For many women, the decision to hike alone begins well before the trailhead, in a quiet calculation of who to tell, when to check in, and what could go wrong somewhere without phone reception. A few hours alone on a forest track, something a male hiker might treat as entirely unremarkable, carries a different weight when the hiker is a woman. The track itself doesn’t change. The gradient, the birdsong, the smell of wet eucalypt after rain, none of that shifts depending on who is walking it. What changes is the mental load carried alongside it: the half-formed thought that surfaces at every unexplained crack of a branch, the tightened grip on a pack strap, the low hum of “what if someone’s out there” running under an experience that is supposed to be restorative.
I received a message some time ago from a fellow hiker, Vicky Explores, that captured this better than I could have. “My first solo camp was an act of defiance,” she wrote. “They told me not to go, that it was too risky and too dangerous. Funny how different the warnings are when you’re a woman. I wish there was a button I could push to make this world safer for women. But until then, let’s be part of the resistance and keep taking up space in the wild.” She followed it with something many women already know and most men rarely have reason to think about: “I don’t think there is a woman out there who hasn’t been subjected to some kind of harassment or abuse. We feel scared walking to our cars alone at night. I think statistically we’re safer in the bush than anywhere else. But there is still that ‘what if’. Especially in areas without reception.”
That last point is really the crux of it. Vicky is right that remote bushland is, statistically, one of the safer places a woman can be alone, safer than a car park at night, safer than the walk home. But statistical safety and felt safety are not the same thing, and the gap between them is exactly where this fear lives. As someone who grew up with three sisters, I’ve watched this fear follow the women around me for as long as I can remember, and I’m still struck by how early it takes root and how rarely it’s questioned. Most people on a trail, including most men, mean no harm at all. But it only takes a small number who don’t for the calculation to become a permanent fixture of how a woman plans a walk in the bush.
The scale of that calculation isn’t guesswork. A 2017 survey by Outside Magazine, one of the more widely cited attempts to quantify the problem, found that 53 percent of women had experienced some form of harassment while hiking, trail running or otherwise recreating outdoors. Within that figure, 93 percent had been catcalled, 56 percent had been followed by someone, 18 percent had been flashed, and 4 percent had been physically attacked. In Australia, the pattern shows up earlier than the trailhead: SBS has reported that 46.6 percent of Australian women aged 15 to 19 say they feel unsafe or very unsafe simply walking alone in their own community after dark. A fear that starts on a suburban street doesn’t stay there. It travels into the bush along with everything else a person carries.
That conditioning starts young and is reinforced constantly, often by people with good intentions. An essay published by the Washington Trails Association put it directly: “As women, most of us hear these messages of fear from the moment we’re old enough to take them in. The world is dangerous, and it’s not safe for you here as a woman. Someone wants to hurt you. You need protection.” It shows up in advice that sounds caring on the surface: be home before eleven, are you sure about that dress, why don’t you see if a friend can go with you, did you remember your pepper spray. Advice like that quietly teaches a woman the outdoors is conditional territory, something she has to earn safe passage through, rather than simply hers to walk.
The trail encounters that follow from this conditioning tend to fall into recognisable patterns. Outdoor writer Andrew Skurka, drawing on accounts from women hikers, has documented men deliberately slowing their pace to walk alongside a woman they don’t know, asking pointed questions like “are you alone?”, or making comments that cross from friendly into unsettling. One hiker described a man trailing behind her for an uncomfortably long stretch of trail; when she finally asked him to pass, he told her he’d “enjoyed the view from behind.” Moments like that can look minor enough to dismiss individually. Stacked across years of walking, they build into something closer to a working assumption: that vigilance isn’t optional, it’s the cost of admission.
It isn’t only solo hikers who carry this. As someone who has organised group hikes for years through the Trail Hiking Australia meetup community, some of the more uncomfortable situations I’ve had to deal with happened in groups, not despite the numbers but regardless of them. Women have told me about being followed home after a hike, about persistent pressure to keep socialising once the walk had ended, about someone stripping off for a swim at a rest stop with no apparent thought for who else was there. In more than one case, the outcome was the same: the woman simply stopped coming. I’ve treated those reports as seriously as they deserve and dealt with them quickly when they’ve come to my attention, but the fact that they occur inside a group activity built around shared enjoyment says something about how deep the underlying pattern runs.
