Students find wonder, legacy and Buffalo Soldiers expert from Detroit in Yosemite National Park

Madelane Martinez never imagined herself camping in tents, cooking outside or climbing the granite rocks of the Sierra Nevada in Yosemite National Park.

Growing up, she didn’t spend a lot of time outdoors. There weren’t green or open spaces near her where she grew up in Detroit and Chicago, and no one really encouraged her to explore the wilderness.

“My parents always thought that it was really dangerous,” said Martinez, 18, who recently graduated from Cass Technical High School. “And also it’s always just been a really expensive thing to do.”

She knew other kids in other communities did those things, but she had never experienced it herself.

“Whenever I went outside of the city, that’s when I actually started to see people doing all these things outside,” she recalled. “I saw flyers hung up (that said) kids can go on these trips and stuff, but I never got to see it at my own school.”

That gap is what Detroit Outdoors aims to bridge.

“There is a mainstream perception, sometimes, and a mainstream media message that really sort of holds up this image of white, affluent folks being like the center of ‘outdoorsiness,’” said Garrett Dempsey of Detroit Outdoors .

The program works to challenge that perception by offering free outdoor experiences for people of color in Detroit and Hamtramck throughout the year.

Detroit Outdoors is a collaboration between the Sierra Club, the City of Detroit’s Parks and Rec Department and the YMCA. The organizations came together in 2017 to “reactivate” the city’s only campground — Scout Hollow — nestled in a hidden valley in Rouge Park. Dempsey is the lead Sierra Club staff working with Detroit Outdoors.

The program trains youth organization leaders to camp and provides all the equipment and support needed for outdoor trips.

Since then, its reach has grown to include skiing, climbing, canoeing and camping trips across Michigan and the country. It also supports Outdoor Adventure Clubs in schools throughout Detroit and Hamtramck.

Public lands belong to everyone

This year alone, Detroit Outdoors took students ice climbing in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in February, created a 12-week climbing club at Dyno Detroit’s climbing gym and took youth to the Boundary Waters in Minnesota, rock climbing in New York and hiking in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.

Dempsey emphasized the collaborative effort it takes to make these trips happen.

“Taking a cue from the natural world, if we find a way to work with each other so that we’re sharing resources, the whole can really start to achieve these wonderful things,” he said.

The program’s biggest achievement this summer was what it called Detroit to Gloryland, a week-long trip to Yosemite National Park, designed to coincide with National Buffalo Soldiers Day on July 28. The trip was funded by the Kresge Foundation, which also made the initial investments in the restoration of Detroit’s Scout Hollow campground; Detroit Outdoors was originally founded in 2018 to lead camping trips at Scout Hollow.

The goal was to connect students with the park service’s foremost expert on the history of the Buffalo Soldiers — Shelton Johnson.

Johnson, native Detroiter and a Cass Tech alum, has been a park ranger at Yosemite for almost 35 years.

He said seeing the Detroit students in the park — many from his alma mater — was thrilling after working for years to get more Black people to visit national parks.

“I want to see them at the edge of the Grand Canyon,” Johnson told them. “I want to know that they’re there, walking to the Upper Geyser Basin and Old Faithful at sunrise. I want them to be walking through a grassland or through a redwood forest in California — or, even better, a …grove of giant sequoia, the largest trees on earth.”

Johnson reminded the groups that national parks are public lands that belong to everyone.

“African Americans have this perception, which is wrong, that … we don’t go to national parks. White people go to the national parks. We don’t do that sort of thing,” he said. “(Then) they find out that people who look like you and me were here protecting America’s best idea before there was even a National Park Service ranger.”

‘A crisis of translation’

The Buffalo Soldiers became some of the first “rangers” in the national parks. They were the first Black soldiers in the U.S. Regular Army. Buffalo Soldiers included other people of color — and, Johnson said, even a cunning woman .

Johnson said Black rangers who worked at Yosemite before him passed the history on to him. When he began researching Buffalo Solders history, he thought Yosemite had only a few dozen Buffalo Soldiers. Using national and Yosemite archives, he identified the more than 500 soldiers who had served there .

