Araminta “Minty” Ross was born into slavery in 1822 on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. As a girl, she dreaded doing domestic work that kept her indoors under the hawkish eye and often abusive hand of a mistress. As a teenager, she was hired out to do the kind of grueling agricultural labor usually assigned to men, and she later worked alongside her father, a lumberman, learning how to forage and to follow waterways. Eventually, she used the survival skills and physical endurance she’d developed not only to escape north to her own freedom, but also to lead more than a dozen successful missions to liberate over 70 enslaved people. Ross navigated for those groups under cover of night and in freezing winter conditions. She hid people in swamps, showed them which plants could be eaten safely, and deployed her knowledge of the woods to evade slave hunters. For this she would one day be described as “the ultimate outdoorswoman” by a park ranger. Most of us know her by the name she adopted in her twenties: Harriet Tubman.

This fresh look at the Tubman narrative is one of many stories from the new book , by Tiya Miles. In Wild Girls, Miles, an author and a professor of American history at Harvard University, reexamines the lives of female trailblazers to reveal how playing and working outside as girls prepared them to subvert the status quo as adults. A childhood full of climbing trees and challenging boys to footraces in Victorian-era New England, for example, inspired Louisa May Alcott to create the feisty, independent Jo March in Little Women. Annual migrations between summer and winter settlements in the Rocky Mountains equipped a 16-year-old Shoshone girl named Sacagawea, who was kidnapped and sold or exchanged to a French trader to be one of his “wives,” to serve as Lewis and Clark’s most valuable guide. Before she founded the United Farm Workers Association with Cesar Chavez in 1962, Dorothy Huerta learned “to be strong,” she said, from hikes through the Sierra Nevada with her Girl Scout troop.

In Wild Girls, Miles focuses on women of the 19th century, when, she writes, indoor spaces represented both literal and psychic confinement. White women were relegated to the domestic sphere at a time when performing physical work or playing sports was considered unfeminine. Enslaved Black women working in the house endured the surveillance of the women who controlled them and sexual predation by the men, even as the outdoors connoted both the toil of forced labor and the beauty of nature. Native girls sequestered in boarding schools had their culture and identity systematically assailed. Indoor spaces were heavily regimented along gender lines, Miles argues, while the outdoors was where girls could be freer from restrictive social norms and supervision. Her thesis: time in nature expanded their minds, readying them for revolutionary thought.

Miles herself was profoundly shaped by time outdoors in her youth. Growing up in Cincinnati in the 1970s, shuttling between divorced parents’ homes, she spent hours exploring abandoned buildings and empty lots in the urban neighborhood around her mother’s house, discovering relics like old shoes and furniture, and imagining what they might tell her about the past. She visited state parks with her father and stepmother, and at Kentucky’s Natural Bridge State Resort Park, Miles saw a landscape so awe-inspiring that she wrote about it for a Bible class assignment requiring her to describe an experience with God.

Miles’s most treasured memories outdoors were of times spent with her maternal grandmother on the porch of her Craftsman bungalow or in the garden she lovingly tended. Her grandmother told her stories about her childhood in rural Mississippi, where her family had been sharecroppers. The stories were always rooted in the environment: how green and lush and sustaining the country, how backbreaking the labor in the cotton fields. Miles’s grandmother also described the day when armed white men rode onto the family farm on horseback and forced her father to sign away almost all of their land and possessions. “There was this memory of an idealized Southern nature accompanied by a terrorized Southern nature,” Miles told me when we spoke in the fall. “At the same time,” she continued, citing her grandmother’s ability to save over decades to buy that Craftsman, “there was a present-day experience of the pleasure and pride of having one’s own little bit of the outdoors, one’s own little garden.” The idea that Black people have a complicated yet nonetheless deep and sustaining relationship with the outdoors is a theme Miles has explored in her writing again and again.

“The way we think about nature and the environment in this country is fairly limited,” says Carolyn Finney, author of the book Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors. “We either see nature as a supermarket of resources or a place for outdoor recreation.” Tubman doesn’t fit into either category in that narrow view; nor do the relationships that many people of color have with the outdoors. For example, Finney points out, “Labor has never been seriously considered as a way to have a really strong relationship with nature.” This narrow mindset has led to the erasure of Black people and other people of color from the conversation about environmentalism, she says. The stories in Wild Girls, then, also quietly expand the idea of what it means to be an outdoors person. Miles wants readers to know that, as she writes, “People imagined to exist outside only as exploited laborers or romanticized symbols have in fact lived large and impactful lives outdoors.”

Soon after the revelation about Tubman, Miles, who began her research in African American and Native American women’s histories, became increasingly interested in environmental action. Also in 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, disproportionately affecting Black residents, and Miles saw that the effects of climate change were likely to hit poor communities and people of color hardest. In her work, she began to collect notes on how enslaved people related to nature. In 2011, she founded a nonprofit, ECO Girls, which provided environmental cultural experiences in southeast Michigan. These efforts culminated more than a decade later in Wild Girls.

