Notes from the Workshop
On going alone.
Why people spend so much to reach a track no one else took — and run it alone.
Notes from the Workshop · 8 min read
There is a particular silence you only meet at the end of a track no one else took. Not the absence of sound — the desert is never quiet — but the absence of noise. the chatter of life. No notifications. No small talk. No one for fifty kilometres in any direction. Just the tick of a cooling engine and a sky coming down to the horizon on every side.
People spend a great deal of money on their vehicles to reach that silence.
The oldest reason there is
Humans have always lit out alone. In 1923, asked why he wanted to climb Everest, George Mallory gave the most famous three words in exploration: because it’s there. He died on the mountain the following year. The single-handed sailors, the naturalists who walked into ranges with a notebook and a week of food, the desert monks who went looking for clarity in the one place that offered nothing to distract them — the pull is ancient and it hasn’t changed. We just have better tyres now.
What has changed is how rare the silence has become. The world has filled in. Campgrounds are booked out, the good spots are busy, the phone follows you everywhere. Which is exactly why the impulse to go further — past the last gate, past the last bar of signal — has never been stronger. One survey put solo trips at nearly a third of all campers in 2024, up from a fifth three years before. People aren’t going alone because they have to. They’re choosing it.
The desert’s quietest authority
No one has made the case for solo vehicle travel more plainly than Tom Sheppard. An ex-RAF test pilot, he led the first west-to-east crossing of the Sahara in 1975 — sextants and almanacs, twenty years before GPS — and then spent decades going back alone, often completely off-tracks, into the most isolated reaches of the Algerian Sahara. He called one of his books Quiet for a Tuesday. The title says everything about why a person drives into all that emptiness on their own.
Sheppard writes about the desert the way others write about cathedrals. Cresting a dune at dawn, watching the first light scythe across the sand, he described it as serene, awesome, beautiful — like witnessing the birth of the world. But ask him what solo travel actually taught him and the romance turns instantly practical. His hardest-won lesson, learned mending a puncture at the side of a track: take it steady, be a granny, get things right — life is about detail. The poetry and the preparation are the same discipline. That is the overlander’s creed in a sentence.
Scott Brady — who founded Overland Journal, crossed all seven continents and circled the planet three times — built an entire definition of the pursuit around the same idea. Overlanding, in his words, is vehicle-supported, self-reliant adventure travel; the self-reliance is not a footnote, it sits right at the front. The whole appeal is being the one responsible. Out past support, the trip stops being about the people and starts being about the place — and about you.
The same nerve, without the engine
You see the identical wiring in people who go alone with no vehicle at all. Watch Free Solo and you expect an adrenaline junkie; you meet the opposite. Alex Honnold, the only person to climb El Capitan’s 900 metres of granite without a rope, is emphatic that thrill has nothing to do with it. If I get an adrenaline rush, it means something has gone horribly wrong, he wrote. His climbs are slow, methodical, and rehearsed to the point of boredom — every handhold memorised, the uncertainty drilled out in advance until a death-consequence climb feels like a sure thing. Fear isn’t conquered by bravado; it’s dissolved by preparation.
His way of putting it is worth keeping: the only real way to manage fear is to broaden your comfort zone until things that once seemed impossible sit comfortably inside it. Peter Croft, another of the great soloists, described the state on the wall as a kind of super-perception — sounds are sharper, colours of the sunset more intense, every sense lit up because there are no distractions and the feedback is absolute. A lot of times I don’t want it to end, he said. Any overlander who has watched a desert night come down alone knows exactly that feeling.
Dean Potter, who free-soloed El Cap and pioneered wingsuit flight before it killed him at forty-three, framed it differently again: you’re not controlling your fear — you’re stepping outside of it. And the freedivers — who descend on a single breath into a silence more total than any desert — chase the same thing the wilderness-solo studies keep finding: in the quiet, stripped of the world’s noise, people meet a calmer and clearer version of themselves. One leading freediver simply called her book One Breath. That is the whole proposition. Everything you need, carried in, with no margin for the thing you forgot.
What they all share
Climbers, explorers, divers, desert drivers — the surface could not look more different, but underneath it is one temperament. They court risk and refuse to romanticise it. They are studious to the point of obsession, because going alone converts every shortcut into a consequence. And they all report the same reward: a self-reliance you cannot fake and cannot buy, only practise — and a clarity that arrives only once the noise, and the other people, are gone.
Solo travel is less about the places you visit than the person you become.
That is the romance of going alone, and it is not soft. It is earned. You come back quieter, steadier, and — strangely — better in a group than you were before. The ones who do it alone almost always say so.
Which is where the gear comes in
Because here is the unsentimental truth under all the poetry: when you go alone, self-reliance stops being a feeling and becomes a packing list. There is no one to spot you on the recovery, no one to remember the thing you forgot, no one on the other end of the drawer. Honnold drills the uncertainty out before he leaves the ground. Sheppard recces on foot and gets the detail right. The principle is the same in a loaded 4WD: out there, the kit either holds up its end or it doesn’t.
So every system you carry has to be operable by one set of hands — in the dark, in the cold, on the second day, when you’re tired and the light is going and you still haven’t made camp. Not the showroom standard. The 4:30pm, winter, sun-going-down standard. A piece of gear that needs a second person to work isn’t a system. It’s a second person you have to bring.
Going alone doesn’t mean going without. It means carrying exactly what you can run yourself.
That is the whole reason a thing like this gets built the way it does — light enough to handle alone, simple enough to trust, reachable from one position so you’re never unpacking the load to find the one thing you need. The silence at the end of the track is the point. Everything we make is just there to get you to it, and back.
— Vaughan