The Kiwi women finding therapy in the mountains

Victoria Taylor likes to hike with her dog Bodhi. Photo / Supplied

One turned to the mountains after suffering sexual violence, another after a break-up. Jo Bennett talks to three Kiwi women finding solace in the mountains.

When Victoria Taylor, a 27-year-old osteopath from Auckland, broke up with her boyfriend in the middle of last year's Covid-19 lockdown, she missed tramping with him and felt unsure about going it alone.

Eager to make a few new, socially distanced, mates in a new city, she started a Facebook group, Wāhine Tramping and Hiking New Zealand. She figured a handful of women might be interested.

A year on, the group has more than 5000 members from all over the country. At its peak, Taylor - who regularly hikes with her dog Bodhi - would log on to Facebook each day to find more than 70 friend requests from women asking to be added to the group.

Victoria Taylor, a 27-year-old Osteopath from Auckland. Photo / Supplied

The group is now a repository of outdoorsy women: women finding mates for a "peak bagging" expedition (a colloquial term for "collecting" names of summited mountains), women asking for gear advice, and women sharing selfies from recent solo tramps, with backdrops of painterly purple sunrises over Mt Cook, or the waters of a turquoise tarn.

For Taylor, the shared experience is part of the joy – but for Germaine Srhoy and Hazel Phillips, author of new bestselling book Solo, the meaning of tramping is about seeking out solitude, and largely about self-reliance.

It's a rainy afternoon in suburban Auckland when I call Srhoy but she can't talk. She's halfway up Mt Somers on a solo expedition.

"I'm off-route a bit," she says, "I am trying for the summit, but there's just enough snow to be bloody annoying".

Srhoy, 34, is a solo mum of an 8-year-old and lives in mid-Canterbury. Most days she's in the community working as an emergency medical assistant, but the rest of the time she's traversing the country on foot and on her own – most recently on the Te Araroa trail – a 3000km hike that takes most people four months to complete, cutting a line down the entire length of New Zealand, from Cape Reinga to the wilds of Bluff.

Germaine Srhoy, 34, a solo mum of an eight-year-old who lives in mid-Canterbury. Photo / Supplied

Being alone in the wilderness in New Zealand is nothing new – we are a small, isolated country that breeds self-reliance, a can-do attitude and regular doses of she'll be right. On our good days, we are a feminist nation – first to give women the vote, a country with multiple female prime ministers, but until recently, if you were to describe a solitary figure tackling the steep ridges of the Southern Alps, it probably looked like a man.

In a recent Sport NZ survey, tramping is the second "new activity" adult women would like to try in the next 12 months. The Te Araroa trail organisation reports nearly half of all registered trampers in the past 18 months have been women. A recent slew of articles by women doing solo tramps across New Zealand – including Victoria Bruce with her 7-year-old – and the popularity of female kiwi adventurers on YouTube such as Elina Osborne, seems to corroborate this idea. Is tramping alone the new frontier of feminism in New Zealand?

This year marks a decade since Portland-based author Cheryl Strayed published her bestselling memoir Wild – a gorgeous retelling of her 4000km hike on the Pacific Crest Trail, from Mexico to Canada. It was turned into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon. When Strayed wrote the book in 2012, the idea of a woman going off on her own into the wilderness for four months was considered well, wild – and even a little irresponsible.

Today there is still expectation that women live their lives in relationship to others, and to be naturally wary of strangers, especially when alone, and in the dark. What could women gain from solitary outdoor pursuits? As it turns out, there's a lot.

Reese Witherspoon in a scene from the film Wild.

When I talk to Phillips, 44, on Zoom, she's sitting in a cavernous room with a couple of wooden chairs and tables, and a potbelly stove glowing in the corner. She's bundled in a black puffer jacket and a beanie because she's in the middle of Aoraki Mt Cook National Park. The view behind her – timber beams on the ceiling, triangular floor-to-ceiling windows and snow-capped mountain ranges looks like something you'd find on a Pinterest board under "cabin porn".

Alone but for the kea, in the 48-bunk New Zealand Alpine Club (NZAC) Unwin hut, she is quick to smile, and has a bright, steady tone to her voice. Her unruffled, no-nonsense nature makes me feel almost homesick in its distinct Kiwi-ness.

"I was at Fox Glacier recently in one of the NZAC huts, and I went for a whole week without having any meaningful conversations with any other humans. I guess people see it as kind of challenging or unusual – the idea that you could spend a lot of time just by yourself, but I think it's kind of fun. I'm trying to be less of a hermit these days, but here I am in this giant lodge, and I'm not really succeeding, am I?" she laughs.

In researching her book Solo, Phillips spent two years combing literature by female mountaineers like Freda Du Faur and Lydia Bradey, looking at how women write about their experiences in the wilderness. She found female mountaineering and gender almost always intersect and believes it's because women in the mountains are naturally "othered", and not the norm.

