One morning in February, just as dawn broke, Janet Ridgway found herself gazing over the African continent from the top of Mount Kilimanjaro.
It was hard to believe: The 65-year-old former kindergarten teacher with the "short" legs, bundled in a parka, breath streaming out in the thin, frosty air, was standing on the roof of Africa. Awed and humbled, she thought about her late husband, and about the mother who had raised her long ago in a very small, very flat town in Kansas.
Then she posed for photos with her companions, five other women who came together to climb the 19,340-foot peak, and in so doing symbolically joined the growing ranks of women pursuing travel without the company of men.
Not only are more women signing up for active vacations with women-only operators like Adventures in Good Company, the Baltimore-based company that mounted the African journey, they are also taking all-female trips to spas and vineyards, filling up theater and shopping tours, and making pilgrimages to sacred sites.
"Women are one of the most important segments of the adventure travel industry," says Chris Doyle, director of the Seattle-based Adventure Travel Trade Association. "Women make the vast majority of travel decisions in families -- not only the destinations, but the activities. They are the predominant adventure travel planners."
Research by the association also suggests that more women than men are craving adventure travel -- a far cry from the late 1960s when the industry began offering its first whitewater rafting vacations and trekking tours in such places as Kenya and Nepal.
"As we've seen the rise of cultural, environmental and educational tourism in adventure travel, we've also seen the rise of female participation," Doyle notes. "Part of that is due to changes in women's attitudes about their own abilities. As more women participate in such things as fly-fishing, whitewater kayaking and bicycling, we're also seeing concurrent growth in those areas in adventure travel."
As proof, he points to the proliferation of tour operators and companies catering specifically to active women during the past 10 years, at prices ranging from hundreds of dollars for a weekend rafting trip to thousands of dollars for a Kenya walking tour.
A growth industry
