As we start to finally leave our homes after months inside, there’s one place Americans are increasingly turning to: the great outdoors. It makes sense. Vast, beautiful, and ripe for exploring, the country’s trails, coastline, and national parks make for a perfect combination of adventure, fresh air, and social distancing. But for many of us, the outdoors space seems far from accessible, with everything from hiking and climbing to surfing and cycling often feeling exclusionary to anyone who isn’t white, male, cisgender, or able-bodied.
Thankfully, there are plenty of women out there who are working tirelessly to change that impression. And while it is far from all-encompassing, we've put together this list to spotlight 10 of those women, all of whom are creating communities and leading the organizations and initiatives we need to make the outdoors a place that welcomes every type of adventurer. We hope it encourages you to get out there, too—whatever your version of out there might be.
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Danielle Williams, Melanin Basecamp and Diversify Outdoors
Danielle Williams is not what you would call “risk averse.” Following in the footsteps of most of her extended family, she joined the Army in 2006, and subsequently spent time parachuting out of military planes. It’s what first got her into adventure sports—specifically skydiving—even if it was simply part of her job. “People are active in the outdoors in all kinds of ways,” she says. “In the military, we do a lot of ruck marching [fast, rough terrain marches with 45-pound backpacks]—we don't call it hiking. I didn't know people did that for fun until I got out of the military and immersed myself in this community.”
Since discovering the outdoor community, Williams has become a defining member, launching three organizations that have opened up access and created networking opportunities for adventurers often ignored by the industry. Her first, Team Blackstar, founded in 2014, brings together more than 200 African American skydivers from 70 countries on online forums and for annual jumps. “I wanted to create a space where we could talk about gear and we could talk about our experiences, like the fact that we're commonly mistaken for first-time customers, even after hundreds of jumps,” she says.
Two years later, though, Williams found herself in hospital, fighting rheumatic fever. “I was looking for a space online where I could connect with other adventure athletes of color—a community where I got a lot of joy and purpose—and it didn't exist,” she says. So, she created one, launching Melanin Basecamp on Instagram in February 2016 to bring photos and stories of people of color in the outdoors to the forefront. Now, the account has more than 67,000 followers and has morphed into a blog covering gear reviews, trip planning, industry news, and more.
Williams didn’t stop there. In 2018, she founded Diversify Outdoors, bringing together body positive, LGBTQ+, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian outdoors organizations. “The goal was pretty simple: to create a digital Rolodex of different organizations, entrepreneurs, bloggers, and influencers so that people could find an affinity group in their local area and get connected,” Williams said. (You’ll find many Diversify Outdoors members on this list.)
Diversify Outdoors is an exemplar of the diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts already being done—work she hopes the industry catches on to. “If corporations could get with the work that's already being done instead of trying to duplicate it or create their own mechanisms, that would be incredible—to see Black and Indigenous grassroots leaders being supported and being recognized for their leadership and their labor.” —Meredith Carey
Evelynn Escobar-Thomas, Hike Clerb
A quick scroll through Evelynn Escobar-Thomas’ Instagram feed transports you to some of the most scenic outdoor destinations on the West Coast, but for her, it’s less about curated squares and more about reclaiming the way womxn of color recreate. The 28-year-old Virginia native relocated to Los Angeles for more access to nature, but she soon discovered that not all access was created equal.
During her first road trip to the Southwest’s most prominent national parks, including Zion National Park and the Grand Canyon, she noticed an overwhelming—and alarming—whiteness present. Disgruntled white women on the trails would ask Escobar-Thomas questions like, "Is this an urban group?" Others made unsolicited remarks, demanding that people had to move their cars, assuming that people in Escobar-Thomas's group had parked illegally. This experience, coupled with her love for the elements and the joy felt from occupying nature, propelled her to start Hike Clerb, an intersectional womxn’s hike club founded in 2017. The club has swelled over the last three years, going from seven to over 100 womxn on a trail in a single hike. "Being able to bask in the sunlight, breathe the air, and trek terrain is something everyone should be able to experience, not just the privileged faces we see in the mainstream," she says.
Hike Clerb embraces California’s biodiversity, taking to trails in Eaton Canyon, Sandstone Peak, and Eagle Rock, and hikes always incorporate a “why,” whether that means setting an intention to take up space as a group or using the hike as a form of protest. “Earlier this year, AB 345, a bill that would place a safe space between homes and oil drilling, was up for debate in California,” Escobar-Thomas explains. “We dedicated one of our hikes a protest in support of this bill and gathered to sign the petition and make signs, and integrated social media to voice our stance.”
