Trailed Quotes

“Continued scholarly research reveals just how many women, queer or nonbinary individuals, and people of color perceive very real barriers to their participation in wilderness activities. Recent survey participants list a variety of reasons for these barriers, including outdoor recreation’s continued emphasis on physical strength and technical expertise, sexist and exclusionary programming, and a fear for one’s personal safety while in the wilderness. A recent study of advertisements in outdoor magazines found that while women were present in 46 percent of ads, the majority of them appeared in passive roles, such as sitting around a fire with friends or holding outdoor gear rather than using it. Only the smallest percentage of these women were depicted alone and actively engaged in any kind of athletic pursuit while in the wilderness. Of all the women in the ads, a full 91 percent were white. No known trans or nonbinary models were used.”
― Kathryn Miles, Trailed: One Woman's Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders

“Unsolved No More: A Cold Case Detective’s Fight for Justice. “It is a horrible feeling. You feel lost, desolate,”
― Kathryn Miles, Trailed: One Woman's Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders

“Far too often, women are prey in our culture,” she told me. “And there are more guys than we’d like to admit who go out in the wilderness to hunt them.”
― Kathryn Miles, Trailed: One Woman's Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders

“1,257 violent crimes have been reported in federal wilderness areas, which include land maintained by the National Park Service [NPS], the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management.)”
― Kathryn Miles, Trailed: One Woman's Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders

“Karen Warren, Denise Mitten, Chiara D’Amore, and Erin Lotz, “The Gendered Hidden Curriculum of Adventure Education,” Journal of Experiential Education 42, no. 2 (June 2019):”
― Kathryn Miles, Trailed: One Woman's Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders

“Today, there is still a subset of white men who view the wilderness as exclusively their domain and actively employ misogynistic or racist techniques in a misguided attempt to maintain that.”
― Kathryn Miles, Trailed: One Woman's Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders

“It’s tempting to turn Clarke into a caricature or intellectual straw man: an easy grab in an attempt to show the ridiculous sexism inherent in Victorian ideology. Nevertheless, his theories became pervasive in American thought and defined expectations about access to wilderness for generations. Multiple outdoor organizations prohibited female membership, for example, including the influential hiking group the White Mountain Club. The club’s founder, John M. Gould, was a bank clerk and amateur Civil War historian. In his How to Camp Out, first published in 1877, Gould advised young men to view their expeditions as regimental exercises: hikes were best considered “marches”; male camping pals were instructed to form “companies” with clear duties and timetables. Most marches, he warned, would be too difficult for ladies, particularly if routes included loose rocks or tangles of low-growing trees. And because women ought not stray far from home, sites where they might camp must be chosen accordingly. Any overnight locations should be such that stoves could be delivered to make women more comfortable, along with discarded doors that women could stand upon while dressing. Sleeping outside was out of the question during any kind of precipitation; instead, schoolhouses or sawmills should be located as shelter.”
― Kathryn Miles, Trailed: One Woman's Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders

“In 1884, Edward H. Clarke, a physician and one of Pickering’s Harvard colleagues, published Sex and Education. In this book, Clarke maintained that both physical and educational exertion came with a heavy price for women, including, but not limited to, uterine disease, hysteria, chorea (an involuntary movement disorder), increased menstrual cramps and hemorrhaging, along with “a dropping out of maternal instincts, and an appearance of Amazonian coarseness and force.” For that reason alone, Clarke contended that women should be kept inside. His reasoning was twofold. First, from a physiological perspective, Clarke—whose medical specialty was in hearing disorders and the physiology of the ear—argued that women have wider pelvises, which when mounted with the weight of the body cause their thighs to splay out, making standing and walking more difficult (and thus more taxing) than it is for men. Second, he maintained that the development of a woman’s ovaries and uterus, particularly during her teens and twenties, was such an exhausting physical feat unto itself that the body could not tolerate any additional stress, particularly when it came to exercise and “outdoor pursuits.” As a result, Clarke advocated fewer physical and intellectual demands for women overall and total bed rest during the weeks of their periods. A failure to do so, he concluded, would undoubtedly cause a woman to lose “her feminine attractions, and probably also her chief feminine functions.”
― Kathryn Miles, Trailed: One Woman's Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders

“murder cases are more likely to be solved when the crime occurs in private residences or bars and stores rather than in open public areas. Those cases are also more likely to be closed if detectives arrive at the crime scene within a half hour of that crime being reported and if those investigators are followed by the prompt arrival of medical examiners and crime lab technicians.”
― Kathryn Miles, Trailed: One Woman's Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders

“section hiker—out for three days or a week or two. In the caste system of the trail, I was just one rung above the widely reviled day-trippers,”
― Kathryn Miles, Trailed: One Woman's Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders

“Women and girls being killed, women and girls going missing, it's a major problem we still aren't addressing. In our culture the lives of women and girls seem to be not worth so much, particularly to law enforcement.”
― Kathryn Miles, Trailed: One Woman's Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders