{"id":2462694,"date":"2017-04-11T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-04-11T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.outsideonline.com\/uncategorized\/solo-hiking-appalachian-trail-queer-black-woman\/"},"modified":"2025-02-11T07:20:29","modified_gmt":"2025-02-11T14:20:29","slug":"solo-hiking-appalachian-trail-queer-black-woman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.outsideonline.com\/culture\/opinion\/solo-hiking-appalachian-trail-queer-black-woman\/","title":{"rendered":"Going It Alone"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s the spring of 2016, and I\u2019m ten miles south of Damascus, Virginia, where an annual celebration called Trail Days<\/a> has just wrapped up. Last night, temperatures plummeted into the thirties. Today, long-distance Appalachian Trail hikers<\/a> who\u2019d slept in hammocks and mailed their underquilts home too soon were groaning into their morning coffee. A few small fires shot woodsmoke at the sun as thousands of tent stakes were dislodged. Over the next 24 hours, most of the hikers in attendance would pack up and hit the 554-mile stretch of the AT that runs north through Virginia.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve used the Trail Days layover as an opportunity to stash most of my belongings with friends and complete a short section of the AT I\u2019d missed, near the Tennessee-Virginia border. As I\u2019m moving along, a day hiker heading in the opposite direction stops me for a chat. He\u2019s affable and inquisitive. He asks what many have asked before: \u201cWhere are you from?\u201d I tell him Miami.<\/p>\n

A Look Back at Hiking the Appalachian Trail Alone as a Black Woman<\/h3>We followed up with Rahawa Haile to find out what scared her the most, the one piece of gear she couldn\u2019t live without, and why thru-hiking is always worth it in the end.

Read More<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

He laughs and says, \u201cNo, but really. Where are you from from?\u201d He mentions something about my features, my thin nose, and then trails off. I tell him my family is from Eritrea, a country in the Horn of Africa, next to Ethiopia. He looks relieved.<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew it,\u201d he says. \u201cYou\u2019re not Black.\u201d<\/p>\n

I say that of course I am. \u201cNone more Black,\u201d I weakly joke.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot really,\u201d he says. \u201cYou\u2019re African, not Black-Black. Blacks don\u2019t hike<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m tired of this man. His from-froms and Black-Blacks. He wishes me good luck and leaves. He means it, too; he isn\u2019t malicious. To him there\u2019s nothing abnormal about our conversation. He has categorized me, and the world makes sense again. Not Black-Black. I hike the remaining miles back to my tent and don\u2019t emerge for hours.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"
(Courtesy of Rahawa Haile)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Heading north from Springer Mountain in Georgia<\/a>, the Appalachian Trail class of 2017 would have to walk 670 miles before reaching the first county that did not vote for Donald Trump. The average percentage of voters who did vote for Trump\u2014a xenophobic candidate who was supported by David Duke\u2014in those miles? Seventy-six. Approximately 30 miles farther away, they\u2019d come to a hiker \u00adhostel that proudly flies a Confederate flag. Later they would reach the Lewis Mountain campground in Shenandoah National Park<\/a>\u2014created in Virginia in 1935, dur\u00ading the Jim Crow era\u2014and read plaques acknowledging its former history as the segregated Lewis Mountain Negro Area<\/a>. The campground was swarming with RVs flying Confederate flags when I hiked through. This flag would haunt the hikers all the way to Mount Katahdin<\/a>, the trail\u2019s end point, in northern Maine. They would see it in every state, feeling the tendrils of hatred that rooted it to the land they walked upon.<\/p>\n

During the early part of my through-hike, I arrive in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, one afternoon, a little later than I planned. I was one of many thirtysomethings who\u2019d ended their relationships, quit their jobs, left their pets with best friends, and flown to Georgia. By this point, I\u2019m 200 miles into my arduous, rain-soaked trek. Everything aches. The bluets and wildflowers have emerged, and I\u2019ve taken a break in town to resupply, midway through my biggest challenge thus far, the Smokies.<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t until I\u2019m about to leave town that I see it: blackface soap, a joke item that supposedly will turn a white person Black if you can trick them into using it. I\u2019m in a general store opposite the Nantahala Outdoor Center<\/a>. The soap is in a discount bin next to the cash register. I\u2019d popped in to buy chocolate milk and was instead reminded of a line from Claudia Rankine\u2019s book Citizen<\/em><\/a>: \u201cThe past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a shuttle back to the trail at Newfound Gap leaving in 15 minutes. I fumble to take a photograph of the cartoon white woman on the packaging, standing in front of her bathroom sink. She can\u2019t believe it. How could this happen? Her face and hands are black. She scrubs to no avail.<\/p>\n

