It’s the spring of 2016, and I鈥檓 ten miles south of Damascus, Virginia, where an annual celebration called has just wrapped up. Last night, temperatures plummeted into the thirties. Today, long-distance Appalachian Trail hikers who鈥檇 slept in hammocks and mailed their underquilts home too soon were groaning into their morning coffee. A few small fires shot woodsmoke at the sun as thousands of tent stakes were dislodged. Over the next 24 hours, most of the hikers in attendance would pack up and hit the 554-mile stretch of the AT that runs north through Virginia.

I鈥檝e used the Trail Days layover as an opportunity to stash most of my belongings with friends and complete a short section of the AT I鈥檇 missed, near the Tennessee-Virginia border. As I鈥檓 moving along, a day hiker heading in the opposite direction stops me for a chat. He鈥檚 affable and inquisitive. He asks what many have asked before: 鈥淲here are you from?鈥� I tell him Miami.

He laughs and says, 鈥淣o, but really. Where are you from from?鈥� He mentions something about my features, my thin nose, and then trails off. I tell him my family is from Eritrea, a country in the Horn of Africa, next to Ethiopia. He looks relieved.

鈥淚 knew it,鈥� he says. 鈥淵ou鈥檙e not Black.鈥�

I say that of course I am. 鈥淣one more Black,鈥� I weakly joke.

鈥淣ot really,鈥� he says. 鈥淵ou鈥檙e African, not Black-Black. .鈥�

I鈥檓 tired of this man. His from-froms and Black-Blacks. He wishes me good luck and leaves. He means it, too; he isn鈥檛 malicious. To him there鈥檚 nothing abnormal about our conversation. He has categorized me, and the world makes sense again. Not Black-Black. I hike the remaining miles back to my tent and don鈥檛 emerge for hours.

Heading north from , the Appalachian Trail class of 2017 would have to walk 670 miles before reaching the first county that did not vote for Donald Trump. The average percentage of voters who did vote for Trump鈥攁 xenophobic candidate who was supported by David Duke鈥攊n those miles? Seventy-six. Approximately 30 miles farther away, they鈥檇 come to a hiker 颅hostel that proudly flies a Confederate flag. Later they would reach the Lewis Mountain campground in 鈥攃reated in Virginia in 1935, dur颅ing the Jim Crow era鈥攁nd read plaques acknowledging its former history as the . The campground was swarming with RVs flying Confederate flags when I hiked through. This flag would haunt the hikers all the way to Mount Katahdin, the trail鈥檚 end point, in northern Maine. They would see it in every state, feeling the tendrils of hatred that rooted it to the land they walked upon.

During the early part of my through-hike, I arrive in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, one afternoon, a little later than I planned. I was one of many thirtysomethings who鈥檇 ended their relationships, quit their jobs, left their pets with best friends, and flown to Georgia. By this point, I鈥檓 200 miles into my arduous, rain-soaked trek. Everything aches. The bluets and wildflowers have emerged, and I鈥檝e taken a break in town to resupply, midway through my biggest challenge thus far, the Smokies.

It isn鈥檛 until I鈥檓 about to leave town that I see it: blackface soap, a joke item that supposedly will turn a white person Black if you can trick them into using it. I鈥檓 in a general store opposite the . The soap is in a discount bin next to the cash register. I鈥檇 popped in to buy chocolate milk and was instead reminded of a line from Claudia Rankine鈥檚 book : 鈥淭he past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.鈥�

There鈥檚 a shuttle back to the trail at Newfound Gap leaving in 15 minutes. I fumble to take a photograph of the cartoon white woman on the packaging, standing in front of her bathroom sink. She can鈥檛 believe it. How could this happen? Her face and hands are black. She scrubs to no avail.

I leave. Cars honk. I鈥檓 standing at an intersection and straining to return to the world. The shuttle arrives to take us from town to trailhead. The van leads us up, up into the mountains. It鈥檚 a clear day. Hikers are laughing, rejuvenated. 鈥淒id you have fun in town?鈥� a friend I met on the trail asks. 鈥淭his visibility is unreal,鈥� says another, nose against the window. He thinks he has spotted a bear. The sun has lifted spirits. The van spills us out, but I can barely see a thing.

Two days later, a stream of texts hit my phone. Prince has died. I feel my vision blur, sit down on the first rock I see, and don鈥檛 move for a while. The hikers who walk past ask if I鈥檓 hurt. 鈥淚鈥檓 sorry to tell you this,鈥� I鈥檒l hear myself say. 鈥淧rince just died.鈥� No one knows who I鈥檓 talking about. I will see variations of the same vacant expression for the rest of the day. 鈥淭he Prince of Wales?鈥� one hiker asks.

I鈥檓 losing light. I have to get to the next shelter. The afternoon has been a learning experience: the trail is no place to share Black grief. Later, when Beyonc茅 releases Lemonade, an album that speaks 颅powerfully to Black women, I won鈥檛 permit myself to hear it out here. I鈥檓 lonely enough as it is, without feeling additional isolation. I keep it from myself, and I follow the blazes north. I tell the trees the truth of it: some days