The Hike Like A Woman Podcast

The Worst Group Trip I've Ever Led - Here's What I Learned

• Rebecca Walsh

Share episode

Send us a text

Today I share the story of the worst group trip I've ever led and everything that I did wrong. Check it out!

🥾 To learn more about Hike Like A Woman visit https://www.hikelikeawoman.com

⛰ Get our FREE How to Climb Kilimanjaro Guide: https://hike-like-a-woman-.ck.page/553a956ded

💦 Join us for a group trip to Costa Rica 4/14/25 - 4/20/25

: https://travefy.com/trip/6yw9rqk4tbewqz2au2zvsu7krbxgwzq?d=43328549

☀️Join us for a group trip to Southern Utah: https://trovatrip.com/trip/north-america/utah/united-states-with-rebecca-walsh-jun-2025

⛰ Join us for our next Kilimanjaro climb: https://trovatrip.com/trip/africa/tanzania/tanzania-with-hikelikeawoman-aug-2025 

📲 Shop Airolo through our affiliate link here: https://airalo.pxf.io/c/1312492/1268485/15608

⛑️We use, love and recommend Global Rescue for travel protection: https://partner.globalrescue.com/hikelikeawoman/index.html

☀️The GOES safety app will you keep you safe on the trail. We use it wherever we are adventuring. Click here https://goes.health/ and use the code: HIKELIKEAWOMAN for a free 30-day trial

★ Buy rad HLAW swag here: https://hikelikeawoman.creator-spring.com/

Support the show

Speaker 1:

Hey, it's Rebecca. Welcome back to the Hike Like a Woman podcast. Today I am sharing a little story with you. I want to talk about why group trips are so important to me. But first let's rewind almost a decade ago, back to the very first women's trip that I ever led in my entire life. I had this genius idea that I was going to invite a bunch of women and we were going to climb four 14,000 foot peaks in one day. Let's rewind this a little bit.

Speaker 1:

When I left my career as an army officer, I moved to a little town called Laramie, wyoming, where I still live. This was about almost 13 years ago now, and when I moved to Laramie, I didn't have any friends and I had a hard time making friends because where I had been stationed in the army before, whenever you move to a new location, you always just made friends with the people who were in your unit, and it was just really a different thing to be a civilian and move to a new town where I didn't really know anyone. And so I thought, okay, how am I going to make friends? And I would go to story time at the library and I would go to all the mom things, because I was a stay at home mom with my kids at the time and I just had a hard time making friends. And so finally I was like, well, how, how, what, what kind of friends do I need in my life? And it was friends who had children who were the same age as my children, friends who like to get outside and go on adventures, friends who like to go hiking and cross-country skiing and mountain biking and do all of those things. And eventually I thought, okay, well, the way to make these friends is just to start a hiking group. So I started a local hiking group. I called it the Little Laramie Hikers and we hiked every single Friday for probably five, six, seven years. The group is still going strong. I'm not part of the group anymore just because my kids have aged out of it a little bit. So anyway, I started this hiking group.

Speaker 1:

I started to make some really good friends on this hiking group and we decided that we wanted to just push ourselves and go have a really fantastic weekend and do something really hard. So we decided to go climb these four 14,000 foot peaks in Colorado in one day. These peaks are Mount Democrat, mount Cameron, mount Lincoln and Mount Bross, and I'm not sure if you can still climb up Mount Bross. It was on private property, but anyway. So there was a group of us I want to say 10 to 14 women who decided that we were going to go climb this, do this whole 14er circuit and for those of you who don't live here in the Rockies, the 14er is a peak that is over 14,000 feet in elevation, so kind of a big deal. So we got our big group together.

Speaker 1:

I said I would just take on all the logistics. So we figured out food, we figured out tents, we figured out who was going to drive all of those things. We had a pre-trip meeting at my house and we had mojitos and they were delicious. And then we decided that we were going to do the trip over. We were going to leave Friday evening after work or after our spouses got done with work. We decided that we were going to camp at Kite Lake, which was the starting point for this circuit. And, yeah, I thought in my mind. I thought we were ready to go. I thought we had a rock solid plan, but it wasn't as solid as I had hoped and it actually was a bit of a disaster. It showed me that even if you have a really good plan, it's always not going to be executed exactly as laid out. So it started to.