Miles, an artful explainer who often began her responses to my questions by summarizing the points to be covered, told me that there were two reasons she felt compelled to share stories like Tubman’s. “I think it’s important for all of us to understand the complexity and multidimensionality of Black experience,” she said. “Black people and other marginalized groups have been too often reduced to stereotypical elements and not considered or respected or understood in the wholeness of their beings.”

The other reason, she said, is to reveal to Black women and other women of color that their history is rooted in the outdoors; that they, too, have inherited a deep connection to nature. In doing so, she hopes to activate them to meet the environmental challenges ahead. “I want Black women to feel equipped to know that we stand on this earth, we live with this earth, we are part of this earth,” she says. “It’s our duty to try to protect the home that we depend on, as well as the many other creatures we share it with.”

The pandemic in particular exposed unequal access to green spaces, especially for poor communities and people of color. Studies found, for example, that Black and Asian teens were less likely than their white counterparts to visit parks during the early months of the pandemic, and were more likely to feel emotionally distressed. Areas that were predominantly non-white had both less green space and higher rates of COVID-19.

When I asked Miles for some practical ways to make it easier for everyone to get outside, she suggested that people start by ensuring that everyone feels welcome in their own communities. “Visual signifiers” can help, she said, like a sign in her neighborhood that reads WITCHES AGAINST WHITE SUPREMACY, which, she tells me, made her chuckle. “I thought, This is a street I want to walk on.” Miles also suggested that people contribute not only to organizations that work toward conservation, but also to those that improve access for underrepresented groups.

Miles’s forthcoming projects include a book entirely about Tubman, and her first foray into climate fiction. She and her husband, also a Harvard professor, spend their summers in Montana, where he’s from. Their home base in Bozeman is the launching pad for most of their hikes and visits to national parks. But in Cambridge, too, Miles tries to get outside as much as possible, even if it just means taking her laptop outdoors. For her, time in nature is still key to maintaining gratitude and optimism, even while her work immerses her day after day in our country’s fraught racial history and our planet’s warming future. “Even though it’s a very destabilizing time,” she says, “it’s also a time when possibly, maybe, the things we all do can matter more because the stakes are so high. I think we all can have a heightened sense of purpose right now. That sense of purpose really does energize me.”

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When the SOS message beeped on Kirsten Neuschäfer’s satellite device, she was piloting her 36-foot sailboat, Minnehaha, alone through the remote vastness of the Southern Ocean. She was two and a half months into the Golden Globe, an old-school, solo, nonstop sailing race around the world—run without use of most forms of modern technology, a challenge that many in the maritime community consider the greatest in sailing—and she had the lead. Fellow competitor Tapio Lehtinen’s boat had suddenly sunk, leaving the Finnish sailor adrift in a tiny raft far off the tip of the African continent. Neuschäfer changed course, sailed some hundred miles through the night, found the little raft in the huge and heaving ocean, and shared a glass of rum with Lehtinen before safely transferring him to a giant bulk carrier that had detoured from Singapore to help with the search. Then she turned the Minnehaha to the wind and kept racing.

Even after rescuing Lehtinen, Neuschäfer retained the lead in the perilous contest, which ultimately forced 13 of 16 entrants to drop out. When she crossed the finish line in Les Sables d’Olonne, France, on April 27, 2023—after 30,000 miles and 235 days without stepping off her boat—Neuschäfer became the first woman to win a circumnavigation race, crewed or solo, that involves navigating past the three great capes at the bottom of the world.

Neuschäfer, 40, doesn’t like the focus on her gender. She’s prouder that the win made her the first South African to win a round-the-world sailing event. “I think it’s quite a pity that the attention is due to the fact that I’m a woman rather than a sailor,” she told ���ϳԹ���. “I like to be on the playing ground as an equal.”

But the playing ground itself isn’t equal. Historically, women were barred from working on ships, and in our time they remain wildly underrepresented in sail racing, chartering, and sail training, and on superyacht crews. Discrimination still exists; in February, French sailor Clarisse Cremer, who holds the current record for fastest woman to sail solo around the world, was dropped by her sponsor in advance of the 2024 Vendée Globe after she took a break from sailing to give birth to her first child. Race organizers changed the qualifying process, increasing the number of sailing hours competitors needed to complete in the year prior to the event. (She has since found a new sponsor and is working toward qualifying for the race.)

In fact, Neuschäfer doesn’t like the spotlight, full stop. Competitors were required to send daily text message updates for race media, and hers often read merely: text. But she does acknowledge that there are positive aspects to the staggering amount of press coverage she received. “If there are women out there who’ve had a tough time getting into the sailing industry—or any industry that’s male dominated—and they feel, ‘She could do it, maybe I can also pursue my dream,’ then that’s a good thing,” she says.

