Every August, over 500 people trek out to a park just outside of Seattle for the Refuge Outdoor Festival — a weekend of music by the riverbank, movie nights, hikes through the forest, campfire chats, stargazing and workshops on how to thrive in the outdoors. Organizers created the festival to foster community and space for outdoorsy people of color, and it’s become a staple of a deeply rooted and dense network of social media community groups for marginalized people.
“Honestly, it was the most positive, fulfilling, healing vibes that I’ve ever experienced,” said Jas Maisonet, who is Puerto Rican and the founder of QPOC Hikers, one of the groups that attended the festival. “Like so many tears, so many hugs, so much laughter, so much learning and just decompressing. It feels like you’re there for more than a weekend.”
The popularity of outdoor recreation has exploded in recent years — about one out of every 10 Americans picked up the hobby in the past decade. But as park managers rush to control the number of visitors at parks and address the danger uninformed recreationists create for themselves and the nature around them, they’re struggling to meet growing demands to make the spaces welcoming for people of color. The community groups centered around people of color in the outdoors, like QPOC Hikers, have taken matters into their own hands.
National parks and other recreation areas saw a surge in visitation the few years before the pandemic, driven by a massive marketing campaign by the National Park Service in 2016 for its centennial and the rise of outdoor influencers on Instagram and Facebook. The result has been an influx of new recreationists with limited knowledge about outdoor principles, including how to stay safe and respect their environment.
Outdoor recreation continues to be an overwhelmingly white hobby — in 2019, over 85% of visitors to U.S. National Forests were white, while only making up less than 60% of the total population. Activists, recreationists and even the White House are demanding parks increase diversity in their patches of wilderness, create environments where non-white folks feel safe and remove the barriers that disproportionately keep people of color out of these spaces.
While the COVID-19 pandemic slowed the rapid increase in visitors, the numbers still remain much higher than they were a decade ago, and it disproportionately pushed people of color out of the hobby.
“People at the margins were the ones who had to drop out of outdoor recreation because of, let’s say, increased childcare needs, having to pick up another job, dealing with an elderly family member, the cost of having to travel farther,” said Will Rice, an outdoor recreation researcher at the University of Montana and former national park ranger at Grand Canyon National Park. “All of those constraints were kind of ratcheted up during the pandemic.”
It put parks in a “paradoxical position,” Rice said. “We are feeling the pressure of increased visitation, but at the same time, we’re trying to reduce barriers to people who have historically not been able to access these types of outdoor recreation.”
These diversity problems are an everyday reality for people of color in outdoor recreation. “I was usually the only Black guy I would see for hours or days when I was out there,” said Romell Ward, the founder of the skiing and snowboarding group BIPOC Mountain Collective. He added that at the ski town bars, “a lot of the microaggression started happening — ‘Hey so can you dance?’ ‘How often do you wash your hair?’ ‘I’m not racist, but hey, let me ask you something.’”
It motivated Ward to form his own group of people who looked like him. The BIPOC Mountain Collective started out with only a handful of members, but over the past few years, the group has grown into an international nonprofit with six chapters. The Denver chapter has almost 100 active members.
QPOC Hikers experienced a similarly fast growth.
The group’s growth “exceeded any expectations within that first year that I subconsciously might’ve had, because on Instagram we got a lot of traction kind of right off the bat,” Maisonet said.
The groups are focused on addressing the barriers that have long pushed people of color out of outdoor recreation. Sometimes all it takes is “if you just don’t have the time, energy, money, capacity, gear or transportation,” Maisonet said.
QPOC Hikers partners with Community Gearbox, which allows members to borrow hiking and camping equipment from others, so they don’t have to spend hundreds to buy tents, backpacks and sleeping bags. The group also works with a shuttle service in Seattle to ensure all its members have rides out to the parks they hike in.
Some parks attempt to handle the high visitation problem by creating barriers and limiting access through timed entries, campsite reservations and hiking permits, but researchers think these barriers might disproportionately alienate marginalized groups. So, many parks have started focusing on education instead: By teaching visitors about everything they need to know to keep themselves safe, leave no trace and respect the other visitors, park rangers are able to support more park goers.
It’s particularly important during a period with a lot of new and inexperienced recreationists, many driven by outdoor social media influencers.
“We need to educate these folks,” Rice said. “They’re not coming to Yellowstone to try to degrade the environment. They’re coming there because they want to appreciate it.”
But while parks remain understaffed from the pandemic, it’s hard to reach every new visitor with education.
“Even though we have 6 million people coming here, it seems like there’s about 12 people trying to keep this park together,” a Grand Canyon park ranger told Rice in an anonymous interview for a research study.
Outdoor community groups have stepped up, creating a park-going framework that emphasizes education. Whether it’s formal education programs or informal mentorship, the groups are constantly working to educate their new members in the ways of outdoor recreation and living.
“We’re trying to help people as much as possible — as subtly or overtly as possible — either with workshops or just stopping on the trail,” Maisonet said. It’s about “trying to figure out how we can responsibly be outside … without the conquering mentality, but more of just, ‘I’m going outside to connect either with myself, with other people, with the environment.’”