Woman heads off on 3-hour hike—keeps what happened next secret from parents

A woman traveling the world has opened up about the three-hour hike that descended into a seven-hour nightmare she had, until now, kept secret from her parents.

The benefits of travel go far beyond a broadening of horizons. Travel may actually be good for you. In 2020, a study published in the journal Nature found people who experience regular changes of scenery tended to feel happier and more relaxed in their surroundings.

Regularly changing things up seems to be an ethos Lauren Wood, 20, is keen to follow. She’s currently traveling full-time while completing a degree online.

“I made the leap to leave the traditional classroom behind because I realized my biggest lessons come from exploring the world and connecting with amazing people,” Wood told Newsweek.

An avid scuba diver and skydiver, Wood regularly documents experiences in photographs and videos shared to her TikTok, livin.lolo, which she says capture the “magic of adventure and nature.”

“I’m always seeking experiences that push me out of my comfort zone and make me feel alive,” Wood said. However, one experience that occurred while she was living and volunteering on a farm in Oahu, Hawaii, ended up pushing Wood a little too far.

“I was living in a tent and working the farm during the day and in our free time we got to explore the island,” she said.

On that particular day, Wood’s sister was visiting so they decided to hike to Ka’au Crater. It was only supposed to take a couple of hours but, as the video Wood shared on social media explained, what followed was so scary she “didn’t tell” her parents about it.

It all started about an hour into the hike. “Fog started forming all around us and we figured we could finish the hike before it got too bad, but in a matter of minutes we were surrounded and could barely see,” Wood said.

Soon everything that could go wrong, did. “It started raining, my maps stopped working and we lost services,” Wood said. “We made a couple wrong turns and ended up going further up the mountain.”

Wood’s video captures some sense of what it must have been like: Wood and her sister soaked to the bone, mist covering much of the landscape around them with the ground below transformed into a muddy sludge that’s difficult to traverse.

It’s little wonder she chose to keep what happened from her parents. Though she was usually good outside of her comfort zone, this was different. Wood was stressed.

“We started panicking when we realized it was going to get dark soon and we had no way to call anyone and also didn’t give our friends the exact location of the hike,” she said.

Fortunately, Wood’s experience from multiple hikes paid off. They stopped, took a breather and made a plan to get themselves to a point on the trail where they would be able to get phone service again to work out how to get home. Even then, it wasn’t easy.

“Once we got service again we pulled up a map of Ka’au crater in All Trails and we were able to see the wrong turns we made so we turned around and followed the trail it showed on the app which took us another three hours because it had rained, the mud was slippery, and we got to a point where there wasn’t even a clear trail anymore,” Wood said.

They eventually made it back with their parents none the wiser about how close they had come to getting seriously lost. Though it was a stressful experience, it has also proven to be a learning one for Wood.

She now makes sure to have a map of any hike she goes on downloaded on her phone, which she follows closely. Wood also makes sure to share her location with others who aren’t going on the hike and makes sure to check the weather before she sets off.

Wood’s advice to anyone traveling like she does is simple: “Be prepared.”