The coverage has also helped draw attention to the Golden Globe. While other major circumnavigation races—like the Vendée Globe and the BOC Challenge—involve expensive, high-tech boats that race at high speeds, the Golden Globe hearkens back to a simpler era. The inaugural, legendarily disastrous Golden Globe was run in 1968, when nine men vied to be the first to sail solo, nonstop, around the world. Only one man finished the race. The rest sank, abandoned the journey, or, in one harrowing case, slipped into the sea in an apparent suicide. The Golden Globe was revived in 2018 and is run every four years. The course follows the same perilous route as the original: from Europe down the coast of Africa, around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, Australia’s Cape Leeuwin, and South America’s Cape Horn, returning north along the east coast of South America, and crossing the Atlantic back to Europe. Competitors, who are barred any outside assistance, sail with much the same technology used in 1968, in small boats, navigating with paper charts and sextant, catching rain for water, and communicating by radio.

Neuschäfer likes the Golden Globe because it’s old-school, which makes it more affordable than other sailing races. “It’s accessible to anyone who’s interested in adventure,” says Neuschäfer, a veteran thrill seeker. She cycled the full length of Africa at age 22, riding more than 9,300 miles through jungles and across the Sahara Desert, and sailed National Geographic and BBC film crews to wildly remote locations in the Southern Ocean. When she’s alone in the calm waters of the tropics, she sometimes drops sail and jumps into the ocean, swimming away from the boat “to get that feeling of vastness, that sense of eternity.”

If the buzz around Neuschäfer’s Golden Globe win “inspires people to follow their dreams to whatever degree,” she says, “then it has its worth in that.”

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Mikaela Shiffrin had a banner year in 2023. On March 11, she notched her 87th World Cup win, breaking the record for most career victories, held for 34 years by Swede Ingemar Stenmark, considered by many to be the most successful ski racer of all time. Shiffrin is now the winningest racer in World Cup history—and at 28 years old, she has plenty of time to add to the tally.

She has a lot going for her, to say the least. Incredible discipline, strength, technical skill—you name it. But Shiffrin has long said that the secret to her success isn’t her time in the gym or a perfect ski tune. It’s her mom, Eileen Shiffrin. Eileen has coached and traveled with Mikaela since her first season on the World Cup circuit, at age 15.

Eileen is a former masters ski racer herself, but by the time Mikaela was notching her first results, she’d settled into a career as an ICU nurse. Eileen never set out to be a ski coach. But it was a natural fit, and the two Shiffrins made a remarkable, inseparable team. The few times Eileen has stepped away from her coaching role—once in 2015, and again in 2019—Mikaela’s results suffered. In 2020, they weathered the loss of Jeff Shiffrin, husband and father.

Instead of assigning a writer to interview Mikaela about her year, we decided we would pass the mic to Eileen, so she could ask her daughter about relationships, success, life in the public eye, and what’s next. They recorded this interview while Mikaela was in Portillo, Chile, for a preseason training camp.

EILEEN SHIFFRIN: Last season was a really big year for our team. I know you said it was the first season since Dad passed where you really felt like you could focus for two runs on race day. I know you focus on process rather than on goals, but what did it feel like to reset Ingemar’s record? What motivates you now that that’s in the rearview?
MIKAELA SHIFFRIN: The whole time, I was mostly worried that I was going to break the record when you weren’t there. I was feeling the pressure, and I just didn’t want to think about it anymore. Then you came back to help with the season, and that was a deciding factor for me subconsciously. I thought, If it happens here I’m OK with it, because Mom’s here. It was like the universe said, It’s OK to do it now, because your family’s here. Let loose.

Once I did it, it just felt hectic. You get about ten and a half seconds to yourself, and then you’re thrown to the media and you have to start talking about how you feel before you’ve processed how you feel. I’ve realized that if you don’t let it sink in within the first 24 hours, it just never will. It’s been cool to come to camp and ski and not think about the record at all. I’m focused on working on my position, my downhill performance, and getting better at gliding. With slalom, there’s room for more precision. It’s really exciting to think that I still might be able to get faster.

Would you say that your motivation comes from making small improvements over time?
Right, the record wasn’t a limit. It was just the furthest that anyone had gone up until that point.

It was a result of the process, which has always been your guiding light. The result was resetting Ingemar’s record. But what keeps you motivated is the process, and continuing to set yourself apart with better skiing. How has your relationship to being in the public eye changed since you first started getting attention for your racing?
I’m actually really interested to hear what you think about this one.

OK! I feel like you’re more comfortable than when you first started getting attention for your racing. I think it was exciting for you in the beginning, but also tiring. The hardest part was that you’re an introvert, and you were put in the spotlight.
It forced me to be more comfortable with myself. I still think back to the days at Burke Mountain Academy. If I had to go alone to the dining hall, I just wouldn’t go—I’d skip meals, because I had such a fear of showing up to a room alone. It’s already full, there are no seats open, and you’re just carrying your tray and standing there. Everybody’s already in their conversation. I felt like nobody was missing me, and I shouldn’t be there. That’s still my natural instinct. But somehow I’m more comfortable with just doing what I need to do, and existing how I want to exist, and not worrying about what eyes are on me anymore.

