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(Big news inside this episode: Acadia is coaching the brand-new trail half marathon cohort of the Trail Running Sisterhood, our scholarship program, in 2027. Applications open November 2026. Get on the waitlist here.)
Acadia Gantz started the Bear 100 four times and never finished it. The fourth attempt was the first one she ran for fun, instead of running away from something.
What she’d been running from started in her first season at a river company in Idaho: a sexual assault by a well-liked senior guide, in a culture where there was nowhere to report it and a beer after every river day looked normal. This past April, she published her story on her website. She went looking for stories from women like her in the outdoors, and she couldn’t find them.
Content note: this episode includes discussion of sexual assault, alcohol use, disordered eating, and depression. Please take care while listening.
Acadia Gantz is a midwife, running coach, dog mom, and outdoors enthusiast who lives, works, and plays in the western Maine mountains. Through Canyon Wren Coaching, she leads group runs, workshops, and retreats in Maine and New Hampshire and coaches runners virtually all over the world, helping women find their power through adventure, birth, childrearing, and everything in between.
Acadia grew up on the river in summer and knew she wanted to be a river guide long before she knew what else she wanted to do. She guided whitewater and worked ski patrol for years before becoming a midwife.
Acadia and Angie talked about:
- Leaving Colorado State University after two years to guide rivers and work ski patrol
- How party culture gets baked into seasonal outdoor work, and why it hid her self-medicating for years
- The ski patrol policy that put one woman on each team and called it equality
- What outdoor companies owe guides after a traumatic incident (hint: more than an HR person 100 miles away)
- Getting sober, finding EMDR, and feeling lighter on her feet in the woods for the first time
- The importance of storytelling in outdoor advocacy and women’s safety (but doing it with care)
📚 Podcast rec! The Outdoorsy Women+ Book Pod
Hosted by Christine Reed, the Outdoorsy Women+ Book Pod features women and gender-expansive writers with an outdoor adventure book out in the world. They cover hiking, running, climbing, kayaking, biking, and snow sports, in memoir, narrative nonfiction, and fiction.
On this show, we’re always nudging you to tell your own story. Christine’s guests took that all the way to a finished book — and now you can hear all about it in audio form!
Follow the Outdoorsy Women+ Book Pod wherever you’re listening right now, and find your next favorite episode (or book).
Make sure to tap these links:
- 🌐 Canyon Wren Coaching
- 📱 Acadia on IG
- 🏃♀️ Trail Running Sisterhood (2027 waitlist: join here)
- 🎙️ Outdoorsy Women+ Book Pod with Christine Reed
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- ✏️ Acadia’s story, published April 2026
- 📚 The River’s Daughter by Bridget Crocker
- 📚 Know My Name by Chanel Miller
- 📚 One Way Back by Christine Blasey Ford
- 📚 Push Off From Here by Laura McKowen
- 🔬 Dr. Maria Blevins, researching sexual assault and harassment in guiding and the outdoor industries
- 🌐 Respect Outside
- 🌐 A-Dash Collaborative
- 🌐 Take Back the Night
- 🌐 Redside Foundation
- 📱 Lizzy Fowler, an ultrarunner fundraising for Take Back the Night
- 🎙️ River Radius Podcast: Sexual Harassment in River Guide Culture (7/23/2024)
- 🎙️ See Her Outside with Sasha Klontz of Guide Theory
- ➡️ The Cairn Project on IG
- ✨ The Cairn Project’s newsletter
Like this episode? Leave a 5-star rating and review on your podcast app!
You can help us close the gender gap outdoors and beyond:
- Become a Trailblazer. Your Adventure Fundraiser makes wilderness experiences possible for girls and women.
- Check out the Summit Scholarship Foundation.
- Send this episode to a friend who guides, patrols, or works a seasonal outdoor job.
Make sure you subscribe to the See Her Outside Podcast so you don’t miss a story!
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In this episode of the See Her Outside Podcast, host Angie Lake talks with Acadia Gantz, a midwife, trail running coach, and former river guide and ski patroller, about sexual assault in outdoor guiding culture. Acadia Gantz describes how party culture becomes part of seasonal outdoor work: guides living, working, and playing together for weeks and months, cash tips in their pockets, and no responsibilities once the day is done. On ski patrol, she watched a one-woman-per-team policy get presented as equality while it kept every female patroller isolated and managed by men.
Acadia shares her experience of sexual assault by a senior river guide during her first season at a river company in Idaho, and why reporting felt impossible when he was protected at every level of the company. She talks about what trauma-informed support from outdoor companies could look like, beyond an HR contact in an office 100 miles away, and how burnout and unprocessed trauma drive the fast guide turnover that keeps guiding from becoming a long-term career.
The conversation follows the years she spent self-medicating with alcohol, disordered eating, and ultrarunning, and her four attempts at the Bear 100 endurance run. Acadia explains how a disordered relationship with alcohol can hide inside an answer like “three to five drinks a month,” how getting sober in 2023 brought her trauma to the surface during the race, and how a sobriety community and EMDR therapy changed the way trail running felt in her body.
Listeners will hear why Acadia Gantz decided to publish her story, how she told her parents first, and what happened after: messages from other survivors, apologies from people at the company, and connections to researchers and authors working on sexual assault and harassment in the outdoor industry. For any woman who is still silent about what happened to her in an outdoor job, her message is direct: as alone as it feels right now, you’re not alone.
