It was the summer of 2019. Britain was trying to leave the European Union, a former comedian named Volodymyr Zelensky had just been elected president of Ukraine, and the pandemic was but a twinkle in a pangolin’s eye. For my part, I was two miles into what was supposed to be a week-long bikepacking trip in a remote corner of British Columbia’s Chilcotin Mountains.

I’d sewn myself in with a salty crew that had the habit of approaching from the north, along an old Indigenous hunting and trading trail that traced the shores of Taseko Lakes. And, oh, would it be grand. We’d haul BOB trailers filled with our provisions and tools (to clear the seldom-used trail) all the way to Graveyard Valley, make camp, and then spend days riding divine ridgelines in an obscure corner of the range before scooching back out the way we’d come.

I’d pitched the story to Bike magazine, where I was a senior writer at the time, and my editor gave it a reluctant “yes.” I could sense she thought it had a lot of moving parts. In the end, it turned out to not have enough. Five days into the traverse, our team of nine had made it all of 10 miles in an alcohol-and-mushroom-infused slow stumble that left my ego clawing at the nothingness we’d achieved. I was crushed that I wasn’t crushed; I wanted my body to be swollen with ache, and to have a story to write that, if not triumphant, was at least packed with resilience.

Close calls, injury, exhaustion, I was good with these—I secretly invited them. But this trip had no disaster; no storm or wildfire or bear attack. (Those types of things were the limit of what I thought could go wrong in the world at the time.) It wasn’t the odds that beat us. It was just us. We were a troupe of middle-aged men who simply brought too much alcohol and gear to move efficiently. Sullen, I wrote an acrid account of the trip that I titled “Epic Fail.”

I thought adventure was supposed to be hard, to defy the odds, to be uncommon. This story had none of that, but much to my surprise my editor loved it anyway. As I hyper-fixated on all the bumbling, obstinate mistakes that drove me crazy, I became the joke—a high-strung adventure journalist who couldn’t see past his own seriousness, and whose sensitive goat was constantly being gotten by the tight, lovable crew around him as they took every setback in stride. It was a perfect tragicomedy.

I wrote it this way because self-deprecation was all I was left with. After all, someone persistently not getting what they want is a classic narrative hook. Charlie Chaplin knew it; so did Richard Pryor and Andy Kaufman. The Coen Brothers and Wes Anderson have become modern-day masters of this bit, and Taylor Tomlinson has made an entire career out of her foibles. Then there was me, so laughably desperate for adversity and finding none. Meanwhile, all that the other guys wanted was time together in the woods, and they got exactly that.

I begrudgingly leaned into the humor despite the fact I fancied myself more of a Jon Krakauer than a Bill Bryson, and it grated me that I didn’t get the trip I wanted. But as time worn on, and these instances of disappointment have repeated themselves to the point of a pattern, hindsight has offered a glimpse into what I missed on Taseko Lakes. There was no going hungry for the glory of achievement, but there were psilocybin-induced laughing fits, brisk swims, endless stories, and campfire meals made delicious because they were shared. Two of the guys even repaired an old boat they found and took it for a serene and impromptu paddle.