I tell her it reminds me of a recent mountaineering club night I went to when a male climber, during a PowerPoint talk on his expeditions, showed a cartoon woman in a bikini being helped up a rock by a man. Shocked, I looked around the room for other women's reactions until I realised there were only three of us in a room of 50 people.

Hazel Phillips, 44, author of new bestselling book Solo. Photo / Supplied

"For men, gender doesn't really come into mountaineering – it kind of does in a wider way in New Zealand, as we have all these tropes around masculinity and pioneerism and stuff. But you very rarely get a woman just writing about mountaineering, without talking about the fact she's a woman. Whereas was [Sir Edmund] Hillary, thinking about his masculinity and how he could overcome his ideas about it to successfully be a climber?

"It does, in a way, feel like a huge feminist act to go by yourself into the wilderness, because you're saying, first of all: I can handle myself in terms of not falling off a cliff or getting hypothermia, but two: also saying, I am okay. I am safe in the world."

For most women who tramp alone, one of the first things people ask is whether it's "safe". Not in the traditional sense of the track's difficulty or challenge – but because of the threat of sexual violence. On most tramps you are often out of cellphone range, staying overnight in secluded huts with little privacy in shared bunkrooms. Yet statistically speaking, sexual violence is rare when tramping outdoors, especially in New Zealand.

Sexual violence is what got Srhoy on the Te Araroa trail in the first place – but she didn't experience it while on a tramp. Like most women who experience sexual violence, it was in her own suburban home. After leaving the relationship, she eventually found solace in therapy – and solitary expeditions where she could "scream and cry, and then leave it on the trail". It also reconnected her to the good in people.

In researching her book Solo, Hazel spent two years combing literature by female mountaineers like Freda Du Faur and Lydia Brade.

"After being assaulted, I had learned to distance myself from people. The only person I could rely on was me. I let this narrative run my life to say I didn't need people. It was a very lonely existence – it was protective. But on the TA, I was constantly exposed to little acts of kindness – if I was walking alone down a back road people would often pull over and ask, do you need a lift?

"When my hips and legs were buggered, I was commiserating with another chick and she gave me her codeine. I had never asked anything of someone who was essentially a stranger to me, and her offer really touched me. I learned I could let people back in again. That was huge for me."

Sport NZ research reflects Srhoy's experience – while men are more motivated to exercise for fun and to challenge themselves, women are more likely than men to do so for mental and emotional wellbeing.

Yet despite these unique benefits, there is still some way to go in normalising women being on the trail alone. Philips describes multiple occasions where she was questioned on her ability or experience- until the person recognised her bright pink jacket from social media and remarked that "she'd be fine" - or given constant praise for her bravery while on a difficult tramp – once by a guy passing her in the snow on Tongariro wearing jeans and a jacket.

"I've seen a bit of backlash from some guys towards seeing women being promoted or applauded for going solo. I heard a guy say the other day that if he tramps by himself, people might think he's a weirdo or pervert, but if a woman does it, she's 'hashtag inspirational'. But I think there's a whole aspect there that's being missed in understanding why it's a thing for women. It's because we're already carrying around this giant bag of fear to get over, and then you've got to figure out how to kind of put that down and go and do these things."

For Srhoy, tramping alone and without distraction made her extra-attuned to her body – figuring out how it works best, and what it needs to function. This gave her back the feeling of ownership over it and reminded her of its capabilities. It's also left her with an enduring sense of gratitude.

"Solo tramping for me is like the reverse of PTSD. I knew gratitude before doing this, but after completing some sketchy parts of the TA, I had an overwhelming sense of thankfulness – that I was alive, and that I had the option to do this stuff. Even on shitty days, the further south I went, the more I felt it. Sometimes after work I put some headphones on and go for a run in the mountains, and just being in that environment with my music, the emotions I felt on the TA rush right back – they're still with me to this day."

Phillips says Solo is not a traditional mountaineering account of a person doing amazing things, it's really a book about self-doubt and the ability to overcome it. She hopes it will encourage ordinary women like her to move past their own limiting beliefs.

"With writing, there's always this idea that somebody else out there might have experiences or questions or sometimes trauma that's in the shape of your words, and that can be meaningful to somebody.

"I hope other women will look at this and go, here's this completely ordinary woman going out and doing stuff even though she is worried about it or doesn't feel like she can do it or doesn't necessarily believe in herself. If a woman reads this and gets out there – whether it's solo or not – that's really gratifying to me.

"In the beginning, when I started going solo, people would be really worried on my behalf, and I'd sort of wonder if I should be worried. Now, I just sort of laugh internally a little bit – but I know they mean well."

Just as we finish talking, Phillips tells me that the definition of the word "solo" in the outdoors doesn't mean alone, it means "untethered" or without a rope. In other words, free of ties and limitations, just like her.