An Ode to Night Hikes and Night Writes

At 3:30am on June 21st, I woke up to rain pounding my window. My roommate and I threw our bedheads into ponytails and went hiking.

I can’t remember exactly when the tradition started, but for a while now, a group of us girls hike for sunrise, rain or shine, on the longest day of the year. We would get to the trailhead at approximately 2am, headlamps mounted, and hoof it up one of Vermont’s finest peaks for the very first glimpse of summer.

Two of us brought this ritual to Bellingham. Groggy and wet, we climbed as dark gray turned to light gray. We boiled up some coffee on the ridge and toasted to tradition.

Despite being hours later than usual, this year’s alarm was brutal. This is because my mostly-unemployed sleep schedule is so out of whack that 3:30am is closer to my bedtime than my wakeup time. Much closer, actually. If I’m dialed into a book, a writing project, or a job application, I’ll often give a weary-eyed glance to my clock and find that I’ve long cleared midnight, 1am, 2am. Lately, I’d been inching past 3.

Without the structure of an hourly job, my sleep schedule is dictated by nothing but my own volition. And it seems like my volition is to hike all day and write all night. I’m the opposite of my roommate, who wakes up at 5am to work East Coast hours and is sound asleep by 9 if nothing stops her. She’s a true early bird, the kind that baffles me, and I’m fully and honestly a night owl. Anyone who tries to tell me that staying up late is unhealthy or a sign of illness will always be met with a hard scoff. As a long-distance hiker and proud sufferer of an immune disorder, I’ve learned to speak my body’s language. And my body is telling me to stay up recklessly late and reap the benefits of nocturnality.

When I drove east to west, watching the days literally get longer as I crossed through time zones, I found myself in the circadian rhythm of a morning person. Sleeping in tents as the clock jumps forward will do that to you. I kept it up for a while once I reached Washington, but the nighttime was too alluring. Before long, I was back to crashing at 2 in the morning and waking up at 10 with a full eight hours of rest.

Circadian rhythms, while influenced by the sun’s cycle and presence or absence of light, are in part determined by genetics. While we don’t understand for certain why some of us are comfortable staying up so late, some scientists have theorized that the night owls of our ancestors were better equipped to stand guard of hunter-gatherer camps while others slept, therefore increasing the survival rate of the entire group. Researcher Michael Weedon told CNN that there are 351 genetic factors that influence our chronotype, or our preference toward day or night.

None of this surprises me—my parents are night owls. When I developed a habit of collecting water glasses on my bedside table, my dad invented a game in which one of us got a point every time we spotted abandoned dishes or trash in the other’s room. I’d often rack up points after discovering yogurt containers and popsicle sticks by his side of the bed, evidence of midnight snacks to fuel late-night activity.

I often had trouble falling asleep as a kid, too. To help, my dad suggested that I make up bedtime stories in my head. Creative minds like ours will keep us up at night, he said. Better harness it before it gets out of control.

That’s the thing, though. My dad’s creativity manifests in oil paintings and landscape architecture, so making up a story might be a good way to distract his imagination from thinking about work. But for me, the writer? That little piece of advice might have destroyed what little chance I had at becoming a morning person. Not that I’m complaining. My night functionality is one of my favorite things about myself.

All day long I’ll loathe the idea of sitting down at my computer to write. Daylight makes all my fears crystal clear: I’ll hate it. Nothing I write will ever be good. It’ll never come out how I hope it will and then there will be evidence of my foolish failure. Every time I think I’ve worked up the courage to try, I’ll run into these thoughts like spiderwebs strung across a trail. They cling to my skin and my hair, and I’ll try to brush them off but they’re invisible and titanic and refuse to come unstuck.

But the darkness changes everything. As the sun slips away, the headlamp comes on. Suddenly, the peripheral is gone, and my small beam of light finds the trail. A few feet at a time, the path emerges. The ideas tumble in, slow at first and then faster. At each switchback there’s a new angle to explore; each ridge is a new perspective. The screen might be covered in squiggly red scoldings, but they no longer matter. The only goal is the keep going up, follow this blood-pumping trail of thought, fuel the writer’s high, and get to the revelatory climax before the sun floods over the peaks and washes it all away.

