393 Holly Worton ~ Staying Safe in the Outdoors

Transcript

Holly: Hello adventurers and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 393. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with a solo episode. Today I am going to talk about safety in the outdoors. This is something that I have written a couple of blog posts about – and I will link to those in the show notes – but it is something that often comes up when I talk to people about my outdoors adventures.  A lot of people, women particularly, don’t feel safe to go hiking on their own, or walking on their own, or running on their own, in the outdoors.

And I am aware that some places are safer than others, and one of the things that I love so much about the place that I live is that I feel really safe here, I feel really, really, safe in the outdoors and I know it is not the same everywhere. So the advice that I am going to be giving you, the perspective that I am going to be sharing with you, in this episode is from the place of someone who lives in the UK, which I consider to be a pretty safe place to be spending time in the outdoors as a woman, but of course adapt this to wherever your live.

So what are we going to talk about today? I am going to talk about safety in the outdoors from different aspects: what are the main risks, what are the ten essentials which you may have heard of. I will be talking about danger from people and I will be talking about skills that you might want to learn so you can feel safer in the outdoors.

So, let’s get on with it.

I know that I have taken outdoors courses and I am continuing to take outdoors courses, so that is something that gives me a certain level of confidence in going outdoors on my own. I think if you don’t know what you don’t know sometimes that leads people to take stupid risks but a lot of times it just keeps people feeling stuck and unsafe and unwilling to stretch out of their comfort zone into the adventure zone. So, I think it is important to know what are the main risks that we face when we go outdoors and of course whether you are with people or on your own, you pretty much face the same risks, but when you are on your own you have to troubleshoot on your own. And I know the places that I walk oftentimes I am alone for hours on end and so if I did get injured, and didn’t have a way to get help, I might be there for a while, so I am going to have self-evacuate.

So what are the main risks? Animals, thankfully in the UK we don’t have any dangerous animals, I think the most dangerous animal we have here is the cow, which kills between five and six people a year on average. Obviously if you know how to walk through a field with cows, that will help. If you are afraid of cows, google it, generally speaking, cows are going to be more dangerous if they are with calves and if you have a dog with you. If you don’t have a dog with you then you probably won’t be as stressful to the cows as you would be if you were walking with a dog.

 So if you do engage in dog walking, and you do walk through fields with cows, please go online and do some research into proper etiquette like what you should do if a cow charges at you, you are supposed to let go of the lead, the dog will probably get itself out of there faster than you could if you were dragging itself along on the leash and it will know how to self evacuate. Of course if you live in North America, you probably have bears, mountain lions and all kinds of scary animals to deal with.

Wherever you are hiking – and this especially applies if you are hiking outside of your local area – research the animals in that area, research the risks in that area. I remember when I lived in Southeast Mexico, I used to go swimming in the sea every day and I would see tourists going into the sea with sparkly jewellery, like chains and necklaces and things, and I would always think, ‘oh god, do they not know thar they shouldn’t be wearing sparkly metallic jewellery in the sea?’, fish, but especially barracudas, are attracted to that. I remember the first year that I lived in Mexico a woman was swimming and she got her neck kind of scratched by a barracuda who was trying to get a bite on her necklace and she did not fare well.

So know what the local fauna is like. There were also stingrays that would bury themselves underneath the sand and you were at risk of stepping on them if you didn’t look before you put your foot down as you were getting out of the sea. Now that’s not hiking, that’s ocean swimming, but know what are the risks in the area you travel to if you are going to be having outdoors adventures in other parts of the world and especially know about the risks in the area that you live, so animals are going to be different wherever you are in the world.

Dehydration is a big thing, because I practice intermittent fasting I am really focussed on hydrating well, because I don’t eat food throughout the day like most people do I don’t get water from food so that means whenever I go out on a hike, or I go camping, or a long distance walk, or I go on a trail run, I need to bring more water than the average person. But I am aware of this because again I practice intermittent fasting but for someone who doesn’t they might not be as aware of their hydration needs, so it is really, really, important to calculate how much water you are going to need and then bring some extra water.