Accessibility is at the group’s core, with trails selected to ensure anyone can move through the hike easily. This same logic has applied to the virtual hikes members are now taking in light of COVID-19, which come in the form of a call-to-action, sometimes coupled with a challenge, that encourages members to get out on trails wherever they may be. In addition to teaching participants hiking etiquette basics—like staying to the right to allow returning hikers to pass and proper waste disposal—Hike Clerb takes on the uglier side of recreation head-on. Escobar-Thomas acknowledges the systems of power that often exclude womxn of color from the outdoors using digital education resources to teach hikers the racist history present in U.S. parks and beaches.
“It’s about creating equity in the land that has been stolen and violently taken,” says Escobar-Thomas. “In our gathering as a collective, we are showcasing that womxn of color deserve this access,” she says. —Shanika Hillocks
Jaylyn Gough, Native Women's Wilderness
Jaylyn Gough's childhood and the outdoors are inextricably tied. “I grew up on the Navajo Reservation, and we always went outside to play,” she says. “We would throw baby rattlesnakes at each other. The boys would put black widows in our hair. We just had really close ties to the land.” Yet for a long time, says Gough, whose parents would buy her copies of National Geographic to help feed her curiosity about the world, she thought the outdoors was a space “for white men and white women, because there was no one representing what I look like.”
Then, in 2016, Standing Rock happened. “To see over 500 [people] in 70 tribes come together to fight the government, to stand as one unified voice, really spoke to me,” she says. “It made me think, where are our women's voices? And collectively, as a whole, how do we start the conversation of diversity in the outdoors and in the outdoor industry? Because who knows the land better than us?”
Already a climbing and hiking guide, she started Native Women’s Wilderness, an online platform based in Boulder, Colorado, that brings Native women together in the outdoors. Since its founding in 2017, Gough has created a community that not only raises the voices of Native women and provides opportunities for them to explore their own ancestral lands, but educates both Native and non-Native outdoorspeople about the land they choose to explore.
“For a lot of Native people, when they go into the land it's a sacred step. A lot of us find our strength, well being, and health, both on the land and in the land,” she says. “But the outdoor and travel industries—which have claimed billions of dollars on stolen land—give off this romantic idea of wanderlust within the Southwest, without actually looking at the beauty of the land, the history of the land, the traditional peoples, or the broken treaties of the land.” In the past three years, Native Women’s Wilderness has spearheaded campaigns like "Whose Land Are You Exploring On” and led educational hikes across those lands, garnering some 42.7K Instagram followers along the way.
Right now, though, Native Women’s Wilderness is focusing on its “Give Back” initiative, a COVID-19 relief fund for the Navajo Nation, which has been devastated by the pandemic. With parks and monuments within Navajo Nation currently closed to travelers in an effort to stem the spread, “we now really have to rethink the organization, and what we can provide for people,” says Gough. “We’ve got to take care of our own.” —Lale Arikoglu
Rue Mapp, Outdoor Afro
For Rue Mapp, founder of the Outdoor Afro blog and community, childhood trips from Oakland to her family’s rural ranch in Lake County, California, provided the backdrop for many of her early experiences with the outdoors—and inspired her work toward the inclusion and representation of Black people therein. “My dad took such pride in bringing family members from the city to experience the ranch,” she says. “People would really be transformed in that space. The air felt cleaner. The kids could swim and play when they couldn’t otherwise.”
Mapp started Outdoor Afro as a blog in 2009 out of “a desire to share my personal history of how much I loved the outdoors, coupled with wanting to combat the false stereotype that Black people don’t like the outdoors.” Over the past 11 years, Outdoor Afro has grown into an active community, with members meeting up offline to attend events and get outdoors. “When there were riots in the streets after Ferguson, I decided that we were going to do healing hikes,” says Mapp, who’s now based in Vallejo, California. “We turned to nature as a place of solace and reverence and respect for how African Americans have always known we can lay down our burdens by the riverside.”
“Black bodies have not historically enjoyed freedom to exist and even recreate,” Mapp adds. “The act of being strong, beautiful, and free in nature alone is resistance, and lifts up our human right to have access to nature for our health and well-being.”
