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If you’re like many other New Yorkers, “outdoors” is the distance you walk between your apartment and the corner bodega or, if you’re lucky, a stroll through your nearest urban park. But the outdoors as the rest of the world defines it—hills, ocean, rivers, animals that don’t primarily eat trash—feels pretty inaccessible to most working class people in the city.
Outlandish, the Brooklyn-based store that makes hiking feel cool again, partnered up with The Salomon Foundation, which elevates marginalized communities, to birth Hikeish, a program that is trying to make the outdoors more accessible to New Yorkers of color. Among other things, the program offers guided bi-weekly hikes with shuttle transportation and complimentary Salomon shoe demos so you can try out hiking gear for yourself.
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Outlandish, which is located in Crown Heights (722 Franklin Ave.), is the first Black-owned store that focuses on outdoor apparel in New York. If you haven’t been, it's a boutique experience with carefully curated and designed clothes made for the outdoors, but everything in the store is also something you’d actually wear out in the city. The store itself is all brick, with a seating area that makes it feel like you’re at a friend’s apartment and can just hang out.
The store is the product of a collaboration between friends Benje Williams and Ken Bernard, who come from two radically different worlds: Williams grew up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in Northern California, where the outdoors were ingrained in every aspect of the culture, while Bernard was born and raised in Bed-Stuy and didn’t go on a hike until his late teen years. They met while working at REI and decided to open Outlandish, and they now combine Bernard's expertise around gear with Williams' deep relationship to the outdoors.
When we asked Bernard and Williams what the largest obstacle is for New Yorkers of color to get outdoors, they cited several reasons. For one, it’s hard to even know where to go or how to get there. A lot of people don’t have the right gear, or don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars to get everything they think they might need to go on a hike.
“If you were not born into a hiking family in the inner city, you were just not going to hike, especially as a person of color in the city,” Bernard says. “The city almost feels like a wall and it’s hard to get through the wall because you don’t know what’s on the outside.”
Studies have shown that people of color are less likely to engage in nature-related outdoor activities in general, in large part because of discriminatory practices that have historically excluded POC from organizations like the Sierra Club. For Black people specifically, hiking alone could put them in harm's way, as we all witnessed when Christian Cooper had the cops called on him simply for bird watching in Central Park. These factors, along with many others, makes activities like hiking seem inaccessible to non-white people living in the U.S.: In fact, Black people make up only 7% of all visitors to National Parks.
The historically exclusionary history around access to the outdoors in the United States has also created a cultural gap between who even gets to consider themselves to be a hiker. When Black and other POC do have access to nature, they might not even think of it as an option of something they could actually partake in.
“A lot of people have a stereotype of what a hiker looks like and they don’t fit that and don’t really want to fit that,” Williams says. “We’ve seen folks come in who sort of say ‘Black people don’t hike,” adds Bernard.
A lot of people have a stereotype of what a hiker looks like and they don’t fit that and don’t really want to fit that.
But that’s where Outlandish and Salomon are having some of their most meaningful impact: They’re making hiking cool and accessible by creating gear that’s versatile for New Yorkers. This isn’t, afterall, the type of city where you can go out everyday in leggings and running shoes, unless you’re ready to get some well-deserved side eye.
“This is a fashion city, so when people buy shoes they’re thinking if they can wear it in the city as well as on the trail,” Williams says. Both Salomon and Outlandish exist at the intersection of fashion and function, and for once, they’re speaking to a demographic that the outdoor industry tends to gloss over.
But the clothes and the shoes are all just vessels to reach the actual goal: To get people of color outside and allow them to experience the full range of the mental and physical health benefits that come with being in nature. “I always says nature sells itself,” Williams says. “As soon as you get people outdoors, I know they’re going to be hooked.”
You can sign up for one of their upcoming hikes here.