Preparing for your first ambitious day hike can be intimidating. With these tips, you can focus less on what you need to bring along and more on the trail and the beauty around you.

Pack Smart

When loading your pack, place heavier items (like a second water bottle or a bulky jacket) at the bottom and closest to your back. Keep lighter stuff and anything you want easy access to, like snacks, near the top.

Keep a Paper Trail

A paper map and a compass are the most reliable navigation tools for unfamiliar terrain. Before you set out, write down your itinerary and estimated return time. Leave a copy in your car, and send one to a friend.

Stay Warm

Weather can change quickly, especially when you’re hiking at altitude. Pack a rain jacket and a warm midlayer, such as a puffy or a wool sweater. And don’t forget a space blanket. In an emergency, this heat-reflective piece of plastic can stave off hypothermia.

Fuel Up

PB&Js and trail mix are classics, but my favorite hiking snack is onigiri—Japanese rice balls with various fillings. (I like smoked fish and pickled plums.) Make sure to balance carbohydrates, protein, and salt, and always bring more than you think you’ll need.

Occupy Your Mind

Even spectacular hikes have moments of monotony. A field guide helps you identify flora and fauna along the way, and learning more about what you encounter on the trail is a great way to connect with your surroundings.

Light Your Path

Always pack a headlamp (I recommend the , $25), in case the hike takes longer than expected or something happens along the way. Don’t rely on the flashlight on your phone—you’ll need the battery in an emergency.

Plus: The Trick to a Good Day

Not all trail essentials are carried on your back. Ashley Manning, an outdoor guide based in Helen, Georgia, who posts encouraging tips , says that having a healthy mindset is just as important as what goes in your pack. “A lot of people who try hiking are so uncomfortable that they hate the experience,” she says. “It’s because they push themselves to the limit.” Slowly work up to bigger hikes until you find your sweet spot. Once you’re on the trail, focus on fully absorbing the experience. Also, make sure you leave everything how you found it. “Recreate responsibly,” says Manning. “Pack it in, pack it out. All of it.”

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Aliphine Tuliamuk visualized the finish line of the Olympic Trials marathon long before she touched down in Atlanta in February 2020. The 32-year-old Kenyan American had won road races before, but she was the tenth seed going into this one—a long shot, or at least an underdog. She would toe the start line with more than 400 other women, hoping to finish in the top three. She’d thought about this moment for 12 years.

On the morning of the marathon, Aliphine is feeling stressed and physically off. Her right leg hurts. By the time she emerges from her hotel room, her coach, Ben Rosario, sees that she looks frightened. He gives her a pep talk and reminds her to smile. (“A happy Aliphine is a dangerous Aliphine when it comes to racing,” he says later.) Once she arrives in the lobby, the spectators milling around see an entirely different runner. Dressed in her team’s signature Diva Blue, she strides across the street to Centennial Olympic Park. Standing at the start, she’s self-possessed, elegant, hungry. When the race begins she takes off, her homemade red, white, and blue beanie quickly disappearing around the bend.

Throughout the race, there are only two nonwhite women at the front of the pack: Aliphine and Sally Kipyego, who is also Kenyan-American. During the , they’re almost always in the frame, but they are rarely talked about. The commentators—all of them white men—discuss the athletes to watch: Des Linden, Emily Sisson, Molly Seidel. Aliphine’s name doesn’t come up.

Aliphine has no idea what the commentators are saying, of course. She’s in the middle of a race, focused on winning, and the first 20 miles of a marathon repay steady patience. By mile 21, she and Seidel have broken away to become the front-runners. Mindfulness, Allie T., mindfulness, Aliphine tells herself. She’s an efficient engine, no movement wasted, her long stride smooth as she glides toward the finish.

Even as Aliphine steadily pulls away from Seidel, the commentators say very little about who she is or how she got here—about her Kenyan village, her American hometown, her multiple national championships. Yes, Aliphine was an underdog, but she didn’t come out of nowhere. She’d been consistently winning road races and placing in the top ten at major competitions for more than 15 years.

The 26.2-mile course is relentlessly hilly, and the final stretch is brutal. At the end there’s pain, but perhaps a reward, too. Aliphine arrives again at Centennial Olympic Park, an arch adorned with five gold rings above her head. She runs across the finish line, arms up, a miniature American flag in her hand flapping in the breeze. She’s won, with a time of 2:27:23. As the crowds cheer, Aliphine immediately turns around to applaud her future teammates as they cross, Seidel in second and Kipyego in third.