Now a national nonprofit, Outdoor Afro has offices on both coasts, with 90 carefully vetted volunteer leaders across 30 states that serve some 40,000 community members. Through her work, Mapp is striving to reach a point of what she calls “ordinariness” for the Black community in the outdoors—a moment, she says, "when we look up and see people that look like me out in nature and enjoying protecting it, and it’s no big deal." —Krystin Arneson
Corina Newsome, Black Birders Week
When Corina Newsome, 27, was growing up in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Germantown, she thought she might become a veterinarian—not a wildlife scientist. But it wasn’t for lack of interest. “I didn’t really have access to the resources to know what a career would look like for someone who was interested in studying wildlife,” says Newsome, who runs the @Hood_Naturalist Twitter account. “I also never saw anyone who wasn’t white working with wildlife on television, or in magazines or books. I had a very narrow understanding of what it was I could do.”
It wasn’t until an internship shadowing a friend’s sister at a local zoo that Newsome, now a graduate student at Georgia Southern University, first contemplated a career in wildlife conservation. That mentor, who was also a Black woman, offered Newsome a glimpse of something else. “I got to see representation for the first time,” she says. “It wasn’t until that moment that I realized that my only seeing white people [represented in those roles] had a tangible impact on what I thought I could do.”
Newsome went on to study wildlife biology in college, and after reluctantly taking an ornithology course, she became hooked. (It was seeing a blue jay for the first time that did it, she says; “I call it my gateway bird.”) But being a researcher is still lonely work, she says, with few other Black people in her department. “I’ve seen the impacts of the system on the diversity of people in this space, and I had to ask what the mechanism is that keeps this a homogeneous space,” she says. “I started to really interrogate that.”
In May, that objective took on a new dimension after an incident in Central Park, when a white woman called the police on a Black birder named Christian Cooper. In a large group chat called Black AF in STEM, started by Atlanta-based birder Jason Ward, Newsome helped organize the first-ever Black Birders Week, a social media initiative filled with virtual Q&A sessions, discussions, and more meant to celebrate—and demonstrate—the existence of Black nature explorers. “It’s extremely comforting” for Black people to see one another in these spaces, she says; but it’s also important to signify their presence to non-Black, and in particular, white people. “If racism pops up in birding, it can cost someone their life,” says Newsome.
Increasing that visibility is ultimately part of a broader ongoing project of decentering whiteness, not just in the field of conservation, but in the outdoor recreation space and beyond. She cites an analogy used by a friend of hers, Animal Planet host and STEM storyteller Billy Almon, comparing activists to decomposers, or organisms that break down dying material. “Decomposers don’t just break the material down,” she says. “They turn it into usable resources to build new life. And that’s what we’re doing: breaking down white supremacy and turning the resources that have been used to prop it up for so long to make justice flow for everyone.” —Betsy Blumenthal
Jenny Bruso, Unlikely Hikers
In 2012, Jenny Bruso went on her first hike and it changed everything. Beyond getting a six mile wander in, a switch flipped for the self-described “indoor kid.” “I felt something kind of unlock, this feeling of possibility like I was seeing nature for the first time,” she told the New York Times last year.
As Portland-based Bruso fell more in love with the outdoors and spent time hiking, she grew more aware of how her body—"femme, queer, and fat"—was perceived by other hikers and the industry, if the outdoor industry even reflected it at all. “I found outdoor culture to be hostile to everyone who didn’t fit the white, straight-size, cishet-normative, able-bodied mold,” she writes on her website, JennyBruso.com, which she started to combat that mold, and share resources, how tos, and more with those who faced physical and financial barriers, among others, to hitting the trails.
Soon after, in 2016, she launched Unlikely Hikers on Instagram, to give representation to those who didn’t see themselves in traditional outdoor marketing. “I hope to bust up tired ideas of what an outdoors person looks like,” Bruso says on her site. Now, Unlikely Hikers connects 104,000 followers across a digital community and continues to provide gear and adventure advice. Pandemic notwithstanding, Unlikely Hikers also hosts meet-ups and inclusive guided hikes—hikes where the slowest hiker sets the pace—across the U.S.
Those hikes are on hold amid the coronavirus outbreak, but Bruso has been staying connected with the community she built through a new podcast, launched in April, that has featured guests like climber Nikki Smith and Wild Diversity’s Mercy M’fon. —M.C.
Rhonda Harper, Black Girls Surf
The face of the surf industry has long been cis, white, and male. But Rhonda Harper has been working diligently behind the scenes to change that narrative. A United States Coast Guard veteran, activist, and surf coach, Harper founded her organization Black Girls Surf in 2014, to help girls and young women of color (ages 5-17) to become professional surfers after noticing an ongoing misrepresentation of Black surfers.
"In 2007, I read an article in one of the surf magazines that had horrible reviews about Africa being a dark and bad place. I could not accept that story about my own people, so I decided to put together a contest that would highlight Black surfers from the diaspora because we needed to showcase to these companies that these people are viable,” says Harper.
