Trailed, p.12
Trailed, page 12
By the dawn of the nineteenth century, he and countless other men of means had converted the simple act of walking into a recreational pursuit deemed worthy of the emerging middle class. These pastoral pedestrians considered themselves “travelers”: individuals who made their own way through the world, often off road and over difficult terrain, so as to better suck out the essence of an experience. In that regard, they distinguished themselves from mere “tourists,” who were content to be plunked down at a site and offered an organized, distanced experience.
A similar phenomenon was occurring in America. Four years after Thoreau left his cabin at Walden Pond, he spoke before the Concord Lyceum about the virtues and benefits of wilderness rambles. The lecture was published posthumously in 1862 by the Atlantic as his now-iconic essay “Walking.” In it, he advocates for “absolute freedom and wildness” gained when we see ourselves as a part of nature. For Thoreau, this lived truth was best achieved by a willingness to “saunter,” a word he erroneously ascribes to both “a Sainte Terrer (one who walks to the holy land) or Sans Terre (without a home).” Neither is correct etymologically (according to the authors of the Oxford English Dictionary, the word is of “uncertain origin despite many absurd speculations”). But it is true that both of Thoreau’s erroneous suppositions make for great metaphor: in the case of the former, the idea is that a woodland saunter, even in one’s own backyard, could achieve the same kind of spiritual significance as a religious pilgrimage; in the latter, that the best hikes are those where we proceed as if we have no home or, perhaps more exactly, that we shuffle through the world like a snail or a turtle, with our homes on our backs. This idea comes with an appealing kind of simplicity: that thrift and austerity, even if it is temporary and artificial, can grant us peace and liberty. Sauntering, we are free to walk for days, stopping when and where we choose for a snack or a nap or to set up camp for the night.
Early American devotees referred to this practice as “tramping.” The word “hike” didn’t appear until the nineteenth century and originally was a colloquialism meaning to make people scarce (as in, Go take a hike!). It didn’t become a fun verb (as in, She hiked the trail) until the twentieth century. As the American tramping craze continued to grow, so too did organizations of like-minded people looking to get outside. Most were white, educated, upper-middle-class men either on the East Coast or in California. The exclusionary nature of this pastime was something Thoreau only briefly acknowledged, lamenting in his essay “Walking”: “How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand it I do not know; but I have grounds to suspect that most of them do not stand it at all.”
Few wilderness organizations have been as influential as the Appalachian Mountain Club. Founded in 1876 by a group of professors and scientists from Harvard and MIT, the club was headed by Edward Pickering, a noted astronomer and physicist. By the tony standards of Cambridge, he was also revolutionary in his gender egalitarianism: his Harvard observatory was peopled by women skilled in computation and data collection (not unlike NASA’s famous “hidden figures”—though it’s worth noting that the females in Pickering’s observatory were widely known as “Pickering’s Harem,” a sobriquet he purportedly enjoyed a great deal). To Pickering’s credit, the Appalachian Mountain Club did admit some women from its inception. But that allowance tells only part of the story. Of the 217 members that first year, only forty-four were women (and nearly half of those were enrolled as the wives of male members). The female members included in these early years played next to no role in the governance or administration of the organization, nor were many of them present on most of the club’s rugged outings.
In 1884, Edward H. Clarke, a physician and one of Pickering’s Harvard colleagues, published Sex and Education. In this book, Clarke maintained that both physical and educational exertion came with a heavy price for women, including, but not limited to, uterine disease, hysteria, chorea (an involuntary movement disorder), increased menstrual cramps and hemorrhaging, along with “a dropping out of maternal instincts, and an appearance of Amazonian coarseness and force.” For that reason alone, Clarke contended that women should be kept inside.
