For more photographs from this story, I saw a notice in the newspaper about a course offered by the Montana Division of Fish, Wildlife and Parks called Becoming an Outdoors-Woman. It’s a national - international, counting Canada and New Zealand - program designed to help more women get involved in outdoor activities. In another lifetime, I’d taken the Colorado equivalent and enjoyed it immensely.
So I blithely signed up.
The BOW course I took in Colorado was in the summertime. And, while I spend as much time as possible outdoors in the summer hiking, fishing and camping, winters are a different story. I don’t ski. I mock my son when he suggests ice-fishing. Taking stock of my sedentary winter life, I realized that pretty much the only time I spend outdoors once the snow flies involves walking from my car to the office.
Just days before I was to head off into the University of Montana’s Lubrecht Experimental Forest for a weekend outdoors, I faced the inescapable truth:
I was an Indoors Woman.
Liz Lodman knows a lot of women just like me.
In the 14 years that FWP has offered the Outdoors-Woman program, she’s met hundreds of us, many of whom come back year after year as part of their transition from indoors- to outdoors-type women. Nationally, 20,000 women annually participate in BOW, which began in Wisconsin in 1991. Now it’s offered in more than 40 states.
Lodman coordinates Montana’s program, which is offered every summer and every other winter. FWP also offers Beyond BOW mini-courses for activities such as snowshoeing and backpacking. Lodman said that every time she tackles the mountain of work that precedes each three-day BOW session, “I wonder, 'Why am I doing this?’ ” But at the completion of each one, she always finds herself thinking, “It’s just so rewarding. At the end, you see how far people have come, the confidence they’ve gained.”
At the workshop I attended earlier this month at Lubrecht, some people arrived with plenty of confidence already. There were marathon runners, mountain climbers, a woman who’d spent summers in a fire tower, and an intimidatingly fit woman in her 70s - Marleen Jewell of Great Falls - who not only was a participant in the winter program, but taught canoeing in the summer course, for heaven’s sake.
This is exactly what I’d been afraid of: That a flatlander like me would be surrounded by a bunch of Montana Amazons, women who could start fires with sticks while jogging uphill on snowshoes without breaking a sweat. (At this point, I didn’t know that during the snowshoeing course we’d also be taught how to start a fire without matches.)
But I quickly relaxed. The women arriving represented a wide range of ability levels, shapes and ages, from a high school student taking the course with her mother, to someone in her mid-80s. We’d all chosen a variety of activities for the weekend, from cross-country skiing and snowshoeing, to ice fishing, winter survival, and “Mountain (Wo)man” camping.
The first arrivals were slated for cross-country skiing. Many of us were newbies, so we were suitably impressed, and not a little embarrassed, to find out the lesson would be taught by Steve Gaskill, a former Olympics coach, and his wife, Cathy, of Missoula. I quickly came to think of them as the Two Most Patient People on the Planet. Their enthusiasm for the sport was as infectious as their patience was limitless.
Among their first commands: Fall down.
Heck, that one was easy. I did it again, and again, and again. With the Gaskills’ help, all of us quickly got good at getting up. After the down-and-up routine, we headed off onto one of Lubrecht’s easier cross-country trails, where it became immediately apparent why people do this.
The previous weekend’s cold had abated, and soft heaps of new snow glittered in the mid-afternoon sun. The forest was hushed and wondrous. We began to get the hang of that gliding thing that’s supposed to happen. I stopped watching my feet and marveled at the beauty surrounding me.
Pam Emard of Great Falls gave voice to my thoughts. “I found myself smiling from ear to ear,” she said afterward. “My face began to ache.”
I knew exactly what she meant. I wanted to kick myself for not having learned to do this years ago. I was sorry when the lesson ended.
By then, other women had begun arriving, and the weekend quickly took on the feeling of a class reunion, as people who’d taken the course in previous years got together and compared notes.
Newcomers like me, and like Amy Munoz and her daughter, Olivia, of Missoula, were quickly made to feel like part of the group. So was Patty Kinast of Helena, who moved here last summer from Florida.
Much like me, Kinast said she tended to hibernate indoors during the winter.
“But I like to do a lot of outdoors stuff, so that’s why these workshops are so good. I’ve got to learn to get out in the winter,” Kinast said.
