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The deathstalker scorpion, a Middle East native shown here in captivity, kills several people each year and occasionally hammers its stinger into the hands of hobbyist collectors. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Furryscaly.

Give me a rainstorm in the night, a herd of pigs trampling past, even a bear—but if I’m camping without a tent, spare me the bugs. Because it’s the little things in the woods that creep many of us out the most, and the thing is, not all of them are so little—and worse, some have fangs and a hundred legs. Centipedes that can overpower a snake, spiders a foot wide, rodent-sized scorpions and other creepy crawlers of the forest floor offer good reason to sleep inside a tent. For years, I only camped under the open skies. If it rained, I would wrap up in a tarp or sleep under the awning of a church. But one night in Portugal while reading a book by the light of my headlamp, a huge spider with legs like an imperial walker came dancing onto my tarp and into my lap like a mad dervish. I screamed, panicked, flew home and bought a one-person, three-pound backpacking tent. That doesn’t mean I always use it, but here are a few good reasons why I should:

Deathstalker scorpion (Leiurus quinquestriatus). The deathstalker scorpion just might have the coolest name in the animal kingdom. A Middle East native, it grows to four inches or more in length, brandishes a horrifying pair of pincers and lives up to its name. Often described as “very aggressive,” it hammers its stinger into many people every year, killing several. Most victims, though, just suffer extreme pain in the region of the bite, along with drowsiness, fatigue, splitting headaches and joint pain, with symptoms sometimes persisting for months. Meanwhile, most scorpions are less dangerous than simply creepy. David Quammen—an admitted arachnophobe—elaborates on this in his essay See no Evil, published in his 1988 collection The Flight of the Iguana. He writes, “…scorpions are perhaps the most drastically, irredeemably repulsive group of animals on the face of the Earth, even including toy poodles.” Tent, please.

Goliath bird-eating spider (Theraphosa blondi). The biggest of the tarantulas and the world’s largest arachnid, the Goliath bird-eating spider lives in the rainforests of South America. Its legs can span the width of a dinner plate (should it find its way into your kitchen cupboard) and it’s large enough that it can, with ease, kill and eat mice—not to mention birds. The animal’s fangs may be an inch long, and yes, they will inject venom. However, the bite of a Goliath bird-eater is hardly worse than a bee sting to a human—but for campers, do you really think that matters? No way. This beast is among the nastiest things that could skitter across your face in the dark night of the Amazon. Zip up your tent.

Giant desert centipede (Scolopendra heros). On a hot afternoon in September 2003, I was bushwhacking out of the mountains in the Baja California desert not far from La Paz. I fought and kicked my way through the thorns, ducking through tunnels in the brush, and finally made it to the quiet shore of the Sea of Cortez. I plopped down in the sand, my back against against a rock, opened my backpack, and went digging for my mask and snorkel—and then appeared the ugliest monster I’ve ever seen: a seven-inch centipede that came snaking out of the pack, right past my arms and on a trajectory for my face. It was, I’m almost sure, Scolopendra heros. I screamed in a howling panic, leaped from the sand, and went backpedaling into the water, where I fell on my butt and and watched the centipede vanish into a rockpile. This creature, I later was told, is poisonous and can, if it feels especially wicked, bite and deliver venom with its fangs as well as some of its legs. And you want a much, much nastier story? In a documented case in Arizona, a man put a garden hose to his mouth and turned on the faucet to have a drink—and can you guess who came charging out of the nozzle? S. heros scuttled right into his mouth and bit his tongue, leaving him in pain for days.

This giant desert centipede has overpowered and killed a lizard. A tent may block your view of a meteor shower, but it'll keep monsters like this from scuttling into your sleeping bag. Photo courtesy of Cabeza Prieta Natural History Association.

Bullet ant (Paraponera clavata). An inch long and known to jump from trees upon its victims, the bullet ant of Central and South America delivers what is said to be the most painful sting of any arthropod. It hurts like a bullet wound, people say, and the pain may persist for 24 hours. In the ant’s defense, Paraponera clavata is not aggressive unless bothered—so if you get stung, you must have asked for it. The ants also offer fair warning before attacking, emitting a musky odor and an audible “shriek.” If you detect anything of the sort while hiking in the Amazon, turn and run—or just suck it up and experience this phenomenal bite like a man,which is exactly what teenage boys in certain forest cultures do to prove their manhood. Anyway, the bullet ant’s bite rarely kills. 

