How to Survive in the Woods: A Guest Post by Kat Rosenfield

Three of them head into the woods. One of them is lying… but which one? This eerie trek through the wilderness is the backdrop for a tale of betrayal and revenge by Kat Rosenfield. Read on for an exclusive essay from Kat on writing How to Survive in the Woods.

In the summer of 1970, my 17 year-old mother set out with a girlfriend for an overnight hike in the Hundred Mile Wilderness, the final stretch of the Appalachian Trail that weaves through Maine’s north woods and ends at Mount Katahdin. They entered from a side trail in area called Bodfish Intervale, forded a stream, ascended a rock scramble to the peak of Barren Mountain, and camped overnight in a lean-to at a mountaintop tarn called Cloud Pond.

The next afternoon, as they were making their way down the trail, they were surprised by two men in a Jeep who called them out by name. They had been sent by my grandmother — whose faith in her daughter’s orienteering skills had vanished sometime around three o’clock that morning, at which point she’d made a hysterical phone call to the forest service to report that her child was lost in the forest and probably, at this very moment, being eaten by bears.

For most of my life, this story was just another bit of family lore. But a few years ago, when I told my mom that I was looking for a very particular sort of setting for my next book — the kind where any horrifying thing might happen and nobody would hear you scream — she laughed and told me she knew just the place.

Fifty years after my extremely woods-competent mother made her journey up Barren Mountain to Cloud Pond, I completed the same hike and knew immediately that, yes, this was where my story would take place. It wasn’t just that this stretch of the AT was, indeed, the ideal spot for a certain terrible husband to have an accident (and where, glory to the thriller-writing gods, there was no mobile coverage and hence no way for someone to ruin the perfect crime by suddenly whipping out a cell phone.) I understood, as I stood on the Barren Ledges with my lungs burning from the ascent and an ominous-looking thunderhead looming in the distance, that the trail is a place of reckoning, one where strength and weakness and skill and fear alike all rise inexorably to the surface. And while that means one thing if you’re hiking alone, it means something else entirely if you’re with other people — even if they’re people you think you know.

How to Survive in the Woods tells the story of three such people. Emma, Taylor, Logan: each with their own story, and their own secrets, and each a very different kind of survivor. And while I won’t spoil the story by revealing more, suffice to say that each one will learn: The Hundred Mile Wilderness is a place where you might be able to get away with murder, but you can never escape the truth of who you are.