Top Adventures for Alpha Females

Janice Kleinschmidt September 19, 2007

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See our slideshow of Top Adventures for Alpha Females.

Marian Marbury, owner of Adventures in Good Company, should know. She’s been guiding since 1988 and started her company in 1999. Women, she says, spend their lives taking care of others and are ready to rediscover their adventurous side, while younger women opt for spa vacations. She also finds the female-only environment creates situations that allow women to explore their potential.

“They do things that they would not do when men are around them,” she says. “Guys jump right in and do things like setting up camp, carrying canoes, and starting fires. [Without men around], they have to do everything — and they do it. They learn skills, and then they feel really proud and pleased.”

Although AGC’s rock-climbing adventure in Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California may be the most mentally challenging, Marbury says her most physically challenging trip is the week-long Grand Canyon hike, which requires participants to hike along rocky trails with 40-pound packs down into the canyon and then back up 3,500 feet with 30-pound packs.

See our slideshow of Top Adventures for Alpha Females.

Women with a bent for adventure — even those younger than 50, or even 30 — can find travel opportunities by Chicks With Picks, an Ouray, Colo.-based company that offers ice-climbing/alpine skills clinics and has partnered with Alala! Women’s Mountain Adventures, a British Columbia-based travel company. In December/January, the two groups offer a trip to the Southern Alps of New Zealand. Rather than spending New Year’s Eve wearing a sequin dress and drinking champagne at midnight among a sea of people in a nightclub, truly adventurous women can spend the eve in a hut on a glacier, preceded and followed by lessons in belaying and rescue anchors, whiteout navigation and crevasse rescue and in climbing the local peaks.

Extremely Patagonia offers women-only adventures in January, February, and March that include ice climbing, trekking, building igloos, whitewater rafting, and kayaking among the glaciers.

If the thought of ice leaves you cold, perhaps you’d like to hang 10 on the waves off the coast of Mexico, hone your roping skills in Montana, scale a rock face in Joshua Tree National Park or bungle through the jungle in Costa Rica. All are women-only travel options (see accompanying slide show). For the multitasking woman (a redundant term if ever there was one), many tour companies offer multisport trips.

For example, Seattle-based Adventure Divas plans a 13-day trip to Peru (May 24-June 6, 2008) that includes horseback riding through Incan ruins, mountain biking, canoeing, parrot-spotting, and trekking to Machu Picchu.

While alpha males may not want to boast about their male-bonding experiences (presumably for fear of seeming less alpha, less male, or both), alpha females are proud to espouse their own relationship-building.

“There’s a woman I met on my first [Adventures in Good Company] trip,” Gabris says. “We have gone on a few trips together. She lives in Tennessee. We will hook up almost every year.”

“When you meet at the airport, you are strangers,” Carlyon says of her AdventureWomen trips. “And in a few days, you feel like sisters.”

See our slideshow of Top Adventures for Alpha Females.

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