Finding Heroes of My Own in Three Unsung Women of America’s Great Outdoors

If someone asked you to name the world’s most common plotline you’d probably come up with something like this: a hero heeds a call to adventure, maybe to slay a dragon or protect their homeland, then they cross a threshold into the unknown, where they face tests, conquer a big challenge, and come home with a lesson or a prize. They’ve grown and learned and made things better. They get the girl; they save the castle. They are often a guy.

It’s the hero’s journey, a familiar arc, easy to transpose on different circumstances. Basically universal, right?

Writer Joseph Campbell, who studied mythology and philosophy, named the hero’s journey in his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He said it was widespread and showed up in every culture.

In the 1980s, Maureen Murdock, a Jungian psychotherapist who was a student of Campbell’s, came up with an alternative plotline, which she called the heroine’s journey. She found that in her therapy work, the hero’s journey arc didn’t encompass everything that her patients, particularly women, were going through. It didn’t answer questions about the roots of their struggles, or what happened after they climbed the mountain and still didn’t feel fulfilled. Or found another, different mountain in front of them.

The last step is acknowledging that there’s never really any dragon, even or any moment when the journey ends. Instead, it keeps going.

Like the hero’s journey, the arc of the heroine’s journey comes in stages. The heroine starts by rejecting feminine values because she hasn’t seen a way to be fulfilled as a woman. Success looks like those masculine ideals, like big adventures or running companies, so she chases those. Then, like on the hero’s journey, she faces tests and trials; she finds success and slays dragons. But that’s where the arcs start to diverge.

Murdock says that at that point, on the outside, the journey might look good, but on the inside, as the heroine, you feel hollow, and not true to yourself. You start to get the feeling that your life isn’t quite right. You’ve achieved and achieved and you still seem unsatisfied. She calls that a sense of spiritual aridity. You feel oppressed, but you can’t find anyone oppressing you besides yourself. You might fall into crisis, even though you’ve achieved what the world said you should.

From there, the heroine has to recalibrate and align the ideals she was chasing with the things that feel true to themselves. Murdock calls this “healing the wounded masculine.” I see it as trying to square the pressure of achievement with what feels core, which can be difficult regardless of gender.

The last step is acknowledging that there’s never really any dragon, even or any moment when the journey ends. Instead, it keeps going.

Murdock found that this conceit resonated with many of her patients. But when she brought it to Campbell in the early 80s, his response was, “Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological tradition, the woman is there. All she has to do is to realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.”

Was I allowed to consider them heroes if they never quite got the prize? Or if they acted poorly along the way?

Which is exactly the kind of thing that happens on the heroine’s journey. You’re dismissed or pushed aside. You face dead ends and distrust and people telling you your voice doesn’t matter, even when you’re pretty sure you’re right.

I found the heroine’s journey when I was researching my book Fierce Country about three women who fundamentally changed American recreation and conservation, but who never got recognition. I’d worked in the outdoor world they’d shaped since I was a teenager, moving from the New England mountains to the rivers of the Southwest seeking sensation and the desire to be outside, but after more than two decades I realized I’d never had role models, or paths to follow along the way, in part because I’d been chasing that hero’s idea of bootstrapping my way through adventures on my wits and strength. I hadn’t let myself look at other kinds of stories. And when I finally realized what I’d missed, I wanted to fill in the gaps.

I became obsessed with the idea of heroes: whose stories got elevated, why I’d never had any of my own. And I kept getting tangled up in the knot Murdock outlined: I’d only heard hero stories that fit Campbell’s mold. But my own dragons had never been straightforward and easy to vanquish. Many of them had been inside my head.

So I went searching for heroes who seemed more relevant to me, ones that had been left out of the canon of stories that get told and retold.

I found the stories of three women who impressed me: Georgie White, the only woman to guide the Grand Canyon for decades, who changed how we get outside and fought against dams; mountain guide Anne LaBastille, who did groundbreaking climate science from her off-the-grid cabin in the Adirondacks; pioneering backcountry skier Dolores LaChapelle, who was also an environmental philosopher who shaped the radical environmental movement of the 1970s.  They were all forging what I consider ideal lives outside, tied to the landscape they loved, fighting to protect it. But they seemed tricky, too. Was I allowed to consider them heroes if they never quite got the prize? Or if they acted poorly along the way?

I realized I was stuck in Murdock’s second stage, trying to fit myself into masculine ideas, frustrated when it didn’t feel right for me, or the women I was looking at, because I was still hemmed in by expectations that the arc of achievement would be clear.

The women I was looking at were groundbreaking and adventurous and committed to ideals that I think are crucial, but they were also mean and judgmental and prone to bending the truth. They didn’t get traditional happily-ever-afters and their quests, like Anne’s push to curb carbon pollution or Georgie’s desire to protect the landscape she loved, are still, frustratingly, ongoing. They didn’t get easy resolution, they had to keep pushing against misogyny, dismissiveness and more, but I think that makes their stories more interesting and more real.

One friend described the heroine’s journey as if the hero’s journey went to therapy, reflective and aware of context. I think that might be true, but it’s also as if the hero kept living past a single quest. Those women are heroes because they didn’t just fight a battle then come home to glory. They kept fighting even when the rewards were hard to grasp, even when their narratives weren’t tidy.

I think we default to well-known stories and familiar plot beats because it’s reassuring to feel like good will win over evil, that we’ll have a happy ending. But that’s not the way life works. And it’s misleading and kind of boring to think it might, in storytelling and otherwise. I don’t want to keep cramming stories into the constraints of the hero’s journey. I want to let them be messy and complex and ongoing.

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Fierce Country by Heather Hansman is available from Hanover Square Press.