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I have been camping my whole life.

I grew up in a family that did weekend trips to Seneca Rocks and Dolly Sods, and by the time I was 12, I could set up a tent in the dark and start a fire with wet wood.

I am 31 years old, and I work in commercial HVAC in Charleston, West Virginia. I mentioned that because

what happened to me last July is not the story of some city kid in over his head. I knew what I was

doing. I had done the exact trip I was planning twice before, and I had spent probably 200 nights of my

life sleeping in the woods. I want that to be clear before anything

else. The trip I planned was a four-day loop through the Cranberry backcountry, which sits inside

the Monongahela National Forest in Pocahontas County. If you have never been there, it is one of the

most remote places left in the eastern United States.

The Cranberry Wilderness area covers about 47,000 acres, and the backcountry extends the roadless

zone even further. There are no cell towers. The last reliable signal I had was in Richwood,

which was a solid 40-minute drive from the trailhead at Big Beachy.

I know all of this because I have looked it up about a hundred times since I got back.

I started on a Tuesday the 14th of July, 2025.

The weather was what you would expect for a West Virginia summer.

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