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These Boots Are Made For Hiking
by Susan Hester
Before I moved to Sonoma County from San Francisco Idecided to check out the place - what kind of lesbian lived up there? So I grabbed a copy of We The People at A Different Light Bookstore in the Castro and checked the calendar listing. One event caught my eye - a trip to the Yuba River with a group called Walkabout, now called North Bay Wanderwomen (NBW) - so I called the contact Lisa L. She told me they were meeting at a fast food restaurant in Vallejo and would car pool up from there. Kay J. was also on that trip and they both remembered me. Wow I didn’t think I made that much of an impression. Since moving to Sonoma County, I have made more friends through NBW than any other group.
NBW is one of the longest groups around. The walks can be a leisurely stroll or a strenuous hike or a kayaking trip down the river. Sharon W. started the group in 1994 along with her friend Rhonda. Over ten women responded to their first ad for a hike along the Pomo Canyon Trail to Shell Beach. “It was an idea whose time had come,” Sharon stated. She started the group because, “I felt good about being single at the time and I wanted to hike with other women. And maybe find a special some one.” The group was from the beginning open to all women and had no organizational structure. For the first 2 or 3 years they took turns putting out a newsletter before they started their website.
Bev M. started doing hikes with the group in its first year. “I joined the group to make friends. I saw an ad and I thought: I like walking. When I went on my first hike there were all these women of different ages. It was just a group that fit.”
Sue S. remembers, “I started going on walks several years after NBW started. That was about six years ago. I started going on walks because it looked like something I would really enjoy. It seemed a healthy thing to do, a laid back way to meet people. I was scared the first time I went - scared to meet all these new people. When I went everyone was really friendly and accepting and I felt really comfortable. I used to go on every single walk that there was. It seemed like that was the highlight of my month.”
For Bev, “What was unique about the group was that there were gay women and straight women. That’s how Sharon started it. At first the gay women were sensitive about that but after awhile you didn’t care.”
Sue states, “I went for walks for about a year and then I got a girlfriend I met on a NBW hike and then I stopped going for about a year and a half. And then I started going again and Sharon was getting burned out and needed someone to take over getting the word out. I had never led a walk but I was so worried about losing that social group so I volunteered.”
“When someone leads a walk they pretty much have charge of whatever they want to do - if they want to co-lead it with another group. I just basically put it up on the website and in the paper.”
Kay met Bev on her first NBW walk in 1996, which was led by Lisa. “ I saw an ad and I was new in town. When I drove up to the meeting place, I saw these women and they were about my age and I thought, that’s for me.”
“On that walk I was showing Kay, the ‘newbe’," said Bev, "what was poison oak. I was moving away these branches so they wouldn’t hit her in the face. Only later on did I find out that poison oak at that time of year can look like branches. I saw Kay a few days later and my face looked like a boxer’s. It was all swollen from the poison oak.”
Lisa remembers, “The first 3 or 4 years the group was very active. There is a solid core of people who still maintain it.”
“I remember going to a show at the Luther Burbank Center and I knew three rows of women who I met through NBW," Bev recalls. "Some people have come in and out of the group but most of the group have all kept in touch through the years and have become life-long friends. We had alot of women who would just go to find a partner and we kept telling them just stay. Because we stayed and you end up making alot of good friends.”
Lisa thinks, "that the lack of organizational structure, dues and meetings is why it has lasted so long. It is simply because women wanted to get together and walk. And people were always welcoming new people.”
And why we can’t call it Walkabout anymore -
“I got a cease and desist email from a group in San Diego called Walkabout International who has exclusive rights (legally) to the name so we changed it to North Bay Wanderwomen,” stated Sue.
Sue, you have found two girlfriends on the NBW walks. “That’s because I go so often.”
North Bay Wanderwomen’s website address is http://www.sonic.net/~toucansu/ww.html . The site has wonderful pictures and mini-movies of some recent trips. And captions such as “Eighteen adventurous women cast off from Bodega Bay on a ‘three hour cruise’ in search of migrating gray whales. The weather had been touch and go following over a week of stormy weather. We took a 56 foot boat out onto 8 - 10 foot ocean swells. The swells were exciting and hypnotic, an ever changing molten landscape of huge, sparkling, gray-blue mounds.”
Just makes you want to come.... along.
Updated 10/5/05