The Girls’ Trip Just Got Wilder: Women Are Swapping Friendship Apps for Adventure Holidays

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.

Increasingly, I find that some of the women I most want to travel with are women I met while traveling. There is an unusual shorthand to friendships forged outdoors: when you’ve already seen someone exhausted after hours in the saddle, laughed together over the indignities of life without a proper bathroom, or sat talking beside a fire long after dark, the usual polite stages of getting to know somebody seem to fall away. Adventure has a habit of turning strangers into friends with startling speed.

And more women seem willing to go looking for it alone. Across every adventure company I spoke to, the majority of women were arriving solo—often overwhelmingly so. For a generation raised on the idea that solo travel is an act of independence, its next iteration may be slightly paradoxical: going away alone in order not to be alone.

At Gutsy Girls, a women-owned and women-only adventure company offering everything from wild swimming and hiking to dog-sledding and cross-country skiing, founder Natalie Bannister says around 85% of guests book alone. The company now runs close to 200 departures a year, nearly double the number it did three years ago. “The proportion booking solo hasn’t really changed; it’s always been high,” she says. “What’s changed is how many women are doing it.”

The motivation isn’t necessarily a lack of existing friends. Sometimes, it is simply an unwillingness to wait for everybody else’s lives to line up. “The common misconception is that they’re all single,” Natalie says. “Plenty are, but a lot have simply chosen to holiday independently.” Friends have babies, partners, limited vacation days, different budgets, or no desire whatsoever to strap on snowshoes in the high Arctic. Booking alone means not having to compromise on the thing you really want to do.

Erika Drolet, co-founder of women’s adventure company Salty Souls, sees the same thing: around eight in 10 women who attend her surf-focused retreats arrive solo. “Sometimes, it’s simply that the women around them are at completely different stages of life,” she observes. “And sometimes, their friends simply don’t share the same appetite for adventure.” There is, she adds, something liberating about doing something entirely for yourself “without having to wait for someone else’s availability, interests or circumstances to align.”

If finding friends in adulthood can feel increasingly difficult, perhaps these trips also offer something everyday life doesn’t: time. Not the squeezed-in drink after work or dinner booked six weeks in advance, but days of sustained, largely uninterrupted proximity. Natalie calculates that a seven-day trip gives a group roughly 100 waking hours together. “If you met a new friend for dinner once a month at home, it would take you two or three years to clock that up,” she says.

It isn’t only the quantity of those hours, but what happens during them. You are learning, getting things wrong and seeing one another without much of the scaffolding of normal life. “You watch someone push herself, and you’re inspired by her,” says Natalie. “You see qualities you’d never see sitting in a café getting to know someone.” Falling over on skis, getting rained on for days while camping, navigating a difficult trail together: “The strongest bonds come out of the hardest bits.”

The friendships that result aren’t necessarily vacation-only affairs. Of Gutsy Girls customers who book a second trip, one in five does so with somebody she met on a previous departure. Increasingly, groups are also requesting private reunion trips.

The stories behind those numbers are even more persuasive. In 2019, Georgina and eight other women met as strangers on a Gutsy Girls trip to walk 110 kilometers through Sweden into the Arctic Circle. Seven years later, their original WhatsApp group is still going strong. They have supported one another through the pandemic, two babies and three marriages; traveled together to Denmark; hiked in the Lake District and Peak District; and are planning another Fjällräven trek in Germany. There is more than a 20-year age gap between the oldest and youngest. “This group has been a lifeline to us over the years,” Georgina says.

Another traveler, Lauren, met Alice while snowshoeing in Finland in 2025. They have since traveled together again in the Pyrenees and are planning hikes in Georgia and along Scotland’s West Highland Way. She calls Alice her “holiday friend”: somebody she may not speak to for months, but with whom another adventure is always on the horizon. What struck her was how quickly the usual adult social script disappeared. “As two single girls in our thirties, no one spoke about partners, kids, and all the stuff people tend to ask at our ages,” she says. Instead, they bonded over snacks and jokes in subzero temperatures. “The usual markers get left at the airport,” as Natalie puts it.

Perhaps that feels particularly potent now. Our friendships have never had more technological assistance: group chats preserve relationships across continents; apps promise to match us with prospective friends; social media gives us perpetual access to the lives of people we haven’t physically seen in years. Artificial intelligence is beginning to mediate more of our daily interactions still. Yet proximity remains stubbornly valuable. In a 2025 Pew Research Center study, only 29% of Americans with close friends said they saw one in person at least a few times a week, compared with 61% who texted them that often. Sadly, some 18% of American adults said they had no close friends at all.

An adventure trip reverses that ratio for a week. Phones lose signal or stay buried in backpacks; conversation has room to meander. There is the enforced intimacy of a long hike, but also the bonding between conversations. “That comfortable silence you normally only get with people you’ve known for years turns up within days,” Natalie says.

There may be something about challenge, too. Research has long linked self-disclosure with the development of friendship, with experimental studies finding that more intimate disclosure can produce greater increases in feelings of friendship. Adventure creates vulnerability without necessarily requiring anybody to announce it: fear is fairly difficult to disguise when you're halfway up a mountain or trying to stand on a surfboard for the first time.