While helping launch Sierra Leone’s Africa Surf International in 2014 and recruiting surfers from around the world to compete, she came across another problem—not only was there a lack of Black surfers, but it was even rarer to find Black women surfers.
"We started looking within the [surfing] associations and realized that there was no representation of Black women. All of these associations are linked to the International Olympic Committee, so it was a huge problem to see that,” says Harper. “Then we started looking at the surf clubs, and I found Khadjou from a picture at this camp in Senegal."
That Khadjou was Khadjou Sambe, the first Black professional woman surfer from Senegal. When the competition was forced to cancel due to the ebola outbreak, Harper invited Sambe to come train with her in California. Now, Harper has opened up surf camps all over California and Africa, including ones in Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Liberia—all of which she funds out of her pocket, with the help of donations. The program requires every student to also be enrolled in school, says Harper, so they are fully prepared for both life off the waves and the competition circuit after graduating from her surf camps.
"Everyone who volunteers and works at the surf camps does it out of true love for the sport,” says Harper. “It's important to me that these girls receive an education, proper training, and mentorship to succeed in a sport that has not been welcoming to them." —Shauna Beni
Shelma Jun, Flash Foxy
Growing up surfing and snowboarding, Shelma Jun had always had a strong relationship with the outdoors. But it wasn’t until she discovered climbing in 2014—and forged friendships with a tight knit circle of female climbers—that Jun was inspired to start the Instagram account Flash Foxy, showcasing women climbers across the U.S. “I didn’t realize that spaces like Flash Foxy were missing until I met the group of women that inspired me to start it,” says Jun. “The dynamic amongst the group, as well as my own demeanor, was different in a really special way.”
Six years on, and Flash Foxy has not only grown into a community of 43,000 followers, but also puts on the biannual Women’s Climbing Festival (WCF) in Bishop, California, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, which provides a safe space for female climbers to connect, learn, and climb together. Tickets for the festival sell out in less than a minute, and Jun works tirelessly to bring even more women into the sport, hiring female guides, welcoming beginners as well as pros, and promoting values of respect, tolerance, and intersectionality. “Flash Foxy has evolved a lot since the beginning,” says Jun. “It originally started as just a page to celebrate the women I was climbing with. Now, its more of a national community that hopes to provide resources, spaces, and opportunities for women to explore climbing through an intersectional feminist lens.”
The festival has, of course, been put on pause in 2020 thanks to COVID-19. A new education program, launched to provide recreational climbers with a standardized curriculum (everything from lessons on safety standards to environmental and social responsibility) has also been postponed, and Jun has been forced to think creatively. Last month saw a virtual festival take place, which bought panels, tutorials, and even dance parties into the digital space. Many of the conversations focused on the physical challenges of climbing, but the emphasis of the event was on the privilege of it. Namely, who does—and does not—have access to recreating in the outdoors.
“The majority of work is yet to be done as long-term systemic change requires structural changes that take time. I hope that our industry is ready to take on that commitment and work,” says Jun. “Because I know that the outdoor community would be so much richer for it.” —L.A.
Elyse Rylander, Out There Adventures
Elyse Rylander was practically born in the outdoors. She took her first canoe trip down the Wisconsin River at two weeks old, her first camping trip just two weeks later. As an adult, she started working at a paddle sports shop in Madison, Wisconsin, which led to working as a ski instructor in the winter, which then got her into sea-kayaking and backpacking as a guide in Alaska. The list of outdoor jobs goes on.
But it was her junior year of college when she was searching for “a sort of queer Outward Bound,” she says, that the outdoors came up short. “I was finding a few opportunities here and there, like being a camp counselor at a traditional summer camp for their ’gay week,’ but that wasn't what I wanted to do,” Rylander says.
“Being young and having no idea what it's actually like to create a nonprofit. I was like, ‘You know what, it doesn't exist, so I'll do it,’” she says.
In 2011, she created Out There Adventures, an outdoor education non-profit geared specifically towards LGBTQ+ youth around the U.S. (The organization officially got its 501(c)(3) status in 2014.) Since then, the Bellingham, Washington-based founder and her team of volunteers have been planning and guiding backcountry and paddling trips for LGBTQ+ teens, forming partnerships with outdoor job training programs like Northwest Youth Corps, and more.
