by Janet Hurley

Perhaps the universe figured I needed a kick in the pants. Right after I started dating my now-husband David in 1991, I met someone who’d gone to college with him and knew his ex-girlfriend. “Last I heard she was leading a canoe expedition through the Northwest Territories,” the guy reported.

Expedition? That word had never described anything in my life—unless you count crossing the Mason-Dixon Line to attend college or going for an extra long walk on the Jersey shore. 

It wasn’t just the physical challenge of adventuring that impressed me but having the inclination to do something so out-of-the-box in the first place. There were people who adventured and those who read about them in National Geographic, and I was a very good reader. 

But suddenly I started to meet adventurous women everywhere: climbing great walls in Yosemite, circumnavigating the globe in a sailboat, doing research in the rainforest canopy. I wondered: what makes a person inclined to take on physical, emotional or financial risk, and what are the benefits? 

According to an article in Psychology Today, the majority of adventure seekers live in economically secure and physically safe countries, so maybe they just want to shake things up. Then again, maybe it’s a personality type—“type T” for thrill seeker. Perhaps some got a bigger dose of the risk gene that ensured survival. Or they got more of the brain enzymes that reduce the thrill of incoming stimuli, creating an “excitement deficit” and a resulting need to tackle increasingly risky behaviors. Or maybe some people just want to be part of the community that springs up around certain activities, a group that speaks in its own special jargon (mountain bikers “catch air,” for example, and climbers talk “tough pitches”). 

Dr. Marty O’Keefe at the Outdoor Leadership program at Warren Wilson College says many adventurers are just doing what they love to do. “The adrenaline that comes from taking on any sort of risk creates a focus, a heightened sense of awareness and a change in the sense of time,” she says. “It’s the ‘be here now’ that is so appealing to many people.” 

But how to define adventure? Heading into uncharted physical, mental or emotional territories could describe Michelle Obama as well as Libby Riddles, the first woman to win the Iditarod. O’Keefe says the definition is personal. “In our culture, it’s the big stuff that gets the attention,” she says. “We tend to look at one end of the scale only—the best of the best—but people take on risk every day that is just as significant to them, choosing a life partner or asking for a raise.”  

In 1993, my husband David and I quit our jobs, sublet our house and headed west in our Nissan king-cab pick-up truck. We traveled for three months, living out of the back of our truck or on the trail, from the desert southwest to the Olympic Peninsula to the Badlands of South Dakota. Fortunately, David was a former (and very competent) Outward Bound instructor. He was encouraging and patient, even when I declared that the uber-steep climb out of the Grand Canyon after a four-day backpack was just too much.   

By the time we got to the Beartooth Wilderness in Idaho, I felt confident enough to go solo backpacking while David paddled the Lochsa River with friends. According to Dr. O’Keefe, I had come into a place of flow, where my skills were in balance with the level of risk I took on—admittedly risks that paled in comparison to some, but for me represented a real expedition.

I’m in good company here in Western North Carolina. Whatever their motivations—romantic or motherly love, a spiritual connection to nature, the joy of physical or mental accomplishment, a fascination with world cultures—the women we’ve interviewed for this issue have personal adventure stories that deserve to be written and read. “There have been women adventurers since the beginning of time,” O’Keefe points out. “They just get overlooked in history.” Not if VERVE can help it.