On the roads of mountaineering, ski touring and sport climbing we meet far too rarely women and girls who practise these disciplines with passion. More often, instead, we meet some willing member of the fair sex who takes on long hiking routes.
Quite a few times I have found myself going out with a large number of male companions. I get contacted via the internet, via Facebook or directly at the mountain clubs I usually go to. We make arrangements and the party is formed. We set off and we learn to know each other... we learn to know our companions' limits, their tolerance of fatigue, their appetite for risk, their capacity to withstand hard work.
But why is it rarer to meet women?
Clearly there is a cultural problem. A prejudice of men towards women. There is also a problem in relations between men and women, which makes it seem harder to build a friendship based on sharing a common passion for the mountains. There is always the unspoken suspicion of attraction between the sexes.
But that's not all, the creeping cultural prejudice is even more deeply rooted. There is the mistaken belief that “women” have much less physical endurance than men.
True, men have a muscle mass suited to power efforts, but it is not true that endurance is an exclusively male prerogative. Far from it!
What I find exciting, every time I go hiking with female travelling companions, is the completely different way of living the experience. The mountains help with this, in sharing “ways” and “thinking”. You could say that a hike brings people much closer than a candlelit dinner.
The mountains are a catalyst for great friendships between men; the question is, why not between men and women?
One great friendship I remember is the one between Kurt Diemberger and Julie Tullis, which began as a professional relationship and was then strengthened by deep mutual esteem. Another friendship that comes to mind, as you can read in the pages of his books, is the one between Erri De Luca and Nives Meroi.
We would like to see more and more women in the mountains and fewer and fewer in shopping centres. We would like to see more and more women in hiking boots and fewer women in stiletto heels.
We would like to talk and share more and more often the pleasure of a good healthy day in the mountains with female hiking companions.
It is up to us men to debunk the myth that the mountains are just “men's stuff”, but it is also up to women to think that the mountains are accessible to them too.
We want more women in the mountains.