Who Belongs in Cispus Basin?

W

e are backpacking in the Goat Rocks Wilderness in Southwestern Washington, crossing from Goat Lake through Snowgrass Flat toward Cispus Basin. Five years ago, Eric, Tim and I stopped in this basin to fill up on water, and it enchanted all of us; a steep horseshoe-shape, green, otherworldly and with impossibly steep wildflower meadows cut by rushing rivers and stillwater pools.

We had told Jon over the years that someday we should return, to show him this place that was hard to imagine was real.

Since my backpacking ankle accident a month after our initial visit to the Goat Rocks Wilderness—all the things that made me an inexperienced and tepid alpine wanderer intensified, and so when hiking with these three guys, I usually opt to fall far behind, sometimes working up my darkest fears about missteps and steep cliffs, small, slippery stone steps, and washed out trails.

As Tim and I apply moleskin blister tape on our heels at a fork in the trail, we spot someone huffing and puffing up the trail. She is a young forest service ranger with a spade over her shoulder. She stops to catch her breath, leaning in on her shovel and gleefully asking about the other campers we saw the night before. “Didn’t see any poop, did you?” And, “No fires? Anybody making fires up there?” 

We thanked Ranger Betty for her service and continued along the trail. This time of year, the alpine wildernesses of the Pacific Northwest begin to swell with the continuous flow of thru-hikers, most moving south to north. Yes, people in the backcountry come in all shapes and sizes. There are hikers with dogs and hikers with small kids and senior-citizen hikers. But one demographic seems askew—of all the people we have crossed paths with, it seems men are outnumbered by women 3 to 1. 

Isn’t the backcountry—isn’t wilderness—the domain of men? Even in writing, men ponder this question. The philosophy blog, Deep Thinker ruminates over this, considering that, “A simple explanation could be that men are physically stronger, and are therefore better suited for the rigorous lifestyle associated with living on one’s own. Carrying logs, cutting wood, building shelter, hunting etc. are all physically-demanding tasks.”

Women, on the other hand have hormonal reasons to avoid the wilderness, he explains. He posits that, “estrogen influences a woman’s desire to reproduce significantly, and isolating oneself in the wilderness betrays that reproductive urge so directly, that it tears the woman apart in a spiritual or holistic sense.“

I am backpacking with three guys who have various and significant wilderness experience. Tim served as an Army medic in the National Guard, Eric, who has been deliberately improving his backcountry skills with classes and regular outings, is the son of a mountaineer. Jon spends much of the year roaming land being considered for conservation by the Department of the Interior. When I shattered my tibia, fibula, and ankle socket on a hike with Tim and Eric, they hatched a daring overnight plan to rescue me.

In my lifetime, I grew up understanding the wilderness as the domain of real and fictional male archetypes —Jeremiah Johnson and Natty Bummpo, and Hugh Glass’ and Paul Bunyon. So, what do we make of all these females hiking around like they belong here?

We make it to Cispus River by early afternoon. We were fearful that, considering the high traffic of late July, there may be no available campsites in the basin. But indeed, when we arrive, we are the sole human residents, and the most glorious campsite, a stand of pines and a flat meadow right along the steep rushing river is free for the taking.

A solitude fortified by dad jokes and lengthy explanations of gear is broken when a trio of thru-hikers emerge at our campsite—two Europeans and an Australian. They had been hiking at a clip of twenty-five miles per day. They wake up early in the morning and are afoot all day. They have been hiking this trail since the Mexican border. 

We tell them that we would be more than happy to have them join us at our campsite, but that if they were interested, there was a second and nearly equal site just downslope of the meadow. 

The next morning, we wake to a steady rain, and a dense, gray fog. I know that, due to my slow pace, I need to get a jumpstart on the others. Before I leave, I peek at the campsite below. No sign of the three thru-hikers. They probably woke at 5. 

I leave camp, again wondering about who belongs at the edge of civilization—and whether the wilderness is our domain. If we are outnumbered three to one by women, isn’t this a new thing, a trend, a novelty, or a statistical anomaly? As my mind wanders as a respite from the steep drops below, I wonder about the James Beard food-writing award-winner writer Cathy Luchetti, chronicler of women and families in the American West’s frontier era. I begin to formulate what I might ask her, wondering if she could help me to answer the question—who belongs out here in the wilderness? 

N

obody ever told me that the wilderness was supposed to be more of a male place, or that us men were better adapted to thrive and enjoy the wilderness, but nevertheless, throughout our lives there are these persistent archetypes that seem to amplify this idea. 

