I Tried To Give Back The Cat That Made Me FamousJJ YoshSat, October 31, 2026 at 4:58 PM UTC
I named him Diablo.
I want to be honest with you, because everyone who knows us now — the millions of people who watch a black cat ride my shoulders up volcanoes and through the Italian Dolomites — they all just assume it was love at first sight. It wasn’t. The first thing I felt for him was a lot closer to regret.
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It was 2016. I was an adventure filmmaker who’d spent nearly a decade building a life with no anchors in it. I’d hosted travel shows for Discovery and TLC, started a production company — basically trained myself to be gone. Bolivia, Kenya, the base of Everest, a new country pretty much every month. That was the whole point. I didn’t want anything that needed me to come home.
Then my landlord knocked on my door with a box of rescue kittens and a ultimatum. He said I either take one or they were gonna be put to sleep. So I reluctantly took the little black one. I didn’t want to change my life, so I figured I’d just keep him alive and keep moving.
That cat was — and I say this now with love — an absolute disaster. He was honestly one of the worst cats I’ve ever been around. He yowled. He bolted. In the first few days, he shot out the door and disappeared into the foothills outside Boulder, which is mountain lion country, where an outdoor cat’s life expectancy is basically measured in weeks, and I stood out there in the dark completely sure I had already failed at the one thing I hadn’t even wanted to do.
I found him hiding under a rock and carried him back inside. And then I sat there and seriously thought about giving him back. I didn’t think he was ever going to change.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about the creatures you don’t choose: Sometimes they decide to choose you.
The author with Simon.Courtesy of JJ Yosh
Within a couple of days Diablo mellowed. He stopped fighting me and started pressing his face into my face, over and over, like he was trying to memorize me. A friend watched this happen and told me I should rename him. “Simon,” she said.
Something in my chest just dropped, because Simon was the name of the imaginary friend I had as a kid, the one I used to think of as this guardian angel watching over me. I’d forgotten about him for 30 years. I renamed the cat that same afternoon.
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Because I refused to cancel my trips, Simon joined me. The first hike he quit halfway and looked up at me like, OK now what? So I put him on my shoulder. He settled there like he’d been waiting his whole short life for me to offer him a spot there, and that’s when I figured out he’d go more miles, and faster, if he just rode on my back.
That’s how a cat became “Backpacking Kitty.” I bought shoulder pads so he could dig in without shredding my skin. Over nine years he learned to hike, climb, paddle, and yeah, snowboard.
The clips that the internet still swears are fake? They’re not. They’re just nine years of a cat trusting one person.
People started watching. Then a lot more people. In 2019, the internet did the thing the internet does, and Simon became way more famous than I will ever be. Today the two of us reach more than 10 milli, and his account laps mine without even trying.
But the moment that actually changed me wasn’t a summit or some viral video. It was a flat, ugly stretch of shrubs in the middle of Kansas, and it was the worst day of my life.
The author rafting with Simon.Courtesy of JJ Yosh
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Simon and I were on a hike near Kanopolis, shooting for a project, on a day so hot and humid the air felt like a wet towel. Simon is solid black so he overheats fast. I turned my head for one second, he was off leash and I was packing up my gear, and when I looked back he was gone. Not “ran up a tree” gone. Gone into a field of low shrubs that stretched in every direction, all of them identical, and I had no cell service and literally no one to call.
I have summited mountains where one wrong step ends you, but I have never felt fear like I felt in that field. I ran up and down the hillside screaming Simon’s name into the heat, and as every second passed, my panic got worse because every second I was doing the math, and the math kept landing in the same place: He’s going to overheat out here and die, and it will be because I looked away. This animal I hadn’t even wanted. This animal who’d somehow become the single most important living thing in my whole world.
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I want to tell you I found him using some great outdoorsman tracking skill. The truth is way dumber and more humbling than that. After what felt like forever, I stopped running around like a hysterical human, and got down on my hands and knees and started to crawl. I tried to think like Simon. Where would I go if I were a small overheating creature in a place with almost no shade? And there he was, just feet from where I’d lost him, tucked under one single shrub, in the one patch of shade for a 100 yards, just blinking at me like I was the one who’d wandered off.
I have never cried like that over anything. I wrote that night on my site that the day had been a tragedy and a miracle. I think now it was just the day I finally understood the trade I’d made.
Because here’s what a decade of running taught me, and what one bad cat untaught me in a single afternoon. I had built my whole life around not being needed, and I called it freedom. Simon made me a liar. He made me someone who checks the weather for two. Who carries extra water for a body that isn’t even mine. Who has canceled and rerouted and rebuilt entire expeditions around the comfort of a 10-pound animal, and then feels guilty about the trips that animal can’t come on.
The author hiking with Simon.Courtesy of JJ Yosh
Simon taught me to slow down and actually be present in the moment, and to care about someone other than myself, which, it turns out, I had no idea how to do until a cat I tried to give back forced me to learn it.
People ask me all the time who rescued whom. They want me to say I saved Simon. The euthanasia kitten, the disaster, the one who ended up getting a passport and climbing a Guatemalan volcano and flying 11 hours across an ocean asleep at my feet. And I did, technically, save his life that day when my landlord knocked on the door.
Also Read: My Dog Killed My Neighbor's Cat. I Had No Idea How Much My Life Would Change Because Of It.
But I know better now.
I was the one who needed saving. I just didn’t know it, because I’d gotten so good at being alone that I had mistaken it for being OK. It took a cat I didn’t want, who I almost lost in a Kansas field, to finally show me the difference.
So if you’re holding out — on the pet, the person, the thing that scares you because it might need you — let me just say this: The life you’re protecting by staying free might be a lot smaller than you think. Sometimes the thing you reluctantly take in — the one you’d swear you never wanted — is the exact thing that finally teaches you how to stay.
His name was almost Diablo. Thank God I changed it. He turned out to be my guardian angel after all.
JJ Yosh is an adventure filmmaker and TV host who has shot in 51 countries,usually with a cat on his back. He has hosted and produced for Discovery, TLCand Tastemade, directed the documentary Ancient Tomorrow, and films theexpedition series OUT THERE alongside Simon the Backpacking Kitty.
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Source: Nature