During and after the race, journalists and running experts called it many things: , brilliant, heartbreaking. These descriptions were accurate, but they missed the historic nature of the new Olympic marathon team. In punching their tickets to Tokyo, Aliphine and Kipyego were set to become the first Black women ever to represent the U.S. in the event at the Olympics. Aliphine emphasized what this meant during the small number of , talking about her adopted country with reverence, appreciation, and a deep understanding of the American dream. (She earned her citizenship in 2016.) “I’ve always said that making the Olympic team would be my way of showing my gratitude to this beautiful nation that has given me so much,” she told one interviewer.

The Olympic Trials took place on the last day of February. No one knew then that for many the race would be the first in a series of lasts: the last time watching sports in person, or boarding a flight, or hugging friends goodbye. On March 11, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, and normalcy stopped all over the planet.

Aliphine’s flight from Atlanta to Flagstaff, Arizona, where she trains part of the year with Hoka’s NAZ Elite team, would be her last for a while: the pandemic would force her to postpone plans to visit family in Kenya. As things began to shut down, uncertainty set in around the Tokyo Games, which had been scheduled to begin in July. To quell her worries while she waited for a decision, Aliphine did her best to keep busy.

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In the spring of 2019, right before I leave for my writing residency in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, my mama tries to give me a gun. A Ruger P89DC that used to belong to my daddy, it’s one of the few things she kept after his death. Even though she doesn’t know how to use it, she knows that I do. She’s just had back surgery, and she’s in no shape to come and get me if something goes wrong up in those mountains, so she tries to give me this. I turn the gun over in my hand. It’s a little dusty and sorely out of use. The metal sends a chill up my arm.

Even though it is legal for me to have a gun, I cannot tell if, as a Black woman, I’d be safer with or without it. Back in 2016, I watched the aftermath of ’s killing as it was streamed on Facebook Live by his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds. Castile was shot five times at close range by a police officer during a routine traffic stop, when he went to reach for his license, registration, and permit to carry a gun. His four-year-old daughter watched him die from the back seat. In his case, having the proper paperwork didn’t matter.

I’ll be in the Smokies for six weeks in early spring, the park’s quiet season, staying in a cabin on my own. My local contact list will be short: the other writer who had been awarded the residency, our mentor, maybe a couple of park employees. If something happens to me, there will likely be no witnesses, no one to stream my last moments. When my mother isn’t looking, I make sure the safety is on, and then I put the gun back where she got it. I leave my fate to the universe.

Before I back out of our driveway, my mama insists on saying a protective blessing over me. She has probably said some version of this prayer over my body as long as I’ve been able to explore on my own.

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It was a simple case of mistaken identity: Earlier this year I was at The Outbound’s Pursuit Series adult summer camp in North Carolina when an ultrarunner walks up and introduces herself:

“Hi, Mirna, I follow you on Instagram.”

I put my coffee cup down and shake her hand before politely explaining that I am not Mirna (aka The Mirnavator). Embarrassed at her gaffe, she draws back her hand, mutters an apology and moves away—I wasn’t the plus-sized ultrarunner with 75K followers that she was looking for.

I realized this runner didn’t really see me at all. She saw someone that she thought “fit the description” because Mirna is a plus-sized African American woman, and I am too.

Mirna and I have totally different body shapes and skin tones. My hair is almost always colored with shades rarely found in nature (think lavender, electric blue, hot purple). I have hundreds of keloided scars that run from my shoulder to my wrist, from my decade long struggle with self-injury. Mirna is often all smiles, willing to command attention, and I am what some folks might term the typical wallflower writer. Half marathons are my mileage of choice. Mirna has the capability to run 100 miles at a time. The only things we have in common is that we are larger-than-expected (not average, because the notion of average is bullshit) outdoor advocates of color. There is such a limited representation of both fat and black bodies in the outdoor industry that, of course, I must be that Insta-famous woman, right? At best, that assumption is lazy. At worst, it’s racist. There can only be one black girl socializing in the middle of the woods, right?

The Body Positivity Movement Has Devolved

Sometimes when I finish a hike or a run, people come up to me and say they’ve been inspired by my determination to finish, even though I was slower than everybody else. The unstated assumption is that because of my skin and size, I should be capable of less. They even call me brave.

I am not brave. I’m just trying to build a life that I’m proud of. To feel healthy, happy, and safe. I don’t want to be a unicorn, and I have no desire to be inspiration porn.

