My thru-hikes and travels have taken me through areas with grizzly bears, spiders, snakes, poisonous plants and cruel environments. But this is the scariest place of them all.

When you decide to do an adventure like a thru-hike, you don’t get very far into the planning process before you come across a list of all the dangers you will encounter. It quickly paints the mental image of being the scariest place in the world and one of the scariest things you can do.

Wildlife, hypothermia, heatstroke, giardia, poodle-dog bush and other poisonous plants, river crossings, snow, dehydration, lightning, navigation and other humans.

A bear attacks you, and while running away from the bear you step on a rattle snake that bites. And this make you fall into a field of poodle-dog bush. To finish the whole thing off you get struck by lightning as you lay on the ground recovering from the bear, snake and poodle-dog.

For a scaredy cat like myself, this can all seem too overwhelming to deal with.

But the truth is, there is no place scarier than your own mind.

This is where your fears and doubts live. This is where you play out every scenario of what can go wrong, ways you can get hurt and the embarrassment that will happen if you fail. Amplifying it times a hundred.

And like most horror movies, the scariest place in the world is especially scary at night.

When setting off to backpack through Australia, the country with the most dangerous animals in the world, I couldn’t sleep for weeks before heading off.

When the thought first entered my head of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, months before I’ve even made the decision of actually doing it, I freaked out just by the thought of sleeping in a tent in the middle of nowhere – and in a foreign country. All while being safe and sound in my bed.

And now, setting out to live full-time out of a van, the fear of failure and images of scary parking spots and the car breaking down comes like a downpour both day and night.

You still need to plan for all the dangers. Preparation is your number one tool to navigate and conquer your fears.

From the moment I’d made the decision to hike the PCT, it was another two years of planning before I took my first step on trail. And during that time I lived through every possible scenario in my mind. From snakes getting into my tent to falling off a cliff. I had several breakdowns months before my flight was scheduled to take off.

But I’ve learned that, in most cases, the thought of something is much worse than the real scenario.

And once I’m in the middle of my adventure, I find it hard to understand why I was so afraid.

Still, I constantly find myself wandering too far off into the scariest place in the world. But I also know, and hope, that this is the scariest place in which I’ll ever be.