Transcript
Episode 1 - Scout Hollow
Uriel Llanas Vargas: My relationship with nature was really just the urban concrete jungle that I grew up in.
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Uriel Llanas Vargas: I remember pointing out to my dad every night like, “look dad, there's a star.” And he would always tell me that, “that's nothing. In Mexico. The stars are infinite.”
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Chris Hill: Urial Llanas Vargas grew up in Southwest Detroit.
Uriel Llanas Vargas: There wasn't really a big emphasis on the outdoors within my family, just mostly because it was very inaccessible.
Chris Hill: It's a neighborhood that can feel a long way from nature.
Uriel Llanas Vargas: There's not a lot of green spaces where you can really just get lost in the woods, and at least when I was growing up, there was a lot of gang activity in my neighborhood. So being outside wasn't always the safest.
Chris Hill: Southwest Detroit is also one of the country's most polluted zip codes. The community is surrounded by an oil refinery, multiple aging steel plants, and a coal-fired power plant.
Uriel Llanas Vargas: So it was always very noisy around me and not the best air quality, but I made do with it.
Chris Hill: Like a lot of kids, Uriel's access to the natural world was determined a lot more by his neighborhood than by his passion or interest.
Uriel Llanas Vargas: And the way I managed to get outdoors was riding my bike with my buddies and going to the park around the corner and just grab our soccer ball and play around and just do that.
Chris Hill: A long, painful, history of racist and discriminatory urban planning and development practices—among other things—mean that people of color are three times more likely to live in neighborhoods with limited nature access.
Uriel Llanas Vargas: I had always just had this idea of the outdoors growing up that I was always striving to find, and every experience I had with the outdoors had never really fulfilled that.
Chris Hill: But while Uriel was star searching in Southwest Detroit, a group of local organizers was looking for ways to help kids just like him by breaking the barriers that kept young Detroit residents from really getting outside. It turns out that nature was closer than Uriel may have thought.
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Chris Hill: I'm Chris Hill, Chief Conservation Officer at the Sierra Club, and this is a new podcast series about the nature all around us, and the people working to protect it and ensure access for all.
“So this is our horse barn where we keep our tack [fade out]...”
“Another small hill [laugh]...”
Chris Hill: Over the next 7 episodes, we'll travel across the country…
“[Announcer] This is flight 65 with service to Anchorage…”
Chris Hill: …from pocket parks and urban greenspaces…
“There’s the hawk’s nest on top of that sycamore tree, see that [fade out]...”
Chris Hill: …to vast wilderness and working rangelands…
“Let’s see if we can see our cows, here we can just walk down here…”
Chris Hill: …to hear from organizers, anglers, ranchers, and scientists who are all protecting biodiversity and expanding access to nature. Let’s take it outside.
I feel most at home in nature fly fishing on the Chilkoot River in Haines, Alaska. But growing up, I didn’t particularly like nature — or even being outside. It wasn’t until an unexpected opportunity changed everything. I was about 12 years old, and my mom bid on a week of camp for me at an auction and won. I spent the week rock climbing, hiking, and playing in the woods of Great Falls National Park. After that, it was love.
I spent every summer immersed in nature. The camp and the outdoors literally changed my life, so I know first hand just how beneficial time outside can be for a young person. But growing up, I rarely saw people who looked like me adventuring outside. My colleagues and I now know that there’s a term for this. It’s called “the nature equity gap.”
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Chris Hill: At the time, all I knew was that being outside sometimes felt a little lonely. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Garrett Dempsey: You know, nature is where we as a species, as people — everything on this planet comes from nature. We're connected to it. And for kids, especially when you're learning so much about how the world works and your place in the world, time in nature is like time with, it's like time with a grandparent,
Chris Hill: That’s Garrett Dempsey. He's the Sierra Club’s campaign lead for an organization called Detroit Outdoors. Detroit Outdoors works to close that nature equity gap, and ensure all kids — kids like Uriel — have the opportunity to experience the abundance of nature.
Garrett Dempsey: The natural world has so much wisdom and lessons to impart to us. And there's a lesson for everybody, no matter who you are. And that's what's so special about nature is that there's something of value that every person can get from having time and access there.
Chris Hill: But time and access can be a challenge for many Detroiters, especially kids. So in 2015, Garrett and a group of fellow organizers from all across the city started to rethink the best ways to get young people outside. And they decided to embrace a concept called “nearby nature.”
