The Death of Adventure Girl

Once upon a time I was adventure girl. My insta feed was filled with sweeping vistas and backpacking trips. Ocean views and rock climbing. They’re still there — the photos. Sometimes I scroll back and look at them. Carefully chosen and edited for the right aesthetic. I followed all the other adventure girls, but I felt superior because I tried harder not to violate leave no trace principles and would unfollow anytime who did, and I NEVER geotagged my locations. Adventure girl wasn’t just a persona I invented for instagram though. She was also very real, she really did spend a significant amount of time in the outdoors, and really loved the adventures, instagram or no instagram.

The Viking was a raft guide on the Deschutes river in eastern Oregon and my childhood was full of memories of camping. People would ask me “Have you ever been to (insert random wilderness area in the Pacific Northwest)?” and my answer was “Probably.” Id text my dad to check, and more often than not he confirmed that I had. I don’t remember any family vacations that weren’t camping.

I started planning backpacking trips with friends in my early twenties, and I actually don’t know how many miles my cousin Hannah and I hiked in the space of a couple years, but it was significant. I didn’t have money to travel internationally, but for the price of gas and granola bars the backcountry was my escape.

I moved to Denver in 2014 to finish my bachelors in photography and in spite of the classes I managed to go cragging on the weekends occasionally, and do a surprising amount of backpacking in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Then I got pregnant.

For awhile I thought adventure girl would remain I couldn’t fathom losing her. I read all the blogs about how to still be outdoorsy with kids, and one of the first things We bought for the baby was a hiking backpack. My first trip to Moab, UT was when I was around 20 weeks pregnant. I donned a full body harness because my normal one didn’t fit over my belly and still managed to stuff my fingers and toes into a crack at Indian creek and drag myself up to the chains on top rope. It wasn’t dignified enough to call it climbing but it was something.

But as the pregnancy progressed, adventure girl started to fade away. By the end of it I felt like crying If my parking spot was too far away from the door at the grocery store because my body just hurt. I definitely wasn’t up for any kind of hiking. We tried to go camping when I was 7 months but my tolerance for tent camping in the rain was significantly lower than it had previously been especially during a fire ban and we ended up at a hotel.

And then the baby came and my socials went quiet. There were no more vistas and mountains and backpacking trips. The whole version of myself that I’d curated online so people would think I was adventure girl came undone. We were lucky to get out on a walk most days. Adventure girl was replaced with spit up and breastfeeding and trying to get the child to sleep, dear god please sleep.

One thing I’ve always loved about the outdoors is that it’s hard. Hiking, climbing, backpacking, rafting, camping — all of it is hard and uncomfortable. It’s part of the draw, you feel like you earned that whiskey by the fire at the end of the day, or the post climb beer on the tailgate. Theres a satisfaction in it, a hard won small pleasure.

Having a baby isn’t like that. It’s just fucking hard with no satisfaction — or sleep for that matter. Every single day was hard. I would without flinching say breastfeeding is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Harder than any backpacking trip. Even the one where I injured both my Achilles tendons and then had to hike 8 miles out.

Why would I add anything even remotely difficult to an already dizzyingly hard day to day life? How could I possibly think of going hiking with a baby who could literally blow their diaper out at any moment using a body that had just undergone childbirth? Every single resource my body had went into that pregnancy and childbirth. Was asking it to climb a fourteener wise? All my energy went to learning to be a mother and keeping that tiny potato alive. If we want to talk survival stories, there’s mine. I survived the newborn stage.

I wish I could say that adventure mom was immediately born from the ashes of adventure girl, but I can’t. I think we used the hiking backpack we paid too much money for less than 10 times in the first year. We went on the camping trip from hell when the baby was almost a year old. And didn’t even dare to try again for almost two years after that. We had another baby during a pandemic and couldn’t go anywhere anyway.

I heard somewhere that the first five years of a child’s life are called the hurricane years. If that’s the case I’m just not prepared to go camping in a hurricane during a pandemic.

The funny thing is, I don’t really miss her —adventure girl. She was who I needed then, and she taught me a lot about doing hard things, but the grit I needed to to help lead teenagers into the backcountry on a backpacking trip on Mt Adams while carrying my camera gear and and camp by myself in Alaska is nothing compared to the grit I have as a mother. This mom thing is the greatest adventure I’ve ever been on — and it can (and does) go sideways at literally any moment.

So now instead of post climbing beers, I have post bedtime beers and congratulate myself for keeping my small people alive another day. Maybe when the hurricane years are over we’ll go camping, but for now we’ll just pretend we’re camping in the backyard. My socials are filled with photos of my kids instead of the mountains and I definitely don’t have time to curate it. It’s not to say that getting outside isn’t still important to me. It’s actually become more important for my mental health than it’s ever been, but “getting outside” looks a lot different than it used to. Ive learned that every outing doesn’t have to be epic, it just has to be out.

Maybe it’s not fair to say adventure girl is dead. Maybe she’s just dormant. Or maybe she’ll be reincarnated as adventure mom in a few years. Maybe she’ll even become adventure grandma, who knows. For now though drinking beer in the backyard while my two boys hit the bushes with sticks is where you’ll find me.

Cheers.