Speaker 1:

The trip started to get a little bit off when the meetup location got confused and one of the women who was going to drive, who none of us knew very well. She stayed at work long and she thought we were meeting at her place of work instead of my house, where the rest of the group was. So we were all at my house just waiting on one person with her vehicle and we'd only communicated via Facebook Messenger. So I didn't even have her phone number. I couldn't call her. I couldn't text her. I was desperately trying to reach her. So finally we did. We got all the confusion sorted out. We got on the road about an hour hour and a half late. Then some of our gear was on someone's. They had one of those trailer hitches where you can put your luggage, and so we had some of our duffel bags on one of those trailer hitches. And then it started to rain and we were worried about our sleeping bags getting wet and our clothing getting wet, and then we piled a bunch of gear into a smaller car. So it was like from the start it was. It was a little bit rocky.

Speaker 1:

We got to our campsite just as the sun was going down and we realized that we were at our campsite with hundreds and hundreds of other people and there wasn't anywhere to park our cars. We kind of had to park illegally. There was not any space to set up our tents. We finally just squished tents in between other people's tents, like we were at a, like we were at a bluegrass festival or something, and it was pretty loud that night because there were just a lot of people parked in or a lot of people camped in this space. There were a lot of vehicles coming in and coming out.

Speaker 1:

And then we woke up at 5 am. We were were ready to start our climb and then there was a little more confusion with the group, where some people in the group brought a breakfast that they would have to cook before we started hiking and other women just brought like granola bars and trail snacks. So there was confusion over what time we were going to start the hike and making sure that everybody had breakfast and we thought we would just all hike together. But then the breakfast thing happened and then there were some girls in our group that were really fast and others like me that just wanted to enjoy the day. So the logistics there kind of fell apart. We also had one woman who was in our hiking group and she had her teenage sister living with her and I don't know what was going on between this woman and her teenage sister, but this woman didn't go on the trip with us, but she sent her teenage sister with us instead. So then we had this girl in her late teens that wasn't a hiker, wasn't a camper, that wasn't really her thing, and we felt a little bit like we had a little bait and switch there. So we felt a little bit like we were babysitting this girl we didn't even know. So that was unusual and I should say it. It sounds like it's a bit of a shit show, right, but but it actually all worked out fine.

Speaker 1:

We we made it to the top of all of the four summits. We split into smaller groups. Uh, everyone who went, I think, had a really fun time. We um, we all met at the campsite after the hike and took down our gear and we went out to lunch and it was fantastic. And we got home in the evening and we felt so accomplished that we had climbed four 14,000 foot peaks in a morning and I learned so much about what it means to be a leader in the outdoors during that trip.

Speaker 1:

And here's one of the things that I learned and I learned that when you do a really difficult thing or you go on a really big adventure with a friend, those friends become your friends for life. In fact, one of the women who was on that trip with me she actually climbed Kilimanjaro with me back in June and we were friends before that trip but that trip really solidified the bond that we have as sisters, as friends, and I love that about group trips and I say it all the time how we start off all of our trips as strangers but we finish as friends. And that was so true on that trip because I think if it would have just gone perfectly from start to finish, we wouldn't have all these great stories and memories and experiences of this shared trip together. The second thing that I learned was that if you just sit around waiting for other people to plan your adventures, they will never happen.

Speaker 1:

I learned that somebody has to be the leader, somebody has to make the plan, somebody has to take the plan, somebody has to take charge, somebody has to have a first aid kit, somebody has to have a contingency plan. Somebody has to be the leader, and more often than not that falls on me, and even when I try not to to take charge I don't know if I'm just extremely type a or what, but but I love to take this backseat and let somebody else take charge. But when it comes to outdoor adventure, I learned that if I want to go on these big adventures and if I don't want to go alone, and if my husband doesn't want to go with me, and if it's not something that we can take the children on or something that we want to hire a babysitter for so we can't take our children on, then that we want to hire a babysitter for so we can take our children on, then somebody has to be the leader, somebody has to plan it, somebody has to organize it, and when you take on the leadership role, everyone is so thankful that you took that on and that you provided that opportunity. So win in charge, take charge, and that's what I learned about that trip. I also learned that if it would have been me so, the Rebecca of 15 years ago would have just driven my car down to the trailhead, I would have gotten there in plenty of time to get a campsite, or I would have had my car ready to camp in and I would have been up ready to hike, and it would have been very peaceful, very organized and not as scattered and as chaotic. But it also wouldn't have been. It wouldn't have been as much fun, because I, as much as I love solo adventures, doing something challenging like climbing four 14,000 foot peaks in one day, it's better with friends and there's a time, at least in my life, when I need to just pull back and just be me and be with me or just be with my family or just be with one or two other friends. But there's also times when you can share that experience with other people and it's so much more special.

