Edinburgh Napier University

  This paper presents an autoethnographic narrative about the social constructedness of ‘nature’ (e.g. Macfarlane, 2003) and the mobilities systems (Urry, 2007) that undergird a binary: bodies that are conventionally read as legitimately ‘outdoorsy’ versus those that are not. These framing ideas allow for stories of walking, camping, bothying, and campervanning as a fat, middle-aged woman going alone —an ‘unlikely hiker’ (Stanley, 2020)— in the Scottish Highlands. And this, in turn, contextualises a provocation on the ‘auto’ in autoethnography and its imbrication in wider assemblages (Gale & Wyatt, 2013).

The land, in Scotland, is storied and deeply contested, and ‘Munro-bagging’ (i.e. climbing and counting off Scottish peaks above a certain, arbitrary, historically salient height) is a marked, positioned activity. Thus, even as I go ‘alone’, I am necessarily part of something bigger. This includes the human-made (the historical; the social; the people you meet out there) and the non-human (such as Scotland’s sheepwrecked ecosystem and its dewilded, denuded ‘nature’). ‘My’ actions in ‘nature’ are therefore deeply connected to place/making, walking-knowing (Springgay & Truman, 2018), and the cultural specificity of going outdoors at all (e.g. Witte, 2021). Further, even as I am located in Scotland, the fact of hiking (as opposed to ‘hillwalking’) necessarily draws on US-centric imaginaries of place.

I ask, then: why hike? Why go camping? Why ‘complete’ a given trail? As these questions, too, are necessarily part of outdoor assemblages, I consider (masculine-coded?) ideas of purity, pilgrimage, and purpose, read through a gendered lens. In search of resistance to the conquering logic of conquest, I turn to my readings of women’s trail memoirs (e.g. Pharr Davis, 2010; Reed, 2021; Shepherd, 2014; Strayed, 2012) in search of my own why.