AR-News: (AK) Woman learn to slice, skin goats; slice, skin muskrats; dog mushing

[Glickman37 at aol.com]

To see photos: http://www.adn.com/outdoors/story/4746180p-4692883c.html 
Noteworthy: this is part of a national program

Gathering of Women
Popular workshop aims to teach women a variety of basic outdoors skills

By ELIZABETH MANNING
Anchorage Daily News
February 15, 2004

SOLDOTNA -- Glynes Gerrior stepped into the main meeting room at a women's 
outdoors workshop last Saturday night and plopped into a folding chair for a 
much-needed rest. 

It had already been an adrenaline-packed weekend. For the first time in her 
life, the 50-year-old Nikiski nurse had held a gun, skinned an animal and slept 
in a bunkhouse with more than a dozen other women. Now she had just spent the 
last hour zooming down a steep hill by inner tube -- another exhilarating 
first. 

"I had to wait until I was 50 to start doing all this stuff," Gerrior said, 
grinning broadly. 

The short-haired nurse didn't stop long, though. She soon popped out of her 
chair and tromped back out into moonlit snow, intent on one last tubing run 
before going to sleep. 

Gerrior's story is not unusual among the more than 100 women attending 
Alaska's 12th Becoming an Outdoors-Woman workshop on the Kenai Peninsula. She grew 
up camping and fishing in Canada but hadn't done much else outdoors. Six years 
ago, Gerrior and her husband relocated to Alaska so she could do more fishing. 
Now she wants to learn about guns and maybe someday hunting. 

Three of the four classes she took at the workshop involved firearms 
training. By the end of the weekend, Gerrior was deciding whether to buy a gun. 

"Almost everyone up here seems to own one," she said. "In Canada, people 
don't have guns. I wanted to see what it was all about." 

A NATIONAL PROGRAM

Last weekend's Becoming an Outdoors-Woman workshop drew 105 women and three 
men to the Solid Rock Bible Camp near Soldotna to learn or hone outdoors 
skills. 

The national program started in Wisconsin 13 years ago and has spread to 46 
states, nine Canadian provinces, plus Costa Rica and the Bahamas. Its founder, 
Christine Thomas, a professor in natural resources management at the 
University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, said she wanted to create a program to help 
break down barriers that keep some women from learning and enjoying outdoor 
sports. 

The first Alaska workshop took place in 1995 at Chena Hot Springs Resort near 
Fairbanks. Since then, one or two workshops have been held annually, said 
Cathie Harms, the Fish and Game employee who first brought the program to Alaska. 


This year's winter workshop in Soldotna, one of the largest to date, was only 
the second for the Kenai Peninsula and the third held in Southcentral. Most 
workshops typically pull in about 75 participants, said Tracy Smith, a Fish and 
Game educator and last weekend's coordinator.

In Alaska, the Fish and Game Department sponsors the workshop. The 
instructors are both women and men; all are volunteers. 

Last weekend, more than 30 classes were offered, including beginning 
handguns, fly-casting, field dressing, maps and GPS, ice fishing, dog mushing, and 
canning and smoking. Each participant takes four courses over the weekend. Each 
class is three-and-a-half hours long.

Characterizing those attending would be like stereotyping men in a sports 
bar. About all you can say is that everyone there wanted to know more about the 
outdoors and appreciated learning in a primarily female environment. 

Some participants were so skilled they could have been instructors; others 
had never even camped before. 

A few, like Gerrior, are married to men who know less about the outdoors than 
they do. Others are married to avid hunters or anglers but don't enjoy 
learning outdoors skills from them. Workshop participants included teenagers, mother 
and daughter duos, a mother and son, a husband and wife, career women, 
homemakers, single women, grandmothers and a recent divorcee who said the weekend 
was better than therapy. 

Lindsay Winkler, 23, and her friend, Kara Schneider, 27, came for the 
chain-saw class. Winkler could have learned how to operate a chain saw from friends 
but wanted to learn safely among other women. The course also covered 
maintenance and some basic repair. Soon, everyone in the class was out in the woods, 
chain saws in hand, whooping and hollering, cutting firewood and felling trees. 

"I cut down my first tree," Winkler said proudly. "All the women felt so 
empowered. We were women with power tools." 

Mushing was another popular course; about half the women took it. Most had 
never before been on a dog sled or been around sled dogs. And when the class was 
over, few were ready to get off. 

Even after a face plant in the snow, Monica Frost, a stay-at-home mom from 
Soldotna, was all smiles. "It was worth it," she said. "I just wanted to try it. 
If you live in Alaska, it's almost something you have to experience." 

Mary Lee Kreger from Kenai signed up for the skinning and hide preparation 
class because she married a trapper four years ago. She was curious to learn but 
didn't think her husband would be the best teacher. 

"He can do a muskrat in about two minutes," Kreger said.

"He just doesn't have the patience to show me how. I'd rather learn here." 

While the workshop is designed for women, it does not exclude men. Three 
brave men attended last weekend. One was Henry Schwass of Anchorage, who came with 
his wife and introduced himself as Henrietta for laughs. Richard Maxted, also 
from Anchorage, attended with his mother because his wife had to stay home 
with a sick child. The third man was Kevin Ayres, a waiter from Fairbanks. 

Ayres said he would like to meet a woman and marry someday but stressed that 
he was not there to find a date. "To introduce that dynamic here wouldn't be 
right," he said. 

Instead, Ayres, 41, said his reasons for being there were similar to those 
expressed by many women participants. He grew up thinking baseball and bicycling 
were outdoor activities, and he knows that he learns better in a 
female-centered environment. Someday he hopes to be able to hunt and provide his family 
with food, he said.

