearing. The silence wasn’t something to fill anymore. It was the whole reason I’d come out here.

Going Back

I’ve done a few more road trips since then, and I have usual spots I try to go back to. I’m still not entirely sure why — or maybe I am, and I just needed enough trips to finally admit that.

I’m not proud of every version of myself that showed up before and during these trips. Some of them were scared. Some were sad. Some were moving too fast to feel anything at all. But I find something in going back through all of it — the condensation-soaked tent at Kodachrome, the trail beer with Gus, the Joshua tree silhouette against the stars — that reminds me I am someone who knows to build joy from scratch. Someone who can find her footing on friction slab, in the dark, without a direction, and figure out which way to go.

The most recent trip I took was part celebration, part pilgrimage. I’d just gotten a new job after a stretch of uncertainty. And I wanted one last long drive before PTO became a distant memory. I pointed the car south toward California — the objective was