Inspiration porn perpetuates the belief that personal willpower can overcome any injustice, even if the problem is large, systemic, and not easily solved by one person’s resilience/problem solving.

It’s the same malfeasance that makes adaptive athletes “inspirational” or “brave” for simply pursuing an activity they love. That same insidious toxic positivity makes me bristle when people want to talk about body positivity. At the core of unicorn syndrome is the idea that people who exist outside the norm are there to make conventionally beautiful people thankful for what they have; that we are here to help them appreciate life, and to present the “exceptional fat person” or “exceptional diversity narrative” in a positive way.

Marketing gurus have cloaked inspiration porn by coopting the term body positivity, a term that has been misconstrued to the point that It is no longer recognizable. In its original form, the body positive movement believed in a pretty radical notion—the idea that you should love the skin you’re in, regardless of its size, shape, color, age, ability. In its current iteration, it often feels like a marketing gimmick—it’s the filtered, fluffed up version of the same socially constructed notion that physical attractiveness is the most important thing about people and we should use it to measure our self-worth. When we compare ourselves to this rubric—“balanced” body proportions, unblemished skin, perfect smile, we never measure up.

Up and down my Facebook and Instagram feeds, conventionally beautiful, proportionate women in an array of sizes pose in bikinis encouraging all of us, no matter our weight, to embrace our curves, shun diets, and love our bodies. The problem? The current aesthetic of body positivity has a weight limit, and outdoor brands aren’t showing off Rubenesque women or large stomachs. It still feels like some brands would rather die than put a fat athlete on their Instagram feed, clinging to the notion that their messaging is aspirational instead of realistic, their photographs are all of all sinew and stone, depleted of color.

Sometimes a brand will talk about being body positive asking consumers to embrace their stretch marks and challenge beauty norms, but their clothing stops at a size 14, when the general populace need sizes up to a 28. As it stands, the message is that loving your body has an upper limit and beyond that, you aren’t deserving of the same self-love smaller people can cultivate. That doesn’t stop companies from using body positivity for likes and social media collateral, without offering anything in return. In 2018, there was even the alarming trend where brands like Madewell and Lululemon used plus-sized models in ads when they did not offer plus sized clothing.

While there is less outright objectification than in magazines of yore, our industry is still struggling with representation and the idea that there is a lot of space between body dissatisfaction and body love. Most of us live somewhere in between, in a space known as body neutrality.

Body neutrality means shifting the mindset of needing to lose weight or worrying about what you see in the mirror to focusing on how you feel. The goal is to focus on what feels good, like meditating, going for a walk, or riding your bike. It means not delaying your happiness until you reach your goal weight or achieve a certain look. It is an ever-evolving process of taking note on how your body feels, and the changes within it.

Part of the implicit goal of body neutrality is to free up all the energy and attention that people often devote to body anxiety so that they can care about other matters instead – like JEDI efforts, reducing plastic use, protecting public lands, or any other issue we need more people working on. Being relentlessly positive about our bodies forces us to regulate our emotions, stuffing the negative ones down deep, until we can no longer contain them.

I honor and respect my body. I like feeling strong. There are certain things about it that I like, but I can’t say that I wake up every day and I love it. Writing that makes me feel like a failure, but I take shelter in knowing that my feelings shift daily.

Sometimes my body fails me and I don’t complete a hike that frustrates me. That niggling bit of self-doubt emerges. The relentless march of body positive posts—by personalities and brands alike—make me feel bad for having anything but gratitude for the body that I inhabit.

How Brands Can Do Their Part To Be More Inclusive

Good-intentioned people have been asking me lately what their brands can do to shift this dynamic. Here is my advice:

• Embrace the original tenets of the body positivity movement, and understand that people don’t come in a “one size fits all” package.
• Drop the preconceived notions about who you believe your consumer to be.
• Voice a commitment to practicing inclusivity, acceptance, and equality in hiring practices and choosing ambassadors.
• Ask your consumers how they see and define themselves, how they wish to see themselves, and what they desire from companies like yours in order to bridge that gap.
• Ask yourself/your team if your brand is engaging in fitspiration, tokenism, or inspiration porn.
• Do a media review. How many images and/or stories do you put out a year that feature people from different communities? How many different modes of diversity do you feature in a six-month span?
• Think critically about your brand’s ambassadors–do they represent the multifaceted, nuanced outdoor space that new generations are flocking to?
• Go deeper with your storytelling, find those places of tension and explore the social, cultural and political dynamics that shape that moment.