I will ask her, “How did you develop an interest in your field of expertise, writing about men, women, food and family in the American West?”

Cathy: Growing up in Texas on the old Goodnight-Loving Trail brought the cattle and cowboy history to the fore. But when I came to California, I discovered—and why didn't my mother tell me all this? I didn’t know this—that my maternal great grandparents on my mother's side had crossed the plains and settled in Baker, Oregon, where my grandfather was part of the Continental Congress. Her story of waiting to discipline her rowdy sons after they fell asleep…out comes the spanking rod!..really caught my imagination. 

Then I found that the Crabbe family, also my grandmother's father, had started the second winery in the Napa Valley, Tokalon, which is now owned by Mondavi. The old mansion on the grounds was once his, but lost to my great grandmother because she was a young girl and couldn't challenge her stepmother for inheritance.

So, with all these pioneers suddenly on hand, I became interested in the pioneer experience. Finding journals and diaries galore in archives throughout the country only whetted my interest, not to mention the bonanza of gorgeous photographs available. 

Having lived a couple of years in an extreme Peace Corps site in Colombia lent insight to 'living rough' which made me admire these settlers and their lives even more. 

Erik: Tell me a little about your Peace Corps experience in Colombia…how did you adapt to this extreme site? Do you think your ability to adapt was different because you are female? In other words, would men in the same Peace Corps site approach these extreme conditions in a different way? 

Cathy: I was given a so-called parachute site, which doesn’t happen anymore. I was dropped in without support, companions or much else to Usiacuri, which then was such a tiny site, that it didn’t even have a market. Initially, I had no food and had to wait for an egg man on Monday, a meat person, a vegetable vendor, and bread also. Food slowly came, but different types on different days. Would a guy have coped? I’m sure so, because survival is without gender.

My assignment was chickens, which seemed preposterous. These folks had been successfully raising chickens for generations. Instead, I found a nearby weaving cooperative and helped with marketing—avoiding the middle person and selling directly. This, too, seemed gender neutral. 

Culturally, male Peace Corps volunteers got more respect from the population. So, coping as a female volunteer took more imagination. Girl volunteers were read as datable—we were not—and specialized in women’s concerns only. Nutrition, health, child issues, education. Men could more easily cross over. 

However, I found that managing to survive the first year felt very much like a pioneer event. 

Erik: I am curious about women in the West in our history - those frontier and pioneer women. Almost certainly, they lived lives at least partially dictated by the backcountry. How did women in these groups adapt to and approach the wilderness?

Cathy: My immediate reaction to men versus women is that women found increased freedom to explore their abilities even though they were usually met with narrow perspectives by men. Thus, even women MD’s might have to disguise their status in order to be seen as a nurse—manure fitting for a female. They did not venture easily into male dominated professions, but increasingly, there were women who homesteaded together or, at least, maintained their homesteads when the husband was gone working, deceased. Or simply gone. 

It was actually the Civil War that boosted women into positions of civic authority—not so much the pioneer west.

Erik: What survival skills did pioneer women develop that were unique to the West —to their new environment? How did these skills differ from those of men, and what roles did they play in the community’s survival?

Cathy: With few familiar comforts, women improvised. No piano for children’s lessons? Draw keys on a tablecloth and hum the notes. No school? Teach at home. No eggs or milk? Make cake with saleratus and flour.  No bathroom? Join female friends in a circle with holding skirts up for privacy. Husband gone for work, and feeling lonely? Huddle with the sheep for warmth. Anyone sick? Home remedies. Childbirth complications? No doctor, bring in friends. Unique to the West was a growing appetite for the outdoors. Women hiked, rounded up cattle, tended crops, men, on the other hand, had less crossover. They did not usually tend children, cook or launder. 

Women also learned to live with and often master fear. Fear of Indian attack, theft, roving bands of outlaws, weather cataclysm—floods, sandstorms, blizzard and fires. 

After reading hundreds of pioneer accounts, men and women, the folks divide eventually into town and country. People gravitated to towns, and when they did, all the Victorian inhibitions and prohibitions of the East settled in with them. It was the homestead women and the farm wives who grew rugged and resourceful, who could shoot the family gun and ride with skill. I was reminded of this a bit a year ago, visiting Kingston, Nevada. It has a population 200, no stores, and the closest is Tononopah, a hundred miles to the south.  A woman had just bought the local bar, which was the only activity in 100 miles. She was offering concealed carry classes for women, and the first one was already filled with a waiting list of twenty-five. Where that many women came from in that incredibly remote area, I cannot say. But they all wanted to be armed.

