Nancy Clark says there’s a picture of her, taken just after she finished her first-ever rock-climbing route, that makes her smile every time she sees it.
“I had never rock climbed before because I was told, ‘Don’t do it. It’s not for you.’ You know, that story we get told sometimes as women,” recalls Clark, 68, who lives in Peoria, a small community on the banks of the Willamette River between Corvallis and Eugene. “I was standing there, and my hard hat is all cattywampus, hanging off my head, and I was just so excited because I had done this climb, and I found how easy it was and how well I had done. I just didn’t care. I’ve seen that picture again, and I’m, like, ‘Yeah, maybe you should have fixed your helmet,’ but I didn’t care. You can see the big grin on my face. It’s awesome.”
Clark’s first time climbing, in 2019 in Leavenworth, Washington, was with AdventurUs, a Bend business that offers travel “designed for women, by women.” It’s the brainchild of Saveria Tilden, 52, who started the business in 2019. She grew up in Washington, but headed to California for college, and then lived in Los Angeles for several years. She was working in marketing when a friend suggested that they climb Washington’s Mt. Rainier. That was a pivotal moment, she said. She discovered she loved the outdoors. Even more important, she realized she needed to help other women discover their outdoorsy side, too.
Clark is one such woman who has benefitted from the curated women-led trips that AdventurUs offers, where you show up and most of the planning (food, lodging, logistics) is done for you, and the gear (bikes, kayaks, harnesses, etc.) is at hand and ready for you to use. All you have to do is decide what type of experience you want to pursue, be it mountain biking or paddling or a myriad of other options. The company also plans bespoke trips for small groups, where those participants can leverage an existing trip’s itinerary or design a customized trip.
Clark, who’s been on four AdventurUs trips, says that while picking up new skills is valuable, it’s the exhilaration you walk away with, the “sisterhood that is joined,” and the abundant opportunities to test personal boundaries that make the experiences so “powerful.” And it’s all down to Tilden and her magic in planning the perfect adventures, Clark says.
“The gal’s got sparkles,” Clark said when talking about Tilden, who she met in 2019 through her older sister Deanne, Tilden’s former in-law who Tilden jokes she “kept in the divorce.” Clark is quick to explain that while Tilden is considered “family … we adopted her,” that’s not why she loves the AdventurUs trips.
“I think that’s Saveria’s superpower,” Clark said. “She just develops these trips and lets them happen. The trips that Saveria is offering, especially right now, it seems like, if you can’t find a trip that makes you go, ‘Ohhhhh’, then I wonder about that. You just need to close your eyes and pick one.”
Tilden, who relocated to Bend in 2022, said that AdventurUs stems from her belief that it was necessary to create comfortable, inviting travel opportunities for women, where they can enjoy the outdoors, see the world, and maybe learn a new skill.
“It’s all about feeding those adventures for everybody. It’s in all of us. Sometimes we just need help figuring out what that means and how we define it,” said Tilden. Along those lines, AdventurUs offers a variety of typically female-only trips and occasional “plus one” trips, such as this October’s jaunt to New Zealand, where all genders are invited.
“When I started AdventurUs, it was with the mission and passion of helping people realize that there is adventure in them,” Tilden said. “It doesn’t always have to be this big, epic, giant thing. It could be, you know, going for a walk outdoors. It’s just helping women redefine that and then also giving them the skills to feel more empowered and more comfortable in the outdoors. We create spaces where there are professional guides, they’re women-led, where they can feel comfortable being authentically themselves.”
AdventurUs grew out of Tilden’s own realization, as she prepared to climb Mt. Rainier more than a decade ago, that she indeed is outdoorsy. She’d always been athletic, she said, having competed in triathlons, among other sporty pursuits.
“I didn’t get into the outdoors until I was in my mid-30s. I was outdoors doing athletic things, but not in the outdoors. The first time I ever went backpacking was in 2011. I had a friend who wanted to climb Mt. Rainier. I grew up in Washington, so I was like, ‘Sure, let’s climb Mount Rainier,’” Tilden says, adding with a laugh, “He said ‘You’ve done triathlons. You’ll be fine.’ I then quickly realized that was probably not the case.”
To prepare, Tilden decided to sign up for a wilderness travel course through the Sierra Club and “realized there was this whole world that I didn’t know existed. I also realized that there’s a lot of insecurity and fear of starting something new later in life. I knew the outdoors could be so rewarding, but also so intimidating. And it’s really easy, especially today with social media, to look around and see people’s Instagrams and see all these epic things and be like, ‘I would love to do that, but that’s not me.’ Like just not feeling enough in some way.”
Nancy Clark navigates single track in Georgia on a trip with AdventurUs.
Credit: AdventurUs
From that epiphany sprang the seeds of AdventurUs. Tilden hosted her pilot event in Bend in the spring of 2019, right before the onset of the global Covid pandemic that shut down travel and personal interactions. She thought the business might not survive.
“It’s one of the things I’m most proud of, that we’re still here, and that we’ve grown, and that we made it through that,” she said. “I think one of the effects of covid has been, sort of, that it gave people permission to be more isolated, and I think we’re all still trying to regain what it means to be in community, and come back together. I think it’s even more important now than ever to be creating these spaces.”
The first flagship event was based at the recently closed LOGE Camp, where several of Tilden’s friends and acquaintances enjoyed a long weekend of fun on the water and in the forests. Since then, LOGE has been the site of the AdventurUs flagship annual long weekend trip that has “summer camp vibes” and offers self-care moments, guided outdoor trips, and catered meals from Bleu Bite.
