And Thus Ends the 2024 Guiding Season

Here's what I learned from Costa Rica’s breathtaking landscapes to Kilimanjaro, the vast wilderness of Alaska, Yellowstone, and Peru as we wrap up the 2024 guiding season.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey, it's Rebecca. Welcome back to the pod. This is the place where, every Tuesday, I just kind of talk about whatever's going on. I ramble a little bit. If you want something a little more polished and professional, head on over to our website and check out our YouTube videos at highglidewomancom. If you want something that is very clear and concise, go check out our newsletter, subscribe to our newsletter and read it every single monday. But if you just want the inner workings of my brain, if you just want rebecca in all of her rambled, messy self, then this is the place to be. Right here on the pod, because I don't really edit. Uh, it's unfiltered. Half the time I record these episodes in my car because it's the quietest place in my house. So that is me. This is the pod. Thank you for being here today. I'm talking about the lessons that I have learned guiding trips and leading trips in the backcountry this year, so let's start here. First I want to say thank you.

Speaker 1: 1:03

We have had an amazing year here at Hike Like a Woman. We kicked off with a trip to Costa Rica in April, so that was a co-ed group trip. That was a ton of fun. And then we had our virtual summit in May, which was fantastic, and if you listen to a lot of our old episodes here, you can listen to some of the women who presented at our summit. Then we went to Kilimanjaro in June and then we went to Alaska in August, yellowstone in September, and I just got back from Peru and as I wrap up this guiding season. So Rebecca Walsh is home. She's not leading any more trips until February, so I have a nice couple months here to enjoy the holidays, kick the new year off, and then we're headed to Iceland, costa Rica, southern Utah, kilimanjaro, and then I don't know where else, and more so I want to talk a little bit about, and more so I want to talk a little bit about.

Speaker 1: 2:07

Lately I've been reflecting on all of the trips from this past year, what I've learned, the experiences that I've had, and I just want to share a few thoughts with you right now. So the first is I want to go back to Kilimanjaro and what I learned on Mount Kilimanjaro and what I learned on Kilimanjaro is that it always works out. And it doesn't always work out exactly how we want it to work out or how we plan it to work out, but it always works out on the, the, very, the. So the second to last day of Kilimanjaro. We got off of the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro early in the morning and we made it back to our base camp and we had one woman who was feeling some effects from acute mountain sickness and she needed to get off the mountain. She needed to get down quickly and so we had to evacuate her off the mountain. And it was this whole thing and it was a very challenging situation. Our guides were amazing and they got her evac'd very, very quickly. But we lost a member of our group for those last two days and we were worried about her and we didn't know what was going on and I kept asking the guides to call the guides that she was with for updates, and so that evacuation did not go as planned for our group. And she's fine, she's great, she's happy, she's healthy, she wants to go on another adventure with us.

Speaker 1: 3:35

So that evacuation happened and then, after she started heading down the mountain, then the rest of us had to get up, we had to get lunch and we had to get out of Barafu camp and we had to move down because there were people coming up who needed our campsite. So it was really hard to encourage and motivate the group to get up and get moving after we had just summited Kilimanjaro and walked all night long, and then, once we got to our camp, we couldn't we didn't have time to make it to the lower camp where we were supposed to go. So we stopped at a camp about two miles up the mountain and we were supposed to get resupplied at that lower camp, and so all of our resupplies were there, including dinner. So we had to wait for the porters to bring dinner up two miles to us and supplies. I think we were out of toilet paper or something. Anyway, so it was just this. It was because we got such a late start, headed back down the mountain and didn't make it to the camp where we were supposed to be.

Speaker 1: 4:39

Things just got a little bit messy and everyone was so exhausted and there was also confusion because one of the tents went back with our girl that needed to be evacuated, and so there we had to shuffle some people and some tents around and in that shuffle we had someone lose a GoPro and a phone which was really expensive, really significant and really stressful, and so we had to report that lost phone to the rangers at Kilimanjaro at that camp, because Kilimanjaro is a national park, so we had to report the lost phone to the rangers. And then the cooks were trying to help us find the phone and they were saying we saw the phone and we saw the camera and we put them in this tent and the girls in that tent said they hadn't seen the phone or the camera and it big big thing. And finally the phone and the camera were found in that tent. But it was just stressful. It was a very stressful almost 24 hours at that point where no one had had any sleep.

