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On the first day of a four-day solo hiking trip in Ontario’s Killarney Provincial Park four years ago, Erica Stern unexpectedly got her period. She had not packed her menstrual cup.
“I was pissed I was going to have to leave my hike!” she recalls. Stern had just tackled a very intense and rock-scrambly climb on the La Cloche Silhouette Trail. Turning back would have been a big deal.
The long-distance hiker bled through her meagre supply of paper towel before folding spare underwear into a pad. When that chafed too badly, Stern cut the tops off a pair of merino wool socks — without a knife.
“I used a sharp rock to slice the sock like a menstruating Bear Grylls,” she recalls.
She washed and dried the sock scraps in cycles and was able to finish her trip.
“The merino wool — you can rinse it out, it still absorbs, it’s soft,” she says. “It’s all the qualities you want in a pad: odour-absorbing and antimicrobial.”
Though Stern’s story may induce anxiety in outdoor novices, personal hygiene is simply another layer of logistics, alongside meal-planning, first aid or navigation. It’s just one that’s less talked about.
Statistics Canada reports that men and women get outside in nearly even numbers and that nearly eight in 10 Canadians report getting outside regularly. Visitors to national and provincial parks have ballooned since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But familiar gaps are present. Immigrants and minorities (the StatsCan term for people that aren’t Caucasian or Indigenous) are less likely to participate in outdoor recreation.
And the more resources, experience and skills required — like Stern’s 80-kilometre, multi-day adventure — the fewer women take part. Canada’s mountain guide industry is estimated to be just 15 to 20 per cent women or gender-diverse and 94 per cent white, according to a 2019 survey of more than 500 guides belonging to three avalanche, ski and guiding associations.
These spaces are full of gear, advice and expertise that treat cis men as the default — their bodies, their athletic performance, their needs.
As an outdoor adventurer, I’ve experienced this firsthand. During a hike on the Pacific Crest Trail in 2022, I got a hitch from a trail angel in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. In the backseat were some hiker amenities, including a box of tampons. A male hiker next to me scoffed, “Why are these here?” I grabbed one just in case.
“In our Western contemporary culture, we’re often taught [menstruation is] something that has to be completely discreet and hidden and a bad thing,” Christine Luckasavitch says. She has Madaoueskarini Algonquin and mixed settler heritage and owns Waaseyaa Consulting and Cultural Tours on Kakinogamak, also known as Galeairy Lake, in Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park.
“In Anishinaabek culture, that’s a time when women are at their most powerful at that point in their cycle. Our whole bodies have an ability to cleanse ourselves, to be able to do that from within,” she says. “Often even in ceremonies, women can’t participate in the same way because we hold such power at that time. It’s such a positive thing instead of being negative.”
Socks, bandanas, spare garments and travel towels can serve dual purposes, but forests also contain an abundance of absorbent foraged materials.
“Primarily, Indigenous women would gather moss. And moss would hold 300 times its weight in moisture. We’d wash and dry it on big rocks, use it for all kinds of things: bedding, pillows, ground mats, menstruation, diapers, because it had an antibacterial and antimicrobial climate,” Matricia Bauer says. Bauer hails from Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation and runs Warrior Women, a cultural tourism, education and training company in Jasper, Alta.
Bauer points out these qualities are also valued by birds, which line their nests with the material. “The refuse goes down between the sticks and into the moss. It provides food and moisture and the moss stays alive and creates a clean environment for the birds,” Bauer says. “It’s symbiotic, it’s a relationship. I’ve always said you can learn a lot by watching what other animals do.”
Plant medicine can offer backcountry relief for unpleasant symptoms, too. Nettle tea is anti-inflammatory; willow steeped into tea relieves pain; wild mint settles stomachs.
“Indigenous people lived for thousands of years in the backcountry and we didn’t have a pharmacy or grocery store. We had to use whatever was in our environment so we got to know the flora really well, for survival and for medicine,” Bauer says.
That includes when nature calls in other ways, too. While walking, Stern will gather fuzzy leaves from mullein or lamb’s ears as natural toilet paper. Cotton-like bear grass or large leaves will work in a pinch too, Bauer says, and cautions “lots of large leaves can also be a bit toxic and you can end up with a hella itchy ass!”
But back to bleeding. If you do carry tampons and pads, they’re conveniently multipurpose. As a backcountry canoe ranger in Algonquin Provincial Park, Luckasavitch kept menstrual pads and tampons in her kit for wound dressings and bloody noses. (Yarrow chewed up into a poultice can coagulate bleeding, too.)
Period underwear, menstrual cups and discs are zero-waste options, Tori Baird says. She runs Paddle Like a Girl, an organization that teaches women backcountry paddling skills in Magnetawan, Ont.
“[Absorbent underwear is] great for the backcountry because you can rinse them out in the water and hang them to dry,” Baird, who prefers Knix boxer shorts, says. “You can reuse them so you only need to bring a few pairs.”