Weather, always check the weather before you go on a walk, a hike, a trail run, whatever. Whenever you go in the outdoors check the weather and know which is the best weather app or service in your area and that might not be, probably won’t be, the weather app that comes on your phone. If you are in the UK you probably want to use the met office in other parts of the world you will have a more accurate weather reporting system than perhaps the app that comes on your phone. So be aware of the weather and plan in advance. You want to be avoiding heat and cold injuries: hyperthermia and hypothermia, so if it is hot you need to be covering your head, you need to make sure that you are staying cool and if it is cold you need to bring extra layers, gloves, hat and warm stuff and bring extra stuff, always bring extra layers, it will weigh down your pack and it might mean that you need to carry a bigger pack – but that’s good training.

Getting lost is another huge risk, so it is really important to have basic navigation skills, always carry a map and a compass and of course know how to use them and it is also worth having some kind of GPS device or app like the OS maps app as a backup system. You don’t want to rely on technology as your primary navigation system, I know a lot of people do and it is very tempting because it is so easy, and you don’t need to think, you just kind of open the app and there you are on a map, but batteries can run out so you need to know how to locate yourself on a map.

Injury, it is really important if you are going to be on your own to take care of yourself and try to stay injury free. Obviously you can trip, you can fall, you can twist an ankle. It is also important to know where you are on a map because you know how to evacuate yourself: how to get down to the nearest road, how to get down to the nearest wherever (house, farm), in case you are injured. So be aware of where you are.

Those are kind of the main risks, there are other things like river crossings could be dangerous, you could get caught out after dark and that is another reason why it is really important to, when you are checking the weather also check the sun down time for the day to make sure that you will be out and back before the sun goes down, or you have a lighting system, a headlamp or something to be able to get back in the dark.

Falling objects, that’s really hard to avoid, sometimes branches fall off trees and that can be dangerous and sometimes avalanches happen and rocks can fall, but that is really hard to avoid, that’s not really something that you can plan for – unless you know you are in an area that has falling objects (and you might want to stay away from that!). Like I said, river crossings, if you know that you will be going on a trail that requires a river crossing, learn how to cross a river, there are plenty of videos online and you need to learn how to determine whether it is safe to cross – or not. I would say save this information on a note on your phone so you don’t have to worry about remembering all the details. You might get to a river crossing and think: what do I do – should I risk it, should I not? Having something written down that gives you kind of the guidelines can really help and give you confidence to know that you are making the right decision.

So what do you do about all these risks? There is a thing called ‘the ten essentials’ and those are the ten things that you should be carrying with you at all times in the outdoors and I have kind of covered some of them in talking about the risks but let’s go through them again: navigation, you should know how to navigate, you should know how to use a map and a compass and it would be good to have a backup technical navigation tool like an app. The google maps will not work for the outdoors, that’s good for roads, not good when you are on trails. If you are in the UK the OS maps app is fantastic, it is paid – £23.99 a month – and it is excellent, excellent, it is worth every penny. It is how I plan my trail runs and how I plan my hikes, it is how I map stuff out and create a GPX file to navigate from and also to share with my husband where I am going to be and it can help me relocate if I don’t know where I am, so it is really, really, useful.

First aid, you should always have a first aid kit with you. There are obviously various different kinds of first aid kits, some are made for the outdoors, you can get those online. I think I will share a link to mine, I have several different first aid kits but I will share a link to those in the show notes. I think it is also important to take a course in outdoors first aid. Now I didn’t bother doing this until a few years ago when I was getting ready to start running a woman’s walking group, and I really, really, really, learned a lot; it is a two-day course and it is 16 hours, eight hours each day, really thorough. It kind of made me a little paranoid because it made me realise that there were so many things that could go wrong but nothing ever did go wrong. Nothing ever went wrong with my group and nothing has ever gone wrong with me being in the outdoors on my own, but taking that course and updating it every three years, means that I feel more confident about my ability to handle an injury.

Next fire, it is good to have something on you to be able to make fire. Now if you do a bushcraft course (I did my advanced bushcraft course last year), you will learn many ways of making fire and you probably don’t need to know all of those but it is really empowering to know that you can. At the very least you should have a lighter, you should have a fire stick, matches, that you keep dry, there are various different ways of making fire but I would say carry at least one if not two, these are small, these are light weight, these are easy to carry with you.

