Women who shaped outdoor adventure: 13 pioneers

By GO! Editorial Team ·October 16, 2026

Every trail, wall and coastline has a “first” behind it, and many of those firsts belong to women who were told the outdoors was not for them. This page profiles 13 of them: climbers, a long-distance hiker, sea kayakers, sailors and polar travelers whose trips changed what people believed women could do outside.

Some of these names appeared on earlier versions of this domain. We have written every profile from scratch and checked each fact against the source linked under it: record bodies, official biographies, national institutions and major publications. Where two sources disagreed on a date or a distance, we left that detail out rather than guess. “First” claims are worded the way the source words them.

Mountaineering

Annie Smith Peck (1850–1935): scholar who climbed in pants

Peck was one of the first women in the United States to work as a college professor, teaching Latin, before she became known as a mountaineer and lecturer. She climbed the Matterhorn in 1895 and drew as much attention for wearing pants instead of a skirt as for the ascent itself. In 1908, at 58 and after five failed attempts, she reached the top of Huascarán in Peru; the mountain’s northern peak was later named Cumbre Aña Peck in her honor. A committed suffragist, she also planted a “Votes for Women” banner on the summit of Peru’s Coropuna.

Junko Tabei (1939–2016): first woman on Everest

Tabei, from Japan, reached the summit of Everest on May 16, 1975, as climbing leader of an all-female Japanese expedition. Guinness World Records lists her as the first woman to climb Everest and the first woman to climb the Seven Summits, which she completed on Puncak Jaya in 1992. She had founded the Ladies Climbing Club in 1969 so that women could organize their own overseas expeditions. Later she led the Himalayan Adventure Trust of Japan and completed a master’s degree at Kyushu University on the garbage problem on Everest.

Wanda Rutkiewicz (1943–1992): first woman on K2

Born in Plungė, Lithuania, and raised in Wrocław, Poland, Rutkiewicz trained as an electronics engineer and worked on computer memory before climbing took over her life. On October 16, 1978, she became the first person from Poland and the third woman to stand on top of Everest. On June 23, 1986, she became the first woman to climb K2, the world’s second-highest mountain. She disappeared in May 1992 on Kangchenjunga, which would have been her ninth 8,000-meter peak; the Polish parliament named 2022 the Year of Wanda Rutkiewicz.

Arlene Blum (born 1945): leader of the first American ascent of Annapurna

Blum is an American biophysical chemist and mountaineer. In 1978 she led the first American, and all-women’s, ascent of Annapurna I, and she co-led the first women’s team to climb Denali. She also completed the Great Himalayan Traverse across the mountain regions of Bhutan, Nepal and India. Away from the mountains, she founded and leads the Green Science Policy Institute, whose work has helped reduce the use of flame retardants, PFAS and other harmful chemicals in everyday products.

Read more: Arlene Blum’s official site

Brigitte Muir (born 1958): first Australian woman on Everest

Muir was born in Belgium and later became an Australian citizen. In 1997, on her fourth attempt, she became the first Australian woman to climb Everest. The same month she completed the Seven Summits, a project she had started in 1988. She was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in 2000 for her services to mountaineering and told her story in the autobiography The Wind in My Hair (1998).

Rock climbing

Lynn Hill (born 1961): first free ascent of the Nose

Hill was born in Detroit and grew up in Southern California, where she started climbing as a teenager. After years as one of the world’s top competition climbers, she set out to free-climb the Nose of El Capitan in Yosemite, using only hands and feet on the rock. In 1993, with Brooke Sandahl, she made the first free ascent of the route. A year later, with Steve Sutton as her partner, she climbed it free again in about 23 hours.

Long-distance hiking

Emma “Grandma” Gatewood (1887–1973): first woman to solo thru-hike the Appalachian Trail

Gatewood, an Ohio mother of 11, read about the Appalachian Trail in National Geographic. In 1955, at 67, she became the first woman to hike the whole trail alone in a single season, reaching Katahdin 146 days after leaving Georgia. Her kit was famously simple: Keds sneakers, an army blanket, a raincoat and a plastic shower curtain. She went on to become the first person to hike the trail three times, walked about 2,000 miles of the Oregon Trail in 1959, and helped build Ohio’s Buckeye Trail as a founding member of its association.

