The By 2014, my friend Louis and I had been hiking buddies for years,

and we went through the forest of Washington and Oregon together,

baked ourselves to a crisp in the deserts of the southwest,

and scaled the peaks of the Sierra Nevada side by side.

But next on our list was the Frank

Church River of No Return Wilderness, or the Frank, as everyone calls it. We planned to hike in,

camp out, and see what the place had to throw at us. We loaded up the car, drove north from

California to Idaho, and set out for what was supposed to be a straightforward

long-haul trip. The drive took two days of heading up the I-5, then east into Idaho's interior,

and then before long, we saw the Frank's two million acres sprawled out ahead of us, a chunk of

land so big that it dwarfed anything we tackled before.

We parked at a trailhead near the middle fork of the Salmon River in a gravel lot with

a faded sign warning about bears and firebands, and then pulled our packs out from the trunk.

They were really heavy, but seeing as they contained our food, our tent, our sleeping bags,

our water filters, and much, much more, they were our entire lives at that moment.

The first day we stuck to the trail, moving steadily through the pine and trees,

and the forest was very quiet, but it was kind of a gentle quiet,

and we managed to make it around the eight miles before we ended up camping near a creek at dusk.

And day two was pretty much more of the same.

We pushed deeper into the woods.

The trail was winding through the valleys and up ridges as the underbrush started to get thicker, and it was swallowing up the path entirely in certain spots.

We didn't talk much.

...