“Let’s make like a hockey player and get the puck outta here,” said our group leader, Howie Wolke, stamping the tip of his sturdy hiking stick on the lakeside trail. It was the beginning of six days of guided wilderness backpacking in the Yellowstone backcountry. We were four city slickers, led by Mr. Wolke, and we needed to get moving. We’d just taken a ride across the vast blue of Yellowstone Lake in a sturdy little motor launch captained by a sun-leathered employee of the Parks Service, who deposited us on the shore, seven miles from the mouth of the upper Yellowstone River Valley. Mr. Wolke’s outfit, Big Wild Adventures, is built on his 28 years of experience offering people a taste of the wild, and is run by Mr. Wolke and his wife, Marilyn, from their home in Emigrant, Mont. Big Wild offers about 16 backpacking trips a year between April and October, most lasting one week and costing between $1,100 and $3,000 (plus airfare to the trip “base” town). Locations range from the Gila Desert Wilderness in New Mexico to remote parts of Alaska, and Mr. Wolke has recently included a canoeing trip down the upper Missouri River. This trip in the Upper Yellowstone Valley cost $1,400 apiece and was based out of Bozeman, Mont., which we had departed from early that morning.

We were each weighed down with around 40 pounds of stuff, a large amount of it food (Mr. Wolke had a 65-pound pack, crammed full of mysterious CPR equipment and other items we never saw). We were also freighted with the usual expectations that accompany such a trip. Would we see elk, moose, bison – even grizzlies and wolves? Would we succumb to hypothermia and have to be bundled in a sleeping bag, naked, with a trail companion for warmth?

More than anything, would we attain that perfect state where all the anxieties and strains of a New York existence melt away into a Zen-like haze – what my husband calls the “wilderness high”?

Scanning the undergrowth, I tried to remember what exactly it is you’re supposed to do when you find yourself caught between a bear and her cubs. If it’s a black bear, you make like an Amazon, scaring her off with your fierceness. If it’s a grizzly…frankly, this is where my mind becomes muddled with panic. You’re supposed to stand your ground and yet look sheepish and non-threatening, a contradiction in terms if ever I heard one. Plus you’re supposed to stay stock-still if the bear “mock charges” you. But if it attacks you, you wield the bear spray attached to your belt – a vicious aerosol of concentrated pepper juice. Only, not if the wind is blowing towards you. Except that’s the time you’re most likely to come upon a grizzly unexpectedly, when he or she can’t smell you coming.

When does it become clear that a bear is not mocking but really charging you? Mr. Wolke shrugged his shoulders and gave a wicked grin I came to know well over the next week. He’s run hundreds of these trips and has only twice encountered a bear at close quarters – neither incident requiring discharge of Eau de Ursus. Mostly, he explained, bears are as eager to avoid you as you are to avoid them. In fact, he disapproves of the bear bells some hikers use to broadcast their presence – they remove almost all chance of seeing any wildlife at all.

Mr. Wolke is the best kind of wilderness guide – a real outdoorsman, but also an active ecological lobbyist and co-founder of environmental activist group Earth First! (he left the organization when it got too radical for him). Under his guidance it is clear that no one should embark on a wilderness hiking trip to capture some sort of dreamy awe of nature. You want to watch a great sunset? Try the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. You want to know what it’s like to eat freeze-dried chili crouched under a tarp in the middle of a thunderstorm, 20 miles from the nearest dirt road? That’s when you sign up for an outing with Mr. Wolke’s company, Big Wild Adventures.

There’s more to it, of course. Looking down a long stretch of river valley swaddled by high-crested mountains at dawn, clouds rising like waking gods, knowing you’ve come as far as you can see on your own two muddy feet gives a deep sense of achievement not bested by any monthly sales presentation.

Out in the middle of nowhere, your life literally dependent on total strangers, you start to get a different perspective on what’s important. Many of Big Wild’s clients have become wilderness conservation enthusiasts after a week in the wild, even changed careers. “We’ve de-lawyered a number of people,” Mr. Wolke said, proudly.

This was my third trip with Mr. Wolke and my husband’s eighth. We’d returned because his trips give us a sense of balance and calm we can’t find anywhere else. My husband proposed to me on our first Big Wild Adventure together seven years ago – on top of a fossilized hump of seabed in the desert wilderness of the Escalante Canyon in Utah, at first light. We were both wearing silly wool hats and fleece jackets against the dawn cold, and toasted our union with a miniature bottle of whisky (he wasn’t going to lug a secret bottle of champagne for 50 miles, and I don’t blame him).

This time around, at our first camp site, in a forest by the pebbly shores of Yellowstone Lake, my hair drying in the failing warmth after a sneaky naked swim, I recognized the urban restlessness that dogged me at the start of every trip. I was agitating about what was going to happen next. The tent was pitched, the water bottles were filled, the food was stashed in the “kitchen” area. I’d tended any nascent blisters and hung out my high-tech towel to dry. There was nothing to do – no phone calls to make or receive, no tidying-up or laundry to distract me from the babble of my own thoughts. Nothing but the gentle sunset gathering behind the far hills at our back, enriched by smoke rising from a forest fire on the other side of the lake. Nothing to do but watch the color of the water change, slowly, with little drama, from blue to silver to gold to beaten copper as the hills darkened around us.

I felt restless, unsure of what had brought me there, and longed for something spectacular to happen. I shared this with my husband, who admitted he felt the same. “I mean, look, the sun isn’t even setting over the lake,” he complained, jokingly, to Mr. Wolke.

Days later, on a high hill we’d climbed on a day hike, contemplating storm heads marching ominously down the valley toward our tiny campsite far below, I realized the white noise had ceased and I was truly there, truly present – albeit with cuts and bruises and mosquito bites and socks so smelly we had to leave them outside the tent at night. And we’d talked and talked with our fellow hikers – people we’d never have met otherwise: a history teacher from Nashville, Tenn., a CPA from Sarasota Springs, Fla.

Our appreciation was silent, but complete. Nature is not only red in tooth and claw, as Tennyson said, but wet and prickly as well as infernally bumpy when you try to sleep on it at night. It’s good to be reminded that this is how our race began, focused on finding food and shelter, avoiding predators, and watching the skies for rain, instead of hurrying from one stimulating distraction to another.

In the end, the true joy of a serious backpacking trip is that, after a long day tramping through streams, over fallen logs, and up and down dale, you make camp, you eat dinner out of a single pot and then, gloriously, nothing happens.