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We saw other humans just once during our ten days in Willmore, and that trip remains the template against which I measure all others. We hiked long hours up imposing passes to get deep into the mountains—and once we were there, we could look around, pick an interesting-looking peak, and spend the afternoon scrambling to the top. I remember taking in the view from one of these peaks, looking around as far as we could see in the distance and finding no signs of humanity in any direction—except for a tiny green dot migrating down the pass below us, which we eventually realized was our tent, blown free from its moorings by a vicious alpine wind.

In the years since, on travels both with and without Lauren, I've always opted for the less obvious, less-well-trodden destinations. In Australia, we loved the Ningaloo Reef, hundreds of miles north of Perth on the barren west coast, far more than the Great Barrier Reef. In India to cover the Commonwealth Games as a journalist, I skipped a prepackaged day trip to the Taj Mahal in order to see if I could make it to the Red Fort from my aseptic hotel by wandering several miles on foot through the crooked alleyways of Old Delhi. On New Zealand's South Island, I read all about the Milford Track, famously dubbed "the finest walk in the world" by the Spectator way back in 1908—and then chose to hike the less heralded Routeburn Track instead.

When I began writing adventure travel journalism for the New York Times in the late 2000s, I noticed that, without intending to, I kept circling back to this theme. On a canoe trip deep in the Yukon wilderness, I bushwhacked up nondescript ridges precisely because they seemed so unlikely to have attracted anyone else's interest. "It was intoxicating," I wrote, "to pick a point in the distance and wonder: Has any human ever stood there?" Backpacking along the remote southern coast of Tasmania—a route whose impenetrable landscape and miserable weather have a lot in common with the Long Range Traverse—I couldn't help questioning whether it was all worth it, much less whether I should be encouraging Times readers to follow suit. "Why," I wondered, "on our preciously rationed vacation days, were we here?"

And yet there we were once again, in the summer of 2022, stumbling semiblindly through the mist and muck of the Long Range Mountains—this time with our kids, who hadn't really signed up for any of this. After a few more wrong turns, Lauren and I accepted the inevitable and started looking for a patch of rock flat and puddle-free enough to pitch our tent. I lay awake that night calculating and recalculating how long it would take us to complete the hike and how much spare food we had, and contemplating yet again what exactly had drawn me here.

This wasn't my first sleepless night of the summer. Even back home, nestled in the comfort of my pillowtop mattress, I'd been regularly finding myself awake and staring at the ceiling in the small hours of the morning. My mind would spin through the various dramas of the week, and then zoom out to broader existential musings about my life path. Two years into the pandemic, I certainly wasn't alone in contemplating my choices. But I'd been stuck in this loop since before the pandemic even started.

In 2018, I published a book called Endure, which explored the evolving science of human endurance. It was the culmination of a decade of reporting, during which my journalistic endeavors had become ever more narrowly focused on that specific topic. I'd started my freelance career reporting for a wide variety of publications on physics, jazz, accounting, travel, philosophy, and anything else that piqued my curiosity. But by 2018, I was a regular columnist for Outside, writing about the science of endurance, having moved there from a columnist gig at Runner's World, where I had begun writing about the science of endurance in 2012, while continuing to moonlight as a columnist at Canadian Running and the Globe and Mail, where in both cases I wrote mostly about the science of endurance.

Endure did unexpectedly well. It scraped briefly onto the New York Times bestseller list, and it positioned me perfectly to brand myself as "the science of endurance guy" and milk that role for the rest of my working life. Speaking invitations flowed in; doors opened at magazines that I'd always dreamed of writing for. To the extent that my younger self had ever managed to conjure up a vision of a dream career (not including winning the Olympics as a runner), this was it. But something didn't feel quite right. My decade of reporting for Endure had been a period of continual discovery, as I learned about new and new-to-me developments in biology, physiology, psychology, and other disciplines. By 2018, though, I was mostly caught up with the current state of knowledge. A future of reporting exclusively on those same topics would mean waiting for rare incremental advances and rehashing ideas I'd already written about. The spark of learning something new was gone.