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This methodological study analyses the merits of adopting an ambulatory 'hike-along' approach to explore the mobile experiences of women during serious leisure pursuits such as Munro-bagging – climbing Scotland's 3,000 feet high mountains. By walking with participants as they ascended their chosen routes, rather than relying on sedentary, post-hoc interviews, we were able to observe the transient, shifting natures of their pastime, the embodied relationships between self and landscape, previously overlooked moments of 'in-between-ness', liminalities between mobility and immobility, and the ways in which women live their experiences into being, intertwining their self-concepts with emerging understandings of their environment. The 'nowness' of our methodology captured the inseparability of actor, (inter)action, self, movement, and temporospatial and sociocultural contexts. Moreover, the inherent mobility of our approach brought a congruence with the subject matter, participants, settings and phenomena of study, which helped to separate women's adventure identities from the androcentricity permeating the canonical literature on walking. We therefore recommend broader adoption of 'hike-alongs' within similar ethnographic studies of serious leisure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on a defining concept of modern surfing: localism. Using a qualitative ethnographic approach, the data for this study were collected using participant observation, field notes and interviews between 2008 and 2009 with a significant population oflocal surfersin a village location in Cornwall, South West of England, UK. Developing Bennett’s definition of localism, data suggested a benign form of localism and in conveying this, we make a number of associated observations. Our analysis considers how a process of Othering led to the construction of Established Insiders based primarily on location, rather than gender. These Established Insiders saw the need to protect their community and its way of life from Outsiders. The focal point for protection was the liminal space/phase that opened up on ‘their’ local waves, as it was through temporal space that communitas was generated and thus community sustained. We illustrate how benign localism was exacerbated by overcrowding and how local surfers’ experiences of localism made them aware of their becoming Outsiders in other surfing localities, modifying their behaviour accordingly. The paper also suggests that debates about localism need to view the concept as a continuum of attitudes and behaviours ranging from the benign to the heavy, and that attention needs paying to how localism varies between contexts and the ways in which localism may share social antecedents. Lastly, we highlight the utility of viewing the beach and wave as liminal spaces that give rise to communitas for those who surf it together regularly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]