Climbing Blind, Trusting Your Feet, and Growing Outdoor Afro
I used to have a pretty real fear of heights. I was on a mountain, this wild place, where I finally learned I was stronger than I ever imagined.
After a lifetime of falling in, out of, then back in love with the outdoors, I wanted to dig deep and really discover a part of who I was in terms of strength and resiliency. So when I was 20, I signed up for the Outward Bound mountaineering school in the Pacific Crest Trail.
When it came to climbing, I experienced a lot of anxiety early on. We would do all these practice runs, building the skill in real time, and my fear of heights stayed with me all throughout. Then one day, we began prepping for an evening climb. The plan was to camp at the summit of a mountain range.
I did not have the proper equipment for this trip. My relationship with nature was a passive one up until then; I never did anything that required specific gear. So I picked and chose the kinds of things I thought I needed, and what I really needed — like, say, a headlamp — I didn’t get.
So there I was, trying to climb this mountain. The sun was setting on the other side of it, and because I didn’t have a headlamp, I had to go first before we lost all of the light. I was so slow! By the time I got about halfway up, I really couldn’t see anything — nothing above and nothing below. I felt completely disoriented, and I was too high up for the folks down below to help me with light.
I had a panic attack and just really broke down right there on the side of the mountain. All I could think in the darkness was, I can’t do this. I cannot do this. I can’t go up, and I can’t go back down because I can’t see in either direction.
That’s when I heard the voice of Marty, one of my instructors who was up top working the ropes. “Rue!” I heard him shout from above. “Trust your feet!” Those three words made something click. It was exactly what I needed to hear to figure out the path forward. I managed to scamper to the top without really seeing what I was doing.
Since then, “trust your feet” became a metaphor for overcoming all kinds of obstacles in my life — things like being a divorced mom of three and finishing my undergrad degree in 2009, and right after starting a national network of African-American outdoor enthusiasts with very little resources — what would become Outdoor Afro. Investing my whole self in it has presented constant opportunities to trust my feet. Because sometimes I find myself in a situation like the one on that mountain, in the dark without a view of where I’ve been or where to go next. Building faith through that experience helped me understand that nature is there to teach you whatever you are ready to learn.
But there’s been this assumption that African-Americans don’t have a relationship with nature. It’s the biggest stereotype that we at Outdoor Afro tackle. It comes from both within and outside of the community. To debunk it right away, all I have to do is start asking a couple of questions. I’ll say something like, “What about fishing?” And someone will say, “Oh, yeah, I used to fish with my grandfather.” I start hearing the stories. Or we start talking about grandma’s garden.
Another tactic is to talk about historical figures in a new way, like Harriet Tubman, who was very much a wilderness leader. I mean, how else did she get people to freedom in the cover of night in the wild? How else can we think of George Washington Carver, who took conservation practice to new intellectual heights? This way, we not only have a chance to reframe some of our historical figures, but we can also think about people in our families who had a close connection to the outdoors.
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I had a family that loved the outdoors. We had a ranch in addition to a home in urban Oakland, California. That ranch was a laboratory for me to explore nature in a fun and unstructured way, from playing in the creek to riding my bike along country roads.
It was also a hub for holiday gatherings and all kinds of celebrations throughout the year with extended family. Thanks to my parents, what has really stayed with me from a very early age is a sense of hospitality with nature. It’s something I completely took for granted. There were even moments when I was, quite frankly, embarrassed because my family had cows and pigs, and as a teenager, I decided those things were icky. It wasn’t until later in life that I started to see just how important those experiences were and how others came to value them.
I had one of those “aha” moments in a conversation with a mentor, in which I realized that getting outdoors with my community was something that I wanted to pursue more deliberately.
I became an early adopter of the Internet to try to find people with similar interests. When social media came on the scene in 2008 and 2009, I really latched onto it as a way to connect with people who also loved the outdoors. The idea was to start a website to reconnect African-Americans to nature. I wanted more people who looked like me to be in all kinds of places in the wild, from close to home to the highest mountaintops. And I knew that social media would be an easy way to get that conversation going.
When I started Outdoor Afro, in 2009, I was able to pioneer a conversation in a way that would be much more difficult to cultivate had I started it last year. Back in 2009, when you put something out in your group’s webpage, anyone who subscribed would see your content, so I was able to reach a wide audience in a very organic way.
