On a sweltering summer day in 2011, Maya Silver was hiking through Colorado’s remote Unaweep Canyon when her then-boyfriend started to grow frustrated with her pace. The sun was blazing overhead, the terrain was difficult, and she couldn’t keep up. Without a word, he stormed ahead – and then vanished from sight. Silver, an inexperienced hiker at the time, spent the next two hours alone, lost and spiralling with fears of rattlesnake bites, heatstroke, and the suffocating isolation of the canyon.
“After one hour, you start spiralling in your head,” she says. “I worried that I might never get off the trail and find him, that he had left me completely, or I would take a wrong turn and trip and fall.”