About an hour after my encounter with the North Carolina ultrarunner, Mirna arrived at camp. Hoka One One, one of the camp’s sponsors, invited one of their ambassadors, Latoya Shauntay Snell (aka Running Fat Chef) to give a talk about her love of ultrarunning and work as a body politics activist. When she arrived the three of us hugged and squealed at the rarity of the moment: three black plus-sized female athletes in one place, smiling and clowning around in the North Carolina sunshine not having to defend our appearance, performance, or existence. The camping crowd at The Outbound’s Pursuit Series was comprised of 30 to 40 percent people of color, with women as well as non-binary folks well represented. They are one of the companies working to figure out how to be welcoming to a larger spectrum of people. In this crowd I wasn’t forced the carry the weight of representation all on my own.

Before the three of us parted ways, we had a fellow camper takes a photo us, standing in our sports bras, grinning from ear to ear. Three radically different women living our truths in different corners of the country, converging for one afternoon in the middle of the woods. Let’s shoot for more pictures like that one.

The post Opinion: In the Outdoor Industry, Body Positivity Isn’t Enough appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

You’re about to read one of the şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Classics, a series highlighting the best stories we’ve ever published, along with author interviews, where-are-they-now updates, and other exclusive bonus materials. Read Tracy Ross’s interview with Latria Graham about this feature here.

There’s reality behind some of these beliefs, but the big takeaway—that Black people dislike the outdoors—is wrong. I’ve loved the woods and wild places all my life, and the same is true for my family and friends. According to by New America Media’s Next 100 Coalition—a group of civil rights, conservation, and community organizations working to bring diversity to national parks and other outdoor spaces—we’re not alone. Seventy percent of those surveyed, all people of color, said they regularly participate in outdoor activities, including hiking, camping, photography, and picnicking. In that same poll, 57 percent of respondents said they’d visited U.S. public lands.

So why do these stereotypes persist, despite statistics and visible evidence that prove otherwise?

In part it’s because African Americans don’t always go where white people do. Swimming? Pools used to be segregated in the South and other parts of the country, so it wasn’t easy to join a team and practice your freestyle kick. Skiing? Not in the cards if you’re poor and live in an inner city. Beaches? In many places, blacks were banned by law or custom. And national parks weren’t especially welcoming, either; many were created as an escape from urban sprawl, at a time when urban was shorthand for blacks and immigrants. The parks were designed to be clean and white, and if we let the data tell the story, that’s how they’ve stayed. In 2009, the National Park Service did a of the American public, consisting of phone interviews with more than 4,000 participants. According to their data, African Americans comprised just 7 percent of visitors.

But again, the reasons for this are really more about history than desire. In that same survey, 16 percent of African Americans said they hadn’t visited a national park because they thought the parks were unsafe. (Less than 5 percent of non-Hispanic whites responded this way.) Why is this number so high? I believe it’s partly because of the Park Service’s history of discrimination. Shenandoah National Park was guilty of this shameful practice as late as the 1940s, hanging wooden signs at certain spots that identified Picnic Grounds for Negroes. Signs on some bathrooms said they were for white women only.

These days I tend to visit a Park Service site approximately once every two years, but that’s because there aren’t many national parks close to where I live: Spartanburg, South Carolina. I’m now 31. I didn’t visit my first, Everglades National Park, until I was 26. But I’ve been a disciple of landscapes for as long as I can remember.

My family has always had a cultural connection to the outdoors—our relationship with the land is the cornerstone of a shared history. When we tell stories, we remember the years by what the weather was like. (I graduated from Dartmouth, in New Hampshire, in 2008, at the beginning of the Great Recession. That year, I remember, it hailed six times in Spartanburg County.) For us land ownership is a point of pride. What we have isn’t much, but it’s ours, and to us that feels like freedom. Our 15 acres of farmland, houses, and trees—along with a nearby lake where we have access—has given my family somewhere to hunt, fish, explore, and play outdoors. It’s where my dad found a renewed sense of purpose as a small farmer.

If you cut me, my blood would be the color of the red-clay hills my family has walked and worked for four generations. We were shaped by the soil, which is red from its iron content but also, in my mind, from the violence of southern history. The land fortifies us, makes us strong, and the deep scarlet dust clings to our bodies like mist on the nearby mountains.

My father, in his youth, thought farming would be his undoing, so he left, part of the mass exodus of rural Black men and women who went off in search of something better—college, a corporate job, new places for new dreams. He eventually came back, which allowed me a reconnection that has been one of my life’s greatest blessings.

