A couple of weeks ago, I went to the Adventure Queens Virtual Campout. This is probably my favourite of the online events lingering from the lockdowns. I know we’ve largely gone back to normal life but we’ve learned that we can get so many more people together online. Our “Old Gang” Christmas event is now online, which means that the whole group can come, even if the ones who don’t live within easy reach of the pub at the bottom of the road our school is on. Was on? Well, the school is still there but we left more than a lifetime ago. The Virtual Campout means people from all over the country, or even the world, can get together on a miserable January night to share stories and inspiration and feel like we’ve been toasting marshmallows together even though we’ve actually been sitting at our desks or in our armchairs.
Adventure Queens, I should clarify, is a community set up by Anna McNuff and Emma Frampton in 2017 to encourage and support women in adventure. It has a Facebook group, it has regional groups, it runs events like camps, hikes, hill skill courses etc, it offers a grant each year to help three women go on adventures (and helps support the ones who didn’t get the big prize). The trouble is, it naturally tends to attract women who are already into adventure and I suspect that can be a little offputting for the women who are early in their adventure journey. It can absolutely make me feel like I’ve crept into a group I’m not really supposed to be in. I’m not a real adventurer. Look at some of the things these queens have done! Look at their questions and their discussions! I’m not up to their level. I’m an imposter who’s sneaked in.
We were supposed to have three talks at the virtual campout on Saturday evening. One got cancelled because the speaker had a pet emergency – that was Natasha, one of last year’s AQ grant winners. The others were another of the grant winners, Jo, and Ellen who had her own adventure in Svalbard. Natasha’s adventure was paddleboarding around the Helsinki archipelago (I want to do this one!), Jo’s was to walk the Hadrian’s Wall trail at night and Ellen’s was a ski/sled expedition into the great white nothing of the High Arctic.
If there’s one thing that defines me, one thing that will be battling in my mind until the day I die, it’s “what counts as an adventurer?”. Compared to the people at work, or certainly the people at my previous job, I’m absolutely an adventurer. They look at me and they see some kind of alien creature of boundless imagination and no fear whatsoever. Then you compare me to a lot of the Adventure Queens and you see a spreadsheet gremlin who spends most of her time inside and whose adventures are rarely more than commercial day tours. So am I an adventurer or am I not? Or does it depend who you’re asking? I had a friend at uni who had a note on his Facebook (remember when that was a thing?) that said “Someone once called me an adventurer and I guess that’s true”. He was a better caver than me but I probably caved more often than him. He’s now into running. I will never be into running but I’ve got quite into paddling. If he was an adventurer when he was a student, then I definitely am now. And yet I’m still deeply hesitant to use the label on myself.
Adventure is a matter of perspective. When Clare, the campout’s host, asked at the end who had adventures planned for 2024, I wanted to tell them about boat club. Well, I did tell them about boat club. I started with “it’s not on the same scale as any of you but-” these Queens have to start somewhere. You don’t just go from a life of TV and sofa and shopping lists and white picket fences and 2.4 beautiful children to paddling solo around Helsinki. This is where that journey could start. I’ve estimated around 150 girls will get to have a go at kayaking this summer through our tiny boat club, will get to try out something adventurous that many of them will never have done before. Some of them will hate it. Many of them will never do it again. But maybe two or three of them will go on to more and bigger things in paddlesport – maybe they’ll buy their own SUP one day and enjoy nice days on the water. Maybe they’ll do some qualifications and come back and help run the boat club. Maybe they’ll go off and have a big adventure and then come home and inspire more people to do something like that. And it all started with an hour on the water at Guides.
In fact, how many of my Guides and Rangers would have had a go at archery or fencing or camping in the freezing cold without me? Several of the women at the campout exclaimed that they never got to do exciting things like that when they were Guides. It was all sewing and cooking. Well, cooking is a perennial favourite. I admit, I like sewing but I’m not stupid enough to try to impose it on my Rangers. Right now I’m looking at three straight weeks of crafts for them (I’m away for two meetings in a row and it’s easy to leave in the cupboard for them) but I’m also trying to give them as many outdoors and adventure opportunities as I can because I’m creating mini Adventure Queens. Adventure Princesses?