Brazilian wandering spider (Phoneutria fera). Widely considered the most poisonous spider in the world, wandering spiders reportedly hospitalized about 7,000 people in Brazil alone between 1970 and 1980 and may have killed more people than any other arachnid in the world. Phoneutria fera is often regarded as the main offending species, but others of the same genus, including the Brazilian huntsman, have similarly toxic venom. The spiders are known to wander and explore, often hiding in clumps of bananas, and often entering homes to have a nap in the toes of a shoe by the doorstep or a vacant pant leg in the clean laundry pile—and surely a cozy sleeping bag would be a fine dwelling site for a wandering spider. Symptoms of a bite include pain, redness and immobility in the area of the bite. Paralysis and death by asphyxiation may follow. In survivors, tissue affected by the poison may die and rot away. Another bizarre symptom immediately following a bite in men is a painful erection lasting hours and sometimes causing impotence.

Mosquito (Family Culicidae). Consisting of 41 genera and more than 3,500 species in the family Culicidae, mosquitoes may not inspire nightmares or make our skin crawl the way that arachnids can, but what other element of nature so frequently ruins a night of camping? Whether on the boggy tundra, in the blazing desert or in the swamp country, mosquitoes may swarm us in clouds. Even a bona fide house with walls and a roof can’t always protect against mosquitoes, and in parts of the world people sleep with permanent netting over their beds. These insects insect may be the most dangerous, too: in 2003, malaria killed 3 million people—infected thanks to mosquitoes. And these bloodsucking disease vectors dealt me what was one of the most torturous nights of my life while camping (with no tent) on the shore of a mangrove lagoon in Mexico. After about 500 bites, I went stumbling into the village around midnight and pleaded with a bartender for bug spray. He said citrus juice was the most potent mosquito repellent—trick from his grandmother—and he threw a lime at me from his cocktail making tray. It didn’t work. After bite 2,000 or thereabouts I wrapped a towel around my head, jumped in the water and breathed through a snorkel until dawn brought relief.

The handsome face of the bullet ant, a New World jungle native whose bite may be the most painful of any arthropod on Earth. Photo courtesy of Flickr user EOL Learning and Education Group.

Cloud, sea and sun create a morning sky as spectacular as it is serene as Matt Rutherford enters another day on his solo voyage around the Americas. Photo by Matt Rutherford

After Columbus, Magellan and Drake; after Steller, Nansen and Amundsen; after the golden age of exploration fizzled into the era of idleness and suburbia; after the deepest jungles of New Guinea were finally mapped; and after the conquest of the solar system—still there remained one thing undone.

And now Matt Rutherford is doing it: He is on the homestretch of a nearly one-year journey that should make him the first person ever to circumnavigate the Americas on a single voyage. The 30-year-old sailor from Annapolis, Maryland is currently riding the wind northwest through the western Atlantic Ocean. The journey runs 25,000 miles from the edge of Arctic Canada to the tip of Patagonia and two oceans in between. He’s sailing alone, though that isn’t essential to the record.

“Nobody, period, has done this before,” Rutherford told me by satellite telephone on March 8. “Not on a 100-foot boat with a crew of 50, not on an aircraft carrier.”

Rutherford’s boat is the sort, as he says, that could be moored at a wharf and not attract a second glance. It’s a modest 27-foot Albin-Vega with a tendency for mechanical things to break and a ceiling so low that the 6-foot-tall Rutherford bumps his head any time he wakes up and forgets where he is. Rutherford, a sailor since 2004, has not set foot on land for almost 280 days, with an estimated 30 left. When we spoke, he was about 200 miles north of the mouth of the Amazon River and moving homeward, and certainly the most perilous parts of the journey are in the sack.