Cathy’s frontier stories show that women are equally, if not uniquely resilient at the edges of civilization and in the wilderness. What is it about society that produces a certain male wilderness archetype—a good archetype, one that I have always loved in its many forms, of course—but a very particular one. 

In fact, there is even an effort to uphold that archetype.  The pompously named magazine, Field Ethos, published by Donald Trump Jr, and whose mission is to uphold “a forgotten lifestyle to those who refuse to conform.” 

The magazine features men wearing tuxedos to trophy hunts, and when women are featured in the magazine, it’s mostly as side characters for the sex appeal.

Their mission statement explains their point of view: “We’re relics—old-school adventurers who make no apologies for who we are. We’re men of global experience with the confidence to explore the uncharted places. At first light, we’re masters of logistics; by sundown, we’re whiskey-fueled philosophers by a campfire.”

The glossy large format photos depict the editors as tough, gun-toting wilder-boys. Their mission is to uphold the wilderness as the domain of men who are wealthy enough to use networks of guides to make their trophy hunting experience comfortable.

In my years on the road, I have come across many male outdoorsmen who lamented that wilderness archetype. Their reasons were always varied; sometimes because it is an archetype that embodies a character of wanting to destroy or triumph over nature, rather than to be a part of it. Others posited that the archetype was just too limiting—real and fictional wilderness archetypes are much more compelling than the ones that rise to the surface of media and literary attention.

A wilderness guide I met in British Columbia, for example, told me that throughout his life, it ate at him that the way he thrived in the wilderness—as a naturalist, conservationist, and birder—was always disparaged by other men in his generation, even though his wilderness experiences in wild Indonesia, the South Pacific and the rugged mountains of Canada were by all accounts more wild, more daring, more heady and more fun than the traditional wilderness archetype.

I continue along the narrow trail in the rain, consumed with my steps and the panic-inducing steep grades. But when the trail cuts away from Cispus Basin and enters the foggy forest, my fears subside and I feel at home among the big old trees. 

Then it dawns on me—this question about who belongs out in the wilderness? Sure there are groups now, like Portland’s Jenny Bruso, whose Unlikely Hikers social media presence encourages diversity in the outdoors, and sure there was the phenomenon of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail—and sure there are more female-specific hiking clubs out there. But these things, while certainly influencing the increase in female hikers, don’t answer my question.

The sense of calm that overcomes me in the forest, that sense of peace once I have left the steep trail, is not exclusive to any one gender or archetype. There is a hypothesis out there—the Biophilia Hypothesis—that states that more aspects of human psychology are connected directly to our deep evolutionary history as humans than our modern society gives credit to. And more aspects of our behavior are directly driven by our own natural history.

The Biophilia Hypothesis suggests that our affinity for the wilderness is rooted in our deepest evolutionary past—we have an innate connection to the natural world, a connection that transcends gender, culture, and archetypes, and it eclipses the notion that the wilderness is a domain of rugged masculinity or that women might be less inclined toward the wild. Rather, like Cathy Lucceti suggested, the modern workings of civilization, even in the pioneer days, develop these imbalances. 

In the forest, the sense of calm and peace is a universal human response, and it isn't shaped by societal roles or expectations, but by an evolutionary heritage which is shared, literally, by every human on Earth.

For almost all of our existence as humans, we lived in the wilderness. Our transition out of the wild really only began about 5,500 years ago, as the earliest cities emerged in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, and China, marking our slow departure from the forest, savannah and coast.

In fact, we didn’t really even start coming out of the trees until about two million years ago. Early humans were zooming through African trees, our children on our backs, and we were constantly looking at, foraging, engaging with and consuming nature. There were evolutionary advantages to being fearful of snakes and spiders, and of knowing how to identify every plant, separating food from medicine from poison. 

For ninety-nine percent of our human evolutionary history, women spent as much time in the wilderness—all of it—as men. 

Today, virtually all aspects of the joyful parts of our lives—our love of ripe fruits, the sounds of birds and crickets and wind-rustled leaves, of gardening and walking and owning pets, of natural light, and evening gossip and chatter and communion by a dim, warm light—might be traced directly to the millions of years of these things in our evolutionary history.

Knowing that is to know that anyone, of any race or culture or age, is equally capable of falling for, and belonging in the wilderness. When people, having lived urban or suburban lives—like the arcade and food cart mall rats of my generation—discover a newfound passion for the wild, they often cite that they discovered that there are things about how their mind works that were completely locked away. Something changes in their eyesight. Their sensory perception improves. Their hearing and ability to discern scents improves. Mental clutter fades away, and they develop a sort of flow state, where everything but the present moment fades away. 