His reasoning was twofold. First, from a physiological perspective, Clarke—whose medical specialty was in hearing disorders and the physiology of the ear—argued that women have wider pelvises, which when mounted with the weight of the body cause their thighs to splay out, making standing and walking more difficult (and thus more taxing) than it is for men. Second, he maintained that the development of a woman’s ovaries and uterus, particularly during her teens and twenties, was such an exhausting physical feat unto itself that the body could not tolerate any additional stress, particularly when it came to exercise and “outdoor pursuits.” As a result, Clarke advocated fewer physical and intellectual demands for women overall and total bed rest during the weeks of their periods. A failure to do so, he concluded, would undoubtedly cause a woman to lose “her feminine attractions, and probably also her chief feminine functions.”
It’s tempting to turn Clarke into a caricature or intellectual straw man: an easy grab in an attempt to show the ridiculous sexism inherent in Victorian ideology. Nevertheless, his theories became pervasive in American thought and defined expectations about access to wilderness for generations. Multiple outdoor organizations prohibited female membership, for example, including the influential hiking group the White Mountain Club. The club’s founder, John M. Gould, was a bank clerk and amateur Civil War historian. In his How to Camp Out, first published in 1877, Gould advised young men to view their expeditions as regimental exercises: hikes were best considered “marches”; male camping pals were instructed to form “companies” with clear duties and timetables. Most marches, he warned, would be too difficult for ladies, particularly if routes included loose rocks or tangles of low-growing trees. And because women ought not stray far from home, sites where they might camp must be chosen accordingly. Any overnight locations should be such that stoves could be delivered to make women more comfortable, along with discarded doors that women could stand upon while dressing. Sleeping outside was out of the question during any kind of precipitation; instead, schoolhouses or sawmills should be located as shelter.
By the dawn of the twentieth century, in both Britain and America, wilderness education had become based almost solely on this military training model. Take the founding of the Boy Scouts. Upon returning from the Boer War, Colonel Robert Baden-Powell was dismayed to find what he saw as a “lack of virility” among Britain’s youth. In his proposal for the Scouts, Baden-Powell suggested a program harkening back to Europe’s chivalric knights and the ancient Samurai. He studied the Boys Brigade, a youth group that used military training to teach muscular Christianity, along with the Sons of Daniel Boone, an American-based group that encouraged boys to wear buckskin and always carry guns (on which they would notch their achievements toward what one contemporary social critic called “nativism and masculinity”).
James West, the Boy Scouts’ first chief executive, was emphatic that the Scouts and their camps remain the exclusive domain of males—a place for the kind of rugged masculinity Teddy Roosevelt espoused. And while West acknowledged that girls’ camps were also beginning to burgeon, he insisted that they remain wholly separate from male organizations. (While serving as the head of a national organization of camp directors, he also famously insisted that any director of a girl’s camp, regardless of that director’s gender, not be allowed admittance into his professional organization.)
The discourse and metaphors surrounding outdoor recreation followed suit. Military-inspired language like “attacking” the trail, “conquering” a mountain, and “hitting” a section of rapids became commonplace. After World War II, members of the army’s elite Tenth Mountain Division returned home with synthetic fibers, freeze-dried foods, and professional skills in pursuits ranging from rappelling and ice climbing to downhill skiing and slack packing. With their expertise and advocacy, outdoor recreation exploded. So too did organizations like the National Outdoor Leadership School, founded by Tenth Mountain veteran Paul Petzoldt. Shortly thereafter, fellow veteran Earl Shaffer became the first person to thru-hike the entire twenty-two-hundred-mile AT, claiming he did so to “walk the war out of my system.” Thousands of Americans would follow him, along with the likes of David Brower, who founded the Sierra Club and published the widely read Manual of Ski Mountaineering, based on his service in the Tenth. In England, Outward Bound was founded by German foreign affairs veteran Kurt Hahn to train young British seamen in survival skills and the stiff upper lip that comes with challenges to one’s personal safety. Its model soon became the gold standard for all outdoor recreation programs.
