I thought I was something for going backpacking by myself for 3 weeks just before I turned 16!
I have a book around here somewhere that I have held onto all these years and it perhaps helped with my folks. It was a bunch of photos with just a few words, written by two young guys. One of the quotes was something like:
Alone and young.
But alone and young in the Wilderness.
That makes all the difference.
(And yes, I was darn lucky! Looking back I can’t imagine what my folks were thinking!)
Gutsy! The closest I ever came to anything like that at the age of sixteen was spending three hours with the girl next door in the back seat of a parked GTO.