Those changes that a former mall rat might experience are indeed just the unlocking of our deep and long evolutionary history.

When society opens up a path for women to engage the wilderness, they are equally adept, willing wanderers. And thinking about this is, and wanting to encourage it more is not a trivial thing. There are just as many women as men out there who, in their lives that have little direct contact with the wilderness, are also voters who will more easily be swayed against the efforts, science, natural history and politics of conservation.

But we need better archetypes in our literature and our media than the buffoons of Field Ethos, who drink champagne while hunting elephants. There are more archetypes than Daniel Boone and Tarzan or Louis L’Amour’s Jubel Sackett.

And those wilderness archetypes already exist at the periphery—the fact that the best wilderness heroes tend to get underrepresented is a challenge to the next author or filmmaker—an eternal reminder that the best wilderness archetypes come in every form. 

Consider Margaret D. Lowman, who invented new ways to explore the jungle canopies, or Frederick Law Olmstead, whose wilderness explorations in the American south and west inspired his designs of Central Park, or Mardie Murie, whose adventures in the Arctic as a conservationist helped establish the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve. Or Te Ata, the indigenous naturalist and cultural preservationist. Or George Bird Grinnell, an early conservationist of the mountain West and a historian of the Cheyenne People. Or Robin Wall Kimmerer, Potawatomi Botanist who wrote Braiding Sweetgrass. Or my favorite of all, Mau Piailug, from the island of Satawal in Micronesia, who was instrumental in the revival of traditional Polynesian navigation methods using celestial navigation and wayfinding skills in the twentieth century.

After I return from Cispus Basin, I realize I should reach out to one of those archetypes, and ask them to elaborate on this theme.

Dr. Margaret Lowman is an ecologist and forest canopy researcher known for her pioneering work in tropical ecology and conservation. Often referred to as “Canopy Meg,” she has dedicated her career to studying the complex ecosystems found high in the treetops, utilizing innovative techniques such as canopy walkways and ropes to access these otherwise unreachable environments. As a science communicator and advocate for environmental education, Dr. Lowman focuses on the importance of biodiversity and the need for sustainable practices to protect our planet's forests. She has authored several books and has been involved in various initiatives promoting the involvement of women in science and environmental leadership. Her most recent book, Arbornaut, is a memoir of a life in the tropical canopies of the world, as well as the hardships of being a female researcher in a field dominated by men.

I wanted to reach out to the person that National Geographic calls “the Real Life Lorax” because I have always seen her as one of our most important wilderness archetypes.

Erik: Do you believe that the connection between women and nature has evolutionary roots, similar to the Biophilia Hypothesis?  

Dr. Lowman: I think women are closely linked to Mother Nature, and in the Peruvian and Incan context, the Pachu Mama is the most powerful spiritual presence on earth. So, yes, women have a great sense of nature, conservation, and links to everything from pollinators in their gardens to medicinal plants to observations of natural activities.

Erik: As an ecologist who has spent a great deal of time in the wilderness, how do you think women’s skills and adaptability in wild environments compare to men’s?  

Dr. Lowman: I think women have a great sense of Mother Nature, so can easily survive well in the wilderness. Men tend to dominate the media and perhaps men have bigger muscles to haul a tree trunk off a trail, but women can do just fine in the wilderness…if they take the steps to try!

Erik: What challenges, if any, do you think women face uniquely in wilderness exploration or fieldwork, and how can they be overcome?

Dr. Lowman: The biggest challenge might be facing male counterparts who tell them they can't survive, or should not go into the wilderness. But I think that is much more easily overcome in this day and age.  

Erik: Are there certain characteristics or traits that women, in your view, tend to bring to wilderness exploration that may be underappreciated or misunderstood?

Dr. Lowman: I find that being a mom really helps me in the wilderness and also in cultures where men tend to dominate. It is easier for women to gain trust by sharing photos of their kids or simply acknowledging their mothering skillset. It is an asset, not a liability to be a mom.  

Erik: I often sense that in our media, literature and historical heroes, we lean too heavily on this one male wilderness archetype. How would society benefit from having more diverse wilderness heroes? 

Dr. Lowman: We need more diversity of all types. I have worked tirelessly to mentor and include minorities in field biology -- African Americans, Latinos, women, and most recently, mobility-limited students. By increasing our inclusivity, conservation is improved and solutions are more forthcoming because we have more diversity of people at the decision-making table.

So, who belongs in the Cispus Basin? We know the answer when we garden, or walk on a quiet evening, or stop to look at a bird flitting through the trees, or listen to the breeze.