There are times, more than I’d care to admit, an hour and a half into a trainer ride in my freezing garage, staring at my bike avatar move through virtual landscapes of Zwift, when my gear is growing moss and the walls are closing in the way do at Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride, that I suddenly feel the urge to shed the cloying comforts of home and go for some long trek through a foreign landscape.

If only, I’ve often thought, I had an Adventure Buddy—someone who would always be there, nodding along as I detailed my latest hazily conceptualized scheme: I just read about the most remote pub in the UK. They’ll buy you a beer if you hike in. It takes a few days. You up for it? To complicate things, my mind never seems to drift to the local, the achievable (say, a day-hike in the Poconos) for which I might actually drum up a companion. I generate quixotic ideas that call for veritable Sancho Panzas.

The trusty companion of trail and tent is an idea—almost a romantic longing—that haunts the world of outdoor exploits. You think of famous climbing partnerships like Conrad Anker and Jimmy Chin, or Tommy Caldwell and Alex Honnold. If you’re me, you think of writers like William Finnegan, in his surfing memoir Barbarian Days, cavorting around the globe with his buddy Bryan Di Salvatore. Finnegan once evinced the bromance aspect of the whole thing. “You go to extreme lengths, and you do it together, so these friendships really get tested,” he told Alta Journal. “You want that great wave, but it’s much greater if your friend sees you get that great wave. It’s a dense sort of homoerotic world you live in.” The same, of course, can be true of female adventure friendships.

I’m not alone in my hunger for shared adventure. You see it on the partner boards at shops like Denver’s Wilderness Exchange, where people put up cards listing their preferred pursuit and available dates (“Always,” being my favorite). You see it in endless online queries from people new to a town who don’t have anyone to join them in the outdoors. The URL adventurebuddy.com will take you to a site, based in Alaska, looking to pair people up. “What a great idea!” one commenter wrote. “Just what Alaska needs … So many things to do, but not always easy to find the people to go with.”