As long as you're prepared like you should be for going out into the Wild, and you know you've get all the equipment, have enough water and food. Go out solo anyway. Don't let not having a partner hold you back.
Just make sure you create and send an email to a family member or loved one where you include like a screenshot of a satellite view of the area you intend to go checkout... if you can, annotate it showing where you plan to park and where you plan to hike in to. And then, just don't deviate all that much from that plan, knowing that this is your safety net, this other person knowing where you're supposed to be, so they can instruct rescue people.
Give that other person a rough idea of about when in the PM you plan to send them a TXT saying "I'm back outta the mountains now", then that last one of "home n safe" once you finally get all the way back to your home.
Also, you can get yourself a Personal Locator Beacon. Somebody donated me my first one, an older model that I didn't think functioned all that great, so I then opted to get the Garmin InReach Mini. Go check it out on Youtube. It's a very cool little device!
Always take at least one trekking pole with you. And use it while hiking! Especially for crossing creeks or any kind of sketchy areas.
And if you can, at your next doctor visit ask them to give you an Rx for a pain med like maybe Tylenol #3's. Those aren't all that powerful, it's just Codeine, so they'll likely agree to do it if you explain to them that you want it to have in your pack for these adventures. They'll give ya like only 15 or so at a time especially now with the changed regulations, since it's an opiate. Bad shit can sometimes happen, and it sucks a little bit less dragging yourself outta there with something to knock the pain down a lil bit sometimes. I had a slip-and-fall stepping off from the last rock before reaching the other side of a creek one morning day after Christmas... so the temp was 32 F, probably a thin sheet of ice was on the stone? In the fall I shattered my wrist just because that one arm happened to slam into the top point of a stone embedded into the other bank of the creek. I only had Advils that time. But that experience taught me and made me think of how screwed a person *could* be sometimes if they didn't have pain management to help 'em limp back outta there some day.
And then like for an extra safe strategy, you can opt to hike-in to a place the very first time you go there during just daylight ours, so you can become familiar with the trails and all the trickier parts to traverse. So that way, when you come back there in full hunt mode, hiking in during AM dark, and hiking out during PM dark, you'll be a bit more comfortable with it since you'll kinda have the lay of the land in your memory somewhat.
