In Episode 3 of The Overstory, we join a group of single mom veterans from New York City as they take a weekend camping trip with their families—and in the course of their adventure find a respite from the stresses of military-to-civilian transition. We also talk with Ray Smith, a member of the first all African-American team to summit Mount Kilimanjaro. Plus: advice from Mr. Green and a radio diary from Yellowstone's "wild woman."

Transcript

In Hiking for Healing, we explore update New York with Claire Tighe and a group of single mom veterans, visit Mount Kilimanjaro with Ray Smith, a member of the first all-African American expedition to summit the mountain, and hear from Yellowstone's wild woman, Meredith Taylor. Mr. Green also chats about how cleaning solar panels.

(1:30) Overcoming PTSD by Exploring the Outdoors - Sierra Club's Military Outdoor Program

Jason Mark: We're gonna start out this episode in New York's Harriman State Park. Last summer, Sierra Club's military outdoors program hosted a weekend camping trip there for New York-based military veterans who are also single moms. About 700,000 women have served in the armed forces since 9/11, and about one out of seven of all of them are likely to be single with kids. It's a relatively small, but growing segment of the veteran population, and it's one that's vastly underserved. Producer Claire Tighe took to the woods to find out what a little hiking, a little conversation, and some camping under the stars can do for five veteran moms and their families.

Claire Tighe: A small group of women and their kids are gathering around a campsite in a New York state park. Between their laughs and easy conversation, it's hard to believe that just 24 hours ago, they were strangers. It's a Saturday morning in June, and the group is hanging out after a night of camping. For many of them, it's their first night of camping ever.

All of the women on the Sierra Club's military outdoors trip are veterans and single moms. This weekend is a special chance for them to get outside with other families like theirs. For most of the women on the trip, it's not often they spend time with other veterans and their kids.

Hawoly: My mindset when I was getting out, which I find is similar amongst other veterans, too, is just like, I want to get as far as possible from that experience.

Claire Tighe: That's Hawol, one of the moms on the trip. She's 28 and lives in Brooklyn. After she left the Navy, Hawoly wasn't exactly looking to be around other vets.

Hawoly: But then you do stuff like this and you meet other veterans, and you're like, you feel better.

Claire Tighe: Women only make up 9 percent of the military. Because they're a minority, they don't always get their needs met, whether that's support for being a mom or navigating their mental healthcare. Some VA hospitals don't even have women's clinics let alone nuanced treatment for women vets struggling with things like PTSD, depression, and the day-to-day of being a single mom.

Hawoly: I think hiking with other veterans who are also mothers kind of give you a sense of affinity with a group of people that you kind of been detached from coming out.

Claire Tighe: For moms like Hawoly, finding other veterans is key to getting the emotional support they need.

Hawoly: And reconnecting and finding out that we have some of the same experiences, we've been through some of the same traumatic instances and just a lot of the same issues that we don't really focus on as veterans, come to light when we're in groups such as these.

Claire Tighe: Hawoly wanted to share that re-connection with her friend Moet, who she knows from the Navy.

Moet: We had the campfire last night, but this, today, just solidified all the friendships and the bonds.

Claire Tighe: The two reconnected after losing touch in the years since their service. Hawoly gave Moet a phone call and asked her to come on the camping trip.

Moet: I kind of shied away from the whole Navy veteran being around all those military people when I got out. I was like, I'm gonna be normal, this, I don't wanna, I just don't wanna be around that. I wanna find out who I am outside of the military.

Claire Tighe: Moet's 27 and a single mom, too. After getting out of the military a few years ago, Moet felt like she didn't need other vets in her life.

Moet: And now I'm starting to realize that I actually do. I need them. I need them to understand me or to just have somebody to talk to cause I hate having to explain everything that happened in the military to somebody else.

Claire Tighe: Moet joined the Navy right after high school when she was 17. She served for five years until she was 22. In that time, she had her daughter, Harlem, who is on the trip with her.

