I’d begun at the soundless place where California touches Mexico with five Gatorade bottles full of water and eleven pounds of gear and lots of candy. My backpack was tiny, no bigger than a schoolgirl’s knapsack. Everything I carried was everything I had.

— Aspen Matis

I’d believed I needed to be steady in myself before I could function with others—but surviving alone no longer felt like a good way either.

— Aspen Matis

I'd crossed a border—Speaking openly, exposing the weak girl I'd been, I was no longer her.

— Aspen Matis

I'd have to be impolite, an inconvenience, and sometimes awkward. But if I could commit, all that discomfort would add up to zap predatory threads like a Taser gun. I'd stun them. They'd bow to me. I'd let my no echo against the mountains. And better to feel bad for a moment saying no—and stop it—than to get harmed. I would take better care. That small word, no. I'd see its deity.

— Aspen Matis

I didn’t know if I was brave or reckless.

— Aspen Matis

I didn’t know what I would do. There was no way I could survive. I stared at my damp tent ceiling, feeling the frigid air against me, the frozen ground against my bottom, so cold my bare skin burned. I needed to get to the next trail-town, Mammoth Lakes. There was no one here to save me now.

— Aspen Matis

I don’t remember having one conversation with my dad in the three days I was home, but looking back at my journal, I see I wrote about him. I scrawled about how I heard him telling my mom that I needed to go back. Furthermore, I was unhappy; he thought the hiking was better for me. I wonder why he told these things to my mother, nothing to me. I wonder if overhearing his approval encouraged me to finally fly back to the trail. Maybe. Maybe my father’s faith in my walk—in me—made me feel strong enough to leave. His actual words, as I wrote them in my notebook, were, “She’s an adult now, she can do what she wants. It doesn’t mean she’s not selfish.” He almost understood.

— Aspen Matis

I doubted I could survive in the woods without these very basic things to help me. It seemed like a tremendous leap of faith to forsake the tools I’d always been told I needed. And yet leaving college to walk was such a massive leap of faith already, and nothing I’d ever trusted and believed in seemed true any longer.

— Aspen Matis

I felt like I belonged to an ancient tradition of all young people given this same task of finding their own ways through to the futures they wanted for themselves.

— Aspen Matis

I felt unready to hold myself responsible for the decision if I slept with him

— Aspen Matis