You and I have a multifaceted relationship. I’m your mom, and to some extent your manager and coach. We’re also best friends. A lot of people assume that it was hard for us to develop this dynamic. How do you feel about the relationship we have? Was it ever hard for you to trust me?
I remember when I was at Burke, and you had gotten a job nearby as a nurse at the St. Johnsbury Hospital, so you would be close when Taylor [her brother] and I were at boarding school. I remember you telling me about one of the parents who said something along the lines of, “Don’t you think it’s kind of strange for you and Mikaela to still be so close?” I think I was 14 at the time. And that’s a perspective a lot of people have had through our whole relationship, as you’ve developed from my mom to my coach to literally the manager of Team Shiffrin. I remember us both being frazzled by that question. Like, what’s wrong with being close to your family? What could possibly be wrong with that?

I felt like it was such a gift for us to be close. It also set me apart through my ski career—to have that closeness with you, and with Dad and Taylor, and just with family in general. There have been periods of time when I’ve been a little bit more difficult. But the fundamental premise in our family philosophy is to be close, loving, and caring. It has carried me through my career.

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If Courtney Dauwalter could travel back in time, this is what she would do: She’d join a wagon train crossing the American continent, Oregon Trail-style, for a week, maybe more, just to see if she could swing it. It would be hard, and also pretty smelly, but Dauwalter wonders what type of person she’d be if she deliberately decided to take that journey. Would she stop in the plains and build a farm? Could she make it to the Rocky Mountains? How much suffering could she take, and how daunted might she be by the terrain ahead of her?

“If you get to Denver and this huge mountain range is coming out of the earth, are you the type of person who stops and thinks, ‘This is good’?” she wonders. “Or are you the person who’s like, ‘What’s on the other side?’ ”

Dauwalter is probably the best female trail runner in the world—a once-in-a-generation athlete. She’s hard to miss at the sport’s most famous races, and not just because of the nineties-style basketball shorts she prefers. (Her explanation: she just likes them.) It’s because she’s often running among the leading men in the sport, smiling beneath her mirrored sunglasses. The 38-year-old is five foot seven and lean, with smile lines and hair streaked with highlights from abundant time spent in high-altitude sun.

Dauwalter shared her historical daydream with me while sipping a pink sparkling water at her house in Leadville, Colorado, after a four-hour morning training run. Her cross-country wagon musings get at why she’s the best female trail runner ever to live: Dauwalter is curious. She’s curious about pain, about limits, about possibility. This quality is fundamental to what makes her so good.

Over the past seven years, Dauwalter has won almost everything she’s entered. In 2016, she set a course record at the Javelina Jundred—an exposed, looped route through the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. That same year she won the Run Rabbit Run 100-miler in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, by a margin of 75 minutes, despite experiencing temporary blindness for the last 12 miles (she could only see a foggy sliver of her own feet). Because of ultrarunning’s huge distances, it’s not unheard of to beat the competition by so much, but it doesn’t happen with the frequency that Dauwalter manages.

In 2018, she won the extremely competitive Western States 100 in California; it was her first time on the course. A year later, she set a new course record while winning the prestigious Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc (UTMB), besting the second-place finisher by just under an hour. In 2022, she set the fastest known time on the 166.9-mile Collegiate Loop Trail in her backyard in Colorado, and she won (and set a new course record at) the Hardrock 100, a grueling high-altitude loop through the state’s San Juan Mountains.

Dauwalter is also one of the few runners of her caliber to seriously dabble in the really long distance races. In 2017, she won the Moab 240—yes, that’s 240 miles—in two days, nine hours, and fifty-five minutes, ten hours ahead of the second-place finisher. She ran even farther at Big’s Backyard Ultra in 2020, a quirky test of wills where athletes complete a 4.167-mile course every hour on the hour until only one runner is left. Dauwalter set a women’s course record of just over 283 miles.

Given everything she’s accomplished, it’s hard to believe that this summer was her most successful yet. At the end of June, she returned to Western States, where she smashed the women’s course record by more than an hour and finished sixth overall. When she passed , who finished ninth, he remembers how calm and collected she looked, running all alone. “My pacer looked back at me and said, ‘Jeff, I can’t even keep up with her right now,’ ” he says. Less than three weeks later, she won Hardrock again, taking fourth place overall and setting a new women’s course record. The race changes direction on the looped course each year, and she now holds both the clockwise and counterclockwise records.

In the interest of testing herself one more time, in late August she traveled to France to run the UTMB again. She won that race too, becoming the first person in history to win all three races in a single summer. “She’s one of those humans who defy even the concept of an outlier,” says Clare Gallagher, a former Western States winner who has raced against Dauwalter in the past. “I look at her summer and I have no words. It’s truly hard to conceptualize.”

Dauwalter led UTMB from the start, and she finished more than an hour ahead of the woman in second place. As she descended the final stretch of trail, she was followed by a barrage of cameras and a handful of people who looked like they just wanted a bit of her magic to rub off on them. As crowds roared on either side of the finish line in Chamonix, she looked back at the spectators and clapped in their direction, never raising her hands above her head or pumping her fists in the air. After hugging her parents and her husband, 39-year-old Kevin Schmidt, she jogged back in the direction she’d just come to high-five hundreds of fans.

