Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire What was your first solo adventure when you were younger?

I was scanning some old Ektachrome slides from my teenage years & it got me to wondering about how young I was when I went on my first solo "adventure". I thought there was probably some people on these forums who might have had similar experiences so I thought I would pose the question here & see what kind of things others might have done sans parents when they were teenagers. When I was really young growing up in south Louisiana, my parents would throw me, my brother & a bunch of my cousins into a station wagon & drop us off on the side of the road in Tangipahoa Parish & let us hike out through the woods to the Tangipahoa River with our Edmund Hillary backpacks from Sears & our Eureka tents while cooking over cans of Sterno. We would camp & fish for several days before meeting them back at the bridge over the river. When I was 13, my brother (16) & I hiked the Appalachian Trail from South Carolina down into Georgia. When I was 15, we canoed the entire Buffalo River & onto the White River in Arkansas. But on all of those trips, I had someone else with me.

When I was 16 & my brother was 19, he decided he wanted to do a solo trip & cycle the entire Natchez Trace from Natchez to Nashville. Mom didn't really like that idea so she told him she wanted him to take me with him so he relented. I was pretty excited so I bought a pair of bikes from the kid across the street for $50 (a Kabuki & a Sears Free Spirit). I was the janitor at the church at the end of my street making $1.35/hour so I had some cash saved . Then I spent the whole summer of 1978 riding all over the backroads & sugarcane fields around Houma, LA getting in shape for the trip. When August finally rolled around, my brother who was a roustabout at the time, got called out on a job on an oil rig. Since high school was about to start, mom & dad decided to let me go alone because I had been working so hard preparing for it all summer. So began my first solo trip:

Mom sewed together some panniers from a Frostline kit for me to haul all my gear.


A Kabuki 10-speed, cutoff jeans, Adidas running shoes, tube socks, a knapsack & way too much hair for a helmet. I'm ready to roll!


I wanted to bring my Minolta XE-7 camera & my Slik tripod so I opted to not bring a tent. I just slept in a net hammock.


I had my poncho tied to a metal ring above my head on the hammock so if it rained, I could pull it over me & use it as a tent. Looks like sardines are on the menu.


I ate a lot of Ramen noodles & drank a lot Tang on this trip. It looks like I just took my parent's pots & didn't invest in anything light or compact to cook with.


You're not supposed to camp in the picnic areas along The Trace but one of the National Park Rangers stopped me & said he had been watching me cycle all day as he patrolled & that I could camp anywhere I liked & that no one would bother me. That was great because I could start using picnic pavilions & stay out of the rain instead of roughing it in the woods. My first night in a pavilion near the Ross Barnett Reservoir, a pack of dogs started harassing me in the middle of the night & I had to throw cans of food at them in the dark to get them to leave me alone.


I make it to the 200-mile marker. Doing pretty good! I'm wearing a Jam Jam t-shirt (Jambalaya Jamboree) from LSU. I don't think that size would fit me any more. Nice sunburn. I bet that Gatorade can had a pull tab that came all the way off the can.


Eventually I made it almost to Tupelo when a cotter pin in my crankset broke which made the crank arm wobble badly. Eventually my ankle started hurting so much I had to abandon the ride. I limped my way to a pay phone, called my parents & asked them to come pick me up. They told me that they weren't planning to come get me until the weekend so I just needed to go out into the woods, pitch a camp & they would come find me in several days. So even though I didn't make it all the way to Tennessee, it was still a pretty good time. I was alone, on my own & making all my decisions for the first time in my life. I found out if you can withstand a bit of discomfort, it's pretty easy to have a nice little adventure.

That is an excellent post.

Got on a bus to Navy bootcamp

Sounds like a great adventure...but someone's gonna ask you "who took the pictures?"

Figured I'd be first.

Good question, no easy answer.

I would pick when I was about 25. Solo sheep hunt, 18 mile backpack to the mountain- probably 170 lb back pack coming out I weighed 150 lbs, took me 2 14 hour days. Had to replace all the straps on the pack....

went back there the next 2 years too, but not solo. Full curls every time.