I leave. Cars honk. I\u2019m standing at an intersection and straining to return to the world. The shuttle arrives to take us from town to trailhead. The van leads us up, up into the mountains. It\u2019s a clear day. Hikers are laughing, rejuvenated. \u201cDid you have fun in town?\u201d a friend I met on the trail asks. \u201cThis visibility is unreal,\u201d says another, nose against the window. He thinks he has spotted a bear. The sun has lifted spirits. The van spills us out, but I can barely see a thing.<\/p>\n

Two days later, a stream of texts hit my phone. Prince has died. I feel my vision blur, sit down on the first rock I see, and don\u2019t move for a while. The hikers who walk past ask if I\u2019m hurt. \u201cI\u2019m sorry to tell you this,\u201d I\u2019ll hear myself say. \u201cPrince just died.\u201d No one knows who I\u2019m talking about. I will see variations of the same vacant expression for the rest of the day. \u201cThe Prince of Wales?\u201d one hiker asks.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m losing light. I have to get to the next shelter. The afternoon has been a learning experience: the trail is no place to share Black grief. Later, when Beyonc\u00e9 releases Lemonade, an album that speaks \u00adpowerfully to Black women, I won\u2019t permit myself to hear it out here. I\u2019m lonely enough as it is, without feeling additional isolation. I keep it from myself, and I follow the blazes north. I tell the trees the truth of it: some days I feel like breaking.<\/p>\n

\n

The National Park Service celebrated its centennial last year<\/a>. In one brochure, a white man stands boldly, precariously, in Rocky Mountain National Park, gazing at a massive rock face. He wears a full pack. He is ready to tackle the impossible. The poster salutes \u201c100 years of getting away from it all.\u201d The parenthetical is implied if not obvious: for some.<\/p>\n

In a Backpacker<\/em> interview<\/a> from 2000, a Black man named Robert Taylor was asked about the hardest things he faced during his through-hike of the Appalachian Trail. He\u2019d recently completed both the AT and the Pacific Crest Trail. \u201cMy problems were mainly with people,\u201d he said. \u201cIn towns, people yelled racist threats at me in just about every state I went through. They\u2019d say, \u2018We don\u2019t like you,\u2019 and \u2018You\u2019re a nigger.\u2019 Once when I stopped at a mail drop, the postmaster said, \u2018Boy, get out of here. We got no mail drop for you.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

It will be several months before I realize that most AT hikers in 2016 are unaware of the clear division that exists between what hikers of color experience on the trail (generally positive) and in town (not so much). While fellow through-hikers and trail angels are some of the kindest and most generous people I\u2019ll ever encounter, many trail towns have no idea what to make of people who look like me. They say they don\u2019t see much of \u201cmy kind\u201d around here and leave the rest hanging in the air.<\/p>\n

The rule is you don\u2019t talk about politics on the trail. The truth is you can\u2019t talk about diversity in the outdoors without talking about politics, since politics is a big reason why the outdoors look the way they do. From the park system\u2019s inception, Jim Crow laws and Native American removal campaigns limited access to recreation by race. From the mountains to the beaches, outdoor leisure was often accompanied by the words whites only. The repercussions for disobedience were grave.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, the fear is like a heartbeat, always present, while at the same time, intangible, elusive, and difficult to define,\u201d Evelyn C. White wrote in her 1999 essay \u201cBlack Women and the Wilderness<\/a>.\u201d In it she explains why the thought of hiking in Oregon, which some writer friends invited her to do, fills her with dread. In wilderness, White does not see freedom but a portal to the past. It is a trigger. The history of suffering is too much for her to overcome. This fear has conjured a similar paralysis nationwide. It says to the minority: Be in this place and someone might seize the opportunity to end you. \u00adNature itself is the least of White\u2019s concerns. Bear paws have harmed fewer Black bodies in the wild than human hands. She does not wish to be the only one who looks like her in a place with history like this.<\/p>\n

Perspective is everything.<\/p>\n

There are 11 cats at Bob Peoples\u2019s Kincora Hiking Hostel<\/a> in Hampton, Tennessee. When I ask Peoples how he keeps track of them, he responds, \u201cThey keep track of me.\u201d We talk about the places he\u2019s hiked and the people he\u2019s met. \u201cGermans have the best hiking culture of any country,\u201d he says. \u201cIf there was a trail to hell, Germans would be on it.\u201d The chance of precipitation the next day is 100 percent. When it drizzles the rain plays me, producing different sounds as it strikes hat, jacket, and pack cover. Of the many reasons to pause while hiking, this remains my favorite. The smell and sound of the dampening forest is a sensory gift, a time for reflection.<\/p>\n