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Natasha “Tashi” Smith is a self-described “unprofessional” athlete and member of the Ebony Beach Club, a group committed to introducing more Black people to the ocean through beach parties and surf lessons. An avid surfer and traveler—you can find her on and and she appears in the film —she chases waves up and down the California coast in her van and regularly makes international trips to explore different cultures. Smith is passionate about teaching people that there are no age or cultural restrictions on being active in sports and activities. Her essay below is excerpted from Been ���ϳԹ���: ���ϳԹ���s of Black Women, Nonbinary, and Gender Nonconforming People in Nature, edited by Shaz Zamore and Amber Wendler, out this month from .��

“They’re Just Activities”

Before I say that I am anything, I must first declare that I am Black. I am a Black woman, a Black skateboarder, a Black motocross rider…the list goes on. I love the distinction. It means that no matter what, I am never plain, and I am always adding to the list. Black surfer is one of my newest titles, and my favorite. I think the universe was saving that one for just the right time.

On my first visit to California, I wanted to experience as much of the place as possible. I took a surfing lesson and had a great time but didn’t actually get it. When I got home to Virginia Beach, my dirt bike broke and, to be honest, I wasn’t that interested in fixing it. It was hotter than usual that summer, and a lot of my friends weren’t riding regularly. The instructor had mentioned Costco had surfboards for $100, so I picked one up.

I spent that whole summer at the beach. Several times each week, I packed my surfboard into my car early in the morning and drove out there. The surf community at my first beach was small. By the time I started to figure out surfing, I knew all the other surfers by name. They taught me a lot and encouraged me to try surfing in California. A year and a half later, I found myself sitting in a van on the Pacific coast, surfing more than I was working, and living well. A ninety-minute surf lesson at Pleasure Point had changed my entire life.

When I talk to Black people about surfing, one of their first questions is how I got into such a predominantly white activity. The brief story I just shared always feels too simple. There should have been a beloved teacher or family adventure, but really it was just me with a Groupon on a work trip. When I thought of California, I thought of surfing, so it felt like a natural decision. My race and gender have never affected whether I pursue a new hobby or project. Before my lesson, I never thought about the fact that I would be the only Black person in the water that day. The only thing on my mind was how cold the water might be in April (and I was right to be concerned). I quickly learned the difference between the chilly, peaky waves of the Pacific and the warm, mushy Atlantic I was used to.

Virginia Beach is a really big town that spans from a newer downtown to the touristy oceanfront, then winds through some pretty countryside that touches North Carolina and all the way up to Norfolk, home of the largest naval base in the world. I grew up near the tourist area, so we dealt with the yearly influx of people from the north and west seeking a coastline. With the community being home to a lot of high-ranking government and military officials, as well as the poor leftover Confederates, misogyny and racial tension swirled through constantly.

I was fortunate enough to maintain a childlike naïveté about the effects of race until much later in life. I tended to blame any negative attention on the fact that I was a girl. Now, when people ask if I feel safe as the only Black person at the beach, I almost have to laugh. I grew up racing motocross in the backwoods of the Southern states, so the beaches of California are far from the most challenging racial environment I’ve ever had to navigate—and I used to do it without a second thought. I’ve slept in many homes that had Confederate flags stamped with Southern pride hanging in the garage. I just figured we needed a new flag for Southern pride because I knew I couldn’t fly that one.

Because of that type of social ineptitude, I never know if I’m qualified to give advice on starting new things. The biggest part of starting a new hobby is simply getting over the anxiety of participating. I know I can’t just say don’t think about that, but that’s what I do. Once my helmet is on or my wetsuit is zipped, I shouldn’t be thinking about who’s looking, because I have to do a thing. Focusing on bettering myself a little each time attracts positivity from other people. I’ve also realized that many altercations start because a beginner does not realize they’re in the way. I always focus on learning how to stay out of the way first because of motocross. If you’re not going as fast, stay to the right. Hold a predictable line. If you fall, do your best to get off the track. These are things that keep the more experienced riders from landing on you.

Similar rules apply to snow sports and other sports where people of different experience levels share the same course. Learning how to be predictable can help maintain the vibe and make it a little easier for you to figure everything else out. Lessons and camps are my favorite ways to start new things because I’m someone else’s responsibility. They’ll tell me right from wrong until eventually I’m comfortable navigating it on my own. And there’s very little chance I’ll get yelled at.

That’s not to say that each reaction is not influenced by prejudices. I’ve seen the same infractions, such as dropping in on someone else’s wave, but people of different demographics get different responses in the session. When I find myself in those situations, I try to think of it as lightly as possible. I don’t have the energy for hate, so I’ll make an empathetic analysis of their actions, telling myself they don’t have the coping skills they need, so that I can go back to focusing on whatever I wanted to do that day. Even if there is a bad interaction, I can always find some small victory at the end of each session if I at least participated. If the surf is bigger than I’m comfortable with, I don’t even make it a point to ride a set wave. I will take the small victory of having made the paddle out, and if I catch a bigger wave, cool.