Indeed, right after setting out last June, he tackled the once almost mythical, now plain legendary Northwest Passage. Then he braved the nasty Bering Sea, and southward he went along the West Coast of Canada, the United States and Mexico. He entered the 30-to-35-degree latitude zone of famously windless weather, often called the “horse latitudes,” where many a sailing ship of the old days was stranded for sweltering, thirsty weeks. But Rutherford sailed through and into the sticky, balmy tropics. He paid little notice to the Panama Canal—the lazy sailor’s gateway to the Atlantic—for Rutherford was taking the scenic route. Ecuador, Peru and Chile sailed by before the American faced off with the tip of South America. As most sailors do when they find themselves in this neighborhood, Rutherford slipped through the Strait of Magellan, which brought him back again to the ocean he knows best, and the final leg of the trip began.

Rutherford has been fishing, he said. He trolls a lure behind him and, about two weeks ago, landed a mahi mahi worth a few good meals. He took a mid-sized yellowfin tuna off of New England early on and has lost a good many lures to strong strikes that broke his line. Those may have been sharks, swordfish or bluefin tuna. But the ideal catch, Rutherford explains, is a skipjack tuna, since they’re big enough for a feast but small enough to not to be wasted.

He is also eating freeze-dried foods provided by a sponsor, Shelf Reliance. The Utah company’s products are of high quality, Rutherford says, and he’s been preparing restaurant-quality soups and stews.

“All the great freeze-dried foods come out of Utah because of the Mormon ideology that you should have at least a year’s worth of freeze-dried food on your shelf,” Rutherford explained. “They make good freeze-dried food. You’ve gotta go to the Mormons if you want the good stuff.”

Rutherford has fought through just enough nasty weather to keep him on his toes, and he had a close call in the Bering Sea when an icy wave nearly flipped him over. Elsewhere, he has seen about 15 gales, he says, adding that he respects the ocean but doesn’t fear it.

“If the boat sinks and I drown, so be it,” he said. “That’s just how it is, but there’s no sense in being scared all the time.”

Somewhere in the Canadian Arctic last summer, Rutherford soaks up the chill, the fog and silence of the Northwest Passage. Photo by Matt Rutherford.

His vessel has had a few technical problems – not the least of which was when his water desalinator conked out off of Newfoundland. More recently, off Brazil, his engine petered out. Rutherford’s engine has served mostly as a generator for various appliances and lights, not for locomotion (he is, after all, a sailor). In each minor crisis, nearby vessels came to his assistance, tossing him the parts needed to make repairs.

Other vessels have been less helpful—like the one in early March that approached him in the middle of the night and began circling, coming closer and closer at each pass until, when the strange boat came to within 20 feet away, Rutherford fired a gun twice into the night sky. The boat departed in a hurry.

Asked whether any peers have criticized his voyage as haphazard or foolish, Rutherford said, “With these kinds of trips, it just depends on the outcome. If I had failed early on, then it could have been easily ridiculed, like, ‘Oh, you can’t do that trip on such a small budget or sailing alone, or on such a small boat.’ Basically, I either fail and everyone thinks I’m crazy, or I succeed and I’m a hero.”

Rutherford’s journey is a fundraising venture for Chesapeake Region Accessible Boating (CRAB), a nonprofit sailing program for people with disabilities, and donations can be made via his website. His progress can be followed through his blog. Rutherford is an experienced adventurer and a self-titled “gypsy,” and this journey will not likely be his last. He has already pedaled a bicycle around Southeast Asia and spent 2008 to 2010 on a 32-foot sailboat zigzagging between four continents in the Atlantic Ocean. Next up may be a return to the Arctic, where Rutherford hopes to film a documentary. But first: home, where he says he’s anticipating “a cold beer and a hot shower.”

The mountain lion is one of the most common large cats but also one of the hardest to see. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Lil Rose.

Just a few miles south, north and east of San Francisco, where I live, it begins. A vast unbroken range of wild country sprawls north into Canada, east across the desert and the Rockies and south all the way to Patagonia: mountain lion country. Also called the puma, cougar and dozens of backwoods names, the mountain lion, Puma concolor, is one of the most abundant yet elusive large predators in the world. Tens upon tens of thousands of them live in their enormous range, and California alone is home to about 5,000, though most of us would hardly know it if we weren’t told. I’ve hiked and biked throughout the state, covering vast distances of road and trail in mountain lion country. Along the way, I’ve seen a few bobcats, some black bears and many coyotes. I’ll bet that mountain lions have seen me. But in all that time, across all that distance, with so many of the cats tiptoeing through the woods and scrub around me, I have never seen even one mountain lion.