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Garrett Dempsey: You know, for us in Detroit, nearby nature is an acknowledgement and a recognition and an embrace of the natural spaces that are right here in our home. And we think there's a value in embracing with nearby nature because it's a part of who we are. It’s not something separate that we go visit, but it’s part of our home
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Chris Hill: But Garrett wanted to take it a step further than day hikes in local parks. He became convinced that getting kids on overnight camping trips inside the city was key to fostering lifelong connections with nature.
Garrett Dempsey: The overnight camping experience is powerful in a couple of different ways. There's the human relationship and the power of forming relationships and strengthening bonds between people by being outdoors. And so to be able to sort of spend time, especially around a fire at night when it gets quiet and a lot of the distractions of the day just sort of fade away, it's like an age old practice for people to gather around a fire and to share some stories and to be with each other, and to reflect. And even the silence that happens around a fire is really powerful.
Chris Hill: In 2015, Garrett attended a ribbon cutting for the Detroit Outdoor Adventure center. It was here that Garrett met Lisa Perez, from the U.S. Forest Service. Garrett told Lisa his dream of creating a campground in Detroit.
Garrett Dempsey: And Lisa says, “Detroit already has a campground. It’s called Scout Hollow. It’s in Rouge Park.”
Chris Hill: This was the first time that Garrett had even heard of Scout Hollow. It turned out to be an abandoned campground in the middle of Detroit’s largest park, right under their noses. And it had been there for a hundred years.
Garrett Dempsey: So it has this historical place of being a spot for Detroiters for multiple generations to have time with each other outdoors and connect with this incredible natural part of Detroit.
Chris Hill: The campground had been abandoned for over a decade, and it seemed like the only people who knew about it were the Friends of Rouge Park, a local non-profit who worked to maintain and protect the park.
Garrett Dempsey: the earliest pictures that the friends of Rouge Park have shared with us, are like black and white pictures from like the thirties of, of scouts from Detroit camping.
Chris Hill: So Garrett and Lisa set out on a mission to find the campground.
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Chris Hill: Rouge Park is this huge urban park that’s over 1,000 acres of walking, hiking, and biking trails, as well as forested area, prairie, and marshlands. Veering off-trail, they were armed only with written directions from the Friends of Rouge Park.
Garrett Dempsey: “Where West Chicago hits Spinoza, look for a park bench and then walk back to the trees behind the park bench and look for the stairs.”
There’s that tree to the left that we had to climb over when we first came down the first time.
And the stairs were all overgrown. We found the opening. and then we descend and then all of a sudden it opens up into this big overgrown meadow.
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Garrett Dempsey: Some of these tall grasses here that we have — some areas that we don’t mow — that’s kind of what this whole area looked like. And then there’s that flagpole. That thing kind of rose above it all. And that was the sign, like, “oh, we found the campground”.
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Garrett Dempsey: When you get into Scout Hollow, it's like crossing into Narnia. It just feels like you're transported into another place.
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Garrett Dempsey: Oh, there's a hawk right there. Nature never fails to show up one way or another. Nature's gonna show up when you come down here
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Chris Hill: Garrett and his team explored plans for the campground that ranged from the rustic to the grandiose, but ultimately all it took was for the parks department to mow down the tall grasses, local volunteers to build a trail from the campground down to the Rouge River, and the local scout troop to build some picnic tables.
Garrett Dempsey: The current status of Scout Hollow is, it’s a very rustic campground, and it's probably just gonna always stay that way. We've been really connecting and using that space for five, six years now, and of all the partners that have come together to use that space, we really kind of feel like keeping it rustic. That seems to be the right way to be in relationship with that campground.
Chris Hill: Detroit Outdoors uses what's called an “indirect service model” to get kids into Scout Hollow for overnight camping. In other words, Garrett and his team are usually not the ones taking young people on overnights there. Instead, they’re training adults from across the city to take kids from their classrooms, scout troops, and summer camps into Scout Hollow.
Garrett Dempsey: For a youth-serving organization to camp down there, they come to an overnight camping training so that they can be familiar with what it's like to camp overnight there. They get to try out all the camping gear that we have in our gear library, and once they go through that overnight camping trip, then they're able to work with the Detroit Parks and Rec department to reserve that campground.
Chris Hill: By tapping into the existing relationships that local groups have with kids, Detroit Outdoors is able to extend their reach far beyond the capacities of their relatively small organization. And one of the people they ended up reaching was someone who’d been dreaming of a place like Scout Hollow his entire life.