Sea kayaking

Freya Hoffmeister: circumnavigating continents by kayak

Hoffmeister is a German sea kayaker who built her reputation with circumnavigations of Iceland in 2007 and New Zealand’s South Island in 2008. In 2009 she paddled solo around Australia, only the second person to circle the continent by kayak, and finished faster than the previous record. She then set out from Buenos Aires in August 2011 and, in 2015, completed the first circumnavigation of South America by kayak.

Read more: National Geographic and ExpeditionKayak

Justine Curgenven: sea kayaker and adventure filmmaker

Curgenven combines long expeditions with filmmaking, and her “This is the Sea” series of sea kayaking films is a staple for paddlers. In 2009 she was part of the first all-female circumnavigation of Tasmania, and in 2011 she paddled about 1,000 miles around Isla Grande in Tierra del Fuego. In 2014 she and Sarah Outen spent 101 days paddling roughly 2,500 km (1,550 miles) along the Aleutian Islands. Her films have won awards at festivals including Banff and Kendal.

Sailing

Ellen MacArthur (born 1976): fastest solo circumnavigation by a woman

MacArthur grew up in Derbyshire, England, far from the sea. Sailing the trimaran B&Q, she went around the world solo and non-stop in 71 days, 14 hours, 18 minutes and 33 seconds, starting and finishing at Ushant, France, between November 28, 2004 and February 7, 2005. Guinness World Records lists it as the fastest solo circumnavigation by a woman.

Jessica Watson (born 1993): youngest solo, non-stop, unassisted circumnavigator

Watson, from Queensland’s Gold Coast, sailed the 34-foot yacht Ella’s Pink Lady into Sydney Harbour on May 15, 2010, after 210 days alone at sea. She was 16. The Australian Museum describes her as the youngest person to sail solo and unassisted around the world. Some critics argued her route did not go far enough into the Northern Hemisphere to count as a full circumnavigation, so it is not an official record. She was named Young Australian of the Year in 2011 and received the Medal of the Order of Australia in 2012.

Read more: Australian Museum and National Geographic

Polar travel

Ann Bancroft (born 1955): first woman to reach the North Pole

Bancroft, from Minnesota, was the only woman on the Steger International Polar Expedition, which reached the North Pole by dogsled on May 2, 1986, after 55 days on the ice. Guinness World Records lists her as the first woman to reach the North Pole. In 1993 she led a four-woman ski expedition to the South Pole, becoming the first known woman to cross the ice to both poles. In 2001 she and Norwegian polar explorer Liv Arnesen became the first known women to sail and ski across Antarctica’s landmass, a 94-day, 1,717-mile (2,747 km) journey.

Barbara Hillary (1931–2019): first Black woman at both poles

Hillary was a New York nurse who retired after a 55-year career and then learned that no African American woman had reached the North Pole. In 2007, at 75, she did it, and she later reached the South Pole too, becoming the first Black woman to stand at both. She died in 2019 at 88.

Books by and about them

If you want the long version of these stories, three books are a good start. We list them for further reading; we have not reviewed them in depth.

Climbing Free: My Life in the Vertical World by Lynn Hill with Greg Child (W. W. Norton, 2002). Hill’s own account, ending with her free ascent of the Nose.
Grandma Gatewood’s Walk by Ben Montgomery (Chicago Review Press, 2014). A journalist’s biography built on Gatewood’s diaries and trail journals.
The Wind in My Hair by Brigitte Muir (1998). Muir’s autobiography, covering her road to Everest and the Seven Summits.

What they have in common

Read the profiles side by side and a few patterns show up. Age was rarely the obstacle people assumed: Gatewood set out at 67 with sneakers and a shower curtain, Peck reached the top of Huascarán at 58, and Hillary went to the North Pole at 75. Several of them made their own teams instead of waiting for an invitation, from Tabei’s Ladies Climbing Club to Blum’s all-women Annapurna expedition and Bancroft’s four-woman ski trip to the South Pole. And many kept going after setbacks: Peck failed five times on Huascarán, Muir reached Everest on her fourth attempt, and Hill failed on the Nose before she freed it.

None of that means you need to sail around the world for your time outside to count. But the next time a trip feels too big, too late or not meant for you, these 13 stories are a good argument for trying anyway.