Small victories lead to eventual success. I have plenty of sports-related testaments to this statement, but building out my van is a more universal example. I didn’t actually know how to build anything before I got my van. A strong base of knowledge in Legos made me the family furniture constructor, but I had no freehand carpentry experience. The first bed in my van was a piece of plywood on Ikea table legs. My dog has only recently become brave enough to sit on its much sturdier replacement while I drive because it used to flip over when I hit the brakes hard.

Once again, persistence and focus on the task at hand brought the right people to me—a small victory. One day while I was working on the van in a parking lot, a hardware store employee who was collecting carts taught me how to build a basic box frame and how to brace it. From there, I built it over and over, better each time, until I had the home on wheels that I wrote this piece in. There were many small victories and some defeats, too, and I don’t know if any project of mine is ever truly finished, but I’m glad I didn’t save up and let a company do it for me. After all those small victories, I gained a wealth of knowledge—and a van. I’m proud of it and everything I do in it, and I can develop and specialize it for any of my new interests.

I hope some of this resonates with someone out there. I hope you can remember to just focus on the task when you start to feel people’s eyes on you. I hope you can excuse some weaker-minded person in the moment so that you can maintain your focus. I hope you choose happiness whenever it’s available. I will say a million times: if you have ever seen anyone do anything that you thought looked fun, you are just as human as they are and you have every right to try it out too. And if you like it, I hope you share it with someone else who didn’t think they could do it either.

Natasha “Tashi” Smith is still chasing waves in her van and enjoys surfing, motocross, skateboarding, mountain biking, and most other sports that involve motion. She has a devoted following on .

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When Indigenous activist and model Quannah ChasingHorse was three, her family moved to a small village in Mongolia, where her mother, Jody Potts-Joseph, had taken a job teaching English. During supply trips to a nearby town, Jody would often find Quannah in front of their hotel’s small television, transfixed, watching a channel that showed nothing but high-fashion runway shows.

“My memories start in Mongolia,” Quannah, now 21, says of those years. “There’s a picture of me sitting, with my legs crisscross, just staring at the TV in awe. Ever since then, my dream was to be a model.”

That dream is now a reality. Quannah—whose mother is Han Gwich’in and is from Eagle Village, Alaska, and whose father is Oglala and Sicangu Lakota (tribes based in South Dakota)—has gone from being a teenage climate activist to walking in runway shows for brands like Chanel, Chloé, and Gucci, providing an Indigenous presence at fashion’s top levels and helping boost visibility for Native brands and designers. Her ascent is chronicled in a new documentary short, , supported by the North Face. (The company premiered Walking Two Worlds on its YouTube channel 0n September 12.)

In advance of the film’s release, I spoke with Quannah and Jody remotely. They were sitting at the kitchen table at Jody’s cabin in Eagle Village, where their Han Gwich’in ancestors have lived for thousands of years, just west of the border with Canada, on the upper Yukon River. I could hear barking dogs outside the cabin—Jody’s sled-dog team.

As the women explained, modeling may have been Quannah’s destiny, but it was advocacy work that first put her in the public eye: as a teenager, she protested against drilling in the (ANWR), served on the , spoke at climate rallies, and worked with the Alaska Wilderness League. Quannah’s mother and grandmother are also activists, and Quannah came to her role as a land and water protector through their influence and from close observation of her surroundings while growing up.

“In my life I have seen these changes, I have experienced these changes, I have witnessed these changes,” she tells me. For Indigenous activists, climate is more than personal—it’s existential. “Our way of life is at risk,” she says. “Our culture, all of those things that make us who we are, that make our identity.”

In a fortunate twist, a documentary filmmaker was along for much of the ride. , a PhD candidate in political ecology at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, first met Quannah and her mom in 2019, at a summit in Washington, D.C., organized to fight drilling in the ANWR. “Quannah was incredible in meetings on Capitol Hill,” she recalls, “and in her conviction that they needed to hear and understand what she was saying. I think she was born for this.”

Wikler pitched the North Face on the possibility of a film project—inspired by the brand’s long-standing support for advocacy efforts around the ANWR and other causes—and began what became more than two years of pandemic-interrupted shooting. Wikler was convinced that Quannah and Jody’s story could resonate with a wider audience. “I felt there was a gap in the storytelling around climate for something that was relational and empathetic,” she says. “I was thinking, How can we get people who never set foot in Alaska to care about what’s happening there?” Fashion wasn’t initially on her radar, she says, “but there’s a saying in documentary film—if you end up with the story you started with, you didn’t do the film right.”

Walking Two Worlds has plenty to say about climate and activism. It’s also a deft portrait of a young woman coming into her own while navigating two different realities: her traditional culture and the flashy realm of haute couture. Jody, who watches over Quannah’s career as her “mom-ager,” experienced a similar tension—between her dreams for the future and a feeling of responsibility to her community and her culture—when she left Alaska in the late 1990s to attend college in the lower 48. While raising Quannah and her two brothers, she says, she taught them how to find their way, “to make sure they were really grounded in their culture and had a connection to their Indigenous lands, but also that they could still be successful in the modern world.”

