Most people don’t think of the outdoor experience as being geared toward one sex or the other, but Ruby McConnell has noticed a significant lack of outdoor guides and advice that are geared specifically toward women.
While it may be true that men and women share the same interests about nature and the wilderness, there are certainly differences when it comes to needs and considerations for such adventures. Little things like going to the bathroom and hygiene needs are vastly different between males and females, and if a girl has no one to show her the ropes when she starts spending time in the outdoors, the experience can be embarrassing and awkward.
That’s exactly what McConnell intends to help women avoid with the production of her book Girl Gone Wild: A Guide to Being a Woman Outside. The book shares her personal experiences in the outdoors from going camping as a kid to backpacking the Grand Canyon as a geology graduate student, from which she offers advice, tricks, and tips that she learned along the way for other women who love the outdoors.
Inside Girl Gone Wild, you’ll find field-tested camping recipes, first aid tips, and information on self-defense, menstruation, and even sex out in the wild, topics that have never really been addressed in any kind of outdoor guide. Readers will also have access to an entire chapter on reading maps and navigation, information that is valuable for any woman to have in the wilderness, and the guide will be filled with beautiful images taken by McConnell of remote places in nature.
In order to get a copy of Girl Gone Wild, McConnell has created a Kickstarter campaign that will see the guide’s production through to completion. Check out this video featuring Ruby McConnell talking about her journey with this project and a bit of what you can expect from the first comprehensive outdoor guide for women by a woman who has a lot of knowledge to share.
Image via Girl Gone Wild
