Hiking solo it is especially important to exercise prudence. At least 2 of my best experiences backpacking have involved turning around or re-routing a solo trip.
The best solo adventure bailout/’failure’ was going over the rim north of the Paliku cabin in Haleakala and trying to hike down through the Kipahulu valley to the Hana Road and the 7 sacred pools. This was back in 1977. Haha! I’m sure I didn’t have a map or any form of shelter or raingear. Early in the day I stopped to look for the rare birds I’d read about with some binoculars I’d brought along for that purpose and evidently didn’t close them back in the case properly when I resumed motion ( thrashing along). Within a minute or so I realized the binoculars had fallen out of the case. Couldn’t have gone more than a few dozen/fifty feet. I stopped and took off my pack and went back in the direction I had come to retrieve the binoculars. No dice and really had to carefully quarter around to find the pack! Just FYI I practically grew up in a sorta semi-tropical southern river bottom version of jungle and also had by this time been through all sorts of heavily forested Hawaiian mountain terrain off trail. The only way I could really practically move along was to follow the streambed which kept every hundred yards or so going over a series of waterfalls which kept getting bigger and bigger. At some point late in the day as I was dropping around and down past about the umpteenth waterfall, a really big one about 150 feet off the upper level bench area into sort of the middle level valley towards the north side of the greater valley I gained a rare clear view downward towards the sea since I was on the rim of this big drop, and the valley down below me just corkscrewed downwards and to the right and out of sight like it was going down a manhole and I finally saw and realized I shouldn’t try to keep going down towards the ocean. It was time to make a camp for the evening and retrace the next day; so I climbed back up onto the upper bench above and to the S-SE of the streambed; found a nice dry little cup in the forest floor between some big trees and made camp. The next day followed pig trails back up the drainage. It was such a tangle, like the Hawaiian version of a Smokies rhododendron or N Cascades alder hell. Often or even usually I was not even walking on the ground. I was really careful realizing that any slip/accident that stopped me from locomotion would likely be the end of me. Boy was I glad to cross the rim back into Haleakala!
Anyhow thinking about that adventure and prompted by this excellent article I searched quotes about ‘failure’ and found a list of @ 30 that had a pretty consistent set of themes.
1. If you don’t dare to try you might not ever ‘fail’ but then again you never really ‘succeed’ either. “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” – Robert F. Kennedy
2.’Failure’ is a great teacher. “Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” – Denis Waitley
And This one: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas A. Edison
And re-evaluating, bailing or turning back are just steps in the greater trip. “We are all failures – at least the best of us are.” And a real classic
“You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.” – Johnny Cash
And this one: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill
“Carry On”
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