Fifteen years ago, I rented a basement apartment beside the Wonder Bread factory in Anchorage, Alaska. After I got out of work, I stalked the edges of a nearby lagoon, swatting at mosquitoes the size of small birds, or headed for the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail or the Chugach Mountains. It was summer, and hours of sunlight remained. I felt like I was getting away with something; I was living two days for the price of one.

My roommate borrowed an ancient Subaru wagon, and we learned to drive stick shift in one of the city’s many empty lots. On weekends we used it to venture farther, testing its last legs as we coaxed it up steep roads to various trailheads. I bought a cobalt blue Kelty pack perfectly sized for small women — still one of my most beloved possessions — and used it for overnight trips into the backcountry. I was restless. One evening I stayed out until 2 a.m. and discovered the sun was not actually setting; it was hovering.

Beneath all this traipsing was a jittery urgency. I had something to prove. I didn’t know what it was, exactly, but it had to do with being young and a woman and Asian and petite, and on top of that rather sickly in constitution. Certain assumptions had followed me to that point in my life, assumptions about physical capability and self-sufficiency and individuality — more specifically, the lack of these traits. If I was honest, I didn’t know if these assumptions were true, but I was trying my best to make them untrue.

At the end of the summer, I set out into the vast backcountry of Denali National Park with my roommate and another friend, both women. It was my third time to Denali but my longest backpacking trip. We caught the bus that entered the park and operated along its single road. Two hours later, at an indistinct spot in the extreme wilderness, we hopped off and watched the bus drive away. From that time on, we saw no other person. Maybe my friends felt the sudden solitude as heavily as I did, but we didn’t speak of it. We stepped off the road and pushed our way into a thicket.