“I started looking at this story not just as military history,” Johnson said. “I started looking at this story as civil rights history, because I recognized early on that these soldiers saw themselves within that same sort of vision, that same sort of view. They knew that they were fighting for something greater than themselves. And you can read it in the letters that they wrote when they were in the Philippines during the Philippine Insurrection. You can read it in the letters that they wrote in Cuba. You can read it in the letters that they wrote in Alaska and in Hawaii.”

Johnson said the story of the Buffalo Soldiers offers a legacy connecting people of color to the national parks and the outdoors. But, he noted, Black people in the U.S. are the least likely to explore these spaces.

“The problem is a crisis of translation,” Johnson explained to the students, gathered in a circle of camp chairs against a backdrop of granite mountains, yellow pines and blue sky. “If you come from a community that’s never experienced mountains, if you come from a community that’s never experienced the desert and the beauty of the desert, if you come from a community that’s never experienced a redwood forest, giant sequoia, saguaro cacti, then they have no idea.”

Johnson is not alone in his mission to bridge that gap.

People of color who work in various roles in the outdoors traveled to Yosemite to join the students on this trip to camp, hike and rock climb with them.

Among them was Roberto Morales, who runs a national Sierra Club campaign aimed at increasing access to the outdoors for low-income communities and people of color. He came from Los Angeles. Chris Hill, the Sierra Club’s chief conservation officer, traveled from Alaska. Phil Henderson , who led the first all-Black expedition to summit Mount Everest, drove from Colorado.

Henderson has worked with Detroit Outdoors before. He took students ice climbing and dogsledding in the Upper Peninsula in 2019.

One of the students from that trip was an outdoor trip leader on this trip. Henderson said that kind of leadership develops when young people see people of color in these spaces.

“They need to see people like me,” he said. “They need to be encouraged by people like me. I don’t have to do much but be here for them to see, ‘Yeah, people like us do these things, and they excel.’”

But Henderson pointed out that the program’s impact goes beyond simply developing a new hobby.

“Half of them … 10 years from now, they won’t be climbing” he said. “But it gives them the confidence to do whatever it is they’re going to do.”

The privilege of experience

That’s what Martinez found when she joined the Outdoor Adventure Club at Cass Tech. After conquering her fear of heights, she went on to ice climb in Munising, Michigan, with Detroit Outdoors. This past year, she’s camped, hiked and rock climbed around the state and the U.S. She’s hooked.

“Outdoor Adventure Club changed my life so much,” Martinez said. “It’s made me so much happier. It’s made me more self-aware, and overall, I think it’s made me a better leader.”

She hopes to become a trip leader for Detroit Outdoors herself.

Dempsey said these experiences can shape both individuals and communities.

“It’s really incredible that time outdoors can be just as meaningful in terms of how we relate to other people as it can be to how we relate to the natural world,” Dempsey said. “Someone might show leadership in their human community, or they might show some leadership in a natural ecosystem. You can lead from any place.”

For many of the students who traveled to Yosemite, building leadership skills wasn’t top-of-mind — awe was.

“Now I see that there are many places that I have no idea about and that are just waiting to be explored,” said Arcia Quinn, a sophomore at Cass Tech. “For me, the world is a lot bigger now, but I know it’s just going to keep getting bigger in my eyes.”

What Johnson called a “crisis of translation” is also just the privilege of experience.

Marianna Alva-Wies, who graduated from Cass Tech in June, said, “I really enjoy feeling small — but that also I’m still significant. And really getting to experience that beauty alongside other people who are also experiencing it has really made these trips special.”

Quinn agreed. He remembered what it felt to see and climb mountains at Yosemite.

“Words can do it no justice. You got to be here to understand it.”

Editor’s note: Marianna Alva-Wies, a former Detroit Outdoors participant, is the child of Sarah Alvarez, Outlier Media’s founder and editor-in-chief.

Students find wonder, legacy and Buffalo Soldiers expert from Detroit in Yosemite National Park · Outlier Media