Harlem: Duck, duck, duck, goose! (laughing) Hello!

Trip Leader: What's your name?

Harlem: Harlem

Trip Leader: There you go.

Claire Tighe: The Sierra Club's approach to this weekend is called adventure therapy. It has its roots in the original Outward Bound program, but the Sierra Club gives it a special twist. Campers can bring their families. Everyone bonds by being outside together, whether they're figuring out how to set up a tent, make a s'more, or tackle a hike, which is what the group is doing next.

Trip Leader: If anybody wants to stop for any reason at any time, just say, "Let's stop, take a break, sit down, water-"

Claire Tighe: At the trail head, one of the trip leaders orients the group.

Trip Leader: ...It's not a race, we're not here to like- uh, uh -that kind of hiking, you know, just it's like a stroll, nice nature walk...

Claire Tighe: That sound the trip leader just made? She means don't be military about it. Having kids around helps not take the hike too seriously.

Harlem: I'm gonna get high to the top. I'm so happy! This is so fun! Why is there so much moss?

Moet: Where do you think moss comes from?

Harlem: Rocks?

Claire Tighe: With their kids running ahead on the trail, the moms get a chance to talk about their shared experiences. It's hard enough being a mom, being single, and being a veteran.

Moet: She's come to the VA to teach us more this mindfulness--

Claire Tighe: Three of the vets, including Moet, say managing their mental health is another added stressor and something that stops them from getting outdoors.

When Moet left the Navy, the VA prescribed Trazodone for depression, anxiety and adjustment disorder. This weekend, she can open up to the other moms about it.

Moet: It's a camaraderie. You don't have to explain, you don't have to be apologetic for anything, you can just drop tears and nobody's like, "Oh my god, but you're a soldier. You're not supposed to be sensitive." I am tired. I am Wonder Woman. I am Mom. I am veteran. I am sister. I am everything but something to myself. So when you have a trip like this, it's like you do get to see your kids, but then you also get to realize I'm not crazy. There's other moms who do this, we're all making it through, and we all suffer sometimes.

Claire Tighe: After the hike, the moms feel a little closer with their kids and one another. They're ready to take on the challenge of building another campfire or anything else that comes their way.

Hawoly: Come on, Ryan! Let's go!

Moet: You got it, Mom's right there. Come on!

Claire Tighe: For The Overstory, I'm Claire Tighe.

Jason Mark: That report was based on a feature story written by Katie O'Reilly, Sierra Magazine's Adventure and Lifestyle Editor. To read the piece and to check out some beautiful photos from the weekend by Robyn Twomey, head to our website sierramagazine.org.

(8:00) Mr. Green Discusses Cleaning Solar Panels

Next up we've got some tips from our advice columnist, Mr. Green. In this episode, Michael calls him from Santa Clara, California, with a question about how to maintain his solar panels.

(8:10) I've never bothered using software to track my solar panel performance. How much better do solar panels perform if they're washed every year?

Mr. Green: Well, that sort of depends on how much slope they have on them. I would say that in general you don't need to clean them unless they're very flat or close to flat, 5 percent. If there's a reasonable slope, it probably isn't necessary to wash them at all. But when you get down around 5 percent slope, you should probably wash them two to three times a year because dust does sit on them.

Michael: I guess even some rain will rinse them off.

Mr. Green: Yes, that's the idea that a little rain will just drain any dirt and gunk off of them, but there are a lot of local conditions and local exceptions, kind of depends also on what kind of neighborhood you live in, whether it's dusty and dirty or whether it's clean and pristine. So where do you live?

Michael: I'm in Santa Clara, California.

Mr. Green: Santa Clara, okay. It would pay to check them out two or three times a year, even if they're steeper than 5 percent, if you're not scared to get up there on the roof, that is. Some of us are, and some of us aren't.

Michael: Yeah, I'll probably do it just because I can, maybe when I get older I won't.