Speaker 1:

I also learned on this trip that it's okay to leave my kids with my husband and I already knew that. It's not like we don't have a partnership in our marriage. It is very much equal, we very much share tasks, but we don't have assigned tasks. There's certain things that I just do because I enjoy doing them same with my husband or because we're naturally better at doing them than our spouse. But I was and I had left my children before. It's not like this was the first time I ever left my kids. I had a job that took me out of town one weekend a month and for a couple weeks every year more than that. So it's not like I had never left my children. That hasn't been a big thing.

Speaker 1:

But leaving my children with my husband so that I could go do something fun, something that wasn't work, felt a little bit icky. At first I realized there was no reason to feel bad about leaving my family behind to go do something fun, because while I was gone my husband and my kids had a ton of fun without me and they were able to bond in a really cool way. And I also noticed that not just on that very first trip where I left my family to do something fun, but also when I lead trips now all over the world. I find that when I come home, my husband and my children their relationship grows. While I'm gone. It gets stronger while I'm gone. Last year I was guiding a trip and my whole family got COVID and I wasn't home to take care of them, but they were fine and they were okay and that experience actually brought them closer together. So I'm really thankful that I have a spouse that is so supportive of what I do for a living and also that, as a husband, that recognizes how important it is for me to step outside of that wife-mom role and into adventurous Rebecca, because I was so adventurous before having children that disappeared for a few years and once it came back I felt like I was Rebecca again.

Speaker 1:

Obviously, since that very first trip, I have learned a whole lot about interpersonal skills, communication, setting expectations, safety and risk management. I've honed my skills. I've taken courses on leadership and on outdoor leadership and on risk management and on first aid, and I've become better at doing what I do. But it really wouldn't have happened and this whole career path of guiding and leading outdoor adventures wouldn't have opened if I wouldn't have said, hey, I'm going to go on this adventure. Who wants to come with me? I'll do all the planning you just have to show up and climb the mountain Hike Like a Woman wouldn't exist if I wouldn't have put myself out there and took a risk and taken on a leadership role for this trip. So if you get anything out of this long, rambling story, what I want you to take home is if you feel like you want to have friends to go on these adventures with, but you feel like you just don't have anyone to go on the adventures with, then put it out there and say I'm going to go on a trip, I'm going to climb this mountain, I'm going to camp here, I'm going to go backpacking here. Whatever your adventure is, put it out there, invite your friends, I bet they'll come along. And if you don't want to put yourself out there, or you can't put yourself out there or you're just a little nervous about putting yourself out there or you don't have time or whatever to plan an adventure, then you can always come on an adventure with me.

Speaker 1:

We have a few openings for our next trips. We are headed to Iceland in February. That trip is waitlist only. It is sold out, but we may have a cancellation or two. So be sure to get on our waitlist over at our website, hikelikeawomancom, if Iceland interests you.

Speaker 1:

Then we're headed to Costa Rica in April. This is a full-blown adventure trip with whitewater rafting, night hiking. We're going to do zipline Tarzan swing. We're going to do some hiking, we're going to check out some waterfalls, we're going to go swimming. This is just. This is an adventure trip. It's not so much a hiking trip, but it's an adventure trip where we stay in beautiful lodges along the river, good hotels, delicious food, amazing guides with our friends at the Pequare Outdoor Center. So if a bucket list Costa Rican adventure trip is something you're excited about, go check it out.

Speaker 1:

In June, we are headed on a national park trip through Southern Utah, so we're going to hit four national parks in Southern Utah. We're going to meet in Vegas and we're actually going to end the trip in Salt Lake City, so that is going to be a fantastic trip. And then in August we're going back to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. And then I'm still trying to figure out where to go next September and next October of 2025. So head to our website, hikelikeawomancom. We have a little poll set up. You can take that poll there and let us know what trips you would like to join us on. That is group trips. That is why I lead group trips, that is how I got started. And just a little, a little sneak peek into our past here at hike like a woman. Thanks so much for joining me today. Go book a trip with us. Hit, subscribe and I will see you out on the trails.