[The first Everest expedition made
up entirely of Black Americans aims to diversify the growing outdoor movement.]
By Associated Press
But the ship has turned. Almost
every corner of the industry is focused on building a diverse population of
outdoor enthusiasts.
“We just need more propulsion. We
need more power,” says the Cortez mountaineer who helps train guides and
organizers for expeditions to the top of the world’s highest peaks. “This is
our boost. We are priming that engine.”
Henderson’s plan to lead the first-ever
all-Black American expedition to the top of Mount Everest will add fuel to the
outdoor industry’s growing diversity movement.
The first American expedition
reached the top of the world in 1963, the same year Dr. Martin Luther King
delivered his culture-shifting “I Have a Dream” speech. The nine-person Full
Circle Everest Expedition aims to be the first all-Black American team to
summit the tallest mountain on the planet next year.
Henderson has been on several
climbing expeditions in Nepal and South America. He taught at the National
Outdoor Leadership School. He’s led an all African American team to the summit
of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. For decades, he’s been a quiet force in
expanding the outdoor industry’s reach to overlooked communities.
As he launches this expedition —
beginning with the grueling, seemingly endless search for financial sponsors —
he’s become a much more vocal force for change.
“It’s kind of emotional for me as
well,” he says. “I’m realizing and living these things I’ve always said were so
important and how it’s so vital for all of us to be connected to the natural
environment.”
A Black American man has never
reached the summit of Everest. Eddie Taylor, an accomplished climber and
mountaineer, says only eight Black people have ever stood atop Mount Everest.
The Full Circle team hopes its expedition, as well as a high-profile training
plan and publicity push, will encourage people of color to not just dream big,
but simply get outside.
“From gardening to bird watching to
climbing Everest, the sky is really the limit when it comes to people just
getting outside and really understanding the benefits of spending time in
nature,” Henderson says.
Taylor is part of the expedition.
The chemistry teacher and head track coach at Lafayette’s Centaurus High School
began venturing into the outdoors as a young boy, going camping and skiing with
his family. He was lucky, he says.
“Those are not traditionally things
that families of color do,” he said.
A friend invited him to go rock
climbing when he was a track star student at the University of Colorado. He’s
been climbing ever since. And for many years now, he’s been shepherding friends
and kids into the outdoors. Those invitations are “really important,” he says,
“but there are only so many people of color who can invite other people of
color to get outside.”
With a proposed book and movie
profiling the actual expedition to Everest and all the training and work before
the team leaves for Nepal next year, Taylor hopes the mission can be an
invitation to hundreds, if not thousands of kids who maybe have never been
invited to participate in outdoor activities.
“That’s the hope, that we give
visibility and normalize this experience for Black folks,” Taylor says.
If everything goes well for the
expedition and all nine mountaineers summit Everest, the number of Black
athletes to ever reach the highest point on Earth will more than double. But
the success of the expedition could resonate beyond the summit.
“We definitely hope this will have
a lasting impact on our community,” says Taylor, who, like many Black
mountaineers, notices the scarcity of people of color at his local rock crags
and remote mountain trails. “Maybe this expedition can help change that.”
'Normalizing
our place in the outdoors'
Misha Charles, an avid mountaineer
who has helped attract new faces to outdoor spaces through her work at Outdoor
Afro, the American Alpine Club and, soon, Vail Resorts, sees the Full Circle
Everest Expedition as helping to broaden the acceptance of Black people in
outdoor places.
She’s been climbing Colorado
fourteeners for years but still fields comments from people on the mountain
asking her if this is her first. A friendly couple in Rocky Mountain National
Park asked her and her pals if they were a basketball team. On a hike outside
Boulder, a person asked her what African language she was speaking with her
friends.
“By and large, people are welcoming
and happy to see us there but, at the same time, folks are always sort of
astonished to see us out there,” Charles says. “I see this expedition as
normalizing our place in the outdoors.”
Charles counts Henderson as her
“mountain mentor.” He helped her organize her own expedition to Mount
Kilimanjaro, even inviting her to his home in Cortez for training hikes and
preparation for big mountain ascents.
“He has accepted the responsibility
of being a mentor, a guide and a role model for a whole generation of people of
color and certainly Black people in the outdoors,” Charles says. “He is very
conscious of the fact that he is carrying all of us to the top of Everest and
that means an awful lot to this community and to quite a few of us personally
and individually.”
Everest expeditions come with
mountains of pressure. There’s not just the physical training required to spend
months at altitude preparing for a grueling final push to the 29,032-foot
Everest summit, but there’s the mental aspect of spending that time away from
family, friends and jobs. There’s also the fight to secure support from brands
and sponsors.
Henderson and his team have the
added strain of fighting for a community that has traditionally been absent
from high-profile alpinism and mountaineering.
“We are used to that weight,”
Henderson says. “It’s like we always have something to prove.”
@ NBC News