In my early years we lived on the edge of Nashville, Tennessee, our days spent in nature. We played in a creek that ran along our property, examining tadpoles and catching bugs we found in the backyard, stowing them in mason jars, and poking holes in the lid so our specimens could breathe. We swung from the gnarled limbs of a peach tree, forcing petals to fall prematurely, violent streaks of pink strewn across a freshly mowed lawn.

I was a Girl Scout, my younger brother a Boy Scout. We often tagged along on each other’s camping trips, accompanied by our father, a veteran woodsman. My brother and I wanted to be artists. My father’s goal was to make sure that, whatever we decided to do, we’d be self-sufficient, always capable of feeding ourselves.

When I was ten, in the summer of 1997, my father was lured back to South Carolina: the iron in his veins was calling. We landed in the suburbs of Spartanburg, but most of my free time was spent at the bottom of Newberry County, in Silverstreet, population 162.

Corn and soybeans had taken over the landscape by then, tended in neat little rows near the highway, cloaking the countryside with green. Two streets over from the main road, the idyllic rural setting is replaced by something more rustic. Over here, the street signs are covered in kudzu. Cars that no longer run list to the side, jacked up, tires in the air. Deserted barns, slowly being absorbed back into the forest, occasionally burp the damp, earthy, rotting smell of soil. The rust on metal roofs blossoms and spreads during summer like the honeysuckle clinging to my grandmother’s mailbox. We’re impossible to find if you don’t know where to look. We don’t mind.

This is my inheritance, and I adore it. As children we spent our time crisscrossing a network of back roads that even the police didn’t come down unless you called them or there was a warrant out. This is home—the Graham family compound, where most of my aunts and uncles own property adjacent to the two-story, yellow and white house where my grandmother still lives.

This is where I did all my sustenance and survival training under the watchful eye of my father. I learned about herbal medicines from my grandmother, committing to memory knowledge that never made its way to the page. I tended hogs with my uncle and cousins. I learned what it meant to provide for myself through hard agricultural work, my body sunburned and tense from building barbed-wire fences to keep the cows away from my ripening cantaloupes. I spent muggy, itchy summer days in long-sleeved clothing, picking okra.

My eagle-eyed father could spot a pecan tree amid a thick grove of other species while lighting a cigarette and steering his gold-colored truck with his knees. He had hands the size of baseball gloves and a way with a knife that I never quite mastered. He loved the land even when it didn’t love him back.

My father had a special affinity for fishing, and for him, being outdoors meant you had to accomplish something—the outing had to involve finding food or checking off a chore, like routine fence maintenance. A walk through the woods would yield a shirttail full of muscadines or a baseball cap stuffed with blackberries, the brim forever stained with juice. Generosity, love, and care all revealed themselves in his woods.

I would not experience real backcountry wilderness—the kinds of places şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř celebrates—until I went off to Dartmouth in 2004. That’s also when I started learning about the various things that Black people don’t do.

I’d never run up against these assertions before. In the mostly white suburb where I went to school, being Black meant being different, yes, but the real split was between rural kids and the affluent kids from the other side of town. This rivalry played out every year at a high school football game between Dorman (rural) and Spartanburg (city). We would come to school dressed in overalls and clanging cowbells, with the occasional upperclassman driving a tractor in from the farm. In this setting, being Black meant being hardworking and capable, not subservient. My parents encouraged anything I wanted to try. I knew how to sew and shoot before I knew how to drive.

At the start of college, I began to feel ambivalent about where I came from. In the larger American culture of that period—the early days of Facebook—southern was code for stupid and black meant second-class. This was the first time I heard that Black people don’t do the outdoors. Later, when I had to complete a 50-yard swimming requirement for graduation, I was told that we don’t swim either, the way women were told we weren’t interested in STEM classes.

I took a wilderness-rescue course one winter, in breath-snatching cold that left my eyelashes frozen. The snow was up to our armpits as we practiced different ways to carry an injured friend out of the woods. Over the years, I would traverse the Green Mountains and the White Mountains. I made my way to the top of Mount Washington with people from my geography class.

Often feeling marginalized a thousand miles from home, I searched for some way to understand my heritage amid the landscape of history. In high school, we’d read the traditional canon of old dead white men, and there was no room for my people in that picture. When African American literature entered my consciousness, it was all about urban spaces, created by writers who, as a result of the Great Migration out of the South, lived in cities like Chicago and New York. I needed to give voice to my experiences, too, and their urban revelations were at odds with what I knew.

Nobody cared about stories like mine, I thought, and by extension nobody cared about me. Professors could smell the desperation, the sour hint of terror-sweat on my skin. Still, my body could not endure the erasure of my ancestry, of the adventurer in me. There were weeks when I couldn’t sleep at all and found myself outside, walking through uninhabited places, waiting for the sun to rise, unsure if it ever would. Hemmed in by tall gray walls of granite, I wondered if this even counted as living.

Zora Neale Hurston saved me. Years before I discovered the serene but spare poetry of Lucille Clifton and the devastating prose of Jesmyn Ward, Hurston, an anthropologist and Floridian who published mainly in the 1930s, was the first writer who made me feel that there was still a place for me outside. In books like , she made literature out of life in a way I’d never read before. She gave me a means to understand all the death and destruction I read about in history books, and the role that race and class played in it.

Hurston talked about wild places and true things, about men and women I recognized, and my skin prickled with their familiarity. I wanted to be a bold adventurer like her—setting off in her car, gun in the glove box, connecting with endangered people who those in power would rather stayed silent, knowing that if they talked they would tell terrible truths.

That’s how, at age 26, I found myself in the Everglades, on a trip with my parents, at a time when my father was suffering through the late stages of terminal cancer. It was February 2013, and the first time we’d ever attempted a trip like this together. When I was a child, Great Smoky Mountains was the park closest to where I lived. We passed it plenty of times, but always on the way somewhere else. In Nashville, my parents held corporate jobs in retail management. If they were able to get two days off in a row, we often piled into our slate Mitsubishi and headed for the Graham family homestead. The trip took eight hours each way, no time for detours.

When we moved back to South Carolina, we ran a farm and produce stand that became a year-round obligation. A long road trip to someplace like the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, or Olympic National Park was out of the question.

Geography is one of the largest impediments to overcome. National parks are not evenly spread across the U.S. Certain chapters in our country’s history—including westward expansion, which involved the takeover of Indian land that often became national parks—explain the disparity.

According to the 2010 census, 55 percent of respondents who identified as Black lived in the South, which has only nine national parks unevenly scattered throughout the entire region, including Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, Hot Springs in Arkansas, Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and Shenandoah in Virginia. Then there are the Biscayne, Everglades, and Dry Tortugas parks, clustered together deep in South Florida. In the extreme southwest corner of Texas—which barely counts as the South—sit Big Bend and Guadalupe Mountains.

The states of Delaware, Maryland, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and West Virginia don’t have any national parks at all. For most people living in those areas, visiting a national park means at least a day’s drive. Park visitors also must find places to eat and sleep, at a time when most African American survey respondents list time and money as two of the most significant barriers to getting outside.

Spending a week in Everglades National Park, my parents and I explored Chokoloskee Bay and tramped through the swamps right outside Everglades City, talking to anyone who would talk to us. We were slightly disoriented by the feeling of exploring a place that we’d only read about in books, but we got in the swing soon enough. We spotted red-winged blackbirds and roseate spoonbills—and, of course, my father saw them first. We took a tram tour into Shark Valley. We stopped at every café along the Tamiami Trail, hoping that something would soothe my father’s taste buds, burned dull from the chemotherapy pills he was taking. (Frog legs did the trick.) Herons, egrets, and cormorants kept us company as we tried to figure out where we should head next.

During that trip, we never camped on park property, instead staying in either a bed-and-breakfast or a KOA site. I wasn’t sure how to go about getting a camping reservation in the park on short notice, and I needed to know that my father had easy access to medical care if he needed it.

My dad was more worried about our safety. Born in 1951, he grew up in the Jim Crow South, where segregation was law—sometimes enforced with fists, handcuffs, or a rope. For all the progress America had made by 2013, he couldn’t shake the memories. During his youth, racist local laws, discriminatory social codes, segregated commercial facilities, and racial profiling by police made it impossible to relax in public spaces.

Back then people of color could be embarrassed, insulted, or killed for subjective infractions like being too successful, “uppity,” or in the wrong town after dark. These fears were solidified by the brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in the summer of 1955. His alleged crime? Making a lewd advance at Carolyn Bryant, a white Mississippi storekeeper, who decades later admitted that she’d lied.

When someone threatens your life, you remember. When I was in college, I took my father to a South Carolina apple orchard where you paid for a set amount of apples that you picked yourself. Halfway through our excursion, the owner emerged from the trees holding a shotgun, accusing us of taking more than our fair share. She was willing to shoot us over a few apples we didn’t even have.