Tilden said that with the recent closure of LOGE, she’s working on moving the camp to Elk Lake Resort, which “actually opens up some opportunities for camping and other fun opportunities.”
Women arrive on Thursday for the flagship event and during the long weekend they create their own schedule, Tilden said, choosing among the offerings that include mountain biking, paddling, rock climbing, hiking, caving, yoga, inner-journey workshops and painting.
“There are all different sorts of classes, and women get to choose their challenge,” Tilden said. “All of these classes are led by professional women teachers and guides, many of whom are Central Oregonians. All of the classes that we do are really beginner friendly, and we provide everything. We provide the guides, the gear, the equipment. You just need to show up.
“We try to create it, so you just get to show up and turn your brain off. We try to make it as easy as possible,” Tilden added. “What we hear from a lot from women is they didn’t realize the amount of thought and decision-making that goes into their lives every day, for everything, right? When they get to us, they get to turn their brains off because we have everything planned, and we feed them. They just need to know what time to be someplace and everything else is taken care of. It allows them to reconnect with themselves and with the other women in ways that they didn’t realize they needed.”
It also showcases the delights of Central Oregon for the women, most of whom hail from elsewhere in the United States.
“I’ve done these trips in other places around the country, but Bend is still the one place that really has it all, and it’s just so special to be able to do all of the things here and to have such a strong community of women guides and women business owners who can support the event. It’s shocking how hard it is to find that in other places,” she said. “Bend is just really unique in that way, so women get to come here and have this amazing outdoor adventure. They get to push themselves, challenge themselves, all in a super supportive environment. It’s meant to be fun but also empowering, and also to really help women see how much they’re capable of.”
Lindsay Kinney, 42, of Kansas City, Kansas, is an avid mountain biker and lifelong athlete. She came across AdventurUs posts on Instagram and was intrigued enough to book a flight out for the Flagship Camp four years ago.
“It just sounded like something so unique that I hadn’t heard about before, and I’m definitely drawn to kind of the opposite of the patriarchy, basically being able to be around more women and diverse communities. I love being outside and trying new things, so I decided to sign up,” she said by phone from Kansas, where she’s the associate director of No Divide KC, a nonprofit arts and humanities organization. “I was at the tail end of my marriage, and it was like an adventure to just try on my own and kind of get a refresh in life.”
She arrived in Bend not knowing anyone but said she made friends with whom she’s gone on subsequent AdventurUs trips. She also was excited by the new athletic endeavors she tried, including snowshoeing, rock climbing at Smith Rock and exploring caves.
“It was a lot of firsts on that trip,” Kinney said. “I honestly went away feeling liberated. I felt more independent, and more freedom, and I felt a true connection with the women. We didn’t talk about what people did, although I’m sure we did towards the end of the weekend, for jobs. It was just, like, ‘We’re all here on this adventure.’ It was the best kind of camp. If you could just imagine the best camp as a kid, but we’re adults now. And that was my first time being in a group with female leads and that many women. I just found there was such a level of comfort and genuine connections from the very first second people got there. Everything just felt very authentic and comfortable.”
Currently, AdventurUs has several globe-trotting adventures on offer, including a trek across the Camino de Santiago in Spain in May in which participants will hike, bike, and horseback ride; a July long-distance hike on a tour of Mont Blanc that’ll take participants to France, Italy, and Switzerland; a kayaking and hiking in Croatia and Slovenia in September; and hiking in Japan’s northern-most island of Hokkaido in September.
Stateside, the Flagship Adventure Camp (https://trips.theadventurus.com/t/the-adventurus/bend-or-womens-adventure-camp-2026) is set for June 4-7. Additionally, there’s a whitewater trip (https://trips.theadventurus.com/t/the-adventurus/womens-salmon-river-rafting-adventure) on the Salmon River in Idaho set for Aug. 10-15. Tilden says it’s a “special” trip that includes private flights to and from Boise to the river, the first night in a hotel, and then a multiday river adventure of rafting and camping.
For most trips, Tilden works with local operators and guides, predominantly female, although there are a few husband-and-wife guide teams with which AdventurUs partners.
“We really like to support women guides,” Tilden said. “That’s something that’s really important to me when I go places, is requesting women guides because women are so underrepresented, especially in outdoor and adventure travel, that I feel like it’s really important to request them and require them because it shows the need and the demand. And it makes it so those women are given more opportunities.”
If you’re not looking for a trip, you can partake of the free speaker series that AdventurUs, in partnership with SheJumps and Between Evergreens, offers the last Tuesday of the month, January through April. The “Empowering Women Through Adventure” speaker series is held at the Embark coworking space in Bend.
“We like to choose local women who are doing rad things, and they come and they talk about their story and their relationship with adventure in the outdoors. It’s pretty great,” Tilden said.
Additionally, AdventurUs offers virtual workshops “that are generally a combination of education and inspiration,” and is starting up a women-only lunchtime walk in partnership with Outside In. The walks will occur on the first Wednesday each month, from Noon to 1pm, starting at Outside In.
For Tilden, the speaker series, virtual workshops and lunchtime walks help promote Bend, which she’s loved since the first time she visited.
“I discovered Bend in 2019 with the first (flagship) event, and was like, ‘What is this magical place?’ It just stole my heart. It was the first time I’d been some place where I felt like the place matched who I was as a human,” she said. “I really wanted to live someplace that had community and that I could help build community and be part of it. It’s been really great.”
This article appears in the Source February 26, 2026.
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