This Sunday is International Women’s Day. Every year, we find ourselves thinking less about celebrating and more about passing something forward. What are we actually giving our daughters? What are they absorbing from the way we live?

Between the two of us, we have five daughters. And most of the time, when we head outside, they’re right there with us. Boots on. Layers sorted. 

We don’t just model an outdoor life for our girls. We live it alongside them. That’s always been the point of Iksplor, and honestly, it’s always been the point of us.

We hope they learn what resilience looks like from the inside.

Not a lecture about grit. Not a motivational poster. Just a mom who, on a hard day, gets everyone in the car and drives to the trailhead anyway.

Some of our best outside days started with nobody wanting to go. A tired kid, a long week, conditions that were fine but not exciting. And then something shifts on the trail. It always does. By the time we’re an hour in, everyone is warmer, looser, better.

We want our girls to carry that with them. The outdoors isn’t a reward for when life is easy. It’s where you go when it isn’t.

We hope they learn that nature takes care of you if you take care of it.

This is one we feel in our bones, and it’s woven into everything Iksplor stands for. We want our daughters to understand the exchange: when you show up for wild places, when you protect them, respect them, notice them, they give something back.

Clarity. Perspective. A kind of reset you can’t find on a screen.

We’ve both leaned on this more times than we can count. And now we get to watch our girls lean on it too, before they even have words for what’s happening.

We hope they learn that adventure doesn’t need a permit.

Some of our favorite days are completely unremarkable on paper. Walking the dog at dusk with a five-year-old who insists on carrying the leash. A few runs after school pickup when the snow is medium at best. Sitting by the river while someone builds a dam out of sticks for forty-five minutes.

We want our girls to grow up without waiting for a perfect adventure. We want them to be the kind of people who just go, because that’s who they’ve always been.

Being outside isn’t something you earn. It’s something you belong to.

Adventuring with them has changed us.

Before kids, adventure meant going farther, faster, higher. We won’t pretend otherwise.

And then we started doing it with small people who stop to examine a bug on the trail for four full minutes. Who need you to look at the exact shape of that cloud, right now. Who hold snow in their bare hands just to feel it melt and look up at you like they’ve discovered something.

Adventuring alongside our daughters has made us slower, more present, and more in love with the outdoors than we were before they arrived. They’re not slowing us down. They’re showing us what we were rushing past.

They’re the reason we keep advocating.

When you’re out there with your kids, skiing through powder or scrambling up something they weren’t sure they could climb, the stakes feel very real. We want them to inherit these same places. The same forests, the same clean air, the same wild.

Iksplor has always been bigger than clothing. It’s about raising the next generation of people who love the natural world and understand why protecting it matters. Whether our girls one day run this company or carry those values somewhere else entirely, that would make us incredibly proud.

What we’ve started to notice in them.

Even at young ages, they know when they need outside time. They ask for it now. That’s not something we taught explicitly. It’s something they’ve built by doing it, over and over, alongside us.

We see their confidence building in small, real ways. Finishing a trail that felt hard. Keeping going when they’re tired. Deciding to try the steeper line.

And the creativity. A stick becomes a wand, a rock becomes a mountain, a trail becomes an expedition. Nature gives kids space to be curious, capable, and free in a way that nothing else quite matches.

Watching that unfold, right next to us, is one of the best parts of being moms.

This International Women’s Day, we’re thinking about all the women raising little nature lovers. The ones coaxing small people into cold boots, packing snacks for the hundredth time, going outside on days when staying in would have been easier.

You’re building something. They’re watching, and better yet, they’re right there with you.

With love from Jackson Hole,

Karissa & Kailey

Co-founders, Iksplor