Erika has watched this play out for more than a decade at Salty Souls, which she co-founded with fellow ‘waterwoman’ Marie-Christine Amyot in 2015. Its women-only trips center surfing but can also include yoga, surf-skating, breathwork and fitness, in destinations from El Salvador and the Philippines to Portugal and Japan. “Something about being in nature, moving our bodies, trying new things and stepping outside our comfort zones makes us let our guard down,” Erika reflects. “The masks fall away rather quickly. Women become more playful, more vulnerable and more themselves.” Women may arrive for the waves, she says, but often tell her afterward that the people were the highlight. Some return for two, three or four retreats; others organize surf and skate meet-ups at home or plan independent trips with women they first encountered at Salty Souls.

Sometimes, the friendship precedes the company altogether. Tori Retreats exists because founders Hildur Karlsson and Agnes Moltesdotter were once strangers themselves. In 2021, Agnes sent Hildur an Instagram message asking whether she would come to Riksgränsen, in Sweden’s far north, to shoot a campaign with her. Three weeks later, Hildur boarded a train north, nervous about spending a week skiing and working with somebody she had never met. She came home with a best friend.

They created Tori to give other women the chance to experience something similar, bringing small groups together around movement, food, creativity, and the outdoors. Around 18 out of every 20 guests currently arrive solo. On its Arctic Summer retreat, women hike through the mountains and swim beneath the midnight sun before returning for sauna sessions and dinners around a long communal table. The founders describe days in which women laugh, cry, get scared, and push themselves together: an accelerated cycle of emotions that leaves little room for small talk. Some of the women who meet there now travel the world together.

The formula doesn’t always require an adrenaline rush. On the remote Shetland Islands, Misa Hay of Shetland Wool Adventures has spent years bringing groups of just six together around two pursuits that turn out to be unusually compatible: hiking and knitting (aka ‘adventure knitting’). Days might involve walking the sea cliffs of Eshaness or exploring Unst and St Ninian’s Isle, then learning Fair Isle techniques, natural dyeing or lace knitting, meeting crofters and wool producers and spending evenings around a table with needles in hand.

Around 70% of Misa’s guests have traveled solo since she began running tours in 2017. The craft itself, she thinks, makes taking the leap easier: everyone knows before arriving that there will be something around which to connect. “There’s something about stripping away the usual social context—job titles, home life, the roles we play for everyone else—that lets women meet each other as they are,” she says. “On a walk or around a table, focusing on a knitting project, you’re not performing.”

WhatsApp groups created for the tours frequently remain active long afterward, filled with knitting projects, recipes, travel photographs and ordinary life updates. Strangers return as friends, sometimes bringing their wider knitting circles with them. Misa describes the alchemy more simply: “Hands busy with needles while conversations drift and deepen. Strangers who arrived on a Tuesday becoming friends by the following Wednesday.”

And sometimes, meeting the right person, or people, changes not only who you travel with, but where you go next. Lauren, the very same wrangler I met in Wyoming and will ride with again in Patagonia, is one half of Between the Ears Expeditions, which she founded with her friend Amelia Greenberg. The pair met while working as wranglers at a guest ranch in Colorado, brought together by backgrounds spanning conservation, environmental education, horses and guiding. In early 2023, they set off with three horses on an eight-week ride through northern Patagonia—a long-held dream that, rather than satisfying their appetite for expedition riding, gave them the idea for a business built around it.

Between the Ears now leads horse expeditions through Argentina, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Morocco, and Türkiye, working with local partners to immerse riders in places where horses remain entwined with everyday life. Around 92 to 95% of its bookings are women, and roughly 80% of riders travel solo. Two women who met on one of the company’s Patagonia expeditions last year are already planning to ride Mongolia together next year.

Lauren describes the bond that develops when you meet someone who is excited by the same slightly unreasonable things you are. “Not everyone wants to cowboy camp in the dust under the stars in Patagonia or spend six days moving sheep through the mountains of Kyrgyzstan without a shower,” she says. But when you find somebody who does, “there’s an instant bond that is created that is hard to find elsewhere.” I understand exactly what she means. In a few months, I’ll fly to Argentina to meet Lauren, Kira and Olivia again. This time, we’ll ride through secluded Patagonian valleys, following gauchos between family homes, eating asado around the fire and camping beside rivers with the horses grazing nearby.

At a time when finding, cultivating, and maintaining friendships can mean yet more screen time—swiping on friendship apps, trading voice notes, keeping group chats alive across time zones—there is something wonderfully analogue about meeting this way. Perhaps that is what feels so powerful about women finding one another in the wilderness. Women have always been explorers, of course, even if the history of adventure has more often celebrated the men who ventured into the unknown: the lone mountaineer, polar explorer, cowboy. These trips offer a different version of that story.

We may come to prove to ourselves that we can climb the mountain, ride the horse, or navigate the trail without waiting for somebody else to come with us. But independence needn’t mean isolation. There can be just as much courage—and considerably more joy—in going together. We may set out alone, only to leave having discovered the women we want beside us when we do it again, somewhere possibly even more far-flung.