CONTRIBUTED PHOTO — Pictured are a group of area women known as “The Howling Hikers” — in the back row, from left to right, are Jan Swanson, Teri Schoborg, Pam Knox, Kayla Bogenrief, Karen Allen and Cyndi Barber. Seated in the front row are Cathy Lacina and Terry Gray. Every year since 2004, at least five of them have traveled to a new location somewhere in the U.S. for a weeklong hiking trip.

What started out as an idea for a group of women to see different parts of the country and get some good exercise while they did it back in 2004 has become a beloved yearly tradition with the 22nd annual installment set to begin in upstate New York on Monday.

Cyndi Barber traced the origins back to discussions with Pam Knox and Teri Schoborg when they worked at Fisher Controls about wanting to go “end to end” across the country and wondering why they hadn’t booked their first trip yet, and former Marshalltown Parks and Recreation Terry Gray through Curves for Women over the noon hour and recalled hearing similar conversations.

One day, she heard they had booked the “Indian Hike,” and the five Fisher employees needed one more person to join them in Vermont. The inaugural group of six — some of whom Gray had never met before — headed east. Through life changes, retirements and even the pandemic, the annual weeklong trip has continued every year since then and taken the women to places as close as Decorah and McGregor in northeast Iowa and as far as Washington State and Yosemite National Park. While attendance and participants have fluctuated a bit — as few as 5 and as high as 12 — Schoborg and Gray have gone on every single trip, many of which have involved a murder mystery and ample bottles of wine.

Gray admitted that they started out as complete novices, not even bringing hiking poles to Vermont and just planning to “go on a walk.”

“We went on a trail that was pretty challenging, and we were struggling. And our faces were red, and we were huffing and puffing. Up ahead of us was an old couple… They were just walking along the trail and we were like ‘How are they doing that?'” she recalled.

While the trip has always been women only, they joked that they’re still on the hunt for a cabin boy who can cook and clean at one of the future outings. And they have no plans to stop hiking anytime soon, finding inspiration from fellow adventurers they meet along the trails, interesting characters in the towns they visit — ask them about Half Pint from Arkansas — and even other Iowans and Marshalltonians who have moved across the country.

“We don’t want to stop because when you get to be older, like a lot of us are getting older, we don’t want to say we can’t do it,” Schoborg said.

Beyond that, there’s so many sites left to see and so many destinations left to cross off the list.

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Contact Robert Maharry at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or

rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.