Now I use MeetUp, the national organizing platform, to get people outdoors. Outdoor Afro has connected close to 10,000 people this way. These are people who are actually physically engaged in outdoor activities. They are the organization’s heart and soul and are guided by carefully recruited leadership teams around the country.
I still lead MeetUps from time to time because I need the medicine, too. If I’m telling the organizers how to lead in Outdoor Afro’s signature way, that means continually testing and adapting how we connect people with nature. I started doing MeetUp groups, in 2010, in response to those who wanted to take the conversation further.
There were people who said, “The online thing you’re doing is fun to look at, but I want to find people in my neck of the woods who want to get together and go outdoors.” So I said, “Okay, let me partner with some local agencies and naturalists,” and I just started learning about what it really took to hold these experiences together. In 2011, Outdoor Afro put out a call on social media asking people if they would be interested, and about 12 said yes. Since then the group has grown to 30. We’ve taken our time growing the leader network because we wanted to learn as much as we could before scaling.
One of the most poignant meet-ups that I’ve been part of has been our first Healing Hike.
I live in Oakland, and after Ferguson, there were helicopters overhead and people were very angry. I was angry. Everybody — no matter where you fell on the spectrum — felt a lot of complex feelings. I knew that the right place for me wasn’t to take to the streets, so to speak. I didn’t feel like that was the answer for me. I was walking to my car and I was thinking, What do I do? It was a very dramatic moment. I’m realizing, Hey, I do nature, that’s what I do. That’s my lane.
So I got on the phone with our leaders and a couple of national partners and said, “Let’s do Healing Hikes.” And we put out that call and people responded. About 40 people showed up, including a local yoga teacher, and we did some exercises at the beautiful Redwood Bowl in the Oakland hills, undisturbed by police in riot gear and any kind of tension from an urban context.
I remembered that African-Americans have always known that we could “lay down our burdens down by the riverside.” And that’s what people did. We hiked to Redwood Bowl and we started sharing. People listened and there was not a single opinion held up over others. And though we did not all agree, people listened and actually heard each other. And those trees in that wild setting just absorbed our energy.
We came out of Redwood Bowl with commitments about what we were going to do for our environment, our local communities, our families, and our workplaces — to make some kind of healing out of all of this. That was definitely a turning point. I am constantly thinking about nature as a place where I can learn to trust my feet, but also as a place for us to heal. That’s what our country needs now probably more than ever before. And Outdoor Afro is here for that.
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Today, we at Outdoor Afro are still very reluctant to participate in new ways of organizing, like solely paying for Facebook Likes. I really don’t think that’s what this movement, this culture shift, is all about. We want to build real relationships with people, and so far we’ve succeeded.
We don’t count our members in just Likes, either. We count them as the people we actually touch and spend time with. We have evolved to become one of the few authorities on African-American community engagement in the outdoors. I’ve been blessed to visit places from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to my urban watershed in Oakland. I share the hope and passion of my good friend, Latino Outdoors’ Jose G Gonzalez, for folks to find the “wild” wherever they are!
And people absolutely do look to us. Outdoor Afro is fielding many more opportunities to get involved and connect folks to nature today. That’s what this is about.
I want to restore outdoor leadership back to the home. I want everyday people — the accountant, the lawyer, the garbage worker who is a passionate fisherman on the weekend — I want those people to see themselves as leaders in the outdoors. I want to make it easy for them to plug into our network and find people who share their interests.
People don’t need to have formal experience. We don’t have to think about outdoor engagement through the perspective of a program. The idea that kids must complete a program to get outdoors today is crazy! I want to disrupt that kind of thinking and help ordinary people equip themselves with knowledge and confidence to be able to create lasting and relevant outdoor experiences for their families and their communities — just like my own parents did for me. So that’s what I mean when I say “culture shift.”
Looking back at my time on that mountain at the age of 20 — the precipice of adulthood — I had an immediate need to learn to trust my feet. I had to be prepared for the life that was coming. I credit nature, my teacher, the timing of that opportunity, for really bringing me where I am today. But the experience also helped me understand that more people can find their own summits in life to learn those lessons, whether it be on the Pacific Crest Trail, where I did, or closer to home.
My hope is that everyone, regardless of what you look like, can find their way back to nature and #OptOutside this holiday season. Click here to see a few things we’ve got going on this month.