Hygiene is as personal as choosing hiking shoes or a backpack — only you can figure out what works for you. Here are some pieces to consider
For digging a cathole. The ultralight and indestructible aluminum Deuce hand shovel comes in many fun colours.
If you’re tough enough for a pee cloth, it can be rinsed daily and hung from your pack for easy access.
Widely available and opaque to hide your used toilet paper and menstrual products.
Trail laundry should be rinsed using water only, downstream from where people gather water. Use biodegradable soap sparingly and dump the grey water in a cathole.
Brands such as OB have no applicator, which reduces space and garbage.
Empty into a cathole before disinfecting with alcohol wipes, filtered or boiling water. Don’t wash in waterways or clean with unfiltered water.
Don’t throw these in the cathole — pack them up and take them home to dispose of.
Spray down your undercarriage with CuloClean or Holey Hiker, caps that attach to a disposable water bottle — or make your own by punching a hole in a bottle cap. Designate a clean hand and dirty hand for this task, and use a dedicated “dirty” bottle.
Highly concentrated and biodegradable, Dr. Bronner’s requires only a drop or two for most cleanup jobs.
Also known as a WAG bag, this is often mandated in delicate desert, alpine or canyon environments, which lack the moisture, soil, bacteria and insects necessary to break down human waste.
Or you may choose to opt out entirely. Some hormonal intrauterine devices, or IUDs, cease periods altogether and other hormonal contraceptives can be used back-to-back without a placebo week to skip periods.
To cut down on toilet paper, a ghastly sight on the trail, try a pee cloth. A lightweight bandana will do, but the purpose-built Kula Cloth features a waterproof, colourful design outside, black absorbent inner layer and folds in half with a snap closure. Wash it with biodegradable soap, hang it to dry from your pack and use it all trip long.
Stern calls the cloth “a cool piece of gear” that allows serious hikers to identify each other in the backcountry, while helping to destigmatize zero-waste hygiene for those that squat to pee.
“It takes any sort of shame of bathroom stuff away because you literally have your pee cloth on the outside of your pack all the time and you don’t hide that.”
As greater numbers of outdoor users venture into the backcountry, the more crucial it is for each person to preserve the land. Nothing spoils a trip or the biome faster than a microplastic-filled used maxi pad in a firepit or soggy toilet paper and feces in the underbrush.
“That land, trees, plants, animals, they’re relatives. We need to treat them with respect in their home in the same way as when you’re visiting one of your human relatives,” Luckasavitch says. “That’s a much different way than understanding it as a resource for our exploitation … We’re there to be in relationship and reciprocity too. We’re not just there to take from the natural world, but what are you giving back?”
No matter the method, all waste should be stored in odour-proof containers, such as a bear hang, Ursack or canister at night, and packed out. Managing smelly items is not just environmentally responsible, it also prevents unwanted animal encounters.
Not that bears are attracted by menstruation, just to be clear.
“This myth is so prevalent,” Kim Titchener, who owns the training company Bear Safety & More in Canmore, Alta, says. “I’ve spoken with fish, wildlife and conservation authorities who literally said to me, ‘Yeah, you can’t go outdoors when you’re menstruating.’ It’s [how] they were trained when they went to school for wildlife management.”
The origins of the myth date back to 1967, when two women were killed on the same night in separate attacks by two different grizzlies in Montana’s Glacier National Park. One of the victims was menstruating at the time, leading authorities to warn women, including employees, to stay out of the backcountry while bleeding.
In those days, bears were conditioned to approach humans and find easy food. Bear-safe practices were non-existent — tourists commonly hand-fed wildlife and left rubbish in open dumps before the invention of bear-resistant garbage cans, food lockers and hanging poles.
Out of that was born a powerful myth that has persisted for decades.
That woman, 19-year-old Michele Koons, is the only menstruating victim of a grizzly on record and her period was not a factor in the attack, according to the research of biologist and University of Calgary professor Stephen Herrero.
Field tests on Minnesota black bears in the late 1980s — which included casting used tampons on fishing rods under their noses — found they all essentially ignored menstrual odours. Polar bears did show more interest. When presented with used tampons, seal meat and non-menstrual blood in a 1983 study, they ate the first two but ignored the last.
Half of all carnivorous animal attacks on humans are cases of “wrong place, wrong time,” Titchener says, citing a 2016 study. The other half involve risk-enhancing human actions that are within our control (from highest to lowest): leaving children unattended, off-leash dogs, searching for wounded animals while hunting, travelling at dawn or dusk when wildlife is more active and approaching females with their young. Unsecured food or garbage also conditions these creatures to be nearer to humans, indirectly resulting in encounters.
The average backcountry adventurer, ripe with body odour and laden with sandwich crumbs, isn’t much of a target, she says.
“Why are these bears not attacking all of us who have delicious food? Because they’re a risk- averse species. They’re not looking for trouble. They often unfortunately find it because of people doing inappropriate behaviours or leaving out food or not making noise,” Titchener says. “Women should feel 100 per cent safe and wonderful out there.”
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