re: Best Wilderness Areas to go contemplate my life?

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That's a pretty good idea. But I wouldn't feel too safe doing that alone.

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Actually its a pretty bad idea to camp out on sand bars. Never know when a river or creek will rise and you'd be fricked especially in the winter. You always want to camp within walking distance to water but never set up right beside it. Same can be said for being out in the desert and camping at old dried up river beds. Rains hundreds of miles away can cause flash flooding.

Biggest?

Frank Church - River of No Return

Best?

Whatever is most logistically possible.

The Church isn't a reasonable option until July, sounds like you need something sooner.

Can't help with local options to LA.

Option 2 - Hitch a ride with a trucker to the Valley of the Gods, just north of Mexican Hat, Utah. It is Bureau of Land Management Land and you can enter and camp free, just have to get 10 feet (or four miles if you like) off the road, so no one will run over you. At this time of the year, you might stay a month and never see another soul in the valley. You can stay as long as you want and perhaps find the meaning of life you are seeking.


One thing for certain, you will learn how insignificant we all are in this universe we inhabit.


Oh - you might see a UFO. I understand they land there sometimes at night. We spent a full day there, but left before dark. Saw one person. He was walking down one of those crushed rock roads, looking for rocks and really had no desire to talk with us.
















You can walk as far as any of these photos show and still be in the valley, with no one to ask who you are and why you are there.

No one will care about any of that, any way

The place is maybe 40 miles up the road from where Forrest quit running.



Good luck with your search.

Peace to you.

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Is this just a positive spin on saying you're going to the woods to contemplate suicide?

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To heal.

Langland... LINK

Kisatchie Hills around Alexandria and Natchitoches:

Cresting yet another sandstone bluff, I witness the sun’s first rays peek over the outcroppings to the east, setting the emerald hills alight. It seems like something I’d find just north in the Ozarks until suddenly, as if on command, the fog lifts from the valley, allowing the amber sunshine to jet through the cypress trees and glint off the swamp below. Many Bayou State hikers head to Arkansas for outdoor escapes, but our backyard is just as wild, if not more. On this 18-mile point-to-point alone, I’ve toured lush mesas, pine savannahs, and bottomland forests. The best part? I only have to share it with black bears, foxes, and otters. There’s more to Louisiana than Mardi Gras. BY JONATHAN OLIVIER









Roger,


How long did you live in AK and where?

It was home to me. The view out every window in my house on the Anchorage mountainside looked like your Gastineau pic, only I was facing West looking at the jagged Ak Range. It was like a giant sundial outside your window. Every day the sun set in a different notch in the mountains. I backed up to the Chugach Mountains and out my backdoor I could go up over the mountains East across Canada for 6,000 miles and never cross more than 1 road.
Brown Bears, Moose, Wolves, Lynx were very frequent 'guests'.

I had a job which allowed me to take clients fishing all over the State.

When I would go by myself, I went to west end of Kodiak for Steelhead, year round and Kings off the Coast.

I know you could do that in Juneau year round too.

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know you could do that in Juneau year round too.

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Juneau is really amazing, I've been here for about 20 years, spent another 4 in the Wasilla/Palmer area. There's 20 million acres of national forests and parks close by. Just a few minutes by boat or plane and you're in wilderness. No roads connect us outside, it's a very unique lifestyle because if that and the inside passage. Glacier Bay NP is just 50 miles by air or ship too. Between here and the Canadian border is the Juneau icefield which is 1500 sq. Miles. The ABC islands have a huge population of brown bear, lots of marine life, etc.

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Hitch a ride with a trucker

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Frankly, I like your idea. Doing this never crossed my mind. Is it really realistic to hitch a ride on a train nowadays? Do truck drivers pick up dudes?

There must be books on this. How would I know which train to get on. I guess I could do trucks the whole way.

It's almost sounds like your asking me to be Jack Reacher. Pretty cool.

What's your advice for when a trucker asks, "frick or walk"?

So you are in Juneau now?

I got a little taste of that area around Yakutat every fall fishing for Silvers. Tongass. Glaciers. Wilderness as far as you could see in any direction.

17 miles north of Wasilla is where I built my first house on an isolated Lake....at the time, Lalen Lake, close to Seymour Lake...believe it is called the Meadow Lakes area sort of lateral from Big Lake but East. An old Sourdough named Bill Herman (which everything in Palmer is named after) is the very first person I met. He took me gold mining on his Buffalo River Land. He was 80+ and like a kid. Lalen Lake froze up around Sept 15-Oct 10. I was working the North Slope at the time as a BP drilling engineer/wells designer. My wife loved it.

Then we got relocated to Anchorage.



Bush Planes: Beavers, Otters...I took them to every isolated lake I could find. I made the mistake of telling friends about great places and would go back and they were no longer isolated.

I flew with old pilots, bold pilots, a one-legged pilot who had to cut his leg off to get out of a crash. But I never flew with any "old bold pilots". IYKWIM

Behind my house in Anchorage was the Harding Ice Field...the size of a small State. The aerial looked a lot like your picture.

AK is the Greatland. The last really wild place and so remote that it will stay that way. North Slope: dark 90+ days a year, light 90+ days. Anchorage 4 hrs -21 hrs daylight range.

I was in Yakutat at a time when a Glacier lurched forward..they called it the Galloping Glacier. It sealed off a bay and trapped marine mammals and Sierra Club and media swarmed in to save the seals, dolphins, whales. By the time they got there the water eroded the dam and the sea life escaped. But, to that point, all the glaciers around my house in Anchorage retreated so fast over 20 yrs that there was no climate change denial. Did you see that around where you are? Maybe not because of immense snowfall.

Do spend a lot of time outdoors. I did year round. After 60 below on the Slope, camping on Kodiak in the winter seemed like Hawaii.

Do you Kayak around Juneau or did you ever? I had friends who worked in govt there and they fished from Kayaks.