I'm an alpha female. I recognized that about myself at a very young age. I grew in a household full of boys raised by a strong single woman. And I'm still very outgoing and aggressive. I often travel alone unaware of potential dangers.

So, when I came across this article about alpha females on Forbes Traveler, I was pleased. One, because I'm not the only woman adventure traveler. Two, because it's great to hear what and where other women are traveling to. And three, because I hope it will inspire other women to travel. I'm often approached about traveling alone to sometimes dangerous countries and environments. This article helps shed a little light on why we alpha females do what we do and where we do it at as well as the top adventures for women.

Sandy Carlyon has searched for tigers on "elephant-back," jumped into the ocean and swam with dolphins, explored caves in New Zealand, carried camping gear up to 14,000 feet in Bhutan, bumped along in a 4x4 in Botswana and flown over Victoria Falls in a two-seater plane.

"It's about as close as you can get to being a bird," says the 67-year-old of the latter experience. A resident of Purlear, N.C., Carlyon has traveled six times with AdventureWomen, a Bozeman, Montana-based tour company celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Owner Susan Eckert-whose trips have included conversations (as opposed to "table talk") with cannibals in New Guinea-specifically established her business for women in their 50s, which she considered an unserved market in the travel industry. In fact, you must be older than 30 to take one of her trips.

"The average age of the women [on the AdventureWomen trips] is about 55, and they don't necessarily want to come with people who are their kid's age," she explains.

"I have yet to be the oldest on any of their trips," says client Camilla Nielsen of Chicago, who, at 69, has traveled across the Sahara and in Kenya on camel.

"I believe in doing things I wouldn't do myself," says Nielsen, whose husband treated her to an AdventureWomen trip to northern India for her 50th birthday. "I never thought of myself as an adventurous woman," she says. "When my husband gave me the gift, it was kind of like opening Pandora's box." She has since been on more than 16 AW trips. The scariest moments she recalls were walking across a suspension bridge in Nepal and negotiating a section of a cliffside trail in New Zealand that was so narrow she had to turn sideways. It was so unnerving, Nielsen says, that she briefly considered turning around and walking solo the day-and-a-half distance back to their starting point.