Mr. Green: (Laughing)

Michael: But I do get a little experience because I volunteer with Sun Work, which is a not-for-profit.

Mr. Green: Oh. What do they do?

Michael: They install solar panels at reduced cost, and their specialty is people who could not otherwise justify the cost of a solar installation because they don't consume enough energy. They go, well, this doesn't pencil out.

Mr. Green: Yeah, that's a problem. I find that I am using so little solar energy that I would have a hard time right now getting a contractor to put it on. Isn't that amazing?

Michael: Right.

Mr. Green: That sounds like a wonderful idea, and I actually did not know that anybody was doing that. But that would definitely make it affordable for some people who are very reluctant to spend on solar energy. How often do you clamber up there on the roof to install these things?

Michael: Not as often as I'd like to. I probably helped install about 30 kilowatt hours of panels.

Mr. Green: That's not bad.

Michael: I actually worked with them to do my installation on my home, so I think I've done four installations. And I keep wanting to do more, but the vegetable garden sort of calls me.

Mr. Green: That's a form of solar energy in itself, is the garden. So you're attacking the solar issue on several fronts, I would say. Well, thank you very much. It's been fun, and keep generating that solar power.

Michael: Alrighty, take care. It's nice talking to you.

Mr. Green: Thank you so much.

Jason Mark: That was Bob Schildgen, a.k.a. Mr. Green, with some advice for sustainable living. If you've got a question for Mr. Green, all you gotta do is go online, sierramagazine.org, click on Mr. Green. It's right there at the top of the page, send Bob your question, and if you're lucky we'll have you on the show to answer it.

(11:16) Yellowstone's Wild Woman Shares Her Story

Meredith Taylor: One of my mottos is "Follow your endorphins." And my endorphins are alive and well in the wilderness, trust me.

Jason Mark: That's wild woman Meredith Taylor, but she wasn't always so wild. She started out her career in a Boston lab, studying mice. Then a research trip took her out west to Dubois, Wyoming. And that's when then adventure began. She met her husband, and she started a company leading tours through Yellowstone National Park that introduced people from all over the world to the natural beauty of the American West, both what remains and what's going away. Here's her story.

Meredith Taylor: I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. I was able to see an intact ecosystem, and wilderness feeds my curiosity. I met my now husband, Tory. Tory and I got married. Well, we did a summer in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, just the two of us traveling around. And we just studied a lot of different things. By then we were outfitting, and there were sheep hunts, big horn sheep, and I would explain to them the natural history of what we were seeing, and they said, "This hunt is great, but my family would just love to come on this trip. So can I bring my wife and my kids next year?" So the outfitting took on a life of its own, too.

We just essentially evolved the business into natural history trips and then conservation trips. We were very happy with doing what we loved to do and seeing the wilderness through more scientific eyes, I guess you'd say. What we love the most is that fact that it is wild, and that's what people loved to do, was to appreciate the wild. So you had clean air, clean water, a number of the research trips that we took out, we took hydrologists and biologists out to study what they were working on, and found that the air quality and water quality were indeed changing.

And we're talking about off of Gannett Peak, the highest point in Wyoming, we were seeing more and more warmer years, and we could see the recession of the glaciers. We became concerned for it. We could understand that these changes were expedited by humans. Some years have gone back to what seemed like normal, but there's been a steady progression of that glacial recession in the Wind River Range, which is what we know now as the largest glacial complex in the lower 48 states. As we learn more and more about that, from the researchers that we were outfitting, we said this is really serious. We need to learn more about it ourselves, and we can see that climate change, and the pollution, and water problems, and air problems, the problems that wildlife are encountering, are just symptom of bigger problems for us. All of those are first seen with the wildlife because they're indicator species for us, and if they can't exist, the writing's on the wall. We can't either.

Jason Mark: That was wildlife biologist and conservationist, Meredith Taylor.