Shelter, I always carry an emergency bivy bag, or an emergency shelter, these are things that you can carry in your bag, they are very lightweight and in the case of the emergency shelter you just open it up and it sits on top of you kind of like a giant bag of tarp that comes around you. I have a small two person one because that means it is big enough for me and my backpack and one thing that I learned in my outdoors course is that an emergency shelter can raise the temperature of your environment by 10 degrees celsius, so that’s a huge, huge, difference, it is just a piece of fabric but it really keeps you warm.

I also have a larger emergency shelter, I think it is a ten person one that I used to use, actually never had to use it, but I had in case of need for my walking group. There was one time when I was out on an outdoors course, I think it was NNAS gold, up in North Yorkshire, and it was freezing, it was raining, the weather was miserable and we sat down to lunch and the course leader pulled out his emergency shelter and we all sat inside to have lunch and it just made such a huge difference. So it can make a huge difference to comfort but it can also mean the difference between life and death, if you are in a really bad emergency situation.

Light, you need some kind of light, so it is good to have a headlamp and it is really nice to have a backup as well. Your phone will of course have a lamp on it, a flashlight, and that is really bright and really good at illuminating, but you don’t want to drain your battery, so that’s why it is really important not to use that one device for so many things (you can’t have just your phone and rely on it as your only source of navigation and light and communication).

Knife, it is always good to have a knife on you, in the UK knife laws are quite strict so you can’t have a locking blade, you can’t have a fixed blade, you can’t have a blade longer than three inches – there are other details, but basically just carry a small blade that can fold; very, very, useful in emergency situations and also just practical things like if you need to cut something.

Sun protection, very important to stay safe from the sun, I know that is something that we don’t always worry about here in the UK, but we do have sun and it can get hot, especially during the summer. I feel like people laugh at me every time I talk about how much I have suffered on long distance trails in the summertime, but it really can get hot when you are outdoors all day long, multiple days on end. Stay safe from the sun, so bring a sun hat, bring sunscreen for your skin, and sit in the shade if you are going to have a break.

Extras, extra food, extra water, extra clothes. So I usually do my hiking fasted but I always have an emergency protein bar in my bag. I also carry sports gels, the kind of things that I take when I am running, I have these energy/caffeine gummies that I carry when I run, those are small, probably not great as food, but those are the kind of things that I carry with me when I am in the outdoors. Normal people who eat food multiple times a day should be bringing extra snacks: stuff like protein bars, nuts, I probably should bring more than I do bring, because food is not just energy for your body it also keeps you warm. If you have ever fasted during the winter you know that it is cold, your body gets really cold when you are fasting in the winter, so if you are in an emergency situation in the cold, eating a little bit of food will warm you up and I think that’s something that a lot of people don’t think about: food is not just fuel it is also warmth.

Extra water, like I said, bring enough water for your adventure and then bring extra water. You might also want to bring some kind of water purification system, there are many different things you could use, there is the Sawyer squeeze which is a bag that you kind of fill with water and then squeeze it out into another bottle and it pushes it through a filter and that filters out 99.999 something % of stuff. You can also get drops that can purify the water. If you are going to be out for multiple days I think that is a good solution, I do not bring a water purifier with me when I am going out on a long distance hike just because I tend to go through places that I can get clean water at, I am passing through towns, I am passing through places that have water taps, a lot of times the national trails will have water taps along the way. So I don’t carry a purification system but I have one for camping.

Extra clothes, insulation and protection from the sun. So especially in the winter always bring extra layers: gloves, hats, buffs or neck warmers, buffs are great because you can use them on your head, you can use them on your neck, you can do all kinds of things with them, so those are really, really, good.

So those are the ten essentials. As you can see a lot of safety in the outdoors is about preparing, it is about bringing the right stuff and making sure you have all the things you need and that will mitigate the risks.

