Cindy Hooper and her travel companions reached the heights of vacation exotica last spring when they encountered a crowded bazaar in Nepal with an imitation Pizza Hut.
“We saw the sign and said, ‘That’s a good [worthwhile] risk for pizza.’ So we went in.” They ordered the most appealing item on the menu: melted yak cheese pizza with a thin stream of tomato sauce and tuna fish topping. “You’re hungry and you’ll eat anything,” Hooper says.
This clearly wasn’t a typical vacation. Hooper, 36, a teacher and director of summer programs at Winnetka’s North Shore Country Day School, trekked last April to Pumori, a sister mountain to Everest, as part of the non-profit “Connecting Classrooms to the World” program.
Her vacation degustation and destination might have been unusual. But adventure travel by women and Americans in general is becoming less so. Over the past 10 years, increasing numbers of women have decided that lazing on a beach chair with a tropical drink doesn’t measure up to backpacking, kayaking or dogsledding.
According to the non-profit Adventure Travel Society, nearly 98 million Americans have taken an adventure travel trip in the past five years, 49 percent of them women, compared with around 20 million Americans in 1990, about 35 percent of them women.
Adventure travel comes in all varieties, from easy snorkeling with catered meals and hot showers to grueling treks in harsh temperatures where sleep is at a premium. Women needn’t be fine-tuned athletes to take some of these trips, and they don’t have to travel far. Wilmette-based Northwest Passage has a catalog that lists Midwest adventure trips for every skill level.
While some women take mixed-gender trips, many opt for women-only expeditions. Susan Eckert started Rainbow Adventures in 1982 in Evanston, then moved the company to Bozeman, Mont., in 1994, also changing its name to AdventureWomen.
“When women came on these trips 20 years ago, people would say, ‘What’s wrong with your marriage?’ It’s different now. Women have time and money and they’re into being with a group, like men have always done with hunting, fishing and golfing.”
What’s more, husbands and families nowadays often don’t want to do these kinds of trips, or single women want to do them on their own initiative, Eckert says.
“So women come with us. It’s safe and very supportive, especially if it’s an activity they haven’t done before,” she says. “And once they get here, they find it very freeing. They don’t have to put on makeup or dress up.”
Eckert’s trips range from rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon to hiking in Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks. Farther-reaching treks include horseback riding in Iceland and kayaking in the Sea of Cortez in Mexico, and trips are rated easy, moderate or high energy. Though ages range from 30 on up, the average traveler is 50.
“I have a zest for life,” says traveler Annika Jaspers, 55, national director of publications for accounting and consulting firm Grant Thornton, who has been on five adventure trips. “I am not a sedentary person and I like to experience new and different things.”
She has parasailed in the Caribbean, downhill skied in Montana, and is looking at hiking in Scotland for her next trip.
“I don’t ever want to be one of those people who says at the end of my life, `If only I had done this,'” she says. “I have several old lady friends who say to do this while you can.”
Pam Gaffigan just returned to Chicago from an AdventureWomen sightseeing safari to Tanzania and Kenya. “I was petrified to do this vacation,” said Gaffigan, 38, an operations manager with Lord & Taylor. “I didn’t know anybody. But it turned out great.”
Geneve Hein, now 22 and a part-time student at College of DuPage, chose a more grueling route. At age 16, the Oak Brook resident became the youngest person and the third woman ever to cross-country ski (with occasional dog-sled breaks) to the geographic North Pole, a trip arranged by the Northwest Passage.
“There’s no land, no trees, and you can feel the ice moving and cracking,” she says. “It’s a place like no other, a frozen ocean with no security, no nighttime [in spring and summer], no people, no animals.”
Though she raised funds for multiple sclerosis and conducted experiments on temperature change for the University of Illinois on the trip, adventure was Hein’s main motivation.
“Someone gave the trip brochure to my mom as a joke,” she said. “I picked it up and said, `If I don’t do this, someone else will and I’ll be so jealous.'”
For nearly 14 hours each day, starting 120 miles from the North Pole, she skied in a line with 14 men (she was the only female on the trip), rarely speaking and enduring temperatures from 30 degrees below zero to 10 above. In preparation, Hein gained 25 pounds of body fat and, during the trip, ate close to 9,000 calories a day with an emphasis on chocolate and nuts.
It was so cold during her two-week trip that Hein’s breath crystallized when she slept and snowed back down on her.
“We were always cold and never comfortable,” she said. To celebrate journey’s end, Hein stood on her head on the North Pole–and was promptly nipped in the rear by a confused sled dog.
More recently and slightly south of Hein’s coordinates, Trish Bosch, 29, manager of Uncle Dan’s camping and travel outfitters store in Evanston, immersed herself in everything Finnish during her weeklong ski trip above the Arctic Circle in Finland in winter of 1998. She tried speaking the language; she munched on deer (“chewy”) and fish (“bony”) and sampled Finland’s dark beers (“powerful”). And one day she experienced a Finnish sauna, followed by a traditional leap into the snow.
And there she remained, flailing naked in a snowbank, unable to stand up. “It was so deep that the more I tried to get out, the more I sank,” the Evanston-born, Chicago-raised Bosch recalled. “Finally some women asked if I needed help.”
While many women choose adventure travel for more intentional challenges, some also take it a step further and travel on behalf of a cause.
During Hooper’s trek to Pumori, for instance, she and three other teachers as well as a small group including museum educators and mountain climbers brought their adventures to classrooms through a Web site. There they posted diaries, offered “alpine” lesson plans and answered students’ e-mails during the trip. (Photos and diaries are at www.activeendeavors.com). The group also brought supplies, shoes and clothing to impoverished children in Nepal.
Hooper’s goal was to reach Pumori’s base camp at 20,000 feet. “I didn’t realize we’d be going down as much as we’d be going up,” recalled Hooper. “There were days we’d climb up to 10,000 feet then down to 6,000. In all my backpacking experiences, you just hike up.”
Though the trekking and sites were incomparable, there were familiar things, such as Coca-Cola and Snickers bars, sold at every village along the way. (And at Namche Bazaar, the last big village before base camp, the group came upon the Pizza Hut impostor.)
While other team members attacked the trail, Hooper strolled so she could take in every detail. When she saw Mt. Everest, she nearly cried. Little did she know it would be the last day of her trip; a few hours later, she was hit by acute altitude sickness and sent back to a village and eventually home. “It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life,” she said of walking six miles to Namche while ill with vertigo, dehydration and hypothermia. “Maybe having a baby would be a little easier.”
Still, she constantly uses anecdotes from her trip in class. “The girls here at school especially believe that anything can be accomplished. I’m living proof of that.”