(14:58) Reaching New Heights - First African American Team to Summit Mount Kilimanjaro

Jason Mark: Ray Smith is a 59-year-old father and U.S. Air Force veteran who works at the Bureau of Land Management. He lives for adventure in the outdoors. He enjoys hiking, snowboarding, he works as a skier with the National Brotherhood of Skiers, an organization of African American ski clubs. He's also wilderness leader with Outdoor Afro, and this July he and a team of 11 African American hikers climbed and summited Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Ray, welcome to The Overstory.

Ray Smith: Thank you! Glad to be here. Appreciate the opportunity to talk with you, today.

Jason Mark: And tell us just a little bit more for folks who aren't familiar, the name in some ways I guess is obvious, but what is Outdoor Afro, and what are the goals, and how does it all work?

Ray Smith: Outdoor Afro started in Oakland, California, about six years ago by Rue Mapp and it is a 501(c)(3) organization whose mission is to lead and curate opportunities for folks of color to be in the outdoors and to have experiences in the outdoors, and connect communities to our outdoors and our public spaces.

(16:02) Jason Mark: Was this the first all-African American expedition to Mount Kilimanjaro?

Ray Smith: From what I understand, this was the first all-African American expedition, and I'm talking about from the guides, the porters, our American guide, all of our support, that's how we planned it. It was important for us to show that we are doing things in the outdoors in an adventurous mode, and it would be successful, it would be joyous, and we can bring back that experiences to our communities. What we are talking about is visual representation, and visual representation is an extension and a beginning of our outdoor story. We have a lot of stories from the past, and we now have new stories and how we connect to the outdoors. We connect to the outdoors for health, healing, recreation, environmental stewardship, and adventure. And we also connect to the outdoors to remember who we are and who we have been on this planet.

(17:01) Jason Mark: And so when you talk about visual representation, is this an effort to counteract, or I guess you could say, be an antidote to some of the stereotypes that are out there, the stereotypes that say it's kinda gonna be like a white guy out in the woods, and that's who's out there on the Appalachian Trail?

Ray Smith: Folks need to understand that African Americans have always been in the outdoors. The Buffalo Soldiers were the first park rangers. Matthew Henson was an explorer, the South Pole, so we've always been out, but you don't see it in mainstream media, you don't see it in magazines, but because of an organization, like Outdoor Afro, we are bridging the gap.

(17:40) Jason Mark: So let's talk about the people. Tell me about some of the other folks on the trail- Did you know any of the other ten people?

Ray Smith: We've done a couple of trips together, we kept in touch with each other with regards to training, daily, over a year.

Jason Mark: And how'd you get ready, Ray? What did that kind of training look like for you?

Ray Smith: Training looked like, for me, just turning up my training efforts from anything else that I ever did in terms of training. I've been a triathlete, I train to get ready for snowboarding, I train to get ready for riding bikes, but training for climbing Kilimanjaro was a whole different animal. For example, I went out to Colorado to get used to being at 10,000 feet and knowing what that feels like. And a lot of gym work and a lot of hikes, getting used to hiking every day, a couple days in a row, so sometimes I would get off from work and go right to Harper's Ferry and hike 'till it got dark, turn around and come home and go back up there again the next day and hike, and then go back up there the next day and hike. So I've hiked Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

Jason Mark: So you get to Tanzania.

(18:44) Jason Mark: And Ray, was this the first time you'd ever been to Africa?

Ray Smith: Yes, that was the first time I've ever been to Africa, and it was a surreal time, just to touch the soil. Just being on the continent, I felt an ancestral connection, the likes I'd never felt before. But also, to know that we were part of a team, that we were there for a mission to enhance the visual representation, to show our connection to the land, and also bring back some perspectives and experiences to our networks about this particular trip, but just to be on the African continent just kinda blew me away.

