A border wall further fragments and disrupts nature, the land, and the people who are intricately woven into the Rio Grande Valley’s natural ecosystem. With increased militarization on the border, who has access to the land? Who is allowed to enjoy the land?
I decided to meet Syd in Oakland to celebrate my newly healed chest. We hiked out into the Happy Boulders, selected our first climb and immediately took off our shirts. It was glorious, but also terrifying and vulnerable.
As a perfectionist, I’ll always be more comfortable sharing my shiny conclusions than my messy processes. And the best thing about climbing, for me, is that it’s pure process.
Most of my old hiking companions from Los Angeles are queer. Now I have Goldie, who takes breaks while we walk, just to jump up and kiss me. She places her paws just over my heart.
“I’ve grown physically stronger through trail work than I ever thought possible, but there’s that different kind of strength that trail work has fostered in me that I believe to be a lot more important.”
Bushwork — work done in the backcountry, often off-grid — offers a kind of freedom difficult to find in modern life. It is also a culture steeped in toxic masculinity in which queer women do not have a place.
Having sex outside of buildings! Have you ever? We sure have!
Maybe if trans women can redefine what it means to be close to nature we can also redefine what it means to be close to each other.
Hey there science nerds! This is like taking high school biology all over again! Except this time when we explore nature, it’s going to be truly, deeply queer.
When we gather together, we don’t need to arrive with hope, because we have the power to create it. We will dictate the future.
The Quaker Aunts were the stuff of family legend, fearsome women in sensible shoes. Did one of them really smuggle Jewish children across the Alps before World War II?
When you’re little, the backyard of your grandma’s house is an entire universe. Growing up is finding the kid in you and being brave enough to take them outside again – without warning them about coming home before the streetlights come on.
I am a first generation Iranian-Canadian queer on their first trip to Iran at the age of twenty-seven, forming connections to the land.
For one group of Chicago lesbians in the mid-1990s, building a queer community meant sitting around a barrel fire in the freezing, rainy April night, casting smelting nets and awaiting a barrage of tiny fish.
My hunting experiences from youth to adulthood, in relation to my life as a black, queer woman of color.
I take photos because they are true, whether they are true or not.
Great Old Broads for Wilderness is a national grassroots organization, led by women, that engages and inspires activism to preserve and protect wilderness and wild lands.
There’s a look I get from black and biracial women on the trail. And there’s a look I give black and biracial women. It’s recognition: “I see you. We’re the only ones like us out here.”
“For all its vastness, rural life had no room for me.”
Sometimes when you go outside, things don’t go according to plan.
