Posted on 08/28/2016 10:55:31 AM PDT by PROCON
Last month, two friends and I backpacked for a week in the Sierra Nevada. We hiked through meadows dotted with wildflowers, slept beneath snow-draped peaks and met plenty of other hikers: the dad and son whose Green Bay Packers caps sparked a conversation about our mutual ties to Wisconsin; scientists from UC Santa Cruz studying flowers and rock formations; five recent college grads from Kentucky who were hiking the John Muir Trail before they scattered to begin their adult lives.
But as the days passed, I grew increasingly troubled by the people we didn’t meet. There were a few Asian hikers, including a couple of hapas like me (I’m half Japanese and half Polish) and one of my friends was half-Iranian, but not a single backpacker who was Latino or African American.
This near-total absence of people of color — which I’ve noticed on past trips as well — was particularly striking because it was such a contrast to my everyday life. I live and work in Los Angeles. The majority of people in my working life are Latino, African American or Asian, and the people in my personal life, including my Mexican American spouse, are reflective of the city’s population.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Dang, that wasn’t too hard to figure out why you don’t see any out there.
Have ever tried to negotiate rough terrain when you have your trouser tops riding down below the crack of your a$$ ?
I used to take biology classes out to Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge and other "wild" places around NYC. I had to emphasize that there were no McDonalds or other sources of fast food anywhere near the nature preserves so they'd have to bring a bag lunch with them. This was obviously a foreign concept to a lot of the kids, including the minority students. It was such a joy to watch students initially reluctant to go on a nature hike field trip really get their nature on while out on the trail. They wanted me to identify birds they saw, they were fascinated by the little fiddler crabs we found, they cooperated beautifully doing transects across several habitat zones from the sea to the marsh, they loved trying to catch goldfish illegally released in a pond (goldfish outsmarted everyone by avoiding the nets), they were amazed at the beauty I almost take for granted while out birding myself. You know what? It was hard to get most of them back on the school bus to leave!
Jesse Jackson on backpacking...
“There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to backpack down the path and hear a rustle... then turn around and see a mother bear with two cubs and feel relieved.”
LOL, good point!
I’ve been to many National and State parks in my seventy years and saw my first black family at Yellowstone three years ago. One black worker, lots of Chinese, French and Japanese.
At Grand Canyon a woman stopped me and asked..”Do you speak English?” She was trying to find the local medical center.
Lots of Latinos at Carlsbad Caverns.
I encourage foreigners to come as it is bringing back our hard earned currency so we can buy more souvenirs made in China!
I know that I would have enjoyed camping if I had more opportunity when I was younger, but I didn't have an experienced parent to take me and show me.
As an adult, I think it's difficult to just decide one day to go on a camping vacation and head to the sporting goods store to equip, without having someone else to guide me.
It's probably the same thing with minorities; it wasn't a handed-down family learning.
-pj
“Wasn’t there an article a few months ago about how threatening the National Parks are to minorities?”
Here’s a good piece from over at the weekly standard about a dad and young son visiting yellowstone.
It all sounds pretty dicey to me. But of course I’m a city girl, as a most minority americans, so we don’t dig that nature thing too well!
http://www.weeklystandard.com/safety-not-guaranteed/article/2003988
Typical liberal dumbass-I hike several times a week-but I live in the boonies where there are trails, woods and a river within a few 100 feet-my ancestry is Latino-not everyone likes the outdoors enough to go out and hike-out here, Nina would be told to mind her OFB, or go someplace else...
Latinos are not “people of color” either-we are just an ethnic group, like Italians or Irish...
If given the choice they would rather associate among themselves rather than be so multicultural...hanging with white people..
Most blacks have an inner city or urban heritage and city folk don't do "hikes in the wilderness" ...
Love of nature is a taught trait.
Many decades ago when I lived in the Pomona valley I took several day trips and many overnighters into the San Gabriel wilderness. In the mid-1980s there were many people living out there; roughing it. I made every subsequent trip armed as there were some dangerous types up there. Many criminals, Viet Nam vets, out to escape the world, lived up in places friends and I found nearly impossible to hike up into. On many trips we’d find - with Brahma as my witness - broken ice chests, piles of diapers, cheap aluminum lounge chairs and garbage, heaps and heaps of old liquor and beer bottles many miles from any trail head. I was told (by other campers, police, park rangers) that Laotion Hmong and several communities of central Americans would routinely hike into those remote places for family retreats and leave all that stuff behind. Hey, if THEY can do it, urban-American blacks can too. They obviously don’t want to. So leave ‘em the heck alone, more for US to enjoy. Or, in classic liberal-progressive fashion, start agitating for a “government program” to take those kids out of the city into the wilderness at great taxpayer expense - push it into the school system, not like they don’t have enough trouble just educating the kids who really want to learn something besides sex and drugs and pop music that they won’t readily adopt another unfunded top-down statist mandate. Sure.
I lived in the eastern Sierras for some time. Few blacks came up there. Few worked there. They stayed in the big cities where the ‘living was easy.’ In the great outdoors, you have to take care of yourself - you could die in a storm; the counties are not well-funded for welfare; there are cowboys and rednecks and gun racks.
There was a work crew came up once, when I was in the building trades. I hear screaming/ shreaking. Someone’s dog was wandering the job site - a very nice dog, everybody fed him. Lots of fear there! The crew never came back.
I worked with a black women who said that only white people go hiking.
the only possible solution is force whitey to stop hiking because it’s racisis
“...a mother bear with two cubs and feel relieved.”
You probably WILL be relieved! Now change your shorts if you are wearing any!
You're spot on!
But, knowing California politicians, I see a new "Inner -City Youth to the Wilderness" program stirring in Sacramento.
This is probably, my all-time favorite Richard Pryor routine.
Warning Language
Nature
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x803d_richard-pryor-nature_fun
FORCE Blacks and Latinos to go backpacking! How DARE they stay home in their A/C when there’s rocks, bears, and bugs being monopolized by raciss white peeople!
No... #AllSyllablesMatter. /s
Back in the 1970s, the Boy Scouts got a bunch of leftist weeners in the national organization. The first thing they did was purge the BSA manual of anything useful or manly, and replace it with “inner city scouting/community organizer” crapola. Among collectors, that edition is regarded as the worst edition ever made.
Then they had a *real* brainstorm. Why not invite a whole bunch of inner city “yoots” to attend a summer camp on a BSA reservation?
In retrospect, they should have called it “vandalism camp”.
They really, truly trashed the place. The buildings were ruined, trash everywhere, even the mattresses they used were either burned or thrown into a river. Damages ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I mention this as an example of what will happen if you take such people out of their environment to offer them things they neither appreciate nor respect. Such things must be offered at a young age under adult leadership.
I was just out at Moosilauke in the White Mountains - it was jammed up with an outing for kids from Dartmouth. Exactly zero black people that I saw. Bunch of Indians and Asians, but not a single black face that I saw.
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