In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and then things got really shitty real quick for Indigenous people. The European colonization of America began the centuries-long murderous legacy of trauma and displacement of Native people under the guise of expansion and elitism. This legacy isn’t just historical but persists in institutionalized racism, public actions, and everyday language, which many communities continue to experience today. Picture a spectrum with voter suppression, unfair lending practices, severe disparities in health and health care, and disproportionately high rates of being killed during a police encounter on one side and white Instagram models wearing headdresses to Coachella on the other.

But that legacy of trauma is also perpetrated in more insidious ways, even in the crunchy, GORP-eating, COEXIST bumper sticker world of the outdoor community.

Earlier this fall, Black Diamond posted a video of skiers arching turns on an untouched powdery slope on its Instagram account. It was a dreamy ski clip that ended oddly when someone off camera said, “We own this range.” When who is Lakota, saw the clip, he felt hurt and confused that a brand would want to represent themselves with aggressive, combative, domineering language. He commented as such on BD’s post. He remixed the video to his own , placing text over the footage that read: “POV: A ski brand or publication says some colonial BS like ‘we own this range’ or ‘conquered a peak’
we don’t let people talk about mountains like that in ski culture anymore.”

During the first few hours of posting, Connor received thousands of likes and hundreds of supportive comments. He also received polite requests for a nuanced explanation of the harm caused, with some commenters pointing toward long-celebrated quotes from famous outdoors people, like Sir Edmund Hillary’s, “It’s not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.” Connor engaged with these comments openly and honestly. “Intention and impact are not the same thing,” he told me during a recent phone call. “I’ve worked with Indigenous kids and women, who all say, ‘I’m so put off by the culture of skiing that I don’t want to get into it, because it’s all, conquer this, own that, shred it, stomp it, and the language just feels very violent, and how I feel about skiing isn’t violent.’ And so, I get someone who’s like, ‘I don’t think conquer is a violent word.’ Yeah, well, from your lens it isn’t a violent word. There was no violence experienced on your end of the barrel of the gun. But for the people who were in the crosshairs, that all comes off as violent. If you’re Native American and someone says, ‘we conquered this place, we own this place now,’ that recalls memories of violence, of trauma.”

In the comment section of his post, during those first few hours, folks were receptive to Connor’s explanation of word choice in ski culture, and the exchanges were civil. To their credit, Black Diamond acted quickly—they deleted the original post within 24 hours, issued a public apology, and their social media manager personally apologized to Connor.  Black Diamond emailed Connor an apology and requested his consulting rates and availability to lead a DEI athlete training (at the time of publication, Connor had not been officially hired for the training and was still awaiting a response from Black Diamond). It was a quick and sincere response to Connor’s feedback, showing that even brands can model responsiveness in building a more inclusive community. Unfortunately, comments on the post devolved into a hellscape of sun-cooked porta potty thrown atop a tire fire.

An accurate number of the racist and bigoted comments Connor received on his post and in his direct messages is hard to calculate. There were so many that he had to block and report accounts, delete comments and messages, turn off comments on the post, and scrutinize new comments on pre-existing and unrelated posts. Friends and followers who stood up to trolling in support of Connor would later tell him they received racist and/or bigoted messages, even death threats. I contacted close to 20 accounts who commented on Connor’s post in a questionable way to hear their perspective, maybe even change it. Four responded. One told me that my Irish ancestors would hang me for “picking that side.” One responded with a series of memes suggesting they’d burn down my house and that they sexually pleasure themself to photos of my face. One admitted they could understand how “conquer” is a harmful word to an Indigenous person and that language can be damaging but saw no issue with calling Connor a homophobic slur. I did have a civil exchange with the fourth respondee, who identified as white and male (he did not feel comfortable sharing his age), but he ultimately doubled down on his belief that words cannot cause harm, even slurs. It was not a great day to go interneting.

The concept and impact of harmful language can, at times, be difficult to grasp for white skiers. A simple change could make a big difference. If ski enthusiasts embraced language that reflects a relationship of respect with the land, it might feel more welcoming to skiers from all backgrounds. To contextualize it, I asked Connor if a fair comparison for outrage would be white folks taking issue with an Indigenous skier creating a reel of a jib session filmed on the grounds of a Catholic church in which someone could be heard saying, “I just crucified this!” He told me a more apt comparison would be if he filmed himself skiing in Germany using “holocaust” as a descriptor for skiing. Connor was quick to tell me the motivations for his post and how he interacts with people in person and online. In general, it is not about calling folks out but rather in. Connor figures the skiers in the BD post most likely won’t have a combative relationship with the mountains. They probably are grateful for them, even love them. But we’ve been conditioned to describe skiing as having dominion over the land. And in any other circumstance, that type of language would be ridiculous.

“It’d be like dancing with your grandma at a wedding and then you jump up and you’re like, ‘Fuck yeah, bitch! Told you I had the moves,’” he described to me. “Everybody would be like, ‘Dude, what’s wrong with this kid?’ That’s how I feel in my relationship with the mountains. This is my respected, cherished elder.” Connor wants skiers to shift our language to represent our true feelings. And that is not a hard concept to grasp. Think about it. We don’t don eyeblack and listen to Jock Jams before we ski. We’re not physically besting an opponent. Skiing is not a football game, so why do we talk about skiing like a contact sport with a scoreboard? Maybe it’s time to embrace language that truly reflects our connection to the mountains— and community rather than a win-at-all-costs mentality. We’d get dumped on our asses if we smooched our significant other and yelled out, “Slayed it!” We don’t use meathead language in our love affairs. Skiing is no exception.

One of the things I love most about skiing is the universal language of the pursuit of joy. Laughter and those barbaric yawps, yippees, and woooohoooos we bark out in communal elation at the bottom of an epic wiggle do not need Google Translate to be understood. Shouldn’t we all want as many people as possible to feel that? The answer is yes. And that means that, at the very least, we need to think about what we’re saying and be open to hearing someone else’s perspective. Unfortunately, the internet is filled with hateful dickalopes. But you don’t have to be a hood-wearing Klan member to say something hurtful.

After Connor and I talked about racism-net, our conversation moved to a subject decidedly less awful: powder skiing. Connor and I are friends, and we’ve shared a handful of frosty days filled with featherlight snow that has risen to our eyeballs. We often joke about “stoke” and “flow” and how we whiff when describing the magic of skiing. I told Connor the person who described it best was mystic, author, and powder skiing legend Dolores LaChappelle. “Did you just hear what you said,” he asked me. “You said something I take issue with.” To describe LaChappelle, I used the word “pioneering.” I hadn’t even realized it. My intention was not to cause any harm, but I had. And I immediately thought, No, no, no. You’re my friend. I’m on your side. I’m a good guy. I felt like I needed to defend myself. But Connor pointed out that we must accept when we’re wrong to be a good guy, for skiing to be more inviting and inclusive.

