As a happily single, childless woman in my thirties, I’ve become accustomed to signing up solo for the kinds of trips that are harder to persuade someone else to join: remote expeditions, multi-day horse treks, safaris that require a little discomfort and a willingness to disappear off grid. I’ve kayaked around glaciers, followed polar bear tracks, and mushed a husky team in Svalbard with women I’d met hours earlier through Basecamp Explorer, removed spiders and snakes from new friends’ tents in the Botswana bush, and horse-packed through Kyrgyzstan in the depths of winter, sharing yurts and saunas with strangers in the snow. Technically, I went on all of those adventures alone.
Along the way, I have come to realize—and deeply appreciate—that solo adventure travel rarely means being alone. In fact, some of the women I feel most immediately at home with are the ones I’ve met furthest from it.
This summer, I spent a week living alongside a group I had never met before on a working cattle ranch in the Bighorn Mountains. At Paintrock Canyon Ranch in Wyoming, part of the family-run Ranchlands operation, women were everywhere in a world still popularly imagined in terms of cowboys: among them Grace Phillips, the youngest of founder Duke Phillips’ three daughters, who grew up on the family’s ranches and, after several years guiding and fly fishing in Alaska and Argentina, has returned to work in the business.
Our days at Paintrock revolved around horses: riding for hours through sagebrush and canyon country, untacking at the end of the day dusty and bathing our saddle-sore legs in the creek, then doing it all again the next morning. At night, we swapped stories around the fire and beneath skies startlingly bright with stars. By the end of the week, we had also swapped phone numbers.
One of those belonged to Lauren O’Toole, Ranchlands’ head of stay programs and our intrepid lead wrangler; the others were Kira and her daughter Olivia, who was working as a ranch apprentice for the summer. West Coast-based Kira and Olivia had journeyed over a thousand miles to ride here; I had crossed the Atlantic, but it turned out geography mattered surprisingly little when we had horses—and an appetite for adventure—in common. Having gained what felt like long-lost sisters, I stayed in touch with them after Wyoming, sending messages about riding and places we wanted to go next. By early 2027, the four of us plan to be together again, this time on horseback in Patagonia.
