It's something you talk about in hushed tones, asides. It's too taboo to bring up in a crowd, or in writing. (I've been afraid to bring it up here.)

But we've all experienced the glommer -- and someone's got to talk about it.

Glommer, n.: Person who invites him/herself on road trips, hikes, runs, bike rides, climbs, ski tours, ski condos, hut and/or camping reservations. He/she uses some of your gear and probably eats your food, too.

I get the glom -- desperate times, desperate measures and all. I went through a minor glomming phase when I first started climbing. Lacking gear, I made my boyfriend take me climbing all the time (oh, the horror!) and snagged my first climbs at Lumpy Ridge by glomming onto his bros-only trip... which he needed a fourth for, anyway.

The boys punished me appropriately by making me their 120-pound porter. So I paid dues.

But true glomming goes beyond a gear-less phase. It requires a consistent disregard.

Glommers display a repeated lack of awareness (or lack of care) about social graces coupled with some form of babysitting. For example, a glommer would invite him or herself on a road trip, not pay for gas, and be unprepared in some essential way, like not having a beacon for backcountry skiing, or mountain biking in the desert without a spare tube.

You're left praying for a stable snowpack or no cactus spines (fat chance).

Glomming is a bold act, and managing it requires a bold response -- bolder than I feel qualified to muster. So I consulted my friend Erika Napoletano, a Denver cyclist, climber and blogger who writes a weekly "Bitch Slap" to shake up readers. Bold is her trade, and it turns out she's dealt with many a glommer in her day. She offered three solutions for de-glomming:

Ignore them: Facebook and Twitter have given glommers new opportunities to latch on to your trips -- you innocently post your weekend plans, because it's Friday and you're psyched, and a glommer grabs on. Options? Ignore it, Napoletano says. Yes, it's a little rude, but so is glomming.

Be direct: "When you're dealing with a glommer, you have to assume they're oblivious, which is why you have to be direct," she says, I argued that it's hard to be direct if you don't want to be an asshole. Napoletano argued that when you sugar coat it, it leaves openings for them to glom again, and onto other people, and you're doing everyone a favor when you tell Joe, "Hey, you're not invited on this road ride because you're squirrelly in a pack."

Fire them: If you repeatedly showed up to work meetings and didn't have your shit together, you'd get fired, right? "You should think of group outdoors situations like work -- you have to contribute, or you're going to get fired," Napoletano says.

I'm not as direct as Napoletano, so I don't know if I'll man-up enough to be so direct with a friend. But Napoletano pointed out that, usually, glommers aren't friends, they're acquaintances.

"Friends ask friends," Napoletano says. "Glommers don't ask -- they're barnacles."