A City Girl Learns About Taking to the Woods--Without Help From a Man

I’m a city girl. I know how to take the subway, hail a cab and walk on city streets at night. Traveling to New York, Buenos Aires or Hong Kong doesn’t faze me.

But I don’t know how to build a fire, pitch a tent, read a compass or use a snakebite kit, which is why the great outdoors intimidates me.

I don’t let this stop me, of course. Wilderness expeditions are among some of my most memorable travel experiences. But like many former Girl Scouts who have failed to retain much besides how to make s’mores, I seldom go camping or backpacking without a man. For once in my life, I’d like to be able to show a guy how to chop wood--or, better still, venture into the wilderness on my own.

To help women like me master the skills they need to travel freely in the outdoors and to encourage them to take a more active role in preserving it, there is a program called Becoming an Outdoors-Woman, or BOW. It was started 10 years ago by Christine Thomas, a professor of resource management at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, and it offers one- and three-day seminars on everything from campfire cooking to rifle shooting in beautiful settings like the mountains and the seashore.

In California, the Fish and Game Department holds three BOW weekends a year in Plumas, Fresno and Santa Barbara counties, with space for 100 women each. The price is kept as low as possible ($180, including meals, accommodations, equipment and instruction), which is why program managers have sought additional financing from sponsors like Bass Pro Shops, Bowhunter magazine and the National Rifle Assn.

The NRA affiliation almost put me off, because I have no interest in hunting and heartily support gun control. But I have wondered whether I’d feel safer in the wilderness with a weapon and wanted to know enough about firearms to avoid being frightened by them, at the very least. Then, too, the BOW November weekend in the Western Sierra foothills seemed like a great little getaway. So I signed up for four classes: firearms safety, map and compass reading, outdoor cooking and field orienteering.

The gathering was held at Wonder Valley Ranch, a rustic resort about 50 miles east of Fresno. The food and accommodations weren’t fancy, but that didn’t matter because I spent most of the weekend in class, starting Friday afternoon with firearms safety.

There were about 25 women in the group, with different reasons for attending. A woman from the Bay Area said she kept a gun next to her bed and thought she ought to learn how to use it. A woman from Maricopa said a failed marriage taught her that couples need to have something they enjoy doing together, so she decided to learn how to hunt with her new husband. Another wanted a gun for solo camping trips, although she added that she’d never dream of pointing it at Bambi.

Together, we inspected a variety of shotguns and rifles, passed them around with their safeties on and chambers empty, and learned some basic hunting ethics--above all, that hunters with the right stuff never kill more game than they plan to eat and that they consider the sport a privilege, not a right. I realized how closed-minded I’d been to view it as a pastime only for gun rights advocates and beer-guzzling macho men.

Kathy Ponting, one of the instructors, learned to hunt when she was 5 and now serves as a fish and game warden, patrolling the back country alone, checking hunters’ licenses and sometimes issuing citations. “Being a woman warden has never been an issue,” she says. “It’s matter of confidence and the way you carry yourself.”

Dinner that night was a wild game buffet, featuring such dishes as bear meatballs in mushroom sauce, teriyaki wild boar and duck kebabs. I stuck to salad and dessert, and didn’t go on to take shooting classes the next day. Instead I learned how to use a compass and triangulate a position by taking readings off fixed points. I’m also better with a map because I now know how to interpret contour lines and that you use the angle of declination on most topo maps to tell the difference between true and magnetic north.

I used some of these skills the next day, field orienteering with three other women. As part of the class, we set out with maps and compasses to find seven buckets hidden on and near the ranch. This was an interesting exercise, partly because we had to stay together and work as a team, a challenge resulting in subtle power struggles and the discovery of new talents. One woman took the lead immediately, triangulating with her compass. Another woman, who became our bloodhound, never failed to find the prize when we got her close to the bucket.

I also learned how to make cherry cobbler and pizza soup in a Dutch oven, how to cook bacon and eggs over the campfire without using pans and how to construct a miniature convection oven from a coffee can. We saw a slide show one night presented by a woman who had just backpacked 1,600 miles along the Pacific Crest Trail, and we did the old Girl Scout thing, telling stories in front of a roaring fire while eating s’mores.

The other women were really the best part of the trip: nurses, computer analysts and stay-at-home moms who wanted to be more self-reliant. My favorite was a middle-aged woman who told me that recently, while her husband was away, she had taught herself how to light a gas grill. One small step for her, but a giant leap for womankind.

Becoming an Outdoors-Woman, P.O. Box 1945, Sacramento, CA 95812, telephone (916) 653-7748.