Female Trail Safety and Adventurer's Project

Occasionally, the topic of trail safety for women comes up on the Buckeye Trail Association's Facebook group.  Also, getting more female hikers is of interest to the BTA anyways.  I've been in the area for two years and I'm glad to gotten some feedback on this subject.  I have a vested interest in it as well.

I just had a female solo hiker go through the Road Fork and Whipple Sections - Buckeye/ North Country Trail.  For those of you who do know it very well, it's rugged for Ohio, sparsely populated, in terms of cellular service, it's the most remote place in the state and the off-road trail was built to mimic some of the conditions that you might find on more minor portions of the Appalachian Trail.

The area at a thru hike rate takes about 9 days to pass through both sections.  In one capasity or another, I was her in-person water resupply there.  Without cellular communications, we had walkie talkies and I we were always at her day's end location by 7:30pm.  I was late, either one of us could get on the walkie talkies and make that known.  If she was late, I would retrace her steps, or start driving the on-road trail against her rate of progress, try to find her and see if something was wrong?

I even hiked 5 miles with her, took the prepositioned bicycle back about 4 miles, fetched the car and met her with her water resupply on one of those evenings.  I'm pleased to report that these sections are probably solo female friendly, with that especially being true in the Marietta Unit of the Wayne National Forest.

I actually had four thru hikers this year.  It was a exercise of the Adventurer's Project, which is a limited protochapter on the Buckeye Trail that covers is Road Fork and Whipple Sections at the moment.  If it becomes a chapter, I hope that we extend and also cover about 3 counties of the nearby American Discovery Trail. I'm it's principal and sole volunteer at the moment.

From what I know, the on-road is pretty safe for women.  And due to the fact that anyone is unlikely to encounter anybody on most of the off-road, I'd put the odds of anything bad happening due to other people as being remote.