The Aspect of Safety in Outdoor Adventure that Too Many Leaders Forget ⛑️

When it comes to safety in outdoor adventure, we often focus on the wrong details.

Wearing dangly earrings while backpacking is less dangerous than another man’s sexist Instagram comment. A rolled ankle heals faster than the sting from a guy at the trailhead asking if you’re “sure you can handle this.” A steep trail isn’t as scary as the slur yelled by a stranger in the parking lot.

As outdoor leaders, we talk about physical safety all the time. But there’s another kind of safety that too many leaders and communities forget about: psychological safety.

Scroll through dozens of outdoor brand websites, and you’ll find the same sentences: Everyone belongs outside, nature doesn’t discriminate, all are welcome here. Yeah, those look inclusive and welcoming, but the words are free to say, and there aren’t always actions behind them.

Sally Steele, founder of Outdoorithm, spoke with me about psychological safety in the outdoor industry, democratizing public lands data, and reclaiming connection to land. As a kid, Sally didn’t know that National Parks existed. She didn’t realize that many people spend time outdoors to play, not just to work. Her ancestors were enslaved in America, her great-uncle was a sharecropper, and her dad struggles to understand why she’d voluntarily sleep outside. For Sally’s lineage, much of “time outdoors” was about survival, not a way to enjoy nature and feel free. Racism is built into the outdoor industry, whether leaders admit it or not.

Despite our horrific history, we can create a future where the “everybody is welcome” marketing is truthful and no longer performative. Here are some ideas to do just that, borrowed from my convo with Sally (which you can listen to here, and should). The sentences “in quotes” below are Sally’s words from it. :)

1 | Check your sense of entitlement when you’re outdoors.

It feels super icky to admit this, but I’ll occasionally notice a “but I deserve this!!!” reaction when I’m frustrated. Not just outdoors, but if I’m in a long line, or asking for a favor. And I know that bleeds into outdoor recreation. As Sally put it:

 “It's the scarcity mentality. It's the, if I tell somebody about this trail, my trail is gonna get overrun, and there's not enough trail out there. When the reality is that, one, it's not your trail. Two, other people get to experience the joy that you find on that trail, and they have as much right to it or privilege to it, because all of these public lands and all the land that we live on is stolen, right?

One of the things that we need to think about is, why do I think this space is mine? Why am I thinking about it possessively as opposed to maybe the land owns us in a sense? Or maybe we're in this reciprocal relationship with the land. If it gets overcrowded, I can be one of the people who explores a different place because I've had the privilege, the joy, the honor of already walking these trails and already witnessing the changes of the years and the seasons here. And maybe it's somebody else's turn.”

Sally once camped at a site her family reserved through the same public system as everybody else. A family walked up and asked how Sally got “their” spot, because “we always camp here.”

Your favorite campsite is not any more YOUR campsite than it is someone else’s. (On public lands, it’s OURS.) Consider how you may be gatekeeping even if you mean well. Just because you love a place doesn’t mean nobody else should learn to love it too.

2 | Examine your personal definition of “outdoorsy.”

“You’re not less of a camper if you camp at an established campground. You’re not less of a camper if you RV camp. You’re not less of a camper if you walk 10 minutes down the road to the lodge to have your meal instead of cooking it.” (Go off, Sally.)

When we force an expectation of what “outdoorsy” looks like, we automatically exclude many people. “You visit your first like outdoor store, and all the posters, billboards, and advertisement pieces are of a very particular type of person… There’s a sense of you have to become this other person in order to be in the outdoors, and the implied message is that well, then it’s not for me.”

In many ways, I look like the very person on these advertisements. And STILL, I feel othered at times. In college, I wanted to join the outdoor recreation club, but it was clear from the first meeting that they wanted “hardcore” athletes (and boys). I left the meeting and never went back because I was intimidated. I still mourn the lost opportunities from those years.

“What about my personhood might be flagged as not belonging, and what about my personhood might make me unsafe in these spaces because somebody might decide I don’t belong here?” Sally describes the common internal dialogue keeping folks from entering adventure spaces. “Sometimes holding this risk can be enough of a barrier that you don’t know if it’s worth going on that long hike.”

Next time you use the word “outdoorsy,” consider what image comes to mind, and whether we need to expand that definition.

3 | Support and contribute to data that protects people and public lands.

The Outdoorithm app covers more than 11,000 campgrounds, with info on amenities, reservation links, historical weather, and a place to ask questions. There are a bunch of resources that do that — but Outdoorithm goes deeper. Families of color told Sally they needed more info on safety: sleeping outside near people they weren’t sure they could trust, comments at campgrounds, tents that don’t lock, children they wanted to keep safe.

So the platform added a “Community Vibe Score,” modeled on a book from the Jim Crow era that told Black families where it was safe to stop while traveling. Reviewers rate each campground on whether it felt safe for a woman traveling alone, a person of color, or a queer traveler. The goal isn’t to scare anyone away from a campground, but to provide “the information that lets you make a decision that’s right for you and your family.”

Sally hears feedback from users often: “It was amazing watching my child run free through a campground that I would have been too scared to come to a year ago.”

When more communities safely get outdoors, we are more likely to protect public lands. “Part of protecting our lands is continuing to cultivate a sense of belonging on them. Because when you feel connected to a place, when you build memories there, you’re more likely to protect these spaces.”

And of course, protecting public lands protects our human bodies. “We’re now seeing what Indigenous wisdom and our own ancestors have known for a very long time: the mental, social, and physical health benefits that come from spending time outdoors. We have lands that are essentially public health infrastructure that is already built and already funded.” So let’s use them, protect them, and share them.