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Uriel Llanas Vargas: My first overnight camping experience was at Scout Hollow.
Chris Hill: That’s Uriel again. In 2017, he was 17 years old and had just graduated high school. He was spending the summer with the local YMCA's outdoor leadership training program, which included an overnight camping trip to Scout Hollow.
Uriel Llanas Vargas: It felt very surreal because I felt like I was looking at a picture online of some beautiful national park that I'm always seeing, whether it's on TikTok or Instagram. And here I am looking at this beautiful field, foliage and trees and not a concrete path sight.
[Footsteps and field tape from Scout Hollow]
Uriel Llanas Vargas: Seeing Scout Hollow and seeing that it was a campground within the city of Detroit, and being surrounded by other people of color like myself, it had made me realize that it took me almost eighteen years to finally get what I was looking for my entire life.
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Chris Hill: That first night in Scout Hollow unlocked something in Uriel that was always there.
Uriel Llanas Vargas: It felt like I was finally in an area where I felt comfortable.
Chris Hill: A connection to the natural world strong enough to overcome barriers to access. For Garrett, this is the strength of an urban campground.
Garrett Dempsey: We really believe that connecting with place and natural environments in your hometown can be a part of how each person develops their own identity. So it’s helping Detroiters and Detroit youth in particular sort of see their definition of themselves and their city in a way that includes this richness of Rouge Park and Scout Hollow
Chris Hill: Uriel's first night in Scout Hollow ended up changing everything. And this is a part of Uriel’s story that I can really relate to.
Uriel Llanas Vargas: I’ve always thought there is a very primal calling in everyone to experience the outdoors at least once in their life. I think the outdoors is therapeutic. I think it's healing for anyone to just take a stroll in the woods and not be surrounded by concrete or by concrete corners; to just be able to walk within a tree line and be able to make their own path.
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Chris Hill: He pushed further and further outside of the comfort zone of Detroit. First taking backpacking trips in Pinckney State Recreation Area, just an hour outside the city, and then venturing to Michigan's pristine Upper Peninsula for an ice climbing trip with Detroit Outdoors.
Uriel Llanas Vargas: I remember during that last night, me and one of the other participants of the trip had decided to go outside and play in the snow, and the place that we were staying at was on, not one of the great lakes, but still a lake. And the lake had frozen over — and I had never seen that before. So I, we immediately ran back inside and told everyone, like the stars, the stars are out and they're beautiful. And I ran out onto that frozen lake. I jumped on it, threw myself on it, did everything I possibly could to, and I didn't fall through. And then I decided to lay down and as my dad said, the stars were infinite.
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Chris Hill: Today, Uriel works for Detroit Outdoors, as a program coordinator for the same YMCA youth leadership program that first took him to Scout Hollow.
Uriel Llanas Vargas: That first night I stayed at Scout Hollow made me realize that there were other youth within the city that want to be outdoors, that wanted to go camping or backpacking or kayaking or whatever, but they didn't have access to it. And now I have the ability and the know-how to provide that access. So who am I to not help?
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Chris Hill: Today, Scout Hollow is one of many urban campgrounds with similar models. Youth leaders across the country in cities like Chicago, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Brooklyn can participate in overnight trainings to gain access to gear libraries and urban campgrounds for their youth groups. But there's still work to be done. Nationwide, 100 million people, including 28 million kids, still do not live within a 10 minute walk to a park. People like Garrett and Uriel are working to ensure that all people can find those natural places — whether it's a frozen lake with a view of a million stars or a meadow in the middle of the city.
Garrett Dempsey: In a natural space, every person can have access to, like, the original instructions on how to be a better person…
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…on how to be a better sort of friend and how to share space with the other living creatures — both human and non-human plants and animals. Now the instructions to do that are right here all around us and in a public park like this in Detroit. Anyone can access it, and all of that wisdom and knowledge is there for all of us.
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Chris Hill: This episode was Produced by Tina Mullen, edited by Isaac Kestenbaum of Future Projects, and hosted by me, Chris Hill. Ian Brickey is our executive producer. Mixing and sound design by Peter Lang Stanton. Special thanks to Josie Holtzman, Rachel Felder, and everyone at Detroit Outdoors. To learn more about urban camping opportunities in Detroit, visit the link in our show notes.
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