\n
\"A
A gloomy day on Roan Mountain, Tennessee<\/span> (Courtesy of Rahawa Haile)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The first bumper sticker I see in Hot Springs, North Carolina,\u00a0says that April is Confederate History Month. A week later, I stay in a hostel near Roan Mountain, Tennessee, next to a house that\u2019s flying a Confederate flag. Hikers who\u2019ve hitched into town tell me that the rides they got were all from drunk white men. Be careful, they warn.<\/p>\n

I reconsider going into town at all. It\u2019s near freezing. Two days ago, I woke up on Roan Mountain itself in a field of frozen mayapples. Today I wear my Buff headband like a head scarf under my fleece hat. When I walk a third of a mile back to the trailhead alone the next morning, I look at the neighbor\u2019s flag and wonder if someone will assume I\u2019m Muslim, whether I\u2019m putting myself at risk. I lower the Buff to my neck and worry that I\u2019m being paranoid. Six months later, the San Francisco Chronicle will report on a woman of color who was hiking in Fremont, California, while wearing a Buff like a bandana and returned to find her car\u2019s rear window smashed, along with a note. \u201cHijab wearing bitch,\u201d it said. \u201cThis is our nation now get the fuck out.\u201d She wasn\u2019t Muslim, but that\u2019s not the point. The point is the ease with which a person becomes a \u201cthem\u201d in the woods<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Two weeks later, at Trail Days, there\u2019s a parade celebrating current and past hikers. A Black man with the trail name Exterminator aims a water gun at a white crowd as he moves along. He shoots their white children. They laugh and shoot back with their own water guns. This goes on for 30 yards. I pause to corral my galloping anxiety. He is safe, I tell myself. This event is one of the few places in America where I don\u2019t fear for a Black man with a toy gun in a public setting.<\/p>\n

The Southern Poverty Law Center tracked more than 1,000 hate crimes and bias incidents that occurred in the month after the election<\/a>. On November 16, 2016, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy posted information about racist trail graffiti on its Facebook page. It showed up along the trail corridor in Pennsylvania. The group was encouraging anyone who encountered \u00ad\u201coffensive graffiti or vandalism\u201d to report it via e-mail.<\/p>\n

Starting in 1936, amid the violence of Jim Crow, a publication known as the Green Book<\/a><\/em> functioned as a guide for getting Black motorists from point A to point B safely. It told you which gas stations would fill your tank, which restaurants would seat you, and where you could lay your head at night without fear. It remained in print for 30 years. As recently as 50 years ago, Black families needed a guide just to travel through America unharmed.<\/p>\n

There is nothing approximating a Green Book<\/em> for minorities navigating the American wilderness. How could there be? You simply step outside and hope for the best. One of the first questions asked of many women who solo-hike the Appalachian Trail is whether they brought a gun. Some find it preposterous. But one hiker of color I spoke to insisted on carrying a machete, an unnecessarily heavy piece of gear. \u201cYou can never be too sure,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n

\n

As a queer Black woman, I\u2019m among the last people anyone expects to see on a through-hike. But nature is a place I\u2019ve always belonged. My home in South Florida spanned the swamp, the Keys, and the dredged land in between. My father and I explored them all, waving at everything from egrets to purple gallinules and paddling by the bowed roots of mangroves. This was before Burmese pythons overran the Everglades, when the rustling of leaves in the canopy above our canoe still veered mammalian.<\/p>\n

Throughout my youth, my grandmother and I took walks in Miami, where I\u2019d hear her say the words tuum nifas. It meant a delicious wind, a nourishing wind. These experiences shaped how I viewed movement throughout the natural world. How I view it still. The elements, I thought, could end my hunger.<\/p>\n

Little has changed since. Now the rocks gnaw at my shins. I thud against the ground, my tongue coated in dirt. I pick myself back up and start again.<\/p>\n