Speaker 1: 5:45

And then once we left Kilimanjaro, that's when I started to get sick, and I got sick on the plane and I also lost my passport. So as we were headed to the Kilimanjaro International Airport, about halfway to the airport I put my hand in my fanny pack and I realized I didn't have my passport and my passport. They needed my passport to check me out of the hotel and then they had put it on the counter. So the person at the hotel had put my passport on the counter and I hadn't seen it or noticed it or paid any attention to it, and so my passport was not with me, and so our driver called the hotel and they said we found your passport, we're going to stick it on someone who's on a motorcycle, like a delivery person on a motorcycle, and he's going to bring your passport to you. And meanwhile we got to check into our flight or we're going to miss our flight, and we had to wait for my passport and it was so stressful knowing that my passport was on a motorcycle with some random dude in Moshi and just like hoping that my passport was going to make it and that my passport wouldn't get stolen and it was. It was extremely stressful and once I saw my passport, once we got to the hotel, all was good. We got on the plane, I got through the first flight Okay I got on my second flight and I just started to feel sick and I just had like this horrible head cold, lung thing that just didn't go away and I just did not feel good on the flight home and my body was just super exhausted. So what I learned from Kilimanjaro was it always works out right. I got home safely. It always works out. Everybody got off the mountain safely, the phone and the GoPro were found, our girl who needed to be evac'd was okay, my passport made it to me, I got home and I got healthy, so it always works out.

Speaker 1: 7:44

What I learned when I was leading a trip to Alaska was this fun we had. We had the most fun group in Alaska and Alaska is so beautiful. You guys, if you haven't been to Alaska, maybe we should schedule another group trip there. But it was so, so beautiful and I had so much fun in Alaska and I felt like I made so many new friends. But one thing that made the Alaska trip really special for me as a small business owner was this partnership with Swoop. So Swoop is a company. It's a woman owned company out of Alaska, and Swoop got started by a nurse who just really wanted a comfortable bra that she could wear for 12 hours a day. So she started sewing and she invented her own bra and since then it's it's. It's evolved into other products like really cool tunics and pants and shorts and underwear all of these things and so I have one of their bras. I love it. I have one of their tunics. It's so soft and comfy.

Speaker 1: 8:50

But what was neat about this trip was Swoop actually reached out to me several months ago about a partnership and they wanted to partner with us somehow and I said, well, that's great, because I'm coming to Alaska with a group and maybe we could do like a shopping event in your warehouse before we head out to Hope and before we really start our adventure. Wouldn't it be fun to get some snacks and some drinks and do a little bra shopping before we head out into the wilds of Alaska? And it was really neat and it showed me that, as a woman who owns a company like Hike, a woman, those partnerships, those relationships with other business owners who are just like me, just trying to make it, are really special. So anyway, this is my psa telling you to go check out, swoop, especially if you like bras that are super soft and comfy. All right, this leads me to trip number three, yellowstone. And I didn't talk about costa rica, but Costa Rica was just fun, but let's talk about Yellowstone.

Speaker 1: 10:00

So what is really neat is that on each of our trips the group is different and the memories that I make with each group are so different. And the Yellowstone group I feel like really, really, really bonded. And it bonded a lot like one of our groups last year, one of our Yellowstone groups. That was also a really tight knit group where everybody just got along and had a ton of fun. And that's what happened with this Yellowstone group. And I grew up just outside of Yellowstone in Bozeman, montana, and so when I hear, oh, we're going to Yellowstone, I kind of don't get excited about Yellowstone because I've just seen it a bunch and it feels kind of not as special to me because I grew up right there. But I always love experiencing Yellowstone through the eyes of someone who has never been to Yellowstone before, and so that's what that trip gave me. I watched this group come together and bond and have a ton of fun, and then I got to see Yellowstone through the eyes of women like Amanda, and it was really fantastic.

Speaker 1: 11:12

This brings me to number four, and if you listened to last week, I talked about some of the fears that I had going into our trip with Peru. I was scared that I was going to be out of shape. I was a little bit scared of group dynamics and making sure that everyone felt included, empowered and heard, and then I was scared of the food because I had a teammate get really sick in South America once. Peru taught me to put those fears aside. So as far as being out of shape goes. I really went back to Kilimanjaro where we hiked pole, pole and slowly, slowly, and just knew that I was going to hike slowly and that is just fine.

Speaker 1: 11:57

As far as group dynamics go, I mean it was good, it was cool, we had great women in our group and that I think that goes to show what kind of community is here at Hike Like a Woman. Our group was fantastic and every group has its quirks and every group is so fun and every group always comes together when things get hard. And when things got hard on in Peru, our group really came together. And so group dynamics, I don't need to, I don't need to worry about that anymore because I feel like it always works out Right. And the last thing that I was worried about was the food, and I just was careful about what I ate, what I drank. The food was good, the water was clean and it was fine. It was totally fine. So we have had an incredible guiding season here at Hike Like a Woman and I hope to have many more incredible guiding seasons in the future.

Speaker 1: 12:56

And if you would like to join me on a trip, let me give you a quick update as to what we have going on. We have Iceland going on in February, southern Utah in June. We are going to be headed back to Kilimanjaro in August and then I put some more trips up on the schedule for September and October. So if you want to know what those are, I'm not even going to tell you Go check them out. You can find information about all of our trips by visiting our website, hikelikeawomancom. Thank you so much. I will be back next week talking about my new goals headed into the fall season. Take care, see you next time.