All of which is why it’s so amazing that people can reliably go to India and see a tiger. Just how many individuals of Panthera tigris still live in the wild isn’t entirely clear, but there aren’t many. Estimates place the count as low as 3,200 among all six remaining subspecies. Yet in Bandhavgarh National Park, many or most visitors touring the woods on the back of an elephant will see a Bengal tiger. Ranthambhore and Kanha National Parks are considered the next best places to see the animals, with Jim Corbett, Kaziranga and Panna National Parks all recognized as likely bets, too. (In the forests of Sasan Gir National Park, visitors may even see lions—the last of the nearly extinct Asiatic lions which once ranged from India to Italy but succumbed to human activity where leopards and tigers did not.)

How imperiled is the tiger? Scientists’ premonitions are dire when it comes to the tiger’s odds of going extinct at the hands—well, chainsaws and bullets—of people. In the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, for instance, home to 75 million people, there were 300 tigers in 2006, according to an annual census. In 2011, biologists estimated there were just 257. Meanwhile, organized multi-national groups have recently announced a very ambitious goal of spurring a two-fold increase in tiger numbers throughout Asia. It’s a promising turnaround from the days not so long ago when the Russian government actively and, sadly, successfully advocated for extermination of the now-extinct Caspian tiger. But I wouldn’t take any chances. See this beautiful cat while you can.

Not in the market for a plane ticket to India? Don’t want to deal with the crowds? Already seen your tiger? Then other thrills in big predator viewing are to be had, with almost 100-percent success rates in some places. Here are some good bets:

1) Brown bears of McNeil River Falls, Alaska. From June to September, several dozen of the world’s most powerful bear, Ursus arctos, may gather at once at this famed sprawl of waterfalls to feed on salmon. Visitors have the incredible opportunity to stand as close as several yards from the bears as the animals hunt, lounge, play and fight, seemingly oblivious to their admirers. This rare dynamic between bear and person is due to the tightly regulated arrangement that allows small numbers of people to come, with a guide, and do little else but stand in a designated perimeter on the river bank and watch bears. Want to go? Apply in advance. Note: the bears, which local biologists and guides know by name and appearance, have declined in number, possibly due to bear hunting being allowed near the viewing site.

2) Polar bears of Churchill, Manitoba. The bears are just as big as the browns of southern Alaska, but they’re white, almost 100-percent carnivorous and not opposed to stalking humans. In other words, don’t leave the the tank-like safari vehicles that roll through the frozen scrub here as autumn visitors plaster their faces to the glass. Outside, bears roam the tundra, waiting for the waters to freeze and seal hunting to resume. Polar bears aren’t just a tourist attraction here; Ursus maritimus is an accepted part of life for locals, whose town is dubbed the “Polar Bear Capital of the World.” In Churchill, there is even a temporary holding cell for trouble-maker polar bears, and residents reportedly keep all doors unlocked at all times in case anyone should need to dodge bears wandering the streets.

Polar bears are almost a sure sight for tourists in Churchill, Manitoba. Photo courtesy of Flickr user ucumari.

3) Great white sharks. On the set of Jaws, a very large—and real—great white shark unexpectedly destroyed a miniature diving cage. The footage of the shark, entangled in cables as it thrashed and tore the film prop to pieces before breaking away, was so thrilling to the film crew that they rewrote the script to make a place for the footage in the 1975 blockbuster, a movie that so impacted people’s fear of sharks that Jaws author Peter Benchley said later that he wished he hadn’t written the novel. Anyway, in the real world of modern great white shark tourism, the most feared inhabitants of the oceans don’t destroy cages. Rather, at the Farallon Islands, at Guadalupe Island, off Cape Town and in South Australia, the sharks swim gracefully around the cages, nosing out hunks of tuna and mammal flesh thrown from the boat while paying customers ogle through the bars.

4) Wolves of Yellowstone. In 1995, gray wolves from Canada were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park. Canis lupus, known as livestock-killers, somewhat fictionalized as man-eaters, had been exterminated viciously from most of the lower 48 states. Though wolf opponents, many of them big-game hunters or ranchers, decried the effort, the predators are back now, numbering 1,600 or more throughout the Rockies and Cascades. In Yellowstone National Park, about 100 wolves are consistently observed, especially in the winter months. To see the wolves of Yellowstone, visitors can drive through the park and watch out the windows as they go, or hope to see wolves while hiking in the backcountry. Anyone stands the chance of seeing a wolf or even a pack, but the likelihood is improved by hiring a guide.

