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A few weeks after arriving in Canada from Colombia, Mylene Torres went to the grocery store close by for lettuce. As she stood in the produce section looking at greens she had no names for, hunting for the one she had bought her whole life, she realized that a grocery store had never made her feel so out of place.

In Colombia, buying groceries was effortless. Here, the smallest errand was something she had to learn. She ended up going home without the lettuce. 

The memory has stayed with her for more than twenty years. "It wasn't really about the lettuce," she says. "It was about realizing how many little things I no longer knew."

Fatima Narvaez arrived around the same time, in rural Manitoba, with her parents and brothers. They came in October, early enough to get ready for the winter everyone had warned them about. When it came, whiteouts were normal, and the temperature dropped past forty below and kept going.

Cabs were the only way to move without a car, so Fatima and her brothers walked or biked. One of her brothers was twenty-two, and that first winter he walked to his job at a steel plant every morning, a dark shape in heavy layers and a balaclava on days that hit thirty below. His wife was pregnant in the Philippines, waiting for their first child.

Fatima was twenty-five at the time and struggling too. She didn't think of it as a problem. For her, it was just what being new to Canada meant, everyone under one roof and each of them alone in it.

Years later they would both belong to Women's Adventure Network (WAN), a volunteer-run community of women who hike and climb together that Fatima founded. Mylene joined in July 2025, at a beginner rock climbing event, and was hooked after the first one.

Fatima's first time on a trail was almost an accident. She was in Banff as a tourist with a friend when they saw people walking off into the trees at the base of Sulphur Mountain. She followed in sandals, up the path, until the ground got too hard to keep going. She turned back that day and decided she would come back.

Mylene's first hike came years after the lettuce. A friend from her ESL class at the University of Calgary, a Russian woman named Elena, invited her out to Kananaskis, near Ribbon Creek. Elena's friend Anna came along. On the way they stopped at the Petro-Canada on Highway 1, Mylene saw a long line of vehicles and assumed an event was happening. Elena explained that there wasn’t an event at the gas station at all. The hike was the event and the Petro-Canada gas station was where everyone met before heading into the mountains together.

“It was one of those little Canadian traditions I had never known existed,” she says. Then came the bear spray, 

When Elena said they needed to buy it and the clerk explained how to use it, Mylene nearly went home. She had not pictured needing protection from animals. The others promised that walking in a group and making noise would keep them safe, and she believed them enough to keep going. 

The trail was considered an easy one, and she expected it to feel that way. Mylene had grown up surrounded by the Andes, where hiking was simply part of life. But after more than two years without spending time in the mountains, “My body had forgotten what it felt like,” she says. “That first hike humbled me. It reminded me that loving the mountains wasn’t enough. I had to rebuild my relationship with them.”

Mylene thought all mountains would feel familiar. Instead, the Rockies completely changed her perspective. They were nothing like the mountains she had grown up with. “Their rugged faces, towering cliffs, and open landscapes left me speechless. It was the first time I truly understood why these mountains hold such a special place in so many Canadians’ hearts,” she says.

Being back among mountains after two years reminded her of childhood, the running and exploring, the self that had always lived outdoors. "Standing there, I suddenly felt at home," she says. "Not because Canada looked like Colombia. Because the mountains reminded me of who I had always been. That was the moment Canada stopped feeling like the place where I lived and started feeling like home.” 

She had expected the snow to be the thing that would make her fall in love with Canada. "The Rocky Mountains make me feel that I belong," she says. 

Fatima arrived at the same feeling by a different route. She had been reading about neuroplasticity, learning that she could take some control of her own mind, and the mountains became where she did just that. "The mountains became the outlet," she says. "It helped me get off anti-depressants. It helped me feel accomplished. It brought me joy." The climbing taught her, in her words, that she had far more control over her life than she had thought.

The mountains changed Mylene enough that she couldn't keep it to herself. She stopped waiting to be invited, planned her own trips, and started bringing others along.

Fatima couldn't go alone either, same as many women she knew. “So we braved the mountains together,” she says.

She gathered a handful of newcomer women who were afraid of the mountains the way she had been. They lacked gear, know-how, and the people they trusted to go with. But they went anyway, and built the rest on the trail, in her words, "skills, courage, and community." Years later, that group evolved.

Each of them started bringing in other women, a ripple Fatima calls Beyond Trails. Today the work reaches the women who face the steepest barriers to getting outside, newcomers and single parents among them, along with trauma survivors and women up against systemic and economic walls.

For Mylene, the mountains became where she carried the hardest things. Her husband, Chris, was her backpacking partner. And their last trip together was at The Point in Upper Kananaskis. After he passed away, she kept going back to the mountains.

For years, Mylene believed she was too late. "Too old to learn new things. Too inexperienced to start. Too far behind everyone else," she says. She took up backpacking at 45 anyway, and learned to snowboard at 49. "Growth does not have an expiration date," she says. "The only thing truly holding me back was the story I was telling myself."

Those years outdoors taught her resilience, and resilience was what she needed when a hiking accident in the Dominican Republic nearly cost her life. Recovery was long, painful, and uncertain. She had to rebuild her body, her confidence, and her trust in the mountains. "What got me through wasn't determination for a single day," she says. "It was resilience over many months."

On October 18, 2025, she summited Mount Kidd, her first major summit since the accident. Before, it would have been another beautiful day in the mountains. After, every step carried months of recovery and uncertainty. It wasn't the most difficult mountain she had climbed, but it was the hardest summit of her life. "Standing there wasn't about conquering a mountain," she says. "It was about proving to myself that I could come back." It stood for resilience, gratitude, and the quiet determination to keep moving forward.

Baneen Al-Sachit, a climbing instructor and a member of WAN, organized a climbing event in 2025 through the Beyond Trails project. During her event, she looked around the gym and saw Muslim and Arab women and their friends climbing side by side. Born in Canada to Iraqi parents, it was the first time she had seen a climbing space filled with women like her. And she had helped make it happen. “I felt confident as a leader,” she says, “knowing I had created a space where people felt safe, celebrated, and inspired.”

When a woman who has just landed tells Mylene she could never backpack, Mylene has her answer ready. Neither could she. When she arrived in Canada, she wasn't a backpacker or a climber. 

She was someone trying to build a life in a new country, in a place where she couldn't find the lettuce. "You don't have to become an adventurer overnight," she tells them. "Start with a walk. Then another one. Say yes to one invitation. One day you'll look back and realize the person you thought you could never become is already you."

And as Fatima puts it, they're just getting started.