It’s been heartening for Quannah and Jody to see that message getting attention in their own community—the realities of Native life are too rarely depicted on screen—but the hope was always to broaden the reach. “I want my community to be heard and seen in the right way,” Quannah says. “Not a stereotype, not a fake version of what this industry wants Natives to look like or be like or sound like.”

That task of educating people can be challenging. Her traditional facial tattoos, which are called Yidiiltoo and represent a part of Han Gwich’in culture that was long suppressed, often draw questions. “Someone at a job recently was really intrigued by my tattoos and everything about me,” Quannah says. “I was explaining that I was Native American from Alaska and from South Dakota, that my bloodlines come from two tribes, and they just couldn’t comprehend it.”

Quannah hopes the film will help people understand not just where she comes from, but how threatened her home and her culture are. In it we see her walking through burned stands of trees near the family’s Yukon River fish camp, the result of a wildfire. This summer, the village experienced an unprecedented heat wave and abnormally high river temperatures.

Near Jody’s cabin, other fish camps were quiet as they faced a fourth straight summer of , forcing a closure to subsistence harvests. “The salmon are one of our main food sources,” Jody says, “so we’re facing food insecurity, but also the loss of our culture.” The shared knowledge behind the use of salmon—catching, filleting, smoking, canning, utilizing every part—is passed down through generations on the riverbanks. Without fishing, that doesn’t happen.

Quannah acknowledges the inherent tension between her activism and the fashion industry’s carbon footprint. But she hopes to use her influence to nudge companies in the right direction. “It’s possible to be a part of these industries and create changes and inspire change,” she says. “I always tell people you have to be at the table where they’re making these decisions.”

That messaging strategy seems to be working, both through her own following (more than half a million on ) and through reposts from new fashion-world connections like Gigi and Bella Hadid (78 million and 59 million followers, respectively), who have shared some of her calls to action with their fans.

This can all be a heavy burden for a young person, and it isn’t always easy to stay upbeat. “A lot of my generation, including myself, have climate anxiety,” Quannah says. “It’s a true feeling of being worried about our future.” But amid the pressure, expectations, and demands, she’s found ways to stay grounded in her new home base of Los Angeles, where she FaceTimes frequently with her mom and extended family and “impulsively” got a dog, a black German shepherd named Pepper, who she takes on hikes every day that she’s home.

When life becomes too much, the ultimate tonic is being back in Eagle Village, a place where she feels understood and embraced, and where her thoughts turn to future plans—like creating a space to host youth camps and community discussions, and growing , an organization the family recently founded to help Indigenous kids connect with nature.

As our conversation wound down, I asked Jody and Quannah what the plans were for the rest of her visit. It was raining, and they decided some new tattooing might be in order. The next day, they planned to load up their skiff and head downriver for a camping trip on the beach.

“That’s my favorite thing to do,” Quannah says. “Just build a fire and be at camp. Summertime—it’s just so fun, because you’re on the river, you get to fish and swim and all those good things.”

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In the early 1990s, Kristine McDivitt, then the CEO of Patagonia, was at a café in El Calafate, Argentina, when a man named Doug Tompkins sat down next to her. “Hey, kid, how ya doing?” he asked. Doug was the best friend and climbing buddy of her boss, Yvon Chouinard, and he was known as a brilliant, arrogant bon vivant. In 1964, Doug had cofounded the North Face with his first wife, Susie Tompkins Buell. Seven years later, the two started another clothing company, Esprit. After cashing out, he moved to Chile to live alone in a small cabin.

Kristine, a free-spirited California girl who had worked her way up the ladder at Patagonia after an entry-level, two-dollar-an-hour “assistant packing” job in her teens, knew Doug’s reputation. So when he tried to convince her to stay in South America with him, she demurred. (She also happened to be engaged to another man at the time.) But he was persistent. Months later, a five-day visit to Chile to see the farm Doug had purchased at the edge of a fjord turned into five weeks. Finally, Kristine returned to the States, “blew up her personal life,” and never looked back—by 1993 she had quit her job, married Doug, and moved into his cabin.

For the next two decades, the pair lived between remote homes in Chile and Argentina, only occasionally returning to California. They had a grand plan: buy and protect as much land threatened by logging and overgrazing as possible. Eventually, through a series of nonprofits run by the Tompkinses, the couple purchased hundreds of thousands of acres from ranchers and absentee landowners. Their fairy-tale life ended in tragedy in 2015, when Doug died in a kayaking accident in Chile at 72. Wracked with grief, Kristine was left alone at the helm of Tompkins Conservation, which was on the cusp of making the largest private land donation in history, to take the form of numerous national parks granted to the governments of Chile and Argentina.

Who better to capture this epic saga of love and loss on film than the Oscar-winning couple of Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin? Their new documentary, Wild Life, follows Kristine Tompkins’s trajectory from barefoot Southern California girl to CEO of one of the most influential outdoor brands in the country to champion of conservation. The film will debut in select theaters starting April 14 and will be available to stream on May 26 on Disney+.

