All Guides
Practical guides, honest gear advice, and everything you need to hike with confidence.
Summer hiking sounds simple — it’s warm, you pack less, you don’t need to worry about wet weather layers. Then you do your first hot-weather hike in a cotton t-shirt and discover that sweat-soaked cotton sticks to your skin, takes forever to dry, and makes a three-hour trail feel twice as miserable as it needs […]
My first real hike nearly broke me. Not because the trail was particularly hard — it was a 7km loop with gentle hills, rated Easy on AllTrails, chosen specifically because I thought it would be manageable. I was wrong. I stopped four times in the first kilometre. My legs were burning by the second. I […]
Most beginner women buy their first pair of hiking boots, put them on, and head straight to the trail. I know because I did exactly this. I bought my first proper hiking boots on a Thursday, wore them for the first time on a Sunday for a 12km hike, and spent the following week with […]
There’s a question most women think about and almost no hiking guide bothers to answer properly: what do you actually do about your period on a hike? The short answer is yes, you can absolutely hike on your period — and most of the time it’s no big deal with a bit of preparation. The […]
My first hiking leggings were a pair of yoga leggings I already owned. They worked fine on my first few easy trails — comfortable, stretchy, nothing to complain about. Then I did a 12km hike with 400m of elevation in them on a warm day and discovered exactly what yoga leggings can’t do: they held […]
Everyone who hikes regularly started exactly where you are — standing at the beginning, not sure what they need, whether they’re fit enough, or how to find a trail that won’t destroy them. The difference between people who try hiking once and hate it and people who fall completely in love with it is almost […]
The fear of getting lost is one of the most common reasons beginner women hesitate to hike alone — or hike at all. I know because I felt it on my first solo hike, a supposedly straightforward loop trail that split in three directions at one junction with no signage. I stood there for five […]
I used to think hiking in the rain sounded miserable — and then I did it wrong twice and decided it actually was. The first time, I wore a cotton hoodie under a cheap supermarket rain mac and was soaked through to my skin within forty minutes. The second time I overcorrected: I wore so […]
I used to think any waterproof jacket would do for hiking. I owned a £30 supermarket rain mac that worked fine in the car park and completely failed me on a three-hour ridge walk in a Scottish drizzle — wet through in 90 minutes, freezing, and still three miles from the car. The problem wasn’t […]
Summer hiking is some of the best hiking there is — early morning light, wildflowers, dry trails, long days. It’s also the time of year when beginner women make the most avoidable mistakes, usually because nobody told them how different hot weather hiking actually is from hiking in mild conditions. This guide covers what to […]
I made most of these mistakes myself. A few of them I learned from watching other beginners on trail. All of them are completely avoidable once you know what to look for. The thing about beginner hiking mistakes is that they’re never dramatic. Nobody trips off a cliff on their first hike. What happens instead […]
Most hiking guides tell you to eat complex carbohydrates and lean protein. That’s true but not particularly useful if you’re standing in your kitchen at 7am trying to figure out what to have before a trail that starts at 8. This guide is the practical version — specific foods, real timing, and honest answers to […]