In 1965, Outward Bound first experimented with allowing women into its courses. And even then, the decision was not without great internal controversy: “There was a strong feeling at the time among those valuing and cultivating Outward Bound’s machismo image that the success of women in similar experiences would diminish that image,” wrote Bob Pieh, founder of the Voyageur Outward Bound School, which hosted the first female class. Specifically, recalls Pieh, the concern within the organization was that Outward Bound would become defined by what he called “Amazon syndrome”: namely, that Outward Bound would begin attracting stereotypically butch staff and female participants.
Despite these misplaced and reductive concerns, early female participants in the Outward Bound programs excelled, and individuals identifying across a wide spectrum of femininity participated. However, it is also true that many of these participants found the pedagogical approach of the program problematic. The Outward Bound model has long been based on a curriculum of increased risk: over the course of a session, which can span anywhere from hours to weeks, participants found themselves in activities that cause more and more stress (like advancing from trust falls to rappelling, for instance). The idea was that as participants’ perception of risk and stress increases, so too would their sense of accomplishment. As those psychological states increased, participants were expected to practice emotional stoicism and the same conquering attitudes present in the early military-based programs.
Along with this almost-authoritarian approach, women interested in wilderness pursuits also faced a proliferation of sexually charged names for climbing and paddling routes, such as the ones encountered by my students at Unity (Throbbing Labias, Gang Bang, One Last Bitch), as well as continued and pervasive instances of sexual harassment. This resulted in a culture that proved, at best, exclusionary for individuals identifying as female, nonbinary, or queer, not to mention people of color who also often experience additional barriers to their well-being in the wilderness.
Woodswomen was founded as a corrective to that experience. The program’s mission was one of fostering relationships and individual growth for women and girls by valuing holistic wellness, safety, and personal choice. Trips had leaders, but decisions were made collectively. Group process was paramount—whether it meant deciding who chops onions and washes dishes at camp or whether or not to portage a tricky rapid. For a lot of participants, a Woodswomen expedition was their first time camping in the wilderness. Ensuring it was a safe, positive, and affirming experience was a major priority.
Woodswomen is also where Julie and Lollie first met.
Denise Mitten was one of Woodswomen’s founders and also served as the longtime director of the organization. She has since become one of the world’s leaders in education and scholarship dedicated to gender and outdoor leadership. In the weeks before my first visit to the surviving family and friends of Julie and Lollie, I contacted Mitten. I wanted to know what Lollie and Julie had been taught about wilderness practices during their time at Woodswomen and, of course, more about who they were and how they fell in love. I also wanted to understand the impact of their deaths on the outdoor industry. Mitten and I talked on the phone for multiple hours over the course of several days. She spoke at length about the pressures and harassment encountered by women, gay, and nonbinary people in the field of outdoor recreation during the 1970s and 1980s.
“On mainstream wilderness trips, there was this pervasive sense of entitlement among guides that it was their right to sleep with some female clients and harass or belittle others. A lot of participants signed up looking for reparative experiences, and theirs were anything but,” Mitten told me. “Woodswomen wanted to change the whole idea that we’re out there to conquer and prove something. Instead, we just wanted clients to be in nature in the most positive sense. So many women are taught that if you could just change this or clean up that, you’ll fit in. We wanted them to believe they were fine the way they were.”
After our first marathon phone call, Mitten sent me on a guided tour of former Woodswomen expedition sites. They included Bde Maka Ska (formerly Lake Calhoun), a four-hundred-acre lake in the middle of Minneapolis, where Woodswomen hosted fishing events for women and kids, and county parks where they taught female correctional inmates to camp. The photos she also sent along, mostly from the 1980s, showed barefoot girls of many races and ethnicities netting minnows and being hoisted onto trip leaders’ shoulders so that they could erect tent poles. Even after all these years, I felt a pang of envy looking at those images. As a child of that era, I had longed for those kinds of opportunities. For many of us, they were few and far between.
