Why These Retreats Are Gentle (And Why That Matters

I have never seen a gentle backpacking retreat.

Not in all my years of searching, scrolling, and wishing something like it existed. Every option I found was performance-forward — miles per day, elevation gain, technical difficulty ratings. Even the retreats marketed to women carried an undercurrent of proving. Of doing. Of push.

So I want to tell you why I made something different. Not just what these retreats are, but where they came from.

The Body That Would Not Slow Down

For most of my young adult life, I used my body as evidence. Evidence that I was strong. That I belonged. That I could do anything a man could do — and maybe more. I pushed hard, hiked too many miles, climbed more mountains than I can name, and learned to treat pain as noise to be filtered out rather than a message worth receiving.

I looked like someone who had it together. Fit, capable, always moving. What was harder to see was that the broken masculine was driving all of it. Worth through output. Proof through suffering. Rest as something you only got to do after you earned it.

My body was screaming slow down for years. I had learned not to hear it.

After the PCT

I completed the Pacific Crest Trail — all 2,652 miles of it. When I crossed the northern terminus at the Canadian border, I thought something would shift. Some internal accounting would close. Enough.

It did not feel like enough.

A few weeks after coming home, I moved a bed by myself. I woke up the next morning and could not get up. It turned out I had reinjured three places in my spine — injuries I had been living with and ignoring for so long that they had become invisible to me. The PCT had not broken me. Years of not listening had.

That was the moment everything stopped.

Two Years of Coming Back

I stopped all physical pushing. I began working with plant medicine. I started the slow, bewildering, necessary work of healing the parts of me I had been running from — the feminine, the softness, the capacity to receive rather than only produce.

It floored me. It took two years of returning, over and over, to begin to come back into balance. To learn what it felt like to have a relationship with my body that was not rooted in extraction. To understand that I could find my edges — and choose not to blow past them.

These retreats are born from all of that. Not as a brand. As a necessity.

Why Gentle

I built these retreats because I needed them. I wanted to carry my weight into the wilderness. I wanted to feel the work of the trail in my muscles and my lungs. And then I wanted to set it all down beside the water and rest.

Not push through. Not prove something. Rest.

Slow miles. Real stops. Ceremony and fire and water prayer. Women who are not competing with each other. A guide who has learned — the hard way — that your body is not your enemy.

These retreats are for women who are exhausted. Who are burned out in the bones. Who feel called to the wildness but are afraid they are not strong enough, experienced enough, capable enough to come.

You are enough. You have always been enough.

You do not need to have done this before. You do not need to prove anything on the trail. You just need to be willing to carry what you need, walk slowly, and set it all down beside the water when we arrive.

That is what I guide. That is what these retreats are.

I guide women to the waters. We carry what we need to our home, set it down, rest and heal by the waters.

2026 retreats are now open — June, July, August, and September in Oregon's Mt. Hood and Mt. Jefferson wilderness.