“I was lucky enough to grow up in a family that prioritized getting outside,” Rylander says. But not every queer teen is so lucky. “Queer teens are overrepresented in all sorts of horrible statistics as it relates to homelessness, mental health situations, and suicide. A lot of that comes from a lack of connection, or a strong connection to family.” With Out There Adventures, Rylander works to recreate that sense of community and familial support—and along the way, the teens learn skills the outdoors teach us all, like self-confidence and resilience.
Because of the pandemic, the group's main trips are “in a holding pattern,” but its partnerships with the Northwest Youth Corps and Outward Bound are continuing as planned. And Rylander knows that the impact of previous trips isn't lessened while we're all staying at home: “When we do our affirmation circle at the end of each program, to have a moment of shared reflection with the kids before they go back to their day-to-day lives, those are the moments when you're really struck with it—being able to bear witness to the really positive change that happens because of time spent in our program.” —M.C.
Luz Lituma and Adriana Garcia, LatinxHikers
For both Luz Lituma and Adriana Garcia, early experiences in the outdoors seemed to prove one thing: they both loved getting outside, but they weren’t crossing paths with others who looked like them on the trails, let alone as the faces of outdoors brands. But they knew that lack of representation wasn’t indicative of a lack of interest from their community. “Luz and I began this conversation like: we’re both Latinx women, we like to go outdoors, and we know we're not the only ones,” says Garcia. “[By] putting our stories out there, and our experiences, we felt like we could connect with other people that are similar to us.”
Their Instagram account, @latinxhikers, launched in August 2017, but the handle is just one element of a larger community shepherded by Lituma and Garcia, who grew up in Georgia and Tennessee respectively. It also includes community hikes designed to bring other Latinx outdoorspeople together. “[I] want to expose more people to these outdoor trails,” says Lituma. “I’m all about being inclusive; it’s in our culture. Whenever we throw parties or food gatherings we invite everyone, and going on hikes and [into] the outdoors isn’t any different.”
Since the pandemic began, these in-person events are on pause—Lituma organized a virtual hike last month—but the interaction continues to flow on social media.
“I’ve seen such amazing things on Instagram of people talking to each other in the comments section and saying ‘Hey, I live in that area too, we should go hiking some time together,’” says Lituma. “[Hearing] ‘I didn’t realize this was something I needed,” and knowing that others are finding like-minded, similar people out on the trail and bonding is definitely rewarding.”
They both know the work is far from done within the outdoors industry, but Lituma says she is seeing more Latinx hikers on the trails, and Garcia is seeing more people of color coming into REI, where she works. They are both hopeful that, one baby step at a time, the outdoors are opening up, so everyone can reap the benefits.
“I feel like my best self when I'm outside,” says Garcia. “I think that it's in my DNA, and it’s something that other folks sometimes have to cultivate. But I think everybody has it in them.” —Megan Spurrell
Alison Désir, Harlem Run
Alison Désir is tackling the running world’s lack of inclusivity at every level. Inspired to get back into running by a Black friend who was training for a marathon and documenting it on social media, Désir, who ran track in high school, completed her first marathon in 2013. “I know that I wouldn’t have ran a marathon if I hadn’t seen someone who looked like me [first],” she says.
Later that year, she founded Harlem Run, a run club that’s grown into a community of hundreds of runners and emphasizes the connection between running and mental health. She’s since fully immersed herself in the running world: along with her work as a mental health coach, she founded a speaking series, Meaning Thru Movement, and two more running-centric organizations. “Harlem Run is about really bringing running to communities of color, Run 4 All Women is about empowering women through fitness, and Global Womxn Run Collective is about then getting women into leadership positions,” she explains.
Run 4 All Women started as a relay race from Harlem to D.C. ahead of the 2017 Women’s March, raising over $100,000 for Planned Parenthood. From there, an ambassador program was created, with group runs and voting events organized by volunteers across the country. Global Womxn, Désir’s latest project, launched last November as a space for women to gather, share information, and develop leadership skills. But as 2020 unfolded and networking moved online, the group has been spotlighting women-run organizations and leaders in the field, allowing people to make connections they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to, Désir says.
“The myth that all you need are running shoes ignores so many barriers of entry, whether it’s feeling like you belong in that space, having representation that lets you know you would be welcome and belong, access to streets that are runnable and free of pollution, access to not feeling like your life is at risk when you leave the door,” she says. “All those things that running requires are assumed in a middle class white identity, but not everybody has access to that.”
Her ultimate goal? “Ten years from now, I want the running industry to be a place where everyone feels welcome.” And to get there, “it can’t just be Black people or Indigenous people or the disabled community or the LGBTQ community fighting,” she says. “It has to be people who control access to resources and power fighting with us and for us.” —Madison Flager