Photo courtesy of the US National Park Service
February serves as a symbolic month of reflection and acknowledgement of the impacts, contributions, and successes of Black Americans in all spaces—both visible and unknown. From national park rangers to big-wall rock climbers to polar explorers, the nine Black outdoor enthusiasts profiled here have achieved incredible milestones, helped shift cultural perceptions, and have inspired legions of more changemakers engaging in the natural world. We invite you to learn more about their work below.
Charles Young
Charles Young, the first Black man to become a national park superintendent, enslaved at birth in 1864 in Kentucky. One of the first African Americans to attend West Point, he served in the US Army for 28 years, primarily with the Buffalo Soldiers, and eventually rose to become the first Black man to attain the rank of colonel. While stationed at the Presidio of San Francisco he was appointed acting superintendent of Sequoia and General Grant (now Kings Canyon) National Parks. In his final report on Sequoia, Young recommended that the government acquire privately held lands there to secure more park area for future generations to enjoy. He published The Military Morale of Nations and Races in 1912, and in 2016 the NAACP awarded Young its highest honor, the Spingarn Medal Spingarn Medal. Nearly a century later, in 2013, President Barack Obama created the Colonel Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument in Ohio.
Matthew Henson
Born in 1866 to sharecroppers in Maryland, Matthew Henson became a cabin boy aboard a merchant ship at age 12. There he met American explorer Robert E. Peary, who chose Henson to join a surveying mission to Nicaragua. Over the next 20 years Henson accompanied Peary on six voyages into the Arctic, where he mastered the Inuit language and became the only non-Native to train dog teams and drive dog sleds in the Inuit way. With Peary and four Inuits, Henson was part of the team widely believed to have reached the North Pole on April 6, 1909—several reports support Henson’s claim that his footprints were the first to cross latitude 90. In 1912 he published a memoir, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole, with a foreword by Peary. In 1937 he became the first African American invited to join The Explorers Club. He is interred near Peary in Arlington National Cemetery.
George W. Gibbs, Jr.
Jacksonville, Florida, native George W. Gibbs, Jr., joined the US Navy in 1935 at the age of 18. Four years into his stint, he was one of 40 sailors chosen to join polar explorer Admiral Richard E. Byrd III’s third polar expedition, also known as the US Antarctic Service Expedition. On January 14, 1940, Gibbs became the first African American to set foot on the continent of Antarctica. He went on to serve as a Navy gunner during World War II. After 24 years in the military, Gibbs mustered out, earned an advanced degree, and logged 20 years with IBM. In retirement, he focused his energies on civil rights, integrating service associations like the Elks Club and co-founding a chapter of the NAACP. In 2009, the rock point marking the northernmost tip of Antarctica was christened Gibbs Point in his honor.
Robert Taylor
As a young boy, Robert Taylor would hike all over his neighborhood in Dayton, Ohio, carrying the lunch his mother had packed for him in his Boy Scout rucksack. As he recounted in an interview with Backpacker magazine, at age six, he happened to watch a TV program about hiking the Appalachian Trail (AT), and he began reading everything he could get his hands on about the 2,200-mile AT and the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail (PCT). In the late 1990s he became the first African American to thru-hike both trails. While his chief concerns on the PCT were cougars and bears, on the AT it was racism. Taylor’s recounts of his experience has helped break down barriers for Black hikers.
Sophia Danenberg
Born and raised outside Chicago, with a Black father and a Japanese mother, Sophia Danenberg was in her late 20s, with degrees in public policy and environmental science from Harvard under her belt, when a friend suggested that she give rock climbing a try. She quickly realized that her passion was mountaineering, and in her early 30s, Danenberg scaled Mts. Rainier, Kilimanjaro, and McKinley, all the while pursuing a career as an environmental regulator. In 2006 she decided to tackle Mt. Everest, and in May of that year, Danenberg became the first Black woman to stand atop the world’s highest mountain. “There aren’t a lot of African Americans—or Black people from anywhere—in high-altitude mountaineering,” she says. “Climbing in Kenya and Tanzania was like a celebration. People were so happy to see a climber who looked like them.”
Rahawa Haile
When Miami native Rahawa Haile completed her solo thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail in 2016, she became one of a handful of Black women to successfully complete the 2,200-mile trek. In "Going It Alone," an account of the hike that ran in Outside magazine, she speaks candidly about being a queer 30-something Eritrean-American on a trail where 75 percent of hikers are male, and how she would leave books by Black authors behind in the trail shelters for the benefit of other hikers of color. Since completing her hike, her writing and public speaking have sought to inspire other hikers of color, queer hikers, and female hikers. Her forthcoming book, In Open Country, explores what it means to move through America, and the world, as a Black woman.
Kai Lightner
By the time he turned 21 last year, Kai Lightner of Fayetteville, North Carolina, had already won 12 national rock-climbing championships. As a preschooler, he was constantly climbing on the furniture at home, so his mother took him to a climbing gym. Soon after, he was competing in events sanctioned by USA Climbing, the national governing body for competitive climbing. In 2014, Lightner earned the gold medal for his age group at the Climbing Youth World Championships, becoming the first American world champion since 1995. He became a role model for climbers of color after he starred in 2014’s 14.c, a short film featuring a 15-year-old Lightner clinging by his fingertips to a vertical rock wall a hundred feet off the ground in West Virginia’s New River Gorge. Last year Lightner founded Climbing for Change, with the goal of increasing minority participation in rock climbing and the outdoor adventure industry.
Shelton Johnson
“One of the great losses to African culture from slavery was the loss of kinship with the earth,” says longtime Yosemite National Park ranger Shelton Johnson. Ever since learning about the Buffalo Soldiers—the Black US Army regiments who served in Yosemite, Sequoia, and other national parks in the years following the Civil War—the 62-year-old Detroit native has dedicated himself to bringing African Americans to the national parks and connecting them to the natural world. Johnson, the author of Gloryland, a historical novel about a young mixed-race Buffalo Soldier in Yosemite, is likely best-known for his star turn in Ken Burns’ 2009 documentary, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.