Every day I eat the mountains, and the mountains, they eat me. \u201cLess to carry,\u201d I tell the others: this skin, America, the weight of that past self. My hiking partners are concerned and unconvinced. There is a weight to you still, they tell me. They are not wrong. My footing has been off for days. There were things I had braced for at the beginning of this journey that have finally started to undo me. We were all hurtling through the unfamiliar, aching, choppy, destroyed by weather, trying not to tear apart. But some of us were looking around as well. By the time I made it through Maryland, it was hard not to think of the Appalachian Trail as a 2,190-mile trek through Trump lawn signs. In July, I read the names of more Black men killed by police: Philando Castile, Alton Sterling. Never did I imagine that the constant of the woods would be my friends<\/a> urging, pleading, that I never return home.<\/p>\n

That was then. Back home in Oakland, California, now, my knees hurt. I struggle with the stairs. I wonder if it\u2019s Lyme disease from an unseen tick bite. The weight I lost has come back. My arms, the blackest I ever saw them after weeks in the summer sun, have faded to their usual dark brown. The bruises on my collarbones from my pack straps are no more. My legs aren\u2019t oozing blood. My feet haven\u2019t throbbed in four months. I am once again soft and unblemished and pleading with my anxiety every day for a few hours of peace. My timing couldn\u2019t be worse. The news is relentless. Facts mean nothing. The truth is, I don\u2019t know how to move through the world these days. Everything feels like it needs saving. I can barely keep up.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Entering
Entering the Smokies<\/span> (Courtesy of Rahawa Haile)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Who is wilderness for? It depends on who you ask. In 2013, Trail Life USA, a faith-based organization, was established as a direct response to the Boy Scouts of America\u2019s decision to allow openly gay kids into their program. A statement by the group made the rules clear: Trail Life USA \u201cwill not admit youth who are open or avowed about their homosexuality, and it will not admit boys who are not \u2018biologically male\u2019 or boys who wish to dress and act like girls.\u201d<\/p>\n

Roughly two years later, news outlets profiled the Radical Monarchs, a group for children of color between the ages of eight and twelve, intended as a Girl Scouts\u00a0<\/strong>for social activists. Headlines like \u201cRadical Brownies Are Yelling \u2018Black Lives Matter,\u2019 Not Hawking Girl Scout Cookies\u201d highlighted what an intersectional approach to youth activism could look like. Organizations such as Trail Life USA and Radical Monarchs show opposite ends of the outdoor spectrum. For conservative Christian men, religion is used as a means of tying exclusionary practices to outdoor participation. For people of color, the wilderness is everywhere they look. They don\u2019t need mountains. Wilderness lives outside their front doors. Orienteering skills mean navigating white anxiety about them. They are belaying to effect change. And even then, their efforts might not be enough.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople on the trail, overwhelmingly, are good people, but it isn\u2019t advertised for us,\u201d says Bryan Winckler, a Black AT through-hiker who went by the trail name Boomer. \u201cIf you see a commercial for anything outdoor related, it\u2019s always a white person on it. I think if people saw someone who looked like them they would be interested. It\u2019s not advertised, so people think, That\u2019s not for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brittany Leavitt, an Outdoor Afro<\/a> trip leader based in Washington, D.C., echoed this sentiment. \u201cYou don\u2019t see it in the media,\u201d she told me recently. \u201cYou don\u2019t see it advertised when you go into outdoor stores. When I do a hike, I talk about what\u2019s historically in the area. Nature has always been part of Black history.\u201d<\/p>\n

She\u2019s right. Outdoor skills were a matter of survival for Black people before they became a form of exclusion. Harriet Tubman is rarely celebrated as one of the most important outdoor figures in American \u00adhistory, despite traversing thousands of miles over the same mountains I walked this year.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow can we make being in the outdoors a conduit for helping people realize, understand, and become comfortable with the space they occupy in the world?\u201d says Krystal Williams, a Black woman who through-hiked the AT in 2011. The change is happening slowly, in large part because of public figures bringing attention to the outdoors. Barack Obama designated more national monuments than any president before him. Oprah has called 2017 her year of adventure. \u201cMy favorite thing on earth is a tree,\u201d she told ranger Shelton Johnson, an advocate for \u00addiversity in the national parks, when she met him in Yosemite in 2010. A recent \u00adphoto of Oprah at the Grand Canyon shows her carrying a full pack. \u201cHiking requires no particular skill, only two feet and a sturdy pair of shoes,\u201d she said. \u201cYou set the pace. You choose the trail. You lock into a certain rhythm with the road, and that rhythm becomes your clarion song.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Resting
Resting on New Hampshire's Kinsman Mountain<\/span> (Courtesy of Rahawa Haile)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n