So you can also learn mountain skills, or outdoor skills. There are lots of things that you can do, you can take navigation courses, the National Navigation Awards Scheme here in the UK has a bronze, silver and gold award, that is a fantastic course to take. If you have zero navigation skills start out with the bronze, if you have some navigation skills you can do ‘straight to silver’, which is a three day rather than two day course, so what they basically do is cram all of the bronze into one day and then the next two days are silver. That was what I started with and then from there I did the gold, I haven’t done the evaluation for the gold but I have done the gold course. I really recommend it for learning how to read a map, there are also online map reading courses that you can take and I think I have one that I can recommend that I can like to in show notes.

Navigation once you get into that, there are lots of other things that you can do in terms of learning and improving your navigation skills: you can do night navigation, you can do relocation, which is when you get lost and you need to relocate where you are, all kinds of stuff. Outdoors first aid, like I said that is a really, really, good course, even if you are just learning it for yourself, it is a very practical course, I have done it twice now, because you have to renew it every three years, and it is not just kind of class learning and practicing in the class, because it is an outdoor first aid class you go outdoors and you simulate injuries and situations where someone will put themselves into an injury. They have these stained with red bandages and things that you put on different parts of your body and you kind of get dressed up like you are injured and then two people come across you and have to help you and demonstrate their skills, it is a really, really practical and really, really useful. And I will link in the show notes to the outdoors first aid company that I have used both times and I really, really, liked them, I had great instructors and I did it in my local area and so it was nice to do that in the environment where I will be spending time outdoors.

Skills to learn: camping, so before I ever went camping on my own I went on this wild camping course, I just googled ‘wild camping course’ and this guy came up and it was this thing in South Wales and I thought, ‘I will do it’, because I was never taken camping as a kid, I didn’t grow up learning these skills, I didn’t know what gear to buy, and so it was great. I basically just had to bring a sleeping bag and my normal hiking stuff and then I got to try out this guy’s gear, go to try out his stove and his tent and his sleeping mat and all that good stuff. So that was really, really good because I got to see what gear he used, what he liked and what he didn’t like and what I wanted to get for myself and how to just do stuff in the outdoors in terms of staying overnight somewhere. So that gave me a lot of confidence in terms of camping. Now I have been camping so many times it is normal, but I started out from nowhere and I just didn’t feel confident about it.

Winter skills, so if you live in a place that has ice and snow, you might want to learn how to use an ice axe and crampons. Mountain skills, if you live up north, or in the mountains, there are all kinds of stuff that you can learn online and – better yet – in the outdoors. I know we are still in the middle of lockdown, or as a friend said to me today, ‘I like to call it retreat’, so we are still in the middle of Covid retreat, it is hard to do in person courses, but hopefully later this year that will change. But there are things you can learn online, there are map reading courses online, obviously it is a good introduction and you will have to practice it, but there is a lot you can learn.

So, as I have said, a lot of this is about staying safe in the environment and knowing how to function in the outdoors in terms of weather and navigation and awareness of how we are interacting with nature, but I think when people talk about ‘safety in the outdoors’, specifically for women, they are thinking about people, they are thinking about scary men waiting to attack them on the trail. And, I don’t know how often that happens, I definitely feel safer on the trails when I am in the middle of nowhere than I do when I am in areas with more people, because obviously people are the scary ones. Most people that are going to be looking to attack a woman probably aren’t going to be hiking deep into the woods to hide behind a bush on the off chance that a woman might come by.

But I think it is important to just be aware of your surroundings, I never listen to music (or podcasts or anything) when I hiking or walking, I do listen to music when I run, but only in one ear. I have just one earbud that I will wear on the left, because I hike on the left side of the trail and then I can hear what is going on on the right. There are bone conducting headphones that I have been wanting to get but I haven’t yet (I think they are called tracks?) I will link to them in the show notes because they have been highly recommended to me by a lot of friends and trail runners. So they don’t go in your ears like ear buds, they kind of sit on your head and conduct the sound through your skull (I think it is through your jaw bone?). Anyway, it is bone conducting headphones. So if you want to listen to music but also have your ears free to hear outdoors surround sound that can be a good option as well, I prefer just to use the one ear bud and that works. But be aware of your surroundings, so don’t listen to music in both ears.

