7 Women, One Camera, and more laughs than we can count.

We sent one of our marketing team members, Tam, on a four-day RadWomen hiking trip with one simple assignment: come back with photos and videos for our website.

Instead, five complete strangers adopted her, a grizzly stole the spotlight, and she returned with aching cheeks, several jokes she still can’t explain and a brand-new group chat with plans to travel together again.

This is what happened.

“My boss didn’t ask me to write this blog. And yet, I sat down at my desk this morning, coffee in hand, genuinely excited to get everything still bouncing around my head onto the page.

This isn’t a “marketing” blog. It’s not part of a campaign or something carefully plotted in a content calendar. It’s simply the story of my weekend, a story nobody asked to hear.

Unfortunately for you, I’m telling it anyway.

If this reads like I’m still buzzing, it’s because I am.

It all started with a 4am alarm

I was sent to join our four-day RadWomen Hiking the Rockies trip to capture photos and video for our website.

One camera. One group of women I’d never met. Four days in the Rockies.

I’ve joined plenty of our day tours over the years, so I already knew how good one day out here could be with the right guests and an amazing guide. But I’d never experienced one of our multi-day adventures first hand.

In my head, it was essentially the same thing, only longer.

More trails. More stories. More photos.

Then I saw 4:30 a.m. beside my start time and began questioning if we really needed another photo of Moraine Lake. 

Still, I had an assignment. I would drink a concerning amount of coffee, follow some strangers around the mountains and return with enough website content to justify being awake at an hour usually reserved for bakers and bears.

Simple.

Except that’s not quite what happened.

How it felt meeting a group of strangers on a women-only trip

We met for dinner the night before the first hike: the whole group, their guide Gini, and me.

Now, a confession.

I’m not naturally brilliant at walking into a room full of strangers. I get anxious, then awkward, then unusually quiet. Later, I go home and conduct a full forensic investigation into everything I said and let it play on repeat in my brain for 7 business days.

So yes, I was a little nervous.

In reality, I really didn’t need to be.

We made it through the usual introductions—where are you from, what do you do—and then somebody said something that had the entire table belly laughing.

The mains hadn’t even arrived.

The trip hadn’t technically started yet.

And already, I felt my guard come down and anxiety ease. I had the distinct feeling I wasn’t going to be hovering quietly in the background.

My excellent plan lasted roughly eleven minutes

My strategy had been to remain an observer.

I’d stay a few steps behind, blend into the scenery and capture the group while they connected and experienced the Rockies.

The group adopted me almost immediately.

By the first morning, we had blown straight past polite small talk and landed somewhere much more interesting.

Life. Love. Careers. Travels. The decisions we’d made, the ones we were still trying to make, and the things that don’t usually come up until you’re several drinks into an evening with your closest friends.

These weren’t surface-level chats with people carefully presenting the most polished versions of themselves, believe me, I learnt a LOT about these women on day one. They were the honest conversations that happen when nobody feels the need to perform.

That feeling of safety usually takes time.

Somehow, in the safety of Ginis guidance, it seemed to take only a couple of hours and one very early sunrise.

And then there was the laughing.

How was a van full of women who had been collected at 4am in the morning this funny?

Genuinely. I’ve laughed less at a comedy club.

By the end of the trip, all anyone had to say was “sea level sunset” and the whole group would lose it.

I still can’t explain why it was funny.

You had to be there—which is sort of the point.

I left for one day. Everything escalated.

On day three, an unusual snow storm hit Banff (yes, in August) and covered the trails in a wintery landscape. In theory, stunning, but for someone who was on assignment to get photos for our ‘summer’ hiking trip, it just didn’t seem practical for me to go and take photos that we would likely have no use for. So I begrudgingly had an office day. 

Emails. Editing. Quietly wishing I was out on the trail with the women I had just met.

When I rejoined the women, the change in energy after just 36 hours was ridiculous.

If Gini hadn’t been wearing a Radventures uniform, I wouldn’t have known she was their guide and not an old friend they’d brought along for the trip.

The inside jokes had multiplied. Entire new stories had developed. I was shown photos of a ‘full moon’ out by the lake, and not the kind of full moon you’re thinking of. Yes. A naked butt. 

I was mildly offended by how much fun they had managed to have without me.

When they spotted me walking towards them that day, nobody said hello.

Not one person.

They looked over, eyes wide, thrust their phones towards me and started shouting:

“TAM. WAIT UNTIL YOU SEE THIS. WE SAW A FREAKING BEAR ON THE TRAIL YESTERDAY.”

So we skipped the pleasantries and immediately formed a huddle around a phone, losing our minds over footage of a grizzly strolling across a snowy Sunshine Meadows.

They had watched it from a safe distance, completely still and holding their breath.

Apparently, it was the quietest they’d been in days.

This was now less like returning to work and more like arriving late to meet your friends, only to be informed that you had missed the most exciting thing that had ever happened.

Right. The assignment.

It was a little too easy to keep forgetting I was working.

I’d be in the middle of a conversation, properly invested, and then I’d notice the camera dangling from my wrist.

Right. Yes. The assignment.

I’d take a hurried burst of photos before being pulled straight back into whatever we’d been discussing.

At some point, I stopped photographing a group of women and simply became one of the women in the group, Gini included.

Which is not particularly what I was there for. 

It is, however, a fairly convincing review.

The last night—or the reason nobody wanted to go home

On the final night, after the last day of hiking, we all went for a long and exceptional dinner with Gini.

It became apparent fairly quickly that the host had stopped seating people at the tables around us.

Fair enough. We were laughing constantly. There were aching cheeks. There was a developing mascara situation. The volume increased every time somebody tried to retell a story and couldn’t get through it without laughing. I had a napkin over my head at one point hiding my streaming eyes and redenning cheeks.

The energy was truly electric, and I mean that. I also totally forgot to get any decent photos for our website on that last dinner. How could I take photos while we were doubled over laughing at things far too NSFW to print in this blog?

We did however manage to sneak one selfie in when I remembered ‘Tam, work, remember?’

By the end of the night, we had swapped details, created a shared Google Photos album and promised to do another RadWomen trip together.

Not in the vague way people do at airports before never speaking again.

They were already discussing where to go, which RadWomen trip to try next, which friends back home would have loved this. 

Gini shared that it was her favourite moments of her entire guiding career.

Having watched the previous four days unfold from behind a camera, I understood exactly why.

The part I didn’t understand before

A multi-day Radventure isn’t a day tour stretched over several days.

I got that completely wrong.

Yes, you still get the thoughtful guides who read the group instead of reciting a script. You still get the intimate small groups, the local stories and that very Radventures instinct for choosing the quiet over the crowds.

But the extra days make room for the parts of an adventure that can’t be scheduled.

The conversations that become more honest as the kilometres pass.

The dinners that go on longer than planned.

The mornings that begin before almost anyone else is out there.

The wildlife encounter everyone talks about for the rest of time.

The moment your guide stops feeling like your guide and is just another friend in a uniform. It might sound cheesy, but I literally watched it happen right before my eyes.

Those things need time.

So does the shift from learning someone’s name to saving them a seat in the van. From asking where they’re from to talking about the parts of life that actually matter. From arriving alone to wondering when you’ll all see each other again.

That’s what the extra days give you.

Enough time for a van full of strangers to become the people you’re genuinely not ready to go home without.

I went to take photos.

I came back with a group chat, a collection of jokes I can’t explain and a very strong desire to invite myself onto their next trip.

So, if you’ve been looking at a RadWomen adventure and wondering whether people really connect like this, they do.

I have hundreds of photos, aching cheeks and some pretty wild stories to prove it.”