Halfway through the descent into Dale\u00adville, Virginia, I found myself lying on the trail floor, wincing up at the canopy. I had taken a sudden tumble and was dazed. My right ankle ached badly, though my trekking poles had saved me from a truly nasty sprain. It was not a difficult stretch of trail\u2014some packed dirt, a few small rocks, \u00adplenty of switchbacks. I felt betrayed and then ashamed. I could feel my confidence evaporating. If I couldn\u2019t walk a well-groomed trail, what in the world was I going to do with the boulder scrambles awaiting me in the north? Falls could be fatal. At worst this one was a slight embarrassment, but it marked the first time I needed to forgive myself for what I could not control.<\/p>\n

Every inch of my being by that point had been shaped by an explicit choice. In pursuit of Katahdin\u2014which I reached on October 1, after six months of hiking\u2014I had wept and chopped off the long, natural hair, so poli\u00adticized in America, that my grandmother had told me to always treasure. My afro was no more. I had left my skin to ash, my lips to crack. I wore my transmission-tower-print bandana like an electric prayer. The Appalachian Trail was the longest conversation I\u2019d ever had with my body, both where I fit in it and where it fits in the world.<\/p>\n

\"Reaching
Reaching the trail's end in Maine, October 1<\/span> (Courtesy of Rahawa Haile)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One of the popular Appalachian Trail books I read while preparing for my trek asked readers to make a short list of reasons why they wanted to do it. The author suggested we understand these reasons, down to our core, before embarking, coming up with something deeper than \u201cI like nature.\u201d I took out this document often when things felt overwhelming on the AT, when the enormity of the pursuit threatened to swallow me whole. Looking back, the list is a series of unrealized hopes. One line reads: \u201cI have always been the token in a group; I have never chosen how I want to lead.\u201d Another says: \u201cIt will be the first time I get to discover not whether I will succeed but who I am becoming.\u201d The last line is a declaration: \u201cI want to be a role model to Black women who are interested in the outdoors, including myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

There were days when the only thing that kept me going was knowing that each step was one toward progress, a boot to the granite face of white supremacy. I belong here, I told the trail. It rewarded me in lasting ways. The weight I carried as a Black woman paled in comparison with the joy I felt daily among my peers in that wilderness. They shaped my heart into what it will be for the rest of my life.<\/p>\n

One of the most common sentiments one hears about the Appalachian Trail is how it restores a person\u2019s faith in humanity. It is no understatement to say that the friends I made, and the experiences I had with strangers<\/a> who, at times, literally gave me the shirt off their back, saved my life. I owe a great debt to the through-hiking community that welcomed me with open arms, that showed me what I could be and helped me when I faltered. There is no impossible, they taught me: only good ideas of extraordinary magnitude.<\/p>\n

Rahawa Haile (@rahawahaile<\/a>) is an Eritrean American writer whose work has appeared in Pacific Standard, Brooklyn Magazine, and Buzzfeed. She lives in Oakland.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What happens when a Black woman decides to solo-hike the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine during a summer of bitter political upheaval? Everything you can imagine, from scary moments of racism to new friendships to soaring epiphanies about the timeless value of America\u2019s most storied trekking route.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48341,"featured_media":2170281,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"uuid":"1360f5ebcd1b423cafe49bdcffe79af3","footnotes":""},"categories":[2577],"tags":[2715,2849,2689,2596],"byline":[1866],"ad_cat":[],"legacy-category":[],"class_list":["post-2462694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-appalachian-trail","tag-evergreen","tag-outside-features","tag-womens","cluster-outside-classics","cluster-the-new-icons","byline-rahawa-haile"],"acf":[],"parsely":{"version":"1.1.0","meta":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","headline":"Going It Alone","url":"https:\/\/www.outsideonline.com\/culture\/opinion\/solo-hiking-appalachian-trail-queer-black-woman\/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.outsideonline.com\/culture\/opinion\/solo-hiking-appalachian-trail-queer-black-woman\/"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/30\/appalachian-trail-solo-african-american-mcafee-knob-roanoke-virginia_h.jpg","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https:\/\/cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/30\/appalachian-trail-solo-african-american-mcafee-knob-roanoke-virginia_h.jpg"},"articleSection":"Opinion","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"cthompson"}],"creator":["cthompson"],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online","logo":"https:\/\/www.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/favicon-194x194-1.png"},"keywords":["appalachian trail","evergreen","long reads","women\u2019s"],"dateCreated":"2017-04-11T00:00:00Z","datePublished":"2017-04-11T00:00:00Z","dateModified":"2025-02-11T14:20:29Z"},"rendered":"