Use common sense, and common sense, it is not something that you are born with, it is something that you get as a result of experience. So if you are inexperienced in the outdoors you might not have that much common sense, because you don’t know what might go wrong, which is part of the reason why I am doing this podcast. But listen to your gut, if someone approaches you and that person feels wrong, trust your gut. Above all don’t admit that you are alone, be really vague about who you are with and what your plans are and obviously don’t tell them where you are camping, don’t tell them what your destination is and don’t be over polite. I think women really have it engrained in us to be polite, we have to be nice girls and we have to be just be polite all the time and there are situations where you obviously don’t want to instigate the person if it is a person with bad intentions, but just know that you don’t have to be polite. You can be cool and distance and make it clear that you want to walk on your own, and that you want to be on your own, or that you are meeting up with someone such as a partner, just up ahead and you let them get ahead of you for a while because they wanted to push themselves or whatever. Don’t talk too much and try to get the person away from you as soon as possible.

Now again, you are probably going to be more in danger, passing through towns or near towns than you will in the deep woods. I recently read, and I am going to link to this in the show notes, a story that this woman posted on Reddit, in the ultra light community. And something happened to her on the trails, thankfully it wasn’t anything too serious but it was something that knocked her confidence. And she was starting to question, she said, ‘I questioned my place in the world as a female solo hiker: am I an idiot for not listening to people’s warning about going off and doing this on my own or am I okay; should I still go outdoors alone?’. It really, really, shook her confidence and it was really beautiful how people popped up in the comments and supported her and said, ‘by all means keep doing this, just here is what you can do next time’.

So I think it is worth, if you have fears about being a woman hiking alone, I think it is worth reading this blog post and seeing what you might have done differently. Because I can totally understand how she made the decisions that led to where she ended up, and I can also see what I wish I would have done if I had been in her place. I can see all the different points where they were like so many little different decisions that ended up to this situation and so many different places where she could have done something differently, but yet I also understand why she did what she did.

So this was in Wales, which also freaked me out because it is fairly close to home (I always like to picture these scary things happening across the water somewhere in some other country), but she was hiking in Wales, passed this town and sat on a bench to have a snack and this man and some woman, who was supposedly his sister, sat down next to her. He started chatting with her, she joined in the conversation and didn’t get any bad vibes from him, but also as he was with this woman he didn’t really bring up any red flags, they left, she left, and starts hiking.

So she is hiking, hiking, hiking, by herself and all of a sudden the guy appears by her side, sweating, out of breath and she was really shocked that she didn’t see him earlier or notice him earlier, or hear him coming up earlier. And he starts talking to her and he starts following her and he is talking, talking, talking and kind of being annoying and trying to impress her and he clearly wasn’t a hiker, he clearly was just following her and she was starting to get red flags all over the place. She kept saying to him, ‘maybe you should turn back, it is really hot, you don’t have any water with you’, and she actually said that her partner was expecting her. And this guy still didn’t leave her alone, he ended up following her for about three miles and until she got to this point where there were some cottages and a farm on the trail (sorry two miles he followed her, which is quite a bit).

And she kept on hiking speedily and he was still catching up with her but clearly not in shape, so she gets to these cottages and she stops and she insisted that he has got to go back and she is thinking, ‘okay there aren’t any cars outside of these cottages, but I want to knock on the door because this guy won’t back down’, and then he tries to hug her and then kiss her on the mouth. And so she gets away from him and tells him ‘no’, pushes him back, he gets offended and then she starts going to the cottages to hopefully knock on the door and see if someone is there. Something clicked for him and he realised that she was getting help and he walked away.

So thankfully it was a very unpleasant situation and didn’t go as far as it could have but it was enough to shake her confidence. So read that, I will link to it in the show notes, and think about all the different things you could have done differently. I get really paranoid sometimes and I don’t want to talk to anyone when I am out. If someone had tried to talk to me on the bench, I would have gotten up earlier and just said ‘got to get on my way’, and I would like to think that if someone followed me on the trail or showed up out of nowhere, I would make it really clear that I wanted to walk alone, or needed to catch up with someone, I don’t know, I would like to think so. But as she said, being in the UK, she can’t carry pepper spray, she can’t carry a knife with a locked blade, so she didn’t have any weapons.