What this produces, over time, is a kind of low-grade cognitive tax that has little to do with the physical difficulty of the walk. Constant vigilance, scanning for who else is on the track, gauging tone and body language, keeping half an eye on an exit route, doesn’t just sit alongside the experience of being outdoors. It competes with it, using up the same attention that would otherwise go toward noticing the forest itself: the smell of it, the birdsong, the quality of the light. Layered on top of that is a separate but related weight, a documented gender gap in self-confidence that surfaces on the trail as it does elsewhere. The figures on this vary and are usually drawn from workplace surveys rather than controlled research, so they’re worth reading with some caution, but a commonly cited estimate holds that around 75 percent of female executives report experiencing imposter syndrome at some point, against roughly half of men, with a general population rate closer to 70 percent overall. On a trail, that same self-doubt shows up as second-guessing: whether a navigation call was really the right one, whether a pace or a route choice reflects poor judgement rather than reasonable caution, whether competence demonstrated many times over still counts for anything in the moment it’s needed.
None of this cancels out what draws women to solo hiking in the first place, and it’s worth being honest about the trade-off rather than resolving it too neatly. The same Washington Trails Association essay captured the pull of it plainly, in the words of one hiker: “Walking up a trail in the forest, breathing in the smell of firs and listening to birds calling to each other opens a space for me to breathe deeper and slower, to shed the hustle and stress of work and home life and to focus on the simplicity of getting up the next mountain.” Another hiker quoted in the same piece described what the challenge itself provides: “Being in the wilderness provides challenges that build my skills, strength and understanding of what I’m capable of. When I have to figure out how to negotiate a tricky water crossing and take care of my basic food, water and shelter needs, I learn confidence that I can apply to challenges in my daily life.” That kind of experience is real, and for many women it’s exactly what makes solo hiking worth the discomfort of the vigilance that comes with it. But the vigilance doesn’t switch off just because the reward is real. The two run alongside each other for the length of the walk, and which one dominates on a given day often has less to do with the trail than with what happened on the drive to the trailhead, or the week before it.
Faced with that trade-off, many women have built their own adaptations rather than waiting for the culture around them to change. Sharing a detailed itinerary with someone before setting out, including expected start and finish times and the planned route, is common enough that outdoor podcasts treat it as standard practice for solo walkers, alongside carrying a personal locator beacon in areas without phone reception and agreeing on check-in times in advance. Equipment choices follow a similar logic. Hiking poles get mentioned as much for their use as a deterrent as for balance on a descent, and a hiking dog is often valued as much for the sense of company and protection it provides as for anything else. Trail and timing choices work the same way: sticking to busier tracks for the sense of oversight other walkers provide, hiking within daylight hours, building up from short solo outings before attempting something more remote. None of this reflects excessive caution. It’s a rational response to a real pattern. But it is also, unmistakably, a tax that falls unevenly. The itinerary-sharing, the beacon, the timing, all of it is time and mental effort spent managing a risk that a comparable male hiker heading out on the same track that same morning is far less likely to have weighed at all. The actual fix isn’t a longer list of precautions. It’s a change in what a woman has to plan around in the first place.
Community has done more to close that gap than any individual precaution could. Groups like She Summits Adventures, Adventure Girls Australia and Wild Women on Top have grown because they offer something a solo hiker often can’t manufacture alone: the sense of collective oversight and shared knowledge that comes from moving through the bush alongside people who understand exactly what’s being weighed up before a solo trip even begins. That’s not a small thing. A woman who has worked through a technical water crossing or an unplanned night out alongside a group of other women carries a different kind of confidence onto her next solo walk than one working entirely from theory.
The other half of closing that gap sits with men, most of whom are, in fact, part of the reason the trail feels safe rather than the reason it doesn’t. The problem is less about intent than about a mismatch in perception: an interaction that feels entirely harmless to the person initiating it can land very differently on someone who has spent the last hour alone on a quiet track. Distance matters more in that context than it would elsewhere, and a comment meant as friendly can read as an opening rather than small talk. Cues like short replies, avoided eye contact, or a clear effort to keep moving are usually enough information to know that someone wants to be left alone, and taking that cue rather than pushing past it costs nothing. None of this calls for avoiding contact altogether; a nod, a wave, an ordinary hello remain normal trail courtesy, and I met my wife on a hike, so it would be strange to argue otherwise. The distinction is between ordinary friendliness and a failure to notice, or care, when it isn’t landing that way.
Set against all of this, the trend worth naming is that women are showing up on Australian trails, solo and otherwise, in greater numbers than they were a decade ago, in spite of a set of conditions that gives them every reason to hesitate. That’s not evidence the underlying problem has been solved. It’s evidence of how much women continue to be willing to carry in order to be out there anyway. The version of the outdoors most hikers describe when they talk about why they go, the quiet, the restoration, the sense of scale that comes from spending a day inside a landscape rather than looking at it, is available to everyone who walks onto a track. What isn’t yet equal is how much has to be managed, planned around, and quietly endured before that experience can begin.
This essay is part of the Human Factors in Hiking series, exploring behaviour, awareness and decision-making on the trail. Explore the series →