Wound up with a wife that didn't know any better, first as girlfriend, then honeymoon.

A few years back at the Banff Mountain Film festival, I saw the documentary Unbranded about some Texas A&M graduates who decided to ride wild mustangs from Mexico to Canada. It's a pretty good film & an epic trip if you ever get to see it. Having taken horses cross country, you could probably relate to some of the problems they ran into. Thanks for the compliment!

35mm camera, a tripod & a self timer. The old-school version of a selfie.

16, school buddy and I decided to take out motorcycles on vacation. Made it through Belgium into Luxembourg, where I wanted to go into Germany,and he wanted to go through France into Switzerland. So I headed East and explored the Rhine country, before turning back north. Other than having to Jerry rig an oversized sprocket and chain to keep running, nothing much eventful happened. Drank lots of beer, smoked some hashies, talked to lots of people, saw a lot of neat country.

When I was 19, I did a solo 1,500 mile road trip on a 2-cylinder Yamaha XS 400 Special. Not exactly a touring bike but it was still a lot of fun. I didn’t start off with any set itinerary. I just rode until I felt like stopping & pitched a tent.

Week long hike from the end of the road in Tn throug the Cherokee Ntl. Forest into NC. Got dropped off and then picked up later by my dad. Wish I had pictures. miss mountains and trout fishing. Not much of that in Mississippi. Don't know how OP survived the skeeters on the tree. I drive that section at least once a week going sown to Natchez for work.
Patrick

We were about as organized, but hit youth hostels along the way. Not exactly great adventure, but it was a guaranteed roof over our heads, which my mother seemed to think was important…..

yes me = USAF boot camp.

Just today I ran across an old photo of a buddy and I leaving my parents place at the crack of dawn on a weekend long grouse hunt. We had a tarp, can of beans, 2 blankets and enough 12 gauge ammo to start a war. We were 12 with no cell phones or plan on where we were going. I bet we put a few miles on those tennis shoes that weekend.

Started hitch-hiking when I was 16. First trip was from my brother's place in Tennessee home to Illinois. Later that same summer I hitch-hiked from home to near Jacksonville Florida to visit a friend who moved there.

When I was 17, I hitch-hiked from home to see a buddy who had a summer job at a fishing camp in Northern Wisconsin, and from there to visit family near the Twin cities. Figured out the Southern states were more amenable to hitch-hiking, and took a Greyhound home from Minneapolis

Impressive 😎

I didn’t do my first bicycle trip (2,000 miles to NY) until age 57. Didn’t do my first cross country motorcycle ride (5,000 mile round trip on a Yamaha 550) until age 29.

The year of the Montreal Olympics 1976 I drove my ‘64 VW microbus up the Gaspe peninsula and back around to NY State through New Brunswick and Maine. I was 19.

Ran away from home when i was 6 to test my parent's response time.....which is to say i hid in the nearby woods in a crater i had dug and declared a fort.....

Lasted all of 2 hours before i turned myself in....

12 years later i repeated the process when i headed off to an out-of-state college.......that lasted 8 years ending up with 2 degrees, the last one a masters.

My best friend and myself spent a month after HS graduation driving around northern Wisconsin in my dad’s Dodge full sized van towing a 12’ aluminum boat. We camped at a different lake every few days, spent all day fishing and most every night was a campfire, a couple beers and beer battered fish for dinner. The last week of the trip was spent in a cabin with his family on their summer vacation. That was a great trip.

Wandering miles over a sheep and cattle ranch near El Dorado, Texas as a ranch kid in 2 nd grade. Chasing crippled acting momma doves. Killing snakes with big sticks. Had a huge 3-4 ft long either coral or King snake get away down a ground squirrel hole.

Drivers license at 14yo. Went camping on Padre Island about 18 miles south of Port Aransas. Was so much fun, did it again a month later. Bob Hall pier was still intact. Caught tons of fish.