We were among several people at the weekend who were fairly new to Montana, all of us eager to better equip ourselves to sample the state’s main attraction - its scenery - as something other than passive observers.
Amy Munoz added a more sobering purpose: Because Montana lacks the safety net of ready assistance available in softer, more suburban states, she said, “We need to know how to survive here if anything goes wrong” - say, when driving in bad weather. We were all mindful of the fact that only a few days before our weekend, a young man had frozen to death east of Toston after his car broke down in a storm.
The weekend’s classes, we hoped, would help us avoid such situations.
Two days later, Munoz and I were crouched near one another over identical pits in the snow that shielded piles of the tiniest twigs possible snapped from the nearby ponderosa pines. We shredded Vaseline-soaked cotton balls atop the twigs, then scraped a knife over a piece of magnesium, willing the resulting sparks to catch fire. This was, mind you, on another sparkling sunny day, without a breath of wind.
By then, all of us in the winter survival class were feeling like old hands in the outdoors. We’d tromped around on snowshoes, remaining upright while glissading down a steep hill. Those in the Mountain (Wo)Man camp roasted their own coffee beans, ground them, and made hot coffee over an open fire. Others who took the Snow Dogs class were awed by the amount of work involved in helping musher Nicki Arndt of Darby hitch up seven dogs to her racing sled. In the process, we gained a new appreciation for the mushers with their 16-dog teams in the Iditarod. We’d heard a lecture on lions, bears and wolves - among other critters - by state wolf coordinator Carolyn Sime, and had tried with varying degrees of success to stitch leather medicine bags under the informative tutelage of rendezvous veteran Gene Hickman of Helena.
Now, on Sunday morning, FWP’s Darlene Edge and Chris Dover, of Absaroka Search Dogs - along with her sidekick, Jager the rescue German shepherd - were doing their darnedest to teach us what we’d need to know in worst-case scenarios.
Oddly, the balmy weather worked against us in one respect. It was nearly impossible to dig a snow cave in the fluffy drifts - although digging down exposed the granular under-layer that is posing such an avalanche danger in the high country. Dover and Edge finally made do with a snow trench.
But they were quick to warn that, as much trouble as we were having getting our fires going on this warm, bright still day, it would be exponentially more difficult in below-zero weather with the wind whipping a gale and nightfall approaching.
Point taken. I puffed harder at the sparks glowing amongst my twigs. They caught - and for a few seconds, burned brightly. Then it was over, leaving me to envision - should the worst-case scenario arise - my frozen corpse next to a scattering of blackened twigs and charred cotton balls. Munoz had little better luck, although her daughter (a national jiu jitsu champion who impressed us during the weekend by helicoptering on her snowshoes and doing a 180 on her cross-country skis) warmed her hands over an impressive blaze.
Amy Munoz said the weekend - a gift from her husband, Mike - was exactly what she’d hoped for. A week later, she was still talking to her nurse co-workers at Community Medical Center about it, she said.
Great Falls’ Emard, whose husband also gave her the weekend, said she’d already made plans to go cross-country skiing again with one of the women she’d met at the BOW workshop.
“Isn’t it great when you find something you love?” said Emard, who moved here from California.
As for me, I felt the same way. I couldn’t wait to go cross-country skiing with my guy, and as soon as I got back from the BOW weekend, we began planning a spring break trip to the Izaak Walton Inn. I didn’t want to wait until then, though, to try cross-country skiing again. But the weekend after the workshop was rainy, and a few days later, that same rain turned into treacherous ice on my driveway.
Down I went and, unlike when I was in the woods on snowshoes or skis, I didn’t get right back up again. Now I’m wielding crutches instead of ski poles, so it looks as though I’m back to being - albeit resentfully now - an Indoors Woman.
But next winter, baby, bring it on.
You too
For more information on the summer Becoming an Outdoors-Woman workshops, or Beyond BOW events, contact Liz Lodman at Fish, Wildlife and Parks at 444-2614, or llodman@mt.gov. Or, go to the national BOW Web site at www.uwsp.edu/cnr/bow/.Contact Missoulian assistant city editor Gwen Florio at 523-5268, or gwen.florio@missoulian.com.
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