"Here, they explain things clearly and they don't mind going back over it," 
he said. "And if someone has trouble getting something, it's not a problem. 
It's safe and noncompetitive." 

CONFIDENCE BUILDER

Before attending last weekend's workshop, I considered myself moderately 
competent in the outdoors. Still, I didn't know what to expect. I hadn't hunted 
since childhood and have never really cared much about fishing. 

After the weekend, I'm still not ready to kill and butcher a moose, but I do 
have more confidence and at least some idea of how to begin. 

I also picked up some interesting insights and tips. Here are a few: 

• Skinning a muskrat is almost as easy as pulling off a shirt except a whole 
lot smellier.

• You're in big trouble if you puncture the gut bag and especially the 
bladder or genitalia while butchering a big game animal.

• Sprinkle black pepper or citric acid on the meat to keep away flies.

• When fishing for different kinds of fish, I now know what size rods and 
what weight of line to use. 

• Never salt and freeze a hide. Do one or the other, but not both.

Some of the classes I signed up for were meant to help me overcome old 
phobias. On bird hunting trips with my father and brother as a child, I used to 
bribe my brother to clean the birds I had shot. In exchange, I did his chores back 
home. It wasn't a fair trade and I knew it, but I couldn't help being 
squeamish. Last weekend, to prove I had outgrown that girly behavior, I took field 
dressing and skinning and hide preparation. 

In the field dressing class, we worked on two locally raised goats. The 
instructor first showed us how to slice open the hide. Then, the women in the class 
took turns cutting away the hide, methodically removing the meat and deboning 
the meat in the field. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it seemed. Here 
I was, a grown woman, helping to butcher a whole goat without difficulty. 

Even pulling out the gut bag was tolerable, more interesting than gory. The 
instructor showed us how to cinch off the esophagus to keep the guts from 
spilling onto the meat. Then after cutting the windpipe and esophagus above the 
knot, she yanked out the guts with one easy pull. 

Of course, this was winter with no bugs and only a small goat, not a moose. 
Still, I got a taste of what it might be like to dress an animal in the field. 
After separating the meat into game bags and pillow cases, we loaded it all 
into backpacks and walked back to camp. 

When it came to muskrats, peeling the skin was amazingly easy. Except for a 
few strategic slices, you could rip most of it off gently with bare hands. The 
trouble was the smell. I tried to be tough but had to leave the room several 
times to avoid throwing up. No one else in the class seemed to have the same 
trouble.

These are tough women, I thought, tougher than I had expected. 

For my last class, I took dutch oven gourmet. In our family, my husband tends 
to be the better, or at least more consistent, camp cook. No more. 

In just a few hours, our dutch oven class whipped up delicacies that included 
crab quiche, baked mushrooms, lasagne, roast goat, rosemary chicken and roast 
potatoes, scones and two kinds of cakes. 

It was surprisingly easy and fun. The only drawback is that dutch ovens are 
too heavy to carry far. "This is not a backpacking tool," joked the instructor, 
Bruce Campbell. 

And even if camp cook is the usual role for many women in the field, most 
seemed happy to learn new tricks. Even the stereotypes were tossed about with a 
grain of salt. One participant, Terri Zopf-Schoessler, joked that both ice 
fishing and dutch oven cooking had helped her get in touch with her masculine 
side. To illustrate, she posed stiff-legged and silent, pretending to hold first a 
fishing rod, then barbecue tongs. 

I also learned one other crucial piece of information over the weekend: women 
do snore. That's why the workshop staff issues ear plugs. 

OUTDOOR FANATICS

By the end of the weekend, I also began to understand why some women become 
outdoorswoman fanatics. 

Not only do you learn a lot at these workshops, you laugh a lot. 

Monica Frost from the mushing class said she had weaned her son early just so 
she could attend. Dona Boylan of Ester said she plans to keep coming to 
workshops until organizers ask her to become an instructor or tell her to go away.

That could happen. 

Most women wanted to return for another workshop. If the sessions become too 
popular in Alaska, Harms said, the first spaces will go to those who have 
attended fewer than two workshops. That preserves the program's goal -- to 
introduce women to the outdoors. 

In addition to the classes, the weekend also features door prizes, a 
tongue-in-cheek outdoor gear fashion show, a bunch of mini courses following dinner 
one evening, plus a bonfire, a moose-calling contest and tubing for the 
adventurous. 

On the final day, many women exchanged phone numbers and made plans for 
future outdoor adventures. Louise Gettman, a 33-year-old cargo pilot from Eagle 
River, said she came mainly because she wanted to learn to trap and to meet other 
women who are also passionate about the outdoors. She said she had learned 
enough by the end of the weekend to try trapping on her own and had also met 
several women who might be interested in going along. 

As for Gerrior, she also had her answer. I spotted her one last time as she 
headed for the parking lot, bags in hand.

"I'm buying that shotgun," she said, beaming. "I even know what kind -- a 
20-gauge semi-automatic Beretta 390." 

And with that, she waved a friendly goodbye. 

Daily News reporter Elizabeth Manning can be reached at emanning at adn.com or 
257-4323. 


 Becoming an Outdoors-Woman workshops usually cost about $200. The next one 
is scheduled for August at the Lost Lake Boy Scout Camp near Fairbanks. To 
learn more, go to the Web at www.wildlife.alaska.gov/education/huntered/bow1.cfm. 
Or call Cathie Harms at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Fairbanks at 
1-907-459-7231 or e-mail her at cathie_harms at fishgame.state.ak.us. 






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