See, I’d watched the talks with some interest. Jo’s tale of walking five nights across the country, camping by day. We all agreed that none of us were brave enough for that and talked about how little time we actually spend outside in the dark and I wanted to say – and maybe I should have said it – that night hikes are an important and beloved part of our Guiding life. I don’t think kids these days get to spend enough time outside – maybe I’m wrong but I don’t get the impression from my Brownies or Rangers that they do a lot of bike adventures or skating expeditions, two staples of my childhood and teenage years. They certainly don’t get out after dark. One of my Rangers asked the other day if they could do a craft involving a hacksaw. It was an odd craft so I said “… if you really want to? Yes? We can?” and they said “But using a hacksaw! We can’t use a hacksaw, surely?”. Uhh… no, that’s fine, as long as it’s one of the weeks I’m there and not one of the weeks I’m leaving you with the Guide leaders in the next room. Girlguiding splits their six themes into sub-themes and their Skills for my Future theme contains Money, Magnificent Machines and DIY. There’s a UMA card specifically about learning to use a hacksaw. Hacksaws, used correctly, are more than fine. There, using tools is in itself an adventure. I did remind them that they’ve already had a go with a hacksaw – we finished our Camp stage 5 Skills Builder with an evening of tent repairs that involved cutting a replacement tent pole to size. No Adventure Queen can deny that learning how to maintain your tent isn’t an important component of real adventure!
That’s very much a detour from the original topic. Giving girls opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have. Yeah. I’ve hiked at night – not for more than two hours and in a circular route that makes sure we get back to the car park in time for the parents to pick them up again at 9pm but I’ve hiked at night while being responsible for someone else’s teenagers. In fact, come to think of it, now I live within walking distance of Rangers – for the first time in my Guiding life, which must be well over thirty years by now – I tend to walk, summer or winter, unless I’ve got tents or anything heavy to carry. I thought I wouldn’t do it in the winter when it’s dark but a) it saves me the hassle and stress of finding there’s nowhere in town to park even a small car b) I’m accustomed to having 20-30 minutes to reflect and decompress on my way home but now I get that on foot instead of in the car. I skip the alleyways in winter because I’m not completely reckless but I like seeing streetlights behind lime trees and I like discovering new places to stare up at the stars. For the first time, I’ve had “huh, lucky you” instead of “are you sure you want to walk? I don’t like that you’re walking” from the other leaders when they had to sit for ten minutes defrosting their cars before they could go home while I could freely stroll off. I did point out that even with defrosting time, they’ll still be home before me. And of course, none of this compares to a long-distance trail done solo at night but you can and I do go out in the dark and appreciate the world without sunlight.
The other one was the Svalbard adventure. Someone said they were amazed by the beautiful photos of “a place that I can’t even imagine setting foot in” and I wanted to say “You know, you can just buy a plane ticket“. Svalbard is incredibly far north and it’s a unique place but ultimately, it’s just another Norwegian province and you can just fly there on an internal flight from Norway. I went in 2015 – and I went because it was cheaper than going to mainland northern Norway. I want to make that abundantly clear. Flying to Svalbard was cheaper than flying to mainland Norway. It’s not right now but it was then. That’s why I did it. Longyearbyen isn’t some wild remote outpost. It’s a small town but it’s perfectly civilised. It has hotels, restaurants, pubs; it even has shops full of (expensive) outdoor gear in case you didn’t think to bring yours or it proves inadequate to the weather. I haven’t done a multi-day expedition involving camping but I have done a dogsledding trip out into the polar night and a snowmobile adventure and went looking for the Northern Lights (the best time would have been the afternoon of the snowmobile adventure when I was defrosting on my heated bathroom floor, it turned out).
My points are twofold. One is that adventure can be a lot more accessible than it looks. Ellen made a point of how expensive her expedition had been but you can still go and spend a week or so in Svalbard and have adventures in its unique landscape without needing every major bank in the country to sponsor you. Or you can put on your wellies, check the opening hours of the fish & chip shop and go out for a hike in the evening. You don’t need five nights, a grant and months of preparation to enjoy nature after dark.
My second point is that adventure is in the eye of the beholder. My half-day snowmobile trip probably isn’t much of an adventure to someone like Ellen but it’s unimaginable to someone like Annie in Accounts or Betty in HR. To me, camping is the cheap way of getting to spend a week in Iceland but to Annie or Betty, again, that’s adventure and bravery beyond their wildest dreams. A weekend in a frozen tent is hell to you but the biggest adventure my Rangers have ever had. Buy a two-man tent and drive half an hour down the road to spend the weekend climbing hillforts and swimming in the sea – or maybe strolling barefooted along the beach letting the sea get your toes wet. Hire a canoe and paddle it up a river. These are all adventures in their own right, even if they seem small compared to Big and Proper Adventurers. And maybe you’ll decide this is the adventure you want to make big one day. Or maybe you’ll just have an interesting or exciting day or evening and that’s a great thing.