What is more important to us: the words we use to describe skiing or skiing itself? I think it’s fair to assume that skiing would still be a joy-filled event if skiers everywhere went mute tomorrow. If the community we love is built upon that joy, then considering how our language reflects our shared respect and love for the mountains is a small but worthy endeavor. No one’s getting canceled, the woke police—whatever that is— isn’t going to confiscate your boots and skis, and no one’s ski membership is being revoked. Being wrong is uncomfortable, but that’s all it is. If we get called on something, we are not at risk of losing anything. We only stand to gain understanding.

“I want you to know how I feel when you say this or that,” Connor says. “I don’t just bring it up with the outcome in mind of like, I want you to be different. I want you to know why I’m different, and to decide if that’s a reason worth changing something small about yourself.”

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Bigger is always better, isn’t it? Why eat one donut when you can have a box? Burgers taste better with an extra patty on top. A 10K trail race doesn’t come close to the adventure of a double-stuffed ultramarathon. One hundred days of skiing are far more smile-inducing than a handful. But none of this rings true for the father of microadventures: writer, lecturer, and professional adventurer Alastair Humphreys.

Humphreys defines a microadventure as “a shorter, simpler, cheaper, more local, more accessible version of what you deem to be an adventure. It’s something that you can squeeze in around the margins of real life.”

Before coining the term and starting the bite-sized adventure movement in 2011, Humphreys accomplished many out-of-this-world physical feats. He first gained notoriety in the adventure community in 2005 when he completed a four-year, 46,000-mile bike ride around the world. He also rowed across the Atlantic Ocean, walked across India, ran 150 miles in the heat of the Sahara Desert, and pack rafted Iceland.

Each time Humpreys returned home to Britain from one of his super-sized adventures, he’d do what nearly all professional adventurers do: write articles about the trip, then a book, then go on a speaking tour. In his estimation, he was paid to push himself to the limit, have fun, and chat about it. And he loved it. But as he repeated this formula over a decade, Humphreys noticed an alarming pattern during his lectures.

“What struck me was that I was regularly talking to audiences of hundreds of people who really liked hearing about stories of adventure,” Humphreys recalls. “But those hundreds of people weren’t going off and having adventures themselves.” Humphreys figured there was one main reason folks stopped before they’d even started: the unofficial but not-unspoken grading system of the outdoors, in which we deem certain adventures worthy because of their epic-ness or unworthy in their lack thereof.

To destroy that barrier and help democratize adventure, Humphreys kicked off his microadventure movement. Over the last 12 years he’s been advocating for the value of small jaunts: a jump in the river, a run around the neighborhood, camping in your backyard. Since then, microadventuring has become Humphreys’s way of life. We asked him to reminisce about his all-time personal favorites. Here’s what he said:

Walking Around the M25 In a Week  (The One That Started It All)

The M25 is a circle around London and it’s 120 miles. And it’s famous in Britain for being a road that everyone hates. It’s just synonymous with traffic jams and just dreary commuter life.

But it took me to places I’d never been before. I found some pockets of wildness and beauty amongst all these boring commuter towns. There’s some fields, there’s some small little woodlands, there’s tiny little streams. The snow was on the ground, so you could see there’d been rabbit footprints running through it.

And that was a really big moment for me in thinking, actually, this isn’t worse than an adventure at all. A microadventure isn’t worse. It’s just different. It’s like having an espresso. It’s just a short shot of adventure.

Cooking in the Woods with a Friend

We went just for an overnight, carrying a steel cauldron that must’ve weighed 30 pounds. It was absolutely ridiculous. We had sacks of fresh vegetables and a bottle of red wine and cooked all that stuff in the woods.

If you like microadventures just eating cereal bars, then go for it. But if you want to take a huge cauldron and cook a feast, then that’s cool too. It’s a broad church. And I have to say that was considerably more fun than sleeping for the night in a freezing cold tent on an ice cap in Greenland.

Camping in Austin, Texas

I just drove literally following my nose until I got to some fields, found a bridge over a little creek, parked the car, went down to the little creek, and set up my bivvy bag for the night. Then I started to hear country music. Paddling down the river towards me was a bunch of Texan people who’d been out fishing and were incredibly drunk. They were just amazed when they found this English gentleman planning to sleep on their riverbank.

(Note: the Texans split a bottle of whiskey and a sack of burgers with Humphreys and they talked all night.)

Welsh Inner Tubing

I was in Wales with a bunch of friends and we went to a tractor shop, a place where they sell the huge wheels for tractors. We bought the inner tubes, which are massive. They thought we were a bunch of complete weirdos. We got four tractor inner tubes and we just drifted down a river on these inner tubes and then camped for the evening on the riverbank. The inner tubes transformed into luxurious armchairs for the night.

Scheduled Nights Outdoors

What I’ve found really helpful is to schedule adventure. One way I started doing that was by putting into my diary the first Wednesday of every month, go climb a tree. I did it for three years.

When your nine-to-five working day finishes, then begins the five-to-nine overnight microadventure time and seeing the five-to-nine as an adventure opportunity. What I’ve really enjoyed is just getting into the habit of regularly sleeping on a hill for a night.

We did a year of go have a coffee outdoors once a month in different places. Go for a swim, then have a coffee. Go for a bike ride, then have a coffee. The point being, it doesn’t matter what you do. You just need to find a way within the framework of your own life to get out regularly, do a bit of exercise, and get out into nature.

The Next Big Little Thing

I bought the map for where I live. You would feel you know your local area quite well, but I decided to really try and get to know it. So once a week, for a year, I went out to explore one single grid square.

I try to walk it or cycle every footpath, every street in that area, go through every wood, and just try and learn everything I could about that one grid square. When I first had this idea, I thought I’d get quite bored and just wish that I was going to the Himalayas instead, because that sounds much more exciting.

But I soon realized that there was so much on this one small map that I live on that I’d never seen before in my life. And after a whole year of it, I’d been to 52 grid squares, but there are 400 on the map, which means I still need to go for another seven years before I’ve ever even been to everywhere on my map.

As a young guy, I spent ten years of my life believing that the only place I could have adventure was by going to the very farthest end of the world.

And yet, right here, under my nose, is all sorts of nature and discovery that is just full of wonder.

Humphreys is writing a book about his year devoted to exploring the map of his home. Local will be published at the end of 2023.

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Courtney Wilson-Kwok told her story to producer Paddy O’Connell for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Search and rescue actually has become my biggest passion. It’s something that if I were to win the lottery, it’s what I would do every day. You’re helping people, you’re outdoors, and you’re constantly learning.

Just when you think you know enough about something, someone throws you a curveball where you have to be innovative and you have to think outside of the box.

I have a couple of nicknames. Court, Wilson, C-Dubs. Someone called me Javelin at one point when I was working at a sports camp, because I was a javelin thrower in high school, and the kids at the sports camp thought that was hilarious. “You step out of line, I’m gonna throw you across the field.”

I live in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. As my regular day job, I’m a registered kinesiologist at the Ottawa Hospital where I do brain injury rehab, helping people with brain injuries get back to their day jobs.

I’m part of Sauvetage BĂ©nĂ©vole Outaouais—Ottawa Volunteer Search and Rescue. You can call the team SBO-OVSAR for short. We are a volunteer search and rescue team that spans the provinces of Eastern Ontario and Western QuĂ©bec. So we cover 58,000 square kilometers to help find missing and overdue people who have gone out into the bush. I love being outdoors, and being a member of the search and rescue team.

A search that we were on that really exemplified the work that this team does occurred in the summer of 2020. Late one night, we got a message through dispatch, and all we were told at that point was we’ve been dispatched for a search. Please show up at these coordinates with all of your gear. Bring a lot of water, it’s gonna be hot. I showed up early that morning ready to go. We went through our briefing and we were informed that we were gonna be searching for an elderly individual who had dementia who had wandered away from home the night before. Their family had reported them missing.

There was definitely a sense of responsibility when you see the family out there and they’ve got so much hope. You could tell there was a mixture of emotion. There was concern, there was stress. You almost saw a sense of relief seeing how many members had shown up in addition to all the police officers on scene, saying, OK, there are a lot of people here, they’ll find him. And that’s kind of what we held onto through the day.

It was about 86 degrees. It was a hot day. And we get told, “Lighten your packs.” It’s gonna be some very dense bush and we think, We’ll be fine, we train in this stuff all the time. What I didn’t know is this area was filled with what we call prickly ash, and it’s this invasive shrub or small tree. They have these large thorns and it creates this massive thicket. If you’ve ever read Harry Potter, it’s like being stuck in this devil’s snare where the more you struggle, the more it wraps itself around you, and the worse it gets.

So we finally get out there, we get deployed. Your job, with your GPS and your compass, and team members on either side of you, is you form this line. Because of how big this area was, the officers elected to have a much longer line—10, 11 people. I believe we were spaced three to five meters apart. So you’re going in a straight line and whatever’s in front of you, you got to go through it, unless it’s a massive tree. You’re bush whacking.

There was a lot of checking back and forth. “Hey, can you clear around this rock? Can you check under this log? Because I can’t see.” And that’s how you’re walking through this line, minding the person on either side and making sure that there is no stone left unturned.

We’re not just looking for the person, but we’re looking for clues. Anything to give us an idea of the direction they might be going in so that we can refine our search area. That could be keys, that could be clothing. It could be a cell phone, a wallet, a hat, a new water bottle, or a new granola bar wrapper. Something to suggest that somebody has been through here recently. We know with that kind of an area, people were not likely to go through there, so it would help to reassure us that we were on the right track. And we weren’t getting a whole lot of that.

The longer you go through the search, the more you start to think about what we call “lost person behavior.” Lost person behavior is something that our team uses to try and figure out where we need to start looking for people and what kind of areas they would be in. For someone with dementia, if you find them within less than 24 hours, there’s a 95 percent survival rate. Once it goes past that 24 hours, that survival rate drops to 77 percent, and so on and so forth. So we’re going on 24 hours here already, and you’re just praying that it’s not gonna be another day.

The longer the day goes on, the more stress starts to pile up. There are a lot of thoughts that are racing through my head. You start to question everything. Is it gonna go into an overnight search? Is it gonna go into a search the next day? Did I miss something? Is there something we should have been doing differently? How far into the bush did this person get, if they got there at all? Are we in the right area? I was definitely a little worried that we weren’t gonna find this person.

So we’re back in the bush, struggling through this prickly ash, we look like we’ve been on the losing end of a cat fight. People literally crawling on their elbows and knees through this bush. Looking at how hard the rest of your teammates are working, it motivates you to keep pushing forward. There was no sense of quitting. With this team though, you look at everyone, everyone’s gassed, exhausted, covered in sweat. It’s swampy, it’s soaking wet. Our boots are wet. And the further you get into this, the more worried you start to get.

At no point did we think we were gonna turn back. This team was gonna power through. We get to a point where someone stops the line. Everyone stays quiet. And then a whisper slowly starts to come down the line from one person to the next. And the whispers are that we found them.

My heart was pounding. I could hear it. I’m trying to control my breathing. Trying to be calm, to be collected. If they need me in there, then I’m ready to provide those skills and be there.

But I’m also worried. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what the injuries are, if there are injuries. I didn’t know whether they were alive or not. It is maybe a number of seconds before we get that second update, but it feels like an eternity.

Finally the word spread down the line that the subject is alive and that we were getting ready to extract them, help get them out of the bush. And that is the biggest sigh of relief you could ever imagine. You start to swell up with tears a little bit, you want to jump up and down. You want to scream.

There were a lot of hugs while we waited to be told what they wanted us to do next. And you just sort of reflect on all of this work has finally become a success for you and this team. It’s just the best feeling in the world. And you know that this is why you do this. There is this quiet pride that you have, knowing that you helped bring someone home the other night, especially knowing that this is a full nonprofit organization. Nobody on this team gets paid. And it’s one of the reasons that this team is so close. You work so hard, and you have these huge victories, and it really is a cool thing to be part of.

I think one thing that was important about this search for me personally is that it reminds you to trust yourself. But even more importantly, you have to trust your team. I trust that the people around me know exactly what they’re doing, and they’re working just as hard, and everyone’s in this together, and that’s huge. The camaraderie with this team is amazing, and it’s a group of people who challenge me and inspire me every day. And so it reminds you when you go through this kind of an experience and you have the outcome that we’ve always hoped for, and we’ve trained for that, you just want to keep doing it. I want to do it every day. I want to be out there with this team.

If there was a time machine 20 years ahead, I’ll still be with this team. I’ll be with them forever.

I freaking love this team.

Courtney Wilson Kwok is a member of the Ottawa Volunteer Search and Rescue Team, a winner of the 2022 Defender Service Award, established by Land Rover. These awards recognize the nonprofits doing selfless service for their communities every day. You can learn more about Ottawa Volunteer Search and Rescue at .

You can follow The Daily RallyÌęŽÇČÔÌę,Ìę, or wherever you like to listen. and to be featured on the show.

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Eeland Stribling told his story to producer Paddy O’Connell for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I think the reason I was put on this planet is to make people laugh, to make people feel good. I don’t even say I’m a standup comedian
I do standup comedy. I don’t think that selfishly of like, Oh, I’m a great comedian, I’m a great whatever.

But, when I’m working with kids, I just get to be silly. I get to be myself.

Sometimes the kids I work with, they call me Mr. E or Mr. Strib. I am from Denver, Colorado, and I live in Denver, Colorado.
I don’t know if I do anything professionally. I think I do everything semi-pro. I work with a nonprofit that works in a couple of different schools. I’m an outdoor instructor, environmental educator.

I like going fishing, but I love going fishing for the purpose of a nap. If it’s kind of cool, and the sun’s just hitting the side of the bank, and there’s a warm spot, just the sound of the water. Or sometimes I’ll sleep with my feet in the water. I love a good nap.

I am also a standup comedian. I like to laugh and I like to be around stuff that’s just funny. I’m a bit facetious—everything, I think can be joked about. So I sort of move throughout the world, even talking to myself, saying stuff to myself that makes me laugh.

Every time I’m on stage I’m like, This is where I’m supposed to be.

I have a joke. I wrote it earlier this year, and it just goes, “I think we need more diversity in the NBA. I would love to see an all white NBA team. We could call them the January Sixers.” And that’s the whole joke. Sometimes it takes people a second to get it, but I’ve done it in conservative rooms and liberal rooms, and everyone, everyone loves it.

The same techniques that I use in a comedy club I use with students. Getting people engaged, making sure they’re listening, making sure they understand what’s going on. You get good at reading faces of people being confused, people being like, What the hell is he talking about? Whether that’s a kid who you’re trying to teach about boreal toads, or you’re trying to do a joke, you can learn, Oh, I should explain this part a little more.

With comedy, I’m like, “Go feel something with these jokes.” Hopefully it’s positive, hopefully it’s laughter. And then with my students, it’s more like, “We learned about this or we did this. Now go do it on your own. Go explore it on your own.”
Last summer I took these students who were in foster care, and we all went fly fishing. None of the kids had been fly fishing before. One of the students really, really took a liking to it and was really, really enjoying it more than other kids.

He won a fly rod at the end of the day, and we were like, “Hey, don’t lose it. If you can use it, we’ll see you next time. We’ll love to have you bring out your rod.” Then he came back the following spring this year, and he was so stoked to be there to fly fish.

We’re fishing at a private lake that we have access to so the kids can actually catch fish. He brings his own rod, and he’s super excited. He is like, “I went once in between last time I saw you guys and I’m really excited to be here.”

This is his third time fishing. He set up his own rod. He needed help threading the line through the guides, but he set up his own rod. As we’re doing the casting stuff for the other kids, he’s casting, and he caught one or two small bluegill.

Then another kid was struggling to cast. It just doesn’t look good, because these kids are in middle school, and it’s not going well. This young man sits down his rod from catching fish, walks over and is helping this kid cast the same way that we taught the whole class how to cast.

Watching this kid say, “I love fly fishing,” and then put it down and go help someone else who was at the same age, there was something about it that’s fucking dope. I wish I had a better vocabulary, but something about it just made me feel good.

Watching the kid the rest of the day, I was in full admiration of what being outside can do, what community looks like, what fly fishing instructing looks like.

I was jealous of how cool that was. Of course I help people fish, but sometimes I’m like, Ah, they’ll be okay, I’ll just fish for 20 minutes by myself and try to catch a fish or whatever. But when I’m with my students, I try to offer up the best version of myself, the version that’s honest, that’s, humble, that tries to make sure everyone feels welcome. I like to think that that rubbed off on that young man and he was like, Oh, I can share a part of myself and I can share this thing that I learned. I was more in the amazement of, That guy is gonna be like a great person. That kid almost taught me how to fish with other people better. And if that’s what the future of fly fishing looks like, that’s pretty special.

I just want people to feel like they can have a community in fly fishing, no matter what they look like or feel like or come from. Just making sure people feel welcome.

I love this quote, “I’m not the first, but I’m the catalyst.” So it’s like, maybe no one will ever remember my name or know my name, but I gave them the best version of myself and they went and made it ten times better. They made themselves ten times better. They made other peoples’ lives ten times better.

Offer up the best version of yourself. And it’s not always gonna go well, sometimes people are gonna boo you, but that’s just because they’re all drunk on a Thursday night.

Not the kids. Just the comedy club. The kids are not drinking on Thursday night under my supervision.

Eeland Stribling is a wildlife educator, biologist, fly fisher, and very funny standup comedian. If you like to laugh, you should find a comedy club he’s telling jokes at by following him on Instagram .

You can follow The Daily RallyÌęŽÇČÔÌę,Ìę, or wherever you like to listen. and to be featured on the show.

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James Edward Mills told his story to producer Paddy O’Connell for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

This is the first time that I’m doing this, with Black men on a trip led by Black men with the intention of telling the story of us as Black men. It was clear to me how unique an experience this was.

I live in Madison, Wisconsin, which is the ancestral homeland of the Ho-Chunk people near the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus. I grew up in Los Angeles, California, in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains between Venice Beach and what is commonly called South Central Los Angeles.

I am a professional storyteller. So, I’m a journalist, a writer, photographer, a reluctant filmmaker.

I come to the world with a profound sense of optimism because as a storyteller, one of the things that I really enjoy doing is changing the ending. Something that my father once said a long time ago that I will take to my grave is, “Things in life will work out as long as you insist that they do.” So if I don’t like the outcome, I try to create a different one.

Halfway through my career, one of the things that I realized was that there were people in our community who looked like me that didn’t seem to have the same opportunities, and they also didn’t seem to have my same sense of optimism. My biggest passion, I think, comes from my desire to provide that sense of optimism that they too could have many of the same experiences that I’ve had in the outdoors, and hopefully creating an environment where there are more people who would ultimately advocate for the outdoors.

I was attending a conference in Old Fort, North Carolina about two years ago, called Outdoors for All. And it just happened that this little town was on one of the many trout streams in North Carolina, and I brought my waders and fly gear fully intending to fish. But what I didn’t realize was that there were five other Black dudes that were interested in fishing as well. And for the very first time in my personal and professional life, I’m on a trout stream with five other men of color, casting a fly rod.

I thought, God, wouldn’t it be cool if the five of us could get together and we can take one of these trips together and we can talk about our experiences as fly fishermen, and as Black men.

So, after we had this amazing experience in North Carolina, the five of us put together this little film project that we ultimately called Blackwaters. We just happened to be able to put the five of us on the Kobuk River in Alaska, in Gates of the Arctic National Park, to fish for northern pike in Grayling.

It’s Alaska in the summertime. So we are literally in the time of the midnight sun. The sun does not go down, so it never gets dark. It’s warm, the sky is completely blue. There’s an incredible amount of greenery in the background. We’re seeing grizzly bear tracks impressed in the sand.

I’m not seeing any fish anywhere, but I’m certain that they’re down there because people told me that they are there. I just have to figure out what I need to do in order to catch them. My good friend Nick Brooks, had never been fishing on this big of a river. He’s the kind of guy that needs to have a successful experience on this trip.

We get to a spot along the river that is shallow, but it’s moving really fast. All of a sudden, there’s this big flash of movement, and a fish bit on something. I had no idea what it was, but I was sure that it wasn’t an insect. And I’m thinking, Oh, there’s probably something like a minnow or some type of smaller fish that they’re biting on.

So I changed up the combination going from a fly to what’s commonly known as a streamer, and within two casts, I landed this fish, and I’m not kidding you, it was the biggest fish I’ve ever caught in my entire life. It was as long as my arm.

I said, “Nick here, this is what I used. You should try it.” He hadn’t caught a single fish the entire time we were there. And in the same spot where I caught this fish with a little bit of information, I was able to give him the resources that he needed to be able to land a fish.

And the next thing you know, everybody in our group is landing these huge Northern Pikes.

This is the first time that I’ve had this experience exclusively with Black men. I really took that to heart. Once the color barrier is broken, so to speak, it should indeed be the rule that everyone can have these kinds of positive experiences in the outdoors. It should be that simple. I think at this moment, for the first time, I think I actually believed that it would be possible, because it was happening to us.

The rule should be that everyone has access to experiences like this. That you don’t necessarily need to have some exceptional person to break the color barrier and go out there and have this amazing experience that will inspire a generation to do similar things.

For the purposes of this film project, one of the things that I really want us to do is to be able to demonstrate our experience, but also encourage people to have similar experiences of their own so that one day they will be so commonplace that we don’t even bother talking about them anymore. That there is indeed an expectation that things like this happen all the time, because we insist that they do.

I think more than anything else I’ve learned that we can decide to be the heroes of our own stories or the victims of our circumstance. And personally, I would much rather be the hero of a story that I’m gonna write. I want to be the hero of a story that I’m going to share and encourage other people to have.

James Edward Mills is a freelance journalist who specializes in stories about outdoor recreation, environmental conservation, and sustainable living. You can follow his adventures and his work on Instagram t. His film Blackwaters will premiere in August. Find screening dates at .

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Shelby Stanger told her story to producer Paddy O’Connell for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

It’s about day four of this surf trip, standup paddle surfing these remote waves off of Indonesia. And I could have played the journalist card, but eventually I had to get out of the boat and actually ride some waves, and I was terrified. I decided to drop in on this one wave, and I really believe one wave can totally change your life. It did for me.

There’s definitely nicknames: Shelby Stranger, Stanger Mouse. But people don’t use that a lot anymore. Shelby Stanger is a pretty rare wild name itself, so that’s usually what I go by.

I grew up in Cardiff by the Sea, California on the beach, and I live one town over in Solana Beach.

I am a podcaster, a storyteller, a people talker. I love people. I’m the author of a new book, Will to Wild: șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs Great and Small to Change Your Life. I’m a surfer. I’m passionate about helping people improve their lives using nature and adventure. I’m a lover of harmless, debaucherous, joyful, fun.  Someone drew a sand wiener on the beach the other day and I was running and I saw it and it just made me laugh out loud. So I partake in sometimes drawing an occasional sand wiener on the beach, too.

It was 2009. I just quit my lucrative, stable job at Vans to become a freelance journalist, which was definitely not a guarantee. I found myself on a surf trip in the middle of the Indian Ocean with some of the top watermen in the world, surfing these waves that were way out of my league.

I’d never ridden waves like that in my life. These waves broke over sharp coral reefs, with fish below that could rival any aquarium. I was used to surfing on waves that were kind of soft and broke on sand, so the consequences were pretty low if I fell. And I had a lot to prove, not just to these guys, but mostly to myself.

Here I was flailing, trying to keep up with them in these waves where I kept trying to surf and I’d fall. My board was too small, I’d get held underwater, and I was scared.

There was this guy on the trip named Brian Keaulana. He happens to be one of the lead stunt men on all the movies filmed in Hawaii. He’s this legendary lifeguard, he’s literally linked to Hawaiian royalty.

All of a sudden, Brian and I are the only ones out in the ocean. And we’re at this place called Muts, which in Australian slang translates to vagina. It was called Muts because it forms a barrel and there’s a hole inside, and whoever named it was disgusting. But despite its sexist name, it was a beautiful left, and I’m a goofy foot. So I was in the right spot with the right guy.

A wave starts coming towards us and it’s shaped almost like a triangle, this thing had a big point. And he looks at the wave, he looks at me, he looks back in the wave and he says, “Shelby, you gonna go?”

And I wanted to go. I mean, I definitely wanted to go, but I was terrified. Falling could mean wrecking the surfboard I just borrowed, wrecking my face, or making a total fool of myself, but I just was like, OK, when Brian Keaulana asked you, “Are you gonna go,” it really means you better go, or you’re gonna be sorry.

So I turned my board around. I pointed it towards where I needed to go. There was no beach. It was just a reef break in the middle of nowhere. And I paddled my little heart out.

The wave picked me up, picked my board up. Somehow I got to my feet and I started zooming at what felt like lightning speed. My fins made an actual hissing sound. I was going so fast. It was sort of like riding a skateboard down a steep hill, and it started wobbling, and I was like, Oh, great. But I kept saying, make it, make it, make it.

I was pretty sure I was gonna fall, but I just had faith, I was like, I’m gonna make it, make it, make it, make it.

Then this wave started to get really steep. So steep that it threw its lip over my head.

I was in the barrel for what felt like forever, but was probably in reality a fraction of a second, and I would normally close my eyes because it’s kind of like going down a really steep roller coaster. It’s really scary. And you know, sometimes you just close your eyes in those scary moments. But I’m so glad I had them open because all I saw was crystal clear water all around me.

It was just an incredible feeling. I’ve never seen anything like that, haven’t since, and my cells just felt electrified.

Now, after the wave ended, I was like, Man, the only thing that would’ve been even cooler is if someone had been there to actually capture this wave. All of a sudden a hand rises out of the water with a camera housing, and the photographer for the trip just happened to be in the channel right then. Caught it all on film, and you can see me in this photo. I have the worst style. I’m in poo stance, my butt is sticking out into the air. I’m bent over. It’s not what a cool surfer looks like. Most surfers see that wave and they’re like, “You weren’t really barreled.” I’m like, “Whatever.”

Everybody knows there’s something magical about water hitting water. It’s why we go to waterfalls. It’s why we go to rivers. It’s why we go watch waves break. Scientists have tried to explain why there’s some theory about negative ions, but I couldn’t really dig up any research that officially proves it.

But I would later interview an older surfer named Mickey Munoz. He’s this old, legendary surfer, and he said he once caught a wave so good in Indonesia, he came out the other side 10 years younger. He says the wave literally changed his cells, and I got what he meant finally at that moment. I feel like sometimes we do an adventure and it gives us so much courage, so much stoke, so much thrill, so much beauty, so much awe, that we’re changed.

And that wave in some ways really changed me because it gave me courage. I dropped in on a wave that absolutely terrified me. It was so thrilling. And when you do a big adventure, you have that moment forever for the rest of your life, and it’ll carry you.

I had been really stuck and scared to quit a job that was perfect on paper and at the height of the recession everybody told me I was so lucky for having. It was the envy of many friends. I had made a lot of pro-con lists about quitting my job to become an adventure journalist, and it never added up on paper. Being an adventure journalist is a really dumb idea, and everybody told me that, but I wanted to do it. I wanted to try it. I wanted to tell stories.

I knew I needed to change my situation. I was just scared.

And so I think that what it taught me was that some things in life aren’t gonna make sense on paper, and that sometimes you can’t make a decision using a pro-con list. It doesn’t always add up. Just like sometimes you’re gonna drop into a wave that you think you’re not gonna make, and you end up making it.

I could have just stayed on the boat where the only thing that was sure is that I would end up seasick or sunburned. But dropping in, sure, I might’ve gotten worked, I might not have made the wave, I might’ve fallen, I might’ve hit my head, I might’ve damaged the surfboard. But I ended up catching the ride of my life.

So, go. You have nothing to lose.

It’s always better to at least try than to be stuck in fear and not go. And then once we do that out in the wild, we can take that to the rest of our everyday life. It’s gonna be a lot of work, but go for it anyway.

Shelby Stanger is an adventure journalist and creator of the podcast. Shelby has surfed all over the world and her new book is out now.

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Conor Hall told his story to producer Paddy O’Connell for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I was a college athlete. I was in great shape. A little swollen lymph node on my neck. I’d gone in to have them take a look at that, not really thinking it was anything at all. I was told I had big tumors in my chest between my heart and my lungs up through my neck. And I really thought that I was gonna die.

My full name is Conor Hall. In terms of nicknames, the most prominent one is probably El Presidente, or Prez for short. I currently live in Denver, Colorado, but I grew up in Crestone, Colorado, which is one of the, and I say this fondly, but probably one of the weirder mountain towns out there. I think it’s impossible to grow up in Crestone Colorado and not come out with some endearingly weird tendencies.

I’m a horrible singer, but I love karaoke. It gets the people going.

I’m a complete political nerd; I’ve spent a long time working in Colorado politics to promote causes that I believe in and care about. I serve as Colorado’s director of the Outdoor Recreation Industry Office. So I do a lot of economic development work, a lot of stewardship, conservation work, a lot of education, workforce development work, and a lot of work around public health and more equitable access to the outdoors. I honestly think I have the best job in government.

I also love, maybe not surprisingly, to do just about anything outside. Hiking, camping, snowboarding, kayaking, SUP-ing, anything that gets me out. The through line in those passions really come back to community.

There was this running joke in my middle school, high school, and college friends that I was invincible. There were just a very high amount of these very close calls with death or extreme injury that I kept walking away from. Falling off a cliff, being missed by a giant rock in a climbing mishap. I had to do an unplanned emergency unassisted landing in cow pasture in a skydiving mishap. I’d been in a horrendous mountain biking wreck. I rolled a car multiple times, dodging a deer. Every single time I walked away completely fine. That just really starts to permeate into your mentality. That’s really how I, for better or for worse, looked at myself. So to get this diagnosis
this was a whole different thing.

It was the last day of my sophomore year in college at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. I had been taking like ten credits over the credit limit, was burning the midnight oil, so I had gotten pretty sick. I just thought it was a bad cold. I went down to the little health services center. I’d got something for my cold, a decongestant. I was walking out and I had this little swollen lymph node on my neck and I was like, “Hey, should I be concerned at all about this?” They’re like, “No, probably not, but we’ll get a scan just in case.”

So I went down to the local hospital and got a scan. Then things started to get weird. Noone would tell me the results. They took me back to the school, and there was a lot of whispering. They asked if I could bring in my twin brother, who went to school with me there, for the news. And they got my mom on the phone. And that’s when I knew this was something that was probably pretty bad.

The CT scan had revealed two major tumors in my chest, wrapped between my heart and my lungs, 11 or 12 centimeters. And then tumors all up through my neck and my lymph nodes. Basically spells out that I have Hodgkin’s lymphoma, stage two bulky.

Everyone was crying. I think I was the only one who wasn’t crying. I immediately went into that mode of trying to comfort everyone and tell everyone that it was gonna be fine, when in reality I did not think it was gonna be fine.

It wasn’t until probably an hour later when I was finally alone just sitting on my dorm bed, where it all started to hit me, and I just completely broke down. Just feeling these feelings of pity and fear and anger all wash over me. It was just such a scary thing. My immediate connotation with the word cancer was death.

I had to focus on the treatment full-time. So that’s what I did. I’d go in to do my chemotherapy treatment every two weeks. I was in there for five hours where they just pump all of these chemicals into you. And it is an awful experience. There’s no way to sugarcoat that.

I couldn’t go to school that next semester, and so I came up with this whole plan to stay mentally sharp. I taught myself economics and stock trading. I was learning Spanish, and came up with 50 books to read. And then, to try to stay physically sharp too, after every session, I would go play sand volleyball with all my friends. We’d do three, four hours of hard, intense, sand volleyball, and sometimes I had to push a little bit to make that happen. But there was something so important to me to physically get out there with those guys, but also just mentally, emotionally, to know that I could still do that.

It was tough and awful and scary, but I certainly felt that it was important to maintain that positive attitude, just finding ways to live beyond that diagnosis.

A couple months after I finished treatment, I went on a First Descents program. This nonprofit that helps young people battling cancer, who’ve survived cancer, heal through adventure; through kayaking and rock climbing and surfing.

I was like, Well, I don’t need a support group, but I’ll go do a free adventure for a week anytime. You don’t have to twist my arm. I went surfing in North Carolina, and I met these 12 other young people from all around the country, all different walks of life, all different types of cancer, and we spent this amazing week together.

There’s something so incredibly re-empowering about riding your first wave, or cresting a rock wall, or running your first rapid after months, sometimes years of this body-breaking, mind-melting treatment. Just that you can still do some of these things, that you’re still powerful.

But the most important thing was the community that was built there. It turns out I actually did need a support group. Especially at a young age, facing your own mortality like that, the highs and the lows and the loneliness. These people all intimately understood that, and had battled with that. And that comes out as you’re waiting to catch a wave or you’re sitting around the campfire. It is truly healing through nature and healing through adventure.

And so I just saw and deeply experienced firsthand the effect of community and the power of it. You can be vulnerable, and there’s a lot of power and good in that. It’s a really natural way for any young person to build community and to get that kind of re-empowerment.

I left that trip and I said, I’m gonna do anything I can to help this organization, and to make sure that any person in my shoes, anyone battling cancer, who has survived cancer, has access to this type of healing and this type of community. So that’s what I’ve done for the past 10, 11 years now.

I’m really happy to say I just celebrated 11 years in remission. I feel incredibly lucky and incredibly blessed. When I sum it up in a sentence, I always say it was a blessing I would never wish upon anyone else.

I think it amplified those deeply-held values of relationships, of community, of really appreciating and enjoying life. Even if you feel alone in that moment, there are always people there that will support you. Even sometimes complete strangers, because I think people are inherently, deeply good. Every person in this world has some community. Reach out and ask for it.

Conor Hall is the director of the for the state of Colorado. When he’s not improving access to the outdoors or enjoying it himself, you can find him trying to sing “Don’t Stop Believing” at a karaoke bar. Learn about the incredible work First Descents does by visiting .

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Vasu Sojitra told his story to producer Paddy O’Connell for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Telling my parents that I’m gonna be a professional skier was fairly far-fetched. I come from a South Asian background, Indian-American. There’s not many professional skiers that come from India. It’s definitely breaking the mold of what folks that look like me typically do. It was a massive shift in my trajectory as a human in society.

My name is Vasu Sojitra. Some people call me Voss for short — don’t wanna say the “su” part, I don’t know. I identify as a disabled person. I have one leg, and I also am South Asian, so I have multiple identities. I grew up in Connecticut and also partly in India.

I fell in love with skiing when I was around ten, so I started going up to Vermont a lot, a little later in my teens. I went to school there at the University of Vermont.

I feel like one of the bigger challenges is trying to figure out what we want to do with our lives, and that was definitely something I was trying to figure out in my late teens, early twenties. I was in engineering for my college career. I needed to get out of that school as quickly as possible. Because I realized I do not like structure as much as I thought I did. But I did pretty well as an engineer. So I was like, OK, cool. I’m good at something, but do I like it? Maybe, maybe not.

What I did enjoy was experiencing the outdoors with my friends. I was kind of an arrogant teenager, just like, Oh, I’m a good enough skier. I don’t need to do anything here. This is fine. And then I was introduced to Vermont Adaptive. I was 21 years old at the time, and it was a pretty sunny day and we were on a ski lesson on a green circle, a typical trail that many people take to just go back to the lodge. I was on this lesson with another volunteer who was physically tethering this other individual, just so the participant would stay in control.

I was skiing next to him next to the edge of the ski run. So the trees were on the other side. I was trying to make sure he looked up and was trying to initiate some sort of turning. But at the end of the day, we were just mostly trying to have fun. The skier had a cognitive disability, and from what I can remember, I believe he was non-verbal, but he was just screaming and hooting and hollering and just having a day. And I think mostly it was based on the speed at which he was going and the wind in his face. We were all happy and joyous and making each other laugh and whatnot. And he was just having the time of his life jumping up and down and just hooting and hollering.

That’s when I stopped talking and just started observing. And I was just like, This is what it’s about. This is really cool. It really doesn’t matter what you look like, where you come from, who you are, or what your background is. This is what true joy is.

That was the moment I was like, Hell yeah. This is where I want to go, and these are the experiences that I want to help cultivate and create.

During the summer of 2014, a few of us decided we wanted to move out west and Montana was our choice. I decided that I wanted to work in the adaptive sports industry, and got my way into working at the local one here in Bozeman.

I was pretty persistent in building relationships with the program directors there and connecting with them and asking about job opportunities, internships, you name it. Just putting myself out there as much as possible, which might have come off as very, very persistent or annoying to some, who knows. I moved from the assistant program coordinator to the assistant director, to the director of the adaptive sports program.

That just filled my bucket and fueled everything that I was trying to do. I moved out of that program during COVID-19. I started realizing on-the-ground work like the stuff I was doing was really amazing and really impactful, but it wasn’t going to create the systemic change that I’m hoping for, providing better access to the outdoors to folks with disabilities or better educational standards, or just providing that representation and cultural relevancy to an industry that seems like it definitely needs it. I started really pushing into the behind the scenes work, whether it’s advisory committees, or DEI committees at the North Face or REI, or at other companies to help them shift their cultures.

As an athlete, I’m in front of the lens a lot, utilizing that representation to share the stories that aren’t being told, especially around disability and race. To showcase that we are human and we also like to have fun.

Adaptive sports are so much more than just the activity itself, but just a way to feel empowered, feel emboldened, and be able to express ourselves how we want to, regardless of how society might treat us.

Vasu Sojitra is a professional athlete and disability access strategist. He is a founding member of the , a co-founder of the , and a member of . Find out more at , and follow him on Instagram .

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Quinn Brett told her story to producer Paddy O’Connell for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Right before I took that cam out, I remember saying to myself, I shouldn’t have done that. I fell twice the rope length, and hit the big cliff of El Capitan.

And then at some point I came to consciousness and I said, I can’t feel my legs.

I work for the National Park Service, and I’m an athlete. I was a professional rock climber, and now I am a disabled athlete. Primarily, hand cycling, water sports, and the Worm. I’m still really good at the Worm.

I spend my time trying to be outside as much as possible. I can move all day, every day, pretty excessively, maybe annoyingly. You spend time outside and then you earn the ice cream or the IPA.  In high school I discovered rock climbing and I wanted to learn more about it, and really dove into it. After college, I moved here to Estes Park, Colorado, and met an amazing amount of people who were into rock climbing, and they mentored me upwards into the sport.

The mental aspect is huge. How to overcome fears, how to stay calm. El Capitan is one of the quintessential iconic features of Yosemite National Park. It is a 3000-foot tall cliff, and the Nose is a rock climb in the center. It’s like a little prow feature.

In October 2017, my girlfriends Josie, Libby and I climbed a route on El Capitan in a day, setting a speed record for females. My headspace was a little off. My personal romantic relationship wasn’t doing so hot, and we got news that a good friend, Hayden Kennedy, and his partner had died in an avalanche. It struck all of our hearts, and climbing is something that we also fall back on, perhaps to distract ourselves from hardship, and so we decided we would still go climbing.

I am leading with placing gear, to a feature called the Boot Flake. That’s about 1500 feet up, but maybe 100 feet below the Boot Flake is another feature called the Texas Flake. It’s a big piece of rock that sticks out separately away from the main cliff of El Capitan. So I was on top of Texas Flake, and set sail on granite slab and clipped all of these bolts. The space between my gear was getting further and further apart. I was maybe 20 or 30 or 40 feet up from that last bolt. I had a cam in the crack, but I took the cam out for some reason, which is unusual for my protocol. I usually have two cams in, and in my rushedness or distracted brain, I took the cam out.

I reached across to my right hip to grab another piece of gear, and at that exact time, my foot or my hands or both slipped out of the rock. I just remember granite whooshing before my eyes as I fell.

I hit that Texas Flake with my back and my shoulder. I was just laying in the rubble, and my climbing partner Josie immediately initiated a rescue. My T-12 vertebrae shattered outwardly and inwardly into my spinal cord. I think I had four or five broken ribs. I had some internal bleeding, a punctured lung. My right scapula looks like a sledgehammer hit it. Fourteen staples in the back of my head. I had a pretty big swelling on the front of my head, like a hematoma. And paralysis, because of the shattered bone pieces in my spinal cord.

I vaguely remember people coming in and out of my ICU room. I was in the ICU for five days before my surgery, and I heard them say I was paralyzed. I remember laying in my bed and pointing at my toes and trying to wiggle them, and obviously nothing responded. It’s just fuckery. You have hope and you’re sad and you don’t get it, and you’re on drugs and you’re overwhelmed and you’re in pain. Of course I was in denial and of course I was mad and sad. I still have a lot of blame for myself, and disappointment and frustration. Where is that time travel machine? If I could only go back for that one second
what the fuck was I doing.

I would rotate through friends, because with the bandwidth for friendships, the amount of listening that I needed, needed to be rotated and spread across different friends. It felt like it was too much if I were to go to one or three of them, I needed 10 of them to listen and console me and be there.

Use your community. You’re not alone as much as we feel like we are at times, because we are in our heads and we feel like nobody’s experienced this trauma or this grief, but somebody out there has. Talk to them. There’s somebody out there who maybe hasn’t experienced the exact same thing, but can share and corroborate on what you’re feeling.

I still struggle with it. I have a lot of shame still, being in public in my wheelchair. I get embarrassed about things like the amount of eyeballs I get when I hand cycle around Lake Estes. Or people being like, “You go girl.” You don’t even know the shit that I was doing before; my heart rate is not even 100 right now. But I clearly still have that internal dialogue, and I talk to myself every day on the hand cycle. I’m like, What good does this do? Is it going to keep me inside? No. Get over yourself. Get outside. What is more important, being sulking inside and sitting on the couch and eating that ice cream, or going to fucking earn the ice cream? Why not try? That’s the human I’ve always been.

After I was injured in 2017, I returned to the National Park Service in a unique role. I’ve been educating on the type of mobility devices out there, opening doors for us to explore and be recreationally more adaptive on our trails in national parks. Also trying to measure our national park trails so we have more specific information, so the user can decide which trail works better for them rather than just being funneled to the one labeled accessible trail in our parks.

I’m gonna be an advocate louder than I can be for people with disabilities recreating in our national parks and in our public lands, and fo spinal cord research. Let’s amp it up, man. We got places to go, things to do.

Quinn Brett is an athlete, writer, public speaker advocate, and National Park Service employee. Her journey is documented in the film An Accidental Life. You can follow her adventures at and on Instagram .

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Connor Ryan told his story to producer Paddy O’Connell for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

In Lakota ways, the highest power we believe in is Wakan Tanka, which is the great mystery.

It’s two in the morning and theoretically, no one should have been awake. We’d maybe been walking for 50 or 100 yards before we were all like, “Do you guys see these footprints in the snow too? Why do you think that these are here?”

They definitely stuck to the route that we were taking. It’s just enough of a shock to penetrate our drowsiness and start to raise the hairs on the back of our necks just a little bit. It was this moment when we all realized this is an undertaking that’s larger than all of us.

My name is Connor Ryan. Some people know me as Sacred Stoke. I think that’s my only nickname. I don’t know the things that people might have nicknamed me when I’m out of the room, but for the most part, I’m called by my name. I’m from Boulder, Colorado, that’s where I was born and raised, and currently I live in Winter Park. I spend most of my time skiing, chasing after snow, and helping native communities to build programs to get kids from our communities out onto the land to ski. Those are my highest priorities. Professionally, I’m a skier, filmmaker, and activist.

My passion is really relationships, and the tools that they are for better understanding our relationship to ourselves. For me, the relationship to mountains, communities, and our environment is really what fascinates me.

It was mid-April 2021 in Colorado. We were in the process of making the film Spirit of the Peaks. April’s usually one of our snowiest months, if not our snowiest month. That year, I don’t know if it had snowed once that month.

I rounded up my guys, Matt and Isaiah, my great friends, storytellers, filmmakers. We were pretty defeated after two weeks of making a ski movie without any fresh snow. We decided to chase this possible storm that was going to hit Monarch Pass. We drove over from Silverton and rented a room. We went to bed at about 9:00 p.m. and we set our alarms for a 1:30 a.m. alpine start.

We show up to the trailhead, and within a few steps, it becomes a tunnel through the forest. Things are pretty melted out and damp, and a fresh about six inches of snow had fallen overnight on top of this melty scene. We’re all groggy, we’re in headlamps, and we start skinning for maybe 50 yards before we all start to notice that there’s these footprints on the skin track.

The thing that is really weird about them is they are like the silhouette of a foot or a shoe, but there’s no tread on the bottom of them. It seems like anybody who should be headed up this way would have snowshoes or skis and skins on their feet. As I look at them, I think that the only thing that I’ve ever seen that look quite like this footprint are the footprints of moccasins.

I started making this joke that, “Oh, we don’t have to worry guys. These are just grandfather’s moccasins.” That there’s some spirit out here leading us through the woods all along the way.

By the time we’d been going for two miles, and the snow was getting deeper and we were deeper in the woods, the footprints still hadn’t stopped. I started to think, Okay, now this is actually pretty strange. As we started to reach the end of the trail, we noticed that the footprints are still kind of leading in the direction we are going. They’re almost equally guiding as they are confusing. And we were like, this is downright weird and we need to just look at these and think about this for a minute, and make sure we’re not getting ourselves into some sort of situation that we don’t understand.

At this point, we’re going to have to break up as a group. Matt is going to have to walk away from us, and he’s going to be across the mountain on a long lens. Isaiah and I are going to have to start booting up the mountain now, and we’re going to use the drone and cinema camera there. For me, this is looking like it’s about to be the longest boot pack of my life. I can’t feel my feet or my fingers, the wind’s howling, and the footprints had faded away almost entirely.

I can see the first twinges of twilight out on the horizon. The intention this morning was that we were going to ski a 3000-foot descent and six inches of powder at sunrise, and it’s going to be this perfect shot that we need to turn this film around and get things going. My head is really filled with questions like, Should we even be here? Maybe we’re done, maybe we’re not going to get any good skiing in this movie at all, and maybe I’m not even that good of a skier.

So I’m squinting through my goggles through the blowing snow, and I see this figure. And I think, There’s some guy on top of the mountain already who started at 1:30 instead of 2:00 like us, and he left these damn footprints the whole way, and we thought it was funny. And now he’s going to get first tracks before us out here on this backcountry line, and the shot’s going to be ruined. This is all just completely pointless. I feel like giving up, but as I look up to the summit of the mountain it just feels like there’s something pulling me to the top.

As I’m chugging up the mountain, and the sun’s coming up, my thoughts are just racing and my feet are going faster and faster. I come over the crest of the ridge of this blind rollover and the entrance to the line, and the figure that I thought was a tall man is actually just a rock that’s maybe three or four feet tall, and very vaguely at best man-shaped. At that moment I just fell to my knees. I don’t really remember if I was crying or I was laughing, but I was pretty hysterical either way. As I stood nearly atop of a 13,000-foot peak, with a sea of peaks below me basking in the alpine glow, I was really grateful. I realized whatever those footprints were, there was a way that grandfather was leading me to the top of this mountain.

We dropped into ski that day and it was crusty. It was nothing special, but when we went back and reviewed the footage, it was the first good shot that we’d gotten while making this film in at least two weeks. It’s my favorite shot in the film; it’s one of the most poignant points in the movie. It’s this key turning point moment, but it was actually that in my real life.

For me, it really helped me anchor in this understanding of these concepts that exist both in Lakota culture and Ute culture. In Lakota we have this phrase, Taku Wakan Skanskan. Essentially, it’s the reason why miracles happen. It means that something sacred flows through everything. They have a similar concept in Ute, which is called Nana-ma. There’s a way for any of us, I think, to be led to a higher purpose than we can imagine for ourselves through a means and mechanism, which we don’t even need to understand in order for it to work out.

I think this experience was one of the things that really brought me to this feeling of having a sense that I did have a strong relationship, quite literally, with the spirits of the peaks. You don’t need to know why, or how something happens in order for it happening to be consequential and important and life changing.

Connor Ryan is a Lakota skier activist and filmmaker. You can watch his award-winning film, the Spirit of the Peaks on YouTube, and you can follow along with Connor’s adventures and activism by checking him out on Instagram @sacredstoke.

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