Chin met the Tompkinses through Chouinard and Rick Ridgeway, a climber and former Patagonia vice president. “Doug, Yvon, and Rick have all been heroes to me since I started out as a young dirtbag climber and photographer living in Yosemite,” Chin said in an email. And after spending time with Kristine, he “quickly learned that she is a force of nature, an incredible human being. So of course, taking on this film was something deeply personal to me.”

Before Doug died, Chin had visited the couple in South America and shot footage of them, noodling on the notion of making a film. After the kayaking accident, he and Vasarhelyi approached Kristine about putting together a movie of her life. “It took me a while to think that a film like this should be made,” said Kristine, adding that she only gave her approval because she thought it would be good for encouraging conservation efforts. “I decided if I was going to do it, I would do it only with Jimmy and Chai. They are extraordinary filmmakers and trusted friends.”

Wild Life delves into the Tompkinses’ years of joy and struggle and the aftermath of the tragedy, as told through intimate interviews with Kristine and a close circle of lifelong companions. Chin’s signature stunning photography of Chile and Argentina is intercut with 1960s footage of America’s original climbing, skiing, and surfing dirtbag royalty: Kristine singing the Beach Boys’ “California Girls”; the Grateful Dead playing at the opening of the first North Face store; Chouinard, Doug, and their funhog crew unfurling a flag after their historic ascent of Fitz Roy. The clips add levity and also bring into focus that, even before they were a couple, the Tompkinses were fundamental players in the creation myth of modern American outdoor culture.

It’s clear that Doug and Kristine were soulmates. Yet they were also intense overachievers committed to conservation work in countries that were often suspicious of and hostile toward their efforts—some Chileans, for example, thought that the couple’s real aim was to populate their land with American bison. The pair rarely had time to explore together. In the film, Kristine sets out to climb a 7,500-foot peak in Patagonia’s Chacabuco Valley that her husband and Chouinard first summited in 2009. Doug dubbed the peak Cerro Kristine. Chouinard and Ridgeway—both were on the kayaking expedition that killed Doug—accompany Kristine on her journey to reach the summit, along with Chin and professional rock climber Timmy O’Neill. “Why did we never climb our mountain together?” Kristine asks the clouds as she stands alone, looking out over Patagonia National Park.

The documentary is a testament to fierce love and how its power can serve a greater purpose. “There was a deep, deep union and devotion to each other, and they came together with a common vision,” says friend and filmmaker Edgar Boyle in Wild Life. But the grief that resulted when that union was severed by tragedy is difficult to watch. At one point, Kristine recounts, while flying with Doug’s remains to his final resting place near their home in the Chacabuco Valley, she carved their names in the coffin with a small knife. “Doug’s death was an amputation,” Kristine told me. “I took some long walks by myself and was never sure I’d turn around and walk back.”

The only way forward was to dive even further into her conservation work. With the help of a roughly 300-person staff at Tompkins Conservation, she exceeded her late husband’s dream of creating 12 national parks. The current count: 15, along with two marine parks and a total of 14.8 million protected acres in Chile and Argentina—an area roughly the size of West Virginia. Those numbers keep expanding, along with Kristine’s seemingly endless supply of energy to continue the work she started with her husband. “I carry Doug around in my pocket. If I get really stuck on something, I simply ask: ‘What would you do?’ I am just grateful that we have this marriage,” she said, still speaking of their union in the present tense. “It’s given me unbelievable strength.”

Kristine is still the president of Tompkins Conservation, but she has relinquished day-to-day operations to focus primarily on strategy. In late February, she met with Chilean president Gabriel Boric to move forward with a proposed donation of 230,000 acres on behalf of Tompkins Conservation, with a view toward creating national park number 16 at Cape Froward, on the Brunswick Peninsula, the southernmost point of the continent. The rugged, largely unexplored region is a refuge for endangered species like the huemul deer. The proposal reclassifies state land that, if included, would make the area bigger than Grand Teton National Park. In recent years, two independent local organizations have spun off from Tompkins Conservation. Rewilding Chile and Rewilding Argentina each work in their respective countries to bring back endangered species—from the Andean condor in Patagonia National Park to the jaguar in Argentina’s Iberá National Park.

“I want people to realize that this film is not about Doug and Kristine,” she told me. “It’s the representation of hundreds of Chileans’ and Argentines’ work. Mother Nature is not winning this game. We are all on the losing team, and everybody needs to join the fight.”

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In her podcast, , Ivy Le takes on the great outdoors—very, very reluctantly. The result is a lot of jokes about poop, icky things in nature, and why people choose to sleep on the ground. But FOGO also offers a refreshing take on a nature show: Ivy is the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants and she presents an alternative approach to the “reckless white men” she says have dominated this space. In her first season, Ivy learned to camp. This year, she upped the ante and tried hunting. Her experience proved to be more enlightening—and humbling—than she ever imagined.

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