She didn’t want to offend him too much because she didn’t want him to get violent. That was one thing that a lot of people said in the comments, ‘you need to be careful about when and how you really push someone away, because when you are around people you can be more forceful about it because you have got other people there in the area, but when you are in the middle of nowhere you perhaps want to be a bit more diplomatic about how you get away from this person’. But again, as I said, don’t feel the need to be polite, you can be distant and serious and not overly friendly and get away as fast as you can. Again this is not something that has ever happened to me but it has happened to other people.

I don’t want to say it is worth reading stories like this because then you will learn, but I think reading other people’s stories can help you realise, ‘What would I do in this situation?’, ‘What would I like to do in this situation?’, ‘What do I really think I would do in this situation, would I be the nice girl, would I be super polite, would I just keep having a conversation and then let this guy hug me and try to kiss me?’, maybe read that story and see what you think and see how you would respond differently, but obviously don’t start getting paranoid about it because this kind of thing doesn’t happen very often.

And think about what would give you the confidence. I have also taken, I took years ago, a woman’s self defence class, years and years ago, I did a model mugging class which is something that still exists. I was just talking about this with a friend last year, an excellent, excellent course and unfortunately in Europe they only do them in Germany, but they have them all throughout the States. Model Mugging is great, it is a hands on self defence course where you are striking your opponent at full force. Obviously the guy is dressed up in a big suit full of protection but it is not light contact, it is full contact.

Also martial arts, I really feel a lot more confident, now that I have been doing kick boxing for the last five years, classes are mixed, that’s something that is really important for me, obviously I know that I am a small woman, if a really large man wants to fight me I don’t know what the situation is going to be like, but I know that in a class situation I am comfortable getting on the mat with a guy and sparring with a guy and that has given me a lot more confidence in the real world. Probably the person that, if you were to get attacked, probably the person would not be skilled in martial arts, they would just be a random person looking to I don’t know attack women.

But again, this is something more that is going to exist in our fears rather than something that is going to happen in real life. However, I think it is important to learn self defence and I think it is important to boost our confidence in whatever way we need. Having said that no one is going to hike into the middle of a forest to attack a woman, any story I have ever heard have been stories where a woman has been followed after going through a town.

So again, if you are walking a long distance trail or something where you are going to be passing through towns, that is the time when you want to check your back or be aware when you are going off into the woods. But again, human predators are the least of your worries, you need to be paying attention to the other stuff that is your real risk in the outdoors. So remember: four-legged animals; dehydration; heat and cold injuries; navigation; getting lost; injury; sun; all that stuff, that’s the stuff that you need to be paying attention to and if you have fears about two-legged predators, do what you need to do to have the skills to make you feel more confident.

So hope you found this interesting and useful. Please drop me a line and let me know how you feel about going alone in the outdoors, what are your fears? What are some of the things that might keep you from going out alone? I know there are countries where you have got lots of scary, wild, animals so you can’t go too deep into the woods. I am very grateful that I don’t live in one of those countries, but what can you do to make yourself feel safer, can you carry bear spray? Can you learn about how to stay safe in the outdoors with these animals? My husband and I have been watching a lot of trail running videos and we always make jokes now when we are out running together, because people in North America will make noises when they are really in the back woods and they will go, ‘hello bear’, and they just yell out to make human sounds every once in a while in case there is a bear around.

And now when Agustin and I will be out running we will go, ‘hello bear!’, even though there are no bears here. So learn what you need to do to be safe with the animals and the situations and the conditions in your area. That is the best thing I can say, but please, let me know what your fears are and what you might be able to do to get some confidence so you can go outdoors alone. And again, it is not safe to go outdoors alone in all parts of the world, I am aware that some places really, really, are dangerous so apply common sense.

So again, hope you found this interesting and useful, please drop me a line and let me know what you thought about this week’s episode, you can email me at: [email protected] or find me online and get in touch there.

I am going to work on the show notes now, I have got tons of courses and stuff to link to for you to check out, stuff that you can learn so that you can feel safer outdoors. And remember to visit HollyWorton.com/393 for the show notes on this episode. Thank you.