Buck up there, little camper. Lemme tell you a story. Shit, I might tell you two. So in 2011 I went to a writer's workshop out at Ghost Ranch, more or less. The guys running it had gone in on a big plot of land out past Abiquiu, a chunk that got shaved off the Baca Land Grant. One of the things we had to do was sit out there, away from everyone, and write. Didn't matter about what. Some perspective - the road was maybe a mile away. There were six or seven other people within a half mile walk. I got where I was going with a canteen of water and no worries - and I've been lost in the woods before and nearly died, so I worry. I had reasonably good cell coverage the entire time. Some different perspective: By the time the US Government gave the land to the Bacas, the Spanish had been gone for 400 years. By the time King Ferdinand gave it to whoever, the Anasazi had been gone for 400 years. And by the time I wandered up to my little dirt knoll in the middle of nowhere, there hadn't been foot traffic since before the Norman Conquest. There were little flaked piles of chert and obsidian everywhere - back when the arid valley I occupied was a reasonable place to hunt deer, Anasazi men and boys hung out, flaked arrowheads with deer horn and waited for lunch to wander by. And in the intervening time, there had been nothing and nobody around. Some kid's cast-offs had sat under a tree and experienced 36,000 sunsets. Until I picked them up. It's pretty stupid that we rank "discovery" higher than "rediscovery" because you know what? Gutenberg didn't invent the printing press. Jared Diamond points out that there were similar gadgets on Crete in 2000 BC. They didn't catch on, though - the time wasn't right. Know what "slow food" is? A rediscovery of conventional cooking. Gastropubs aren't new-fangled, they're old-fangled. Everything old is new again. About them dragons. I've hiked logging roads. In the Southwest, wagon ruts that date back to the Western Expansion are still weed-free. In the Northwest, a trail you cut last winter is now overgrown. The last time I got lost in the woods I stumbled across some logging roads that, upon investigation, dated all the way back to 1971. Paved and everything. And lemme tell ya - they might as well have been Angkor Wat. It's deceptively easy to find yourself standing in a place where no one has stood for 30 years and when you get there by accident, it's every bit as thrilling and terrifying as if no one had ever been there before. I find that people who think all the discoveries have been discovered are the ones who need to get out more. There are vast swaths of the world that are rarely visited, if at all, and your discovery of them should be just as important to you as someone else's discovery the first time. You could start traveling now and would be dead long before you'd seen all the places everyday normal 1st-world people call home. Do you really need to find some lost corner of the Marianas Trench in order to feel like you've done something with your life? Know how archaelogists discover paleolithic ruins in Saudi Arabia? Google Earth. There are so many places in The Empty Quarter that people haven't been since the dawn of recorded history that satellites are the best way to find them. Go discover. Don't worry about whether or not you're the first. You're the first among the people you know and that's enough.