And for no small number of people, they still are. Continued scholarly research reveals just how many women, queer or nonbinary individuals, and people of color perceive very real barriers to their participation in wilderness activities. Recent survey participants list a variety of reasons for these barriers, including outdoor recreation’s continued emphasis on physical strength and technical expertise, sexist and exclusionary programming, and a fear for one’s personal safety while in the wilderness. A recent study of advertisements in outdoor magazines found that while women were present in 46 percent of ads, the majority of them appeared in passive roles, such as sitting around a fire with friends or holding outdoor gear rather than using it. Only the smallest percentage of these women were depicted alone and actively engaged in any kind of athletic pursuit while in the wilderness. Of all the women in the ads, a full 91 percent were white. No known trans or nonbinary models were used.
After we first spoke, Mitten also sent a large Priority Mail box filled with newsletters published by Woodswomen during the 1990s. By the spring of 1995, the place was clearly humming. Show up on any given day and you’d find clotheslines drooping with orange life jackets and wet gear draped from canoes and half-gorged trailers in the parking area. The front desk was staffed with recent college grads, cheerfully answering questions about accommodating dietary restrictions and sending welcoming letters to women who wanted more information about their first big adventure. In the back kitchen, trip leaders would be stuffing bags with oatmeal and lentils.
The trips themselves were grueling by any standard, whether participants were climbing Denali or paddling the Boundary Waters. But they were also supposed to be nurturing—to show participants they didn’t need to prove anything; that they truly were already great just the way they were. And that was no platitude. Instead, it was born out of experience, from cooking pancakes and chicken enchiladas in a collective backcountry camp kitchen, to setting up tents and planning the day’s route with topographical maps and compasses. Along the way, participants would take moments to debrief about the day’s highs and lows and what those moments sparked emotionally and psychologically.
The women who signed up for these trips were evangelical grandmothers and tattooed astrologers, rising executives and stay-at-home moms. Former guides estimate that a quarter of the clients, maybe as many as half, were gay. But even at Woodswomen, people treaded carefully around issues of sexuality. This was the Midwest in the 1990s, after all. “The outdoor world was still so much in the closet,” one former trip leader told me. “It was hard to be open even at Woodswomen. We were on the cutting edge at the time, but the cutting edge was not all that progressive.”
Julie Williams first arrived at Woodswomen in early May 1995, having registered for a canoe skills course. After a lifetime paddling with her dad, she was already proficient in a boat. Now twenty-three years old, she wanted to become an expert. She wanted to see if she had it in her to be an outdoor leader, too. A year earlier, she had graduated from Carleton with a degree in geology. After commencement, she drove cross-country, swung through California, and spent time with Derek and some other friends in Washington State. Eventually, she landed at Big Bend National Park in southwestern Texas. One of our nation’s most remote national parks, Big Bend’s own website, created by the NPS, describes the place as “splendid isolation,” “at the end of the end of the road,” and “weather-beaten desert”—and that’s all in the one paragraph intended to lure visitors.
Despite the austerity, Julie loved it. While at Big Bend, she worked as a Student Conservation Association intern, mostly issuing backcountry permits, selecting rock samples for interpretive displays, and answering the same questions from guests over and over again. Her supervisors called her competent and quiet. They appreciated her interest in the park, the way she was always trying to learn everything about it.
Interns tend to get the worst of national park housing. At Big Bend, that meant ramshackle, mouse-infested doublewide trailers that probably should have been condemned years earlier. Julie shared hers with two roommates. She was convinced her room was haunted: she claimed an old chest cooler someone had left there was always moving around on its own. She tried smudging the place with burning sage to chase away unwelcome spirits. She lined makeshift shelves with her CD collection—all Tracy Chapman and Ani DiFranco and old, old folk singers like the Weavers and Kingston Trio. At night, she’d pull out her guitar and Rise Up Singing songbook. She and her roommates would belt out “Puff the Magic Dragon” and “This Land Is Your Land” without a hint of irony. When someone forgot to clean the kitchen sponge, she’d leave a funny poem reminding them. Some weekends, they’d all hike the remotest trails in the park. But Julie also relished her solitude. She’d take off on her own, spending a day at the local church or handing out food to homeless people or camping alone deep in the desert. That worried her roommates. They thought she could be too trusting, too quick to find goodness in people.
