Since reading Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” in the late 1990s, I’ve been a sucker for books and journalism that tread the line between adventure and disaster. So when Pocket waved “The Accident on the Pacific Crest Trail” by Louise Farr under my nose this week, at least four words in the title grabbed my attention.

The article is not terrifically nuanced, but does give plentiful information about the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) and decisions faced by thru-hikers on this and America’s two other continental trails as the pandemic bore down in March 2020. Do you keep hiking, or do you fly home?

In this account, two hikers decided that they would be “safer from COVID on the PCT than in an airport” after losing their 22-year-old companion to a slip and fall accident precipitated by snow.

The article appears in Alta, which strives to be “a literate magazine counterpoint to the New Yorker from a Western point of view.” I’m curious about the American west, especially this year; California and the water flowing through and around it play a major role in “Love and Water,” my novel in progress.

I also have long hikes in my dreams, if not in my practical future. Reading about the desolation and danger associated with the PCT gives me sobering perspective.

But so does remembering that about the same time these young men met with an unexpected snowstorm on the PCT, I flew across the country (naively, as most of us were in March 2020) to attend a writing conference—and escaped getting COVID-19. Who was statistically in more danger?