When Kindness Finds You

A Moment of Grace in the Most Rugged Place

Aug 05, 2025

I’ve heard that the kindest people in the world are those you meet on a trail. Maybe it’s the common experience or the shared goal. Maybe it’s that everything has been stripped away after days on the journey and all that’s left is raw humanity. Whatever the reason, that has been my experience. Even on my most recent trip to Colorado, some hikers asked Will and me if we had bug spray. When I told them we didn’t, one of the guys reached into his pocket and tossed us some. It ended up being a life-saver.

But over the years, there have been three instances of profound kindness that truly blew me away. And they didn’t happen on the trail—but just off of it. Here’s one of those stories.

We were at 13,000 feet in Wyoming’s Wind River Range, some of the most rugged terrain in the United States—and yes, I’d include Alaska in that comparison. We had just set up our tents with thunder rumbling overhead. We couldn’t have imagined what it would portend. But during the night, heavy snowfall slammed us. Worse still, one of the guys started throwing up in his tent from altitude sickness. And while the visual of a man in his boxers cleaning vomit off his sleeping bag at 2 a.m. at 25 degrees is admittedly comical, we knew by morning that we had to get him to a lower elevation.

Thankfully, as we descended, he began to feel better. We mapped out a three-day emergency exit route and eventually ended up in a parking lot—forty minutes from where we had staged our car. The best-case scenario was that another group of hikers might exit and offer to drive one of us back to our vehicle. But no one ever came. So we decided to wait by the road.

You have to understand—this spot is remote. The odds of a vehicle coming by were infinitesimally small. Even worse, we tried feverishly to find one small bar of cell signal without success. Still, we waited, watching for the slightest movement along the road.

And then, finally…

We spotted a white truck in the distance. It wasn’t coming our way, but it lingered at the intersection with another road. A couple of the guys started walking the quarter-mile to it. Within minutes, we were tossing our backpacks—and ourselves—into the bed of the truck.

On the ride to our vehicle, we learned that the man driving, who was in his seventies, and his wife in the passenger seat, had recently lost their daughter. They had come, along with another daughter, to that exact spot to release balloons in her honor. They admitted they had never driven that road before, but it seemed like the kind of place she would have found beautiful. And they told us their daughter was the kind of person who would have helped stranded backpackers retrieve their vehicle—so, in her honor, they did the same.

Kindness is giving selflessly, expecting nothing in return. And in September of 2016, we were the unexpected recipients of that kind of kindness.