(19:22) Jason Mark: And how were you guys received? How was your particular expedition received when you get there to Arusha, which as I understand, is sorta like the gateway community or sorta like the base came community of Mount Kilimanjaro. What was the reception from the local Tanzanian porters and guides that you were working with?

Ray Smith: The welcome was incredible. When we walked around town, we got the greatest help. I'll tell you one crazy story is that they had these little buses where everybody crowds on the bus, and they drive around town. Well, one bus driver just stopped his route, and he gave us the bus, and he just drove us around the town, wherever we wanted to go. And he did not want to take any money or anything. Of course we pulled together everything we could for him. But they gave us the whole restaurant. They would just do all kinds of things to take care of us.

(20:10) Jason Mark: So how many days did it take to get from the base up to the summit?

Ray Smith: Our climb was six days. It was six days up and two days down. Eight days on the mountain.

(20:18) Jason Mark: And so tell me just a little bit about the landscape. It's pretty impressive, right? You go through African savanna to rain forests, to then Alpine landscape?

Ray Smith:  I can remember, the first two days it was lush green. And then in a matter of day, maybe a day and a half, it turned into an Alpine desert. And then it turned into something worse than an Alpine desert, say nothing but rocks.

Jason Mark: Just straight Alpine.

Ray Smith: I've climbed a couple of 14-ers in Colorado and things like that. I've been snowboarding out West and had to climb or what-not, but I have never seen land and terrain like such on Mount Kilimanjaro.

Jason Mark: And my understanding is the last couple days, you're just in the clouds, or you're above the clouds.

Ray Smith:  That was a surreal time when you could see yourself walking towards and up towards the clouds that you're in this fog, and by the end of the day, the clouds are under you.

Jason Mark: That's wild, man.

Ray Smith: Yeah, it was something to feel and see.

Jason Mark: Cool. I love it. So this does sound like this was successful. Sounds like it was joyous.

(21:27) Jason Mark: But I'm wondering, was there anything that was really hard? Any big obstacles that, in the moment, felt really tough?

Ray Smith: Well, just the sheer fact of physically dealing with the altitude and also physicality of hiking every day. But again, just having the support of our team, our porters, our guides, that made all the difference. Now all of us, we were on this mountain, and we were just supporting each other in any special way that we felt each other needed to have support, but it was a collective support also. We knew that we would only be successful by staying together, being together. The biggest thing is that we all feel that we are better leaders because of our experience.

Jason Mark: Better leaders, you mean, when you come back and do, say, an Outdoor Afro outing in Rock Creek Park, or something?

Ray Smith: It can just be in Rock Creek Park or it can be someplace remote, say in a remote area of the Shenandoah Park. We just have a perspective about being a leader and leading people in the outdoors that can only come from being on an expedition of this nature. We don't take this leadership for granted at all because we know that it is what can make or break someone's experience in the outdoors, whether or not they're gonna come on another experience or they're gonna to tell somebody about another experience, or they're just gonna start just experiencing things on their own.

Jason Mark: This is Ray Smith we've been talking to. He was part of a expedition of all-African American climbers who recently summited Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. You can read more about his story at sierramagazine.org. You can find photos there and a slideshow of the all-African American expedition that summited Mount Kilimanjaro. Ray, thanks so much for talking to us today on The Overstory.

Ray Smith: Jason, I really appreciate it.

Notes and Thank Yous

The ending soundscape is from Bernie Krause, taken at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro.

The Overstory is produced by Josephine Holtzman and Isaac Kestenbaum of Future Projects Media, with help from Danielle Roth and mixed by Ben Chesneau. Theme music is by Jeff Brodsky. Alison Kagel is our editorial fellow. Next time on The Overstory, an epic thousand-mile paddle down the Mississippi River and a conversation with bioacoustician Bernie Krause.

What's Next?

Episode 4 takes you paddling along the Mississippi River with Boyce Upholt, through the world of sound with Bernie Krause, and to Virginia where a couple is fighitng a fracked gass compressor station.