5) Crocodiles of Northern Australia. One of the nastiest creatures on earth, the estuarine crocodile is the sort of animal one should want to see from a distance, a large boat or a vehicle. The animals kill and eat people with some regularity in Australia. The huge reptiles, which may reach more than 20 feet in length, were once hunted almost to extinction for their skins, but restrictions on the trade and a crocodile ranching business have allowed the wild population to grow. Today, crocodile viewing is a tourist attraction, with the region to see them being the tropical north of the nation. And while not every excursion will be a success, other encounters can happen when you least want them to. Use caution in croc country—and stay out of murky sloughs and swamps.

A happy hunter, her Oregon white truffles and the dog that made the day. Photo by Andrea Johnson.

Some underground objects in Croatia will detonate at the slightest touch: landmines.

Other underground objects just smell. When journalist Lucy Burningham went to Croatia in 2007, she went looking for truffles. The Portland-based beer, food and travel writer was doing research for a book she’s writing about truffles of the world. She spent two weeks in northwest Croatia’s Istria peninsula, where she explored the local oak forests with pen and pad, fringed the secretive clan of local truffle hunters and, as she now concedes, poked her nose where not everyone wanted it.

“As a journalist working on a story about truffles, it felt like risky business,” Burningham said. “There’s a lot of cash flowing around, there’s a black market, and I felt like I was entering a world where I wasn’t wanted.”

Most truffle hunters aren’t lawbreakers. They are simply protective of their patches, which may be family-owned and passed along from generation to generation—the foundation of a wholesome industry across Europe. But lookalike truffles are sometimes falsely advertised and illegally sold, and in the dark woods of Europe and in the high-stakes marketplaces, strangers and foreigners are not always to be trusted. Burningham didn’t speak the language in Croatia, and she had just one local contact in the truffle-hunting underworld. The man, hardly a Luddite of the woods, carried four cell phones and seemed to be always negotiating a sale through one of his market connections. He served as her guide, and on one occasion as he drove into a remote truffle patch in the woods, he asked Burningham, seated shotgun in the Fiat, to cover herself with a blanket and hunker down and pose as a sack of potatoes.

“No one wanted to see an international journalist poking around in the forest,” Burningham explained.

Burningham observed the white truffle’s prominent place in Croatia’s culture and cuisine. She saw, too, that Croatian people object to the white truffle’s reputation as the “Alba truffle,” which suggests that this aromatic mushroom, Tuber magnatum, is an Italian specialty. In fact, though France and Italy have gained reputations for having the world’s best truffles, Burningham’s book project was conceived in Oregon, in the woods surrounding Portland, in the heart of North America’s very own truffle country.

Throughout the Pacific Northwest, three species of highly valued, highly aromatic, native truffles grow naturally in the soil among Douglas fir trees, though relatively few people know it. Burningham caught wind of Oregon truffles in 2006. Today an increasing number of chefs, gatherers, retailers and entrepreneurs of many makes are catching on. Though the industry struggled for several decades, demand is now growing, and prices have shot up from about $50 per pound wholesale five years ago to about $250 per pound today.

Truffle season is now in full swing, and those interested in unearthing their own truffles should contact the North American Truffling Society, a group of enthusiasts who meet in Corvallis, Oregon to discuss, study, hunt and eat truffles. The Cascade Mycological Society may also be able to help. The upcoming Oregon Truffle Festival, scheduled for January 27 to 29 in and around Eugene, will offer another opportunity to experience Oregon’s best-smelling mushrooms, both on the plate and in the woods.

Truffle hunting, whether in Europe or America, is usually conducted with truffle dogs, the best of which can smell underground truffles from 150 feet or more away. Only four such dogs, trained and certified through local truffle dog training programs, exist in Oregon, according to Leslie Scott, a managing partner of the truffle festival, where at least one of these dogs will be meeting and greeting guests. (Though truffle pigs still dwell in the lore of old European truffle hunting, the keen-nosed animals posed a problem for truffle hunters as they often attempted to eat the prize. Dogs will merely sniff out the fungus and gladly take a pat on the head in reward.)

