The Difference Between Going Outside and Belonging There

For the first time on record, more than half of American women took part in outdoor recreation last year — 51.9 percent, according to the Outdoor Industry Association's 2024 report.

Sit with the same report a little longer, though, and a second figure tells a more honest story. Average outings per participant fell 11.4 percent in a single year, from 70.5 in 2022 to 62.5 in 2023. More women went outside for the first time. Fewer people, across the board, kept going back.

This is the part access alone can't fix. Getting someone onto a trail once is a real accomplishment. Getting her to return — to build an actual relationship with a place, a sport, a version of herself that only exists out there — is a different task, and it rarely has anything to do with the landscape itself.

What brings a woman back, in my experience, is who she was standing next to when her legs were shaking on the exposed section of trail. It's a guide who notices she's gone quiet and adjusts the pace without making a thing of it. It's arriving somewhere hard with strangers and leaving with people who now know something true about her.

That is the harder thing to build.

A well-designed trip does more than deliver scenery. It's engineered — pacing, group size, the right local guide, the right amount of challenge balanced against the right amount of care — to give someone a reason to come back. This is, in fact, most of what a good travel advisor is doing behind the scenes: not picking a pretty photo location, but building the conditions under which connection, to a place and to the people beside you, actually has room to happen.

If you went once and have been meaning to go again, that's exactly what we built the Death Valley trip to be. Applications are open — I'd love to have you.