If there’s one thing about being Black in America that scares me still, it’s how quickly circumstances can deteriorate. One moment you’re a customer, the next a robber. Every time I watch Black people bleed on TV, bodies slumped on pavement, I realize how easily it could have been me. Almost every person of color does this. In Richard Wright’s 1935 poem “Between the World and Me,” the narrator, a Black man, enters the woods and stumbles upon a scene where another Black man has been tarred, feathered, and burned alive. In the middle of the poem, a metaphysical transformation occurs: Wright inhabits the body of the victim and feels the experience of being lynched himself. Something similar had happened to an uncle of his, decades earlier. Like Wright, Black people know instinctively that bad things happen in the woods.

Even though the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited racial segregation in public facilities, tensions persist—if not at an institutional level, then certainly among individuals. In a , 43 percent of blacks said they believed that America would never make the changes needed to give them equal rights with whites. Only 11 percent of whites expressed doubt that these changes would come. I don’t want to be in that 43 percent. I’m cautiously optimistic about the future of the outdoors, and recent data is encouraging.

According to , 42 percent of African American campers say they feel more welcome in the outdoors compared with the past. Camping among Hispanics, African Americans, and Asians continues to increase, with nonwhites now totaling one-fourth of all campers—which is double what it was in 2012, the first year it was measured. We might not be in national parks, but we’re at the lake, at private campgrounds close to home, and in state parks.

Disappointment comes with the desire to see results quickly. People who monitor the statistics can tell you the cost of everything—the programs and outreach initiatives—but don’t necessarily understand the value. A child’s first exploration of the natural world isn’t quantifiable. It’s hard to put a price on learning to read the sky or the ability to smell the wind and distinguish the scents it brings.

I believe it will take another generation of progress to change the perception people have about how people of color relate to the outdoors. If there are stalls in that progress, it might take two. Perhaps the best metric of change is word of mouth—or, in the age of the Internet, a strong social-media presence showing African American people enjoying all the places that, previously, segregation didn’t allow us to go.

We are doing it. We are out there. We always have been. My Instagram feed is filled with people of color tackling V12 climbs, ascending mountains, teaching their children how to read the sky. Those images appear alongside Audubon Society and National Park Service photos of all the places I plan to go one day.

That evidence is part of why I keep stacking my money, planning for another good vacation in the national parks. At times it’s the only weapon I have against despair. I’m able to do everything my ancestors couldn’t—that’s the structure of my resistance. I swim in public pools and lounge on public beaches because they couldn’t dare.

I am constantly working to figure out how to make you acknowledge me as American, too. I refuse to be seen as poor and powerless, and I attempt to approach each day with a boldness and vulnerability that leaves an imprint on somebody. I continue to penetrate spaces where I’m not expected to be, hoping someone else will see me and know that they can be there, too.

For historically disenfranchised people, some healing has to happen first, and it occurs when our lives are treated with dignity, respect, and care. That is what causes us to challenge vigilante violence and hateful rhetoric. We are still working our way toward reconciliation. I believe it will have to take the shape of restorative justice.

People of color are still often left out of the conservation decisions and planning that affect their communities. Creating equitable outdoor experiences means dedicating money, energy, and resources to programs that have been denied us for decades. For this to happen, well-meaning white people must abandon the post-racial, colorblind fantasy they would like to believe in. The hardest part of my fight is combating the white majority’s fear-stained imagination about what they believe Black people are, as opposed to the reality of who we are.

Spare me your empathy if it does not come coupled with institutional change. Support the initiatives and institutions that help people of color get out there, like the nonprofit and the National Park Foundation’s . Help reframe the discussion about the outdoors. Highlight the stories of the buffalo soldiers, who became some of America’s first park rangers. Tell the children about Harriet Tubman’s ability to interpret the weather. Be unafraid of the historical contexts that hold weight in our country. Explore and overturn those caricatures that are deeply embedded in the mythology we perpetuate about the unjust portions of our history. Having an integrated outdoors means embracing all of America—complete with its messy origins, complicated backstory, and currently murky future. It might mean allowing someone else to claim what you believed to be your exclusive birthright.

When you hear about what Black people don’t do, know that the statistics are only part of the story and can be counterproductive to the future of African Americans in the outdoors. It’s time we change the story we’re telling. Realize that we, as a diaspora, are just as multifaceted, complex, and diverse as the national parks we are starting to explore.