I’m not the only one who feels this way. There’s a long list of writers who only wrote at night, when the rest of the sun-abiding citizens were fast asleep: Franz Kafka, George Sands, Bob Dylan, Ann Beatie. . . the list goes on. Kathryn Schulz wrote an incredible essay about nighttime creativity in New York Magazine:

“It starts, as I said, around 10 p.m., when something ticks over in my mind, as if someone had walked into a shuttered cabin and flipped all the switches in the fuse box to ‘on.’ For the first time all day, I get interested in writing. As a corollary, I get a lot less interested in everything else. . . .If my body is producing a drug during that time, it is a natural methylphenidate—a dose of pure focus, side-effect-free and sweet.”

I know this all too well. The dead of night is the only time I can conjure that excitement I’d feel at 10 years old, scribbling into a notebook for hours of blurred reality, where nothing exists but the story pouring out of me faster than my aching hand can capture it. Both then and now, sense is a loose requirement. Imagination, suspense, and emotion are all that matter, leaving the rigidity of grammar, cadence, and clarity to the daytime critic. The nighttime write is about ascending into that frantic, hallucinogenic state of ideas and connections. That rule-following, self-critical, inner editor, it seems, has gone to bed.

Science agrees that some parts of our brains do begin to power down before others, namely the prefrontal cortex, the part in charge of executive functions like planning and decision-making. Brant Halser, assistant professor of psychiatry at University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, said in an interview for Vice that the prefrontal cortex functions decrease as sleep drive increases, and “with less of that top-down control and ‘cognitive inhibition,’ the brain might be freed up for more divergent thinking, allowing one to make new associations between different concepts more easily.” Huh, like the fresh connections that make a memorable story, you say?

There are also studies that have found DMT, or dimethyltryptamine, in the human brain. DMT is best known for being the psychedelic ingredient in ayahuasca, an Amazonian tea used in spiritual rituals to invoke powerful visuals and distortions. The discovery that our brains can produce their own DMT in several locations is astounding and mysterious—what is it doing in there? One theory is that DMT is linked to dreams, and the chemical is what causes the vivid and sensational stories that unfold in our subconscious while we sleep. I like to think that when we’re closer to sleep, a little DMT trickles out, prepping us for REM while giving our imaginations a boost.

Whether DMT is related to nighttime or not, there’s definitely something linking creativity to dreams, and subsequently, sleep. Scientists and artists have long claimed that their greatest ideas came to them in a dream, as if our brains have secret lives after dark where they solve the world’s greatest problems. It makes me wonder if the daytime is holding us back.

On the day before the sunrise hike, a spam call woke me up at 7am. Instead of dropping back into slumber, I made coffee. The idea was that if I made it through today on four hours of sleep, I could be out by 8pm and get in a few restful hours before the 3:30am go-time.

It was a foggy slog of a day. Four hours later, I looked at the clock and was astounded that it was only 10am. Still, I fought the urge to nap. I edited and posted the previous blog post, and on a whim, sketched some illustrations. At some point, I’d forgotten all about time and got myself lost in a feverish slurry of words and pictures. When I peeled myself away from my laptop, I had a brand new website. How did that happen? Is it possible that a lack of sleep in any direction is what I need to creatively thrive?

Miserable, yes, but productive tenfold.

After the sunrise hike, I went back to sleep. I woke up at 9:30am and started my day like usual. I was amazed when I fell asleep at 10pm and woke up the next day at 8 ready to rock. But that night? Oops, I stayed up until 2 reading. And the next night? Nearly 3am. 

Why fight it, really? This is the most I’ve written for myself since I was in middle school, and I love it. Letting society tell me that my schedule is wrong or that morning people are more responsible has only suppressed my creative potential. I say, let night people be night people. Or as Schulz writes in my favorite essay of all time, “I wouldn’t trade my schedule for the universe. Or rather, I have traded my schedule for the universe. You early birds can keep your worms.”

Maybe on next year’s sunrise hike I won’t sleep. I’ll write all night then I’ll pull on my hiking boots and climb a mountain. For some people, the sunrise is the start of a day. For me, it’s the reward at the end of a long creative sprint. It marks the triumph of a hard night’s work, the quiet finale to a frenzied ritual, the lookout from which I can see how far I’ve come. And by the time the creepy crawly thoughts come looking for a breakfast of sabotage, I’ll already be asleep.

vert tracker: 26,921 ft.

June 20 2025–July 8 2025