OP/ED: SPARE THE THREATS … AND THE CONDESCENSION

 This article was originally published in the May 24, 2025 Edition

It’s been years since I met One-Eyed Jack, but I still remember that night with unsettling clarity. It was the first time I felt scared to camp alone as a woman.

I was nineteen, freshly trained as a Backcountry Caretaker for the Appalachian Mountain Club, stationed at Garfield Ridge Campsite in New Hampshire’s White Mountains—twelve days on, three days off. Most of my job involved stirring human waste with a pitchfork, doing trail work, and collecting fees from hikers passing through. I lived alone in a canvas wall tent, with the nearest coworker at least three trail miles away.

That night was my first solo on site. It was a damp, brooding June evening, and the rain had chased away the usual crowd. Everyone, that is, except One-Eyed Jack.

He arrived soaked and smiling beneath a beard so thick I couldn’t guess his age. “One-Eyed Jack,” he said. It was his trail name, earned from a story he didn’t tell. At first, he was pleasant, even charming.

“I’ve gotta tell all the women hikers who are scared to go solo that there’s a nineteen-year-old girl living up here all alone. What’s their excuse?”

I laughed. It felt like a compliment until he kept going. 

“You’re not just any nineteen-year-old. You’re an attractive one. People are going to take advantage of you out here. How are you going to protect yourself?”

I hadn’t thought of it. I shrugged nervously, and I told him I had an axe. 

He nodded, amused, and told me he’d let his buddies, hikers a few days behind, know there was an “attractive, peppy little blonde thing” waiting up at Garfield Ridge for them. 

That night, I watched his headlamp from my tent, and I slept with my axe beside me. In the morning, I found a note pinned to my platform with a rock and a playing card: the One-Eyed Jack. “Keep that axe sharp.” 

When I told my coworkers, the advice was swift and familiar: Don’t tell people your real age. Don’t wear makeup. Don’t smile too much. Lie if you have to. Say you have a gun. Sharpen your tools when someone walks into camp.

But I didn’t want to lie. I’m a girly girl. I love pink and exercise skirts. I wear mascara just as much as I wear mud. And I am peppy and smiley.

Over time, I’ve learned to adapt. I wear baggy clothes. I don’t hitchhike, even when my male friends do. I never tell anyone on the trail where I’m camping. I’ve practiced setting boundaries in the mirror. I clip a bottle of pepper spray to the front of my pack. When I bought it, I said it was for bears until the clerk pressed me. When I admitted it was really to deter men, he was stunned. “You hike alone?” he asked. “What does your father think about that?”

There are many respectful men in the outdoors. I’ve spent many nights on the trail sharing stories with strangers and made some of my best friends at campsites. I’ve given my phone number out without thinking twice about it. However, the bad memories linger with me, even when the moments were fleeting. It’s not always about what they say; It’s the uneasy feelings they leave behind.

Of the uneasy feelings, some come from condescending men.

This includes the random hiker who corrected my sawing technique while I was on the job, only to snap the blade when I handed it to him. Or the one who got a laugh from his friends when he shouted, “I’ve never seen a pretty girl with an axe before!” while I was clearing a blowdown. 

On a chairlift ride this winter, I told my boyfriend I wasn’t feeling like skiing that day, and a man in his mid-fifties interjected, “The more you get into this sport, the more you’ll love it. Once you learn how to parallel turn, there’s no other feeling in the world.” 

I learned to ski at two. I live in town. I’ve worked at a ski shop. But I didn’t say a word. 

After a few moments of uncomfortable silence, my boyfriend suggested that I might just be frustrated because it was the weekend and there were a lot of people on the slopes. 

“Once you get good enough, you can ski in the woods, and then it feels like nobody’s around,” the man interjected again.

Later, my boyfriend pointed out that I was skiing slower than I usually do. I hadn’t even realized it. But when you hear these things constantly, you get used to the feeling of having to prove yourself until you can’t focus.

Then there are the scary men. Last summer, I solo-hiked the 270-mile Long Trail in Vermont. Twice, I hiked farther than planned to avoid camping near older men who made sexual comments about me. Once, I picked up my pace because a man kept asking where I’d sleep that night.

I used to get very upset by such comments. I ranted to my male friends. Eventually, I stopped mentioning it. I got tired of the same responses: Why are you complaining about a compliment? Everybody hears stuff like that, not just girls. 

However, I recently had a conversation that stirred something deeper. With Stephanie Forté, a professional climber who came forward about being raped by Charlie Barrett, a once-revered name in the climbing world, now sentenced to life. 

Her story was part of an investigative piece by Annette McGivney titled “How Did This Climber Get Away with So Much for So Long?” which chronicled Barrett’s serial assaults on women before his conviction. She reached out to me after I covered Lonnie Kauk’s trial, in which another famous climber was convicted of domestic violence.

Forté first reported her assault in Mono County, but couldn’t get justice until he was charged federally. When she began telling people in her climbing community what had happened, many didn’t believe her. Some mocked her age. “You should be flattered,” one person said. “He’s so much younger.” Others chalked it up to her being single or out of touch: “That’s just how things work now. You don’t get it.”

We talked for over an hour. I plan to write more about her case and experience with the Mono County DA’s office, but we kept coming back to one chilling central question: Why are there so many men in the outdoors who abuse and harass women, and why do their friends let it happen?

Outdoor hobbies aren’t just activities. They’re cultures – ski culture, climbing culture, backpacking culture. These cultures pride themselves on peer discipline. Leave No Trace. Etiquette. Safety skills. But the same vigilance rarely applies when women report feeling unsafe, disrespected, or violated.

According to a 2023 Strava Study, Women globally are 9% more likely than men to cite a lack of safe places to exercise as a barrier to working out, and women in the U.S. were 70% more likely than men to cite this.

These stats make more sense when we remember these spaces have long been male-dominated. Plus, they’re competitive. And what happens when women step into a space like that, as they have in recent decades? When they hike the same miles, send the same routes, carry the same packs? Do men accept this without threat? Do they have to?

It seems to me that some men assert their power through dominance, sex, or belittlement, knowing the culture has protected others in the past, kept their secrets, and taken their word first. There’s no pressure to be better.

After that conversation with Forté, I called my dad. He’s in his fifties, an active outdoorsman, and, in tandem with my mom, the reason I started engaging with the outdoors at a young age. 

He sewed a backpacking pack for me when I was too small for store-bought ones. Took me to the climbing gym. Taught me to ski with a leash and a lot of patience, then taught me how to ski in the backcountry.

When I finished venting, he laughed and said, “Well, it’s a good thing you had a dad who overestimated your ability growing up, then, isn’t it?”

I laughed too. But then I realized: my dad wanted me to grow up and enjoy the outdoors as an equal; he was excited to share something with me. As I grew older, it was a rude awakening to realize that other men might not share the same feelings about my presence.

I’ve since chosen my social circles around this idea, ensuring that I’m surrounded with people I trust. Being around men and other women who believe in me emboldened me to take risks, grow, and stand up for myself.

More women need encouragement and respect in the outdoors, not just protection. More men need to encourage one another to challenge their worldviews.

I still love the outdoors. I still go alone. But I’m tired of keeping my axe so close.