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If you’ve ever seen a pro men’s cycling race, you know the image: a lycra-clad athlete clambers onto the stage flanked by two beautiful women—so-called “podium girls”—in slinky dresses and heels. As he accepts his flowers and a signature colored jersey, he receives a kiss on both cheeks from his female escorts.

On March 1, organizers of the Tour de France their intention to end this antiquated practice in the 2018 race. This decision makes the Tour the second Grand Tour event to stop hiring podium girls—Vuelta a España was the first, in 2017.

That leaves just the Giro d’Italia, where presumably we’ll still see scantily clad, well-heeled women kiss the male athlete du jour this summer—especially now that the UCI, cycling's governing body, . When asked about the Tour de France’s decision, Mauro Vegni, cycling director for the Giro d'Italia organizer, RCS Sports, :

RCS Sport believe that in this specific moment it is more of a temporary trend to remove podium girls from sport events…As long as those girls are treated with respect and carry on their job in a professional manner, there is no reason for changing the hospitality process.

What Vegni and UCI officials don't seem to understand is that the very nature of the podium-girl job disrespects these women. Ending a position that forces women to be seen and not heard isn’t a “temporary trend”—it’s the next step in the evolution of feminism. Podium girl glorifies women as objects, ignoring the incredible female athletes who are also citizens of the pro-cycling world. (Remember, women’s cycling has been an Olympic sport since 1984, and ).Ěý

In the age of #MeToo and #TimesUp, the podium girl has got to go. The only other holdouts—Formula One and the Professional Darts Corporation (yep, it’s a organization)—got rid of their podium-girl equivalents in January. It’s time for professional road cycling to follow suit.

Perpetuating the idea that societal worth comes from being pretty instead of powerful does not help make cycling a popular sport, especially among young people. (Thanks to continuing doping allegations, it needs all the help it can get.) With viewership of the Tour de France for the first time since 2013, organizers are rethinking their event. If they want to woo and keep viewers (especially women), it’s in their best interest to ditch the overt signs of patriarchy. Women’s viewership of sports, and participation in sports, is at an all time high: according to a 2015 Gallup Poll, considered themselves sports fans. These watchers take note when their values don’t align with those of the organizers.

And let’s be honest: male cyclists . Even ignoring all the depressing Froome and Wiggins allegations, they haven’t comported themselves well on the podium. In 2017, Belgian professional road cyclist Jan Bakelants to the Tour de France because, “You never know where those podium chicks have been hanging out.” In 2015, cyclist Marjn de Vries tweeted a particularly appalling photo from the Flanders Diamond Tour:  

At the 2013 Tour of Flanders, cyclist Peter Sagan onstage. Two years later, an used Sagan’s harassment as inspiration, featuring the turquoise gloved hand of a cyclist reaching for a woman’s butt in its ad.

You get the idea.

The worst part about it is that podium girls are just one symptom of widespread gender inequality in cycling, where women get paid less (if at all) and race shorter events than the men. For 2018, the minimum salary for men on Union Cycliste Internationale Professional Continental teams is €30,885 (about $38,000). The minimum salary for women? Zero. At most events, the women’s purse is less than the men’s. They also often have to contend with general, good-old-fashioned sexism. In 2016, British Cycling technical director Shane Sutton 25-year-old British track cyclist and multiple Commonwealth Games medalist Jess Varnish she was “too old” and to “go and have a baby” rather than keep racing.

Now, things are beginning to shift. At UCI’s world championship events, women earn equal prize money, and in 2016 the organization increased the distance for women’s events, from 140 kilometers (86.9 miles) to 160 kilometers (99.4 miles) in the World Tour. The presence of podium girls cannot negate this momentum—I refuse to give it that much sway. But it does hinder the forward progress. If women’s road cycling is to continue to grow, it needs empowered, inspirational figureheads on the front (well-broadcast) lines. Those won’t be the women that hand out trophies, but rather the women who earn them. Getting rid of podium girls acknowledges the effort female-identifying athletes like Anna van der Breggen, Emma Pooley, Marianne Vos, and Megan Guarnier have put forth for decades. 

Perhaps the answer to the podium-girl dilemma comes from Australia. Recently the Tour Down Under for the men’s and women’s races. Two years before, the Tour had retired podium girls and replaced them with junior racers. It’s a win-win, giving young athletes the opportunity to stand next to the sport’s superstars and envision themselves on the same podium one day. And maybe, just maybe, the kids watching at home will see somebody who looks like them right up there on the top step, and that will inspire them to hop on a bike, too. 

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