Anywhere in America when a solo female hiker goes missing, people all over the Internet inevitably ask the utterly unoriginal question of “why was she hiking alone?”, wagging their heads over the audacity or stupidity of a woman daring to venture out on her own.
When it comes to the topic of solo women hikers staying safe on the trail, inevitably many women are told that they just shouldn’t hike alone. And if the commenter is from Texas (ok, really any southern or Midwestern state!) many people tell them to carry a gun, implying that as long as this is done the helpless hiker will be safe.
In the wake of Christina Perry, a *gasp* solo female hiker, disappearing in Big Bend National Park, I saw all the predictable questions hit Instagram and Facebook, which then turned into heated debates on what women hikers should or shouldn’t do and it struck me as an odd, victim blaming way to take on this conversation.
Who is more likely to call for search & rescue: a man or woman?
But here’s the problem. Women aren’t actually the ones needing the majority of the rescuing; men are actually the ones most likely to need SAR (search and rescue). According to the book Lost Person Behavior, a leading search and rescue tome by Richard Koester, 80% of searches on the trail are initiated for males. What’s more, 12% of men who initiate search and rescue cases end up dead versus only 9% of women.
We really should be telling men to be more careful. But there’s another problem.
Why is it okay for men to be alone, but not women?
Some of us ladies like to hike solo. Others don’t have someone to hike with and are forced to go it alone if they want to be able to enjoy nature. Either way, who cares? It’s 2024. For God’s sake, why are women being told they shouldn’t hike alone or that if they do, they really have to carry a “pew-pew” because the big bad wolf is out there looking to get them?
Now I realize that this may be moralizing a bit and it’s certainly looking at the big picture of the kind of society I want to live in and not at an immediate fix, but why do we continue to normalize treating a woman alone as inherently unsafe? Why is it okay for men to be alone, but not women?
Why is the person being victimized the one who gets told to change their behavior instead of the (theoretical) victimizer?
No one panics when a man hikes alone because, the implication must be, he is less vulnerable. The online mob doesn’t tsk-tsk when a solo male hiker disappears (which happens all the time) or publicly lecture a man who survives a dangerous experience about how he should never have been hiking alone.
You can debate why more men call for search and rescue, and why they’re less likely to be found alive, all you want. It’s ultimately beside the point.
If we think women are being attacked on the trail, shouldn’t we be pointing at people who prey upon others as the problem, and not women who choose to put themselves in “risky” situations such as solo hiking?
Which brings me to another point. When a solo female hiker disappears, the general assumption online is that it occurred under nefarious circumstances. She was kidnapped or sold into the sex trade. She must have been raped and murdered. A serial killer must have gotten her. Maybe it was a drug cartel.
See the ridiculousness here?
The assumption seems to be that solo women are vulnerable to attack on the trail, so when they go missing on a hike, something perpetrated by someone else must have happened. Following this logic, if a woman chooses to solo hike (madness, judging from the majority of internet comments), she should definitely “pack heat” so that she will be safer.
But how many instances of women going missing on the trail are actually nefarious? How many are situations in which a gun would even have been relevant?
let’s talk about the real dangers of hiking
Christina Perry was found more than a week after being reported missing, apparently having gotten lost in foggy conditions.
Now, maybe Perry didn’t make the best decisions while hiking. Maybe she would have been less likely to get lost in the company of others, but regardless: there was no foul play.
In no way, would a gun have made her situation any safer, and her getting lost has nothing to do with her gender. A solo man is just as likely to have the same thing happen to him (again, this happens all the time), so why does society at large tell women but not men that they shouldn’t hike solo and that if they must partake in such a foolish endeavor, they should carry a gun?
In the case of Christina Perry, a firearm would have been no use in preventing her from getting lost. Or had she fallen. Or drowned. Or in the face of exposure.
These are the real dangers of National Parks. Falling, drowning, motor vehicle crashes and environmental factors account for almost all of the 4,213 deaths that have occurred at National Parks between 2007-2024.
You’re FAR more likely to win the lottery than to die in a National Park.
Not even death by wild animals is a statistically relevant worry. Only 10 of the reported deaths were caused by wild animals and just 43 were homicides (weapon unspecified). That’s a combined 1% of 4,213 deaths across 17 years.
What’s more, this data comes from ~5 billion park visitors over that time period, so that’s a 0.00008% of any other living creature taking you out. You’re FAR more likely to win the lottery than to die in a National Park.
In other words, having a gun with you at the park is more about feeling safe than being safe, and telling solo women that they need to carry is…just ignorant. A woman can obviously carry if she wishes – that isn’t part of the discussion here – but a situation with a person or animal where a firearm will keep you safe is not likely to happen.
if you don’t have anything helpful to say, don’t say anything at all
It’s time to stop blaming solo female hikers when they disappear on the trail. Stop assuming solo women are any more vulnerable than solo male hikers. Start expecting people not to take advantage of others who are alone and female; on the same note, stop assuming that anytime something bad happens to a woman in the wild, it’s because she was alone or vulnerable.
Solo women are not inherently more at risk than men, or less capable of making sound judgments about their hiking trips (or any other part of their lives).
As women, we deserve to live in a world where we can hike alone, with or without a firearm, without being judged for making the exact same choices as men.
Additional References
https://coloradosun.com/2023/08/14/women-backcountry-opinion-zornio/
https://modernconservationist.com/nps-search-and-rescues/
https://academic.oup.com/jtm/article/16/1/23/1803249
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1580/1080-6032(2004)015[0011:EOWSAR]2.0.CO;2
https://www.psbr.law/nevada/deaths-in-us-national-parks
https://www.nps.gov/articles/missing-persons-in-the-national-parks.htm
https://nypost.com/2023/06/14/us-national-park-visitors-disappearing-without-a-trace