Meanwhile, the Perigord black truffle is now under cultivation worldwide in orchards of hazelnut and oak trees “infected” at their roots with the mycelium of T. melanosporum. These orchards lie in furtive locations in California, Tennessee, North Carolina, Oregon, Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, Argentina and other places. Most are young and still maturing into production, and tourist hunting opportunities for the black truffle will likely grow more common in the near future. The Italian-Croatian truffle has not been successfully cultivated, but some landlords lucky enough to own a white truffle patch among their hardwood trees do host visitors to dig up this most expensive of fungi.

America's most prized fungus, the white winter truffle of Oregon. Photo courtesy of Charles Lefevre.

What’s a truffle good for? T. magnatum is favored for shaving over pasta or poached eggs. It is almost never cooked, and the raw aroma of this critter is so powerful, so intoxicating, so mesmerizing that it is said to drive some people—and female pigs—mad with lust. I’ve only smelled it once, in an Italian restaurant in San Francisco. The chef emerged from the kitchen with a freshly imported truffle on a silver platter, and the smell seemed to hit me like a gust from 25 feet away. If I’d been wearing a tie I think it would have blown up in my face, so powerful was that aroma. T. melanosporum, the black Perigord truffle, is considered almost as good as T. magnatum but is quite different and is often cooked into sauces and meats. Among the New World truffles, the Oregon black (Leucangium carthusianum) may smell like pineapple, wine and chocolate—a truffle that does well in creamy desserts. The autumn Oregon white (T. oregonese) bears similarities to its European counterpart, as does the spring Oregon white truffle (T. gibbosum). Each is piney, musky and garlicky. A favored trick with white truffles, from the Old World or the New, is to place one in a Tupperware along with an egg. The aroma will creep through the egg’s shell and flavor the yolk and the whites.

Almost wherever one goes, truffles can be found. Thousands of species grow worldwide. Most have no culinary worth. Some carry a respectable price tag, like the prized Saudi desert truffle—and just a few are valued like gold. Still others have no aroma or flavor at all but look enough like the coveted species of Europe that fraudsters slip them into the market and draw illicit incomes. T. indicum, for instance, is a worthless lump of a mushroom native to eastern Asia and which looks almost identical to the Perigord black truffle (T. melanosporum). The presence of imitation Chinese truffles in France and Italy has recently become an ecological problem: the species has found its way into the soil and established itself, posing a new threat to the already declining populations of native black truffles. Mixed deviously into a batch of the real thing, fakes add precious weight to a sale that can draw almost $1000 per pound from buyers who assume the product is legit. (T. magnatum draws even more money, often several thousand dollars per pound.) 

All of which should make for some good adventure reading, and we hope that Burningham will have a book chapter in which our heroine visits China and follow her nose into the black market for false truffles. She notes that doing so “will probably be even sketchier” than snooping around Croatia.

Safer, surely, to stay home—but sometimes there’s no resisting the truffle.

Facing the Void: Ellee Thalheimer stands before a high pass near Sampeyre, Italy after an ascent of several thousand feet.

Four months ago, upon arriving in Sofia, Bulgaria to begin a two-month bicycle tour, I met a Ukrainian man named “Slav” at my hostel. Like me, he was an avid cyclist and chronic adventurer and had toured alone through much of Europe. He knew the regions, roads and mountains of Bulgaria like corners of his own backyard. He had pedaled, as well, the entire rim of the Mediterranean Sea, even requiring a tank escort as he skirted the shore of Algeria. Slav’s favorite thing to say about this North African nation was, “Algeria is not touristic. It’s terroristic.” He said so about once per hour.

Slav lived at the hostel. An environmental and social activist, he worked daily to promote bicycle travel in and around Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital. He helped lead a critical mass bike ride every Thursday night through the streets of downtown, and each afternoon he led tourists on guided bike rides to the city’s chief attractions. In doing so, Slav pulled in a slight income and managed to sustain one of the most inspiring, freewheeling lifestyles I’ve encountered.

Funny thing was, this man happened to be a vehement opponent of, as he put it, “the emancipated woman.”

