This Land is Your Land: The African American Outdoor Association Helps Diversify Oregon’s Trails

Written by Eric Gold
Edited by Patrick McDonald

Jacqueline Potts has lived almost all of her life in Portland but had never been hiking in the Columbia River Gorge until she signed up for a trip led by the African-American Outdoor Association (AAOA). “I thought, ‘Black people don’t go hiking!’ We really thought we couldn’t do it.” Yet, at the end of her hike to Eagle Creek, Potts says, she and her two friends had a feeling of achievement that inspired them to try other outdoor activities. Last weekend, the thirty-six-year-old, who had never before set foot on Mount Hood, went skiing for the first time—and she now has her eyes set on parasailing.

The AAOA, founded by Greg Wolley and Tricia Tilman in 2004, seeks to introduce more African Americans, like Jacqueline Potts, to the great outdoors through hiking, camping, skiing and kayaking. Paul Martin, who runs the Inside Out family and youth camping program for the Washington State Parks Department, is another advocate for increasing outdoor recreational opportunities for minorities. In fact, Inside Out began in response to a census of state parks users that showed a distinct pattern. “No shocker to many folks,” Martin says. “People of color, predominately urban, lower to lower-middle-class, are not parks users. African American users were particularly non-existent.”

“We want to help people to start to shift their lifestyle,” Wolley says about his organization’s mission. He notes that while walking around the neighborhood is great, there are genuine rewards to venturing out into the wilderness areas for which the Northwest is so well known. “It’s about helping people expand their turf, so to speak,” Wolley says. “This belongs to everybody. That’s what we want to impress upon people. This belongs to you.”

As a child, Wolley’s experience was not unlike that of Jacqueline Potts. Growing up in the San Francisco Bay area, Wolley did not have much exposure to the outdoors. He never even went to summer camp. “My mother was afraid of either large animals, or me drowning in the creek or the lake.” Even so, Wolley says he was always looking under rocks and logs, and bringing home whatever crawling critters he might find. His interest in ecology grew from there. He attended the graduate program in environmental education at Southern Oregon University, has managed education programs for conservation groups, and has worked as a natural resources planner for Metro.

As an African American and outdoor advocate, Paul Martin knows how difficult it can be to convince urban minorities to go camping. He took over the Inside Out program four years ago because his predecessor was having problems recruiting kids to participate. “The social reality,” Martin says, “is a bald middle-aged white guy from Ferndale, Washington, trying to ask any black family, ‘Can I take your kids camping? Or would you like to go camping?’ felt challenging. Unsafe.” Martin has had better luck increasing participation in the program. Last fall, he issued a report citing over six hundred kids attending one or more programs and events.

Wolley thinks his mother’s suspicion of the wilderness is shared by many in the African American community. While living in Los Angeles, he took inner-city youth out into the desert. At first, he says, they were afraid of tarantulas and scorpions, though eventually they realized “the things that are scary about living in the city are not fears to worry about out there. It’s actually very peaceful.”

Still, he understands the discomfort some African Americans feel. Even though many have roots in the rural South and, as he points out, going back to Africa, the migration of African Americans to urban areas in search of jobs caused many people to become disconnected with those roots. “Remote areas were deemed not very safe because there is racism and violence,” Wolley says. “There’s fear around issues of safety, and comfort level, and other people not looking like them. Every year I go to national parks, and I do a kind of mental census. Even today, there are very, very few black people on the trails, in the lodges or nature centers. There’s sometimes almost a “nature-phobia” that occurs after multiple generations of not being in a forest. Big trees can be imposing, there are sounds at night, things like that.”

The work of the AAOA and Inside Out is part of a national trend to help counteract what Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, has dubbed “nature-deficit disorder.” Louv connects the decrease in children’s exposure to the outdoors to increases in depression, obesity and attention disorders. Currently, a coalition of over one thousand organizations is promoting the No Child Left Inside Act, which would mandate federal funding for outdoor education as a way of combating these trends.

For African Americans the stakes are even higher—studies show that blacks are twice as likely as whites to die from diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, according to Deon Johnson, interim director of the Office of Multicultural Health at the Oregon Department of Human Services. Wolley and the AAOA find those numbers troubling. “It’s our contention that a lot of those things are lifestyle-related,” Wolley says. “It comes back to lack of exercise and poor diet.”

Wolley is quick to note, however, that he is not imposing a “fitness regime." Instead, he hopes, that people will become more active and feel better once they begin to experience the beauty of the Northwest. At some point, Wolley says, participants cross a threshold and start to believe they can do things they’ve never tried before, much like Jacqueline Potts. Additionally, as people begin to enjoy the health benefits of outdoor activity they become invested in the environment as well. The more time they spend in the wilderness, the more they learn about it, and the more they start to care about the environment. “Then they’re more likely to take action if there is an environmental threat,” Wolley says.

Despite some reluctance within the African American community, the AAOA has been slowly changing minds. Since the group’s first hike in Forest Park in 2005, participation in the group has been growing steadily. The organization’s trips have become so popular that some now fill up two weeks in advance. At first, with no budget to speak of, the group simply gathered at the Matt Dishman Community Center in Northeast Portland and carpooled to urban natural areas like Lewis and Clark State Park and Powell Butte. In the group’s second year, Wolley won a grant from the Black United Fund allowing the group to rent a fifteen passenger van and do a wider variety of activities like cycling and kayaking. Another grant, from the Enterprise Rent-A-Car Foundation, made a van available throughout the year, and a grant from REI last summer provided a dozen two-person tents, sleeping bags and pads. Wolley has also been able to negotiate favorable group rates on the rentals of bicycles, kayaks and snowshoes. This winter the AAOA partnered with the Portland-based Ebony Rose Ski Club, a group of African American ski enthusiasts. With a grant from the Seattle-based Youth Outdoor Legacy Fund, they were able to provide transportation, equipment rental, and an all day lift ticket for only twenty five dollars. Kids were able to ski for free.

The organization has also been able to integrate black history into their program, such as the time they partnered with the Friends of the Columbia Gorge. Their executive director led a hike to a ravine where Lewis and Clark—and the African American slave York—camped. The director read to the group from Clark’s journal. “That was good for our group to learn about, especially York,” Wolley says. “He was a full member of the team, and essentially free during the expedition, and then when they went back home he was a slave again.”

Eventually, Wolley hopes that the exposure to the Northwest’s scenic natural areas will inspire young people of color to pursue careers in environmental fields as he has. He has reason to be hopeful; as his organization has grown the participants have stepped up to become trip leaders and liaisons with public land management agencies. “I’ve had a great career and I’ve really enjoyed the work that I’ve done,” Wolley says. “Sometimes it’s hard for conservation work or the sciences to compete for talent, when someone can get a job in the private sector with more money. I think the thing is to focus on the satisfaction and enjoyment, the emotional and spiritual benefits of the outdoors.”

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Eric Gold is pursuing an MFA in nonfiction writing at Portland State University.