Women Gone Wild

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This evening I raced over to the Sacramento REI five minutes before closing to pick up a Therm-a-Rest for next week's backpacking trip to the canyon country of southeastern Utah. My current Therm-a-Rest finally gave up the ghost in Alaska last year, and I quickly realized that there are a great many more options in semi-inflatable sleeping pads these days. The biggest surprise was that there are now Therm-a-Rests made specifically for women and that they are, of all things, pink.

'I think the green one is better,' my feminist friend Lucy said. Lucy never goes camping and couldn't care less about Therm-a-Rests, but she had endured a harrowing race across town in my car, and I could tell that the pink embarrassed her.

'The green one is better,' I said. 'It is also almost a pound heavier, and when you've got a pack on your back for eight straight hours, that pound can make a big difference.'

'At first we resisted the pink,' I told the woman at the cash register. 'Then we decided to embrace it.'

A smile of recognition spread across her face. 'Good call,' she said.

She and I were about the same age, and I could tell that we had probably both spent a good portion of our lives running around the wilderness, trying to prove we were as tough as the boys.

'I have spent so many years trying to be a man out there,' I said. 'I think this decade I want to go out there as a woman.'

Including next week, I will have been on five weeklong expeditionary trips this year. What is true about all of these trips (and almost never true about trips I took a decade ago) is that everything about them went smoothly. We didn't run out of food, we didn't suffer from heat exhaustion or hypothermia, and we didn't lose any gear. There were no tidal waves, lightning strikes, or blizzards; no one got lost or cut off a thumb; no one fell into a crevasse; and no one came anywhere close to drowning. What is also true about these trips is that they were conceived, organized, and enjoyed almost entirely by women.

Coincidence, you say. Accident of timing. I couldn't agree with you more. Sometimes no matter how well you prepare, no matter how conservative your decision making, no matter how few Y chromosomes are along on your trip, you can still find yourself in a mud slide or a hurricane without a dry piece of clothing to your name. But those of us who have given our time and usually our hearts to outdoorsmen over the years know that, for many of them, it's not really a wilderness trip unless, MacGyver-like, they have to make a fire out of a pair of shorts, a glow stick, and a ketchup bottle; it's not really an adventure until someone gets airlifted out.

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