“Why must a woman pursue a career?” said Slav, who was 35 and had already been divorced twice. “A man is the hunter, and he provides for his family. A woman takes care of the house, cooks, cleans, watches children. It was that way for thousands of years. Why change now?”

“You ride a bike,” I pointed out. “Ancient hunters didn’t. Do you hunt?”

He admitted he did not. I posed him another question: “What if a woman wanted to go bike touring with you?” He frowned.

Long ago in America, biking did help bring about emancipation (sorry Slav). Civil rights leader Susan B. Anthony observed this in 1896 when she said that “(bicycling) has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.” And this year, two books came out in which the authors discuss the bicycle’s historical role in the empowerment of women: It’s All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels by Robert Penn and Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom (With a Few Flat Tires Along the Way) by Sue Macy. (Since the cold, wet and wintry season of armchair adventuring is upon us, I’ll soon review these books in some detail.)

Today, more pedal-empowered women than ever are avid bikers. In Amsterdam, New York City, San Francisco, Rome and beyond, women zip soundlessly and nimbly through the streets. They take the lane, merge left to turn, assert their rights as commuters, flip on flashing lights for night riding and blissfully bypass one of society’s nastiest illnesses: the traffic jam. The most intrepid of these women sometimes pack luggage onto their bikes and tour the world. As they pedal, the bicycle charges them with strength, spirit and independence.

In Portland, the thriving bicycle culture teems with thousands of women—31 percent of the cycling populace by one recent count. Among them are two prominent writers and cyclists who are further pushing the bicycle revolution: Elly Blue, a journalist with Grist who has authored a remarkable online series exploring the social and economic value of bicycles, and Ellee Thalheimer, a yoga instructor and writer who has been laboring by pedal and pen to promote the thrilling and rewarding experience of bicycle touring.

Zen and the art of bicycle maintenance: Thalheimer fixes a flat with the composure of a yogi.

This, I decided, I had to hear more about, so recently I spoke by phone with Thalheimer, whose personal website even states, “Bike touring is one of my favorite things ever.”

I asked her why.

“There’s just something about putting all your bags on a bike and riding off and being open to experiencing whatever the road brings you that day,” she said. “It teaches you to be open to the world in a new kind of way.”

Thalheimer’s first bicycle tour was a north-to-south Pacific Coast run with her dad about a decade ago, immediately after college. She fell in love with the lifestyle, kicked into high gear and has since toured extensively—in South America, the Caribbean, Europe and the United States. One of her most rewarding journeys of all was her three-month solo ride throughout Italy in 2008, the research end of a book project for Lonely Planet. She loved the nation north to south, credits Italy as being the place “where I learned to really love food,” and remembers Sampeyre in the Alps as one of the most beautiful places she’s ever seen.

“I don’t usually cry when I see pretty things, but when I got to the top of that pass in Sampeyre, the view was just insane,” she said. “It was so beautiful I almost couldn’t believe it.”

She had to come down, though, and eventually go home, but Thalheimer is almost as thrilled by parts of Oregon. She especially loves Crater Lake and the surrounding country, she says, “but eastern Oregon has really captured my heart. The people are as friendly as they get, the land is beautiful, with mountains and some really hard climbs.” (Thalheimer is marked by a personality trait common to many cyclists: In her words, “I love feeling exhausted.”)

To extol the virtues of her home state as seen from a bicycle and to encourage others (“who might be on the fence about bike touring,” she says) to get on their own bikes and go, Thalheimer is now wrapping up a guidebook about cycle touring in Oregon, a project she’s been researching for years. The book is due out this spring. Asked whether she’s at all reluctant to tell the world about her favorite places, she said, “I love seeing other cyclists when I’m traveling. When two cycle tourists meet somewhere in the middle of nowhere, you immediately have something in common with that person, and you connect in a way that you never could in an urban area.  Anyway, if we ever had a glut of cycle tourists in remote areas, I think the world would be a better place.”

Millions of us agree. I do, and probably so does Slav, who sings the gospel of bicycle touring and building a bike-friendly society in Sofia. It’s a beautiful melody he croons—except the part where he envisions leaving women at the sink elbow deep in dishwater. No matter, because many women have already left him in the dust.