A welcome alternative to the ‘do as I say, not as I do’ approach, this women’s outdoor group embraces beginners

Christine’s laughter overrode any sense of urgency while the legs of my insulated bib overalls roused in happy orange licks of flame. Laughing with her and at myself, I managed to smother the flames by rolling on the snow.

“Should I be taking notes?,” Christine chortled, as I imagined her repeating the event to anyone who cared to listen.

It was early in our relationship, when Christine didn’t know much about the outdoor life that had occupied me since early childhood. One winter day, the temperature had hung up below zero, and she thought it might be a good idea for her to learn to build a fire in the cold, in case I died or committed some other inexcusable behavior while we were out and about.

It went well. We scraped up the delicate “moss” you find under old spruce trees, which is terrific fire-starting material, provided you prepare the rest of the fire stack well. She arranged small twigs and larger dead sticks atop the moss and struck a match (we hadn’t gotten to the rubbing sticks together phase). Soon it became a nice little fire that demanded larger sticks, which weren’t burning fast enough to my liking, and I remembered a similar circumstance from boyhood.

I grabbed a small plastic gas jug and told Christine, “Now I am going to do something that you should never do — in other words, do as I say, not as I do, because this can be very dangerous if the flames catch the gas vapor and follow it into the jug. What you should do is just be patient, or if not, at least put the gas in a small open container that you can throw on the fire.”

The same speech was given to me at age 8 or 9. Doing just as the old guy who showed me, I poured the gas from the jug, directly on the fire. And just as had happened when I was a boy, the flame followed the vapors up the spout, and in an instant, I was holding a bomb with a lit fuse.

I started backing away from Christine to get further away before throwing the jug in the snow. Of course, I tripped and fell backward, and the liquid spewed out onto my legs in a flaming ball as I threw the jug.

These sorts of things must be where the term “boys being boys” comes from. It’s that peeing on the electric fence thing — you know you should say no, but you just don’t have the ability.

Being fortunate to grow up in rural America, without much money, but with the opportunity to learn things, side by side, from folks who loved the outdoors and all it provided, with little cost for admission, my life has always been rich.

I often wonder if that sort of upbringing contributes to the stereotype of men as being able to do most things related to hunting, fishing, and the outdoors in general. Progressing into early adulthood, my environment was a place where you just knew things.

If your vehicle had trouble, you just fixed it. You knew how to shoot, how to set a snare for rabbits, how to build a fire (without gasoline), dress out a big game animal, cast a baitcasting reel, cut and split wood, snowshoe, first aid (just rub dirt on it), use a handyman jack to get a vehicle out of the mud, sleep outside without a tent, on and on the list would go. When one grows up in that environment, and celebrates it, one simply assimilates into it.

The same wasn’t true for my female counterparts. For centuries, women have pursued things like hunting, fishing, trapping and mountain climbing. I expect for many my age, the era we grew up in was an exception, and fathers often excluded daughters from this wonderful outdoor learning of life’s lessons because “girls didn’t do that.”

It seems like the assumption was that girls didn’t want to do that stuff. That assumption was often wrong. Now that the myth has been exposed, and it’s become obvious that all kinds of people may want to do those things, the urban lifestyle has left many without someone to turn to for learning the basics.

In 1990, professor Christine Thomas of the University of Wisconsin, Sand Point conducted a study that revealed women would prefer to learn about hunting, fishing, shooting, and other outdoor activities, in an environment free of competition and with other women with mutual interests. The result prompted the first Becoming an Outdoors-Woman (BOW) event in Wisconsin in 1991.

Since its modest start in Wisconsin, BOW has grown across the nation. Alaska entered the arena with the first BOW workshop at Chena Hot Springs in 1995.

[Discomfort and unpredictability can be constant companions on outdoor excursions. But participating is almost always worth it.]

With the support of the state of Alaska, Department of Fish and Game, the Outdoor Heritage Foundation, and the efforts of hundreds of volunteers, the annual BOW workshop has grown into an extraordinary three-day event in a secluded rural mountainous setting.

As Christine and I headed east, away from Anchorage, to participate in the 2023 BOW event, my mind returned to some of the times I demonstrated things like this story’s beginning. Christine and I have had a small role in the event, presenting an outdoor adventure writing workshop to help encourage folks to share their outdoor stories with others.

What we have seen during the five years we’ve been involved is a too rare environment that embraces beginners and supports the participants in a way that is clearly evidenced by the smiles and laughter that reverberate across the compound. It is free of the “hold my beer” mentality that may be fun when you are comfortable with it but has no place with beginners who start out mostly alone in the outdoor pursuits.

BOW is not strictly about hunting. In our workshop this year, there was only one person who had hunted. It is more about camaraderie and fun while connecting with like-minded people who want to be responsive in a new environment.

The folks who put these events together work tirelessly to ensure the folks they welcome have a great time while learning together. It is an event that is far more valuable than the sum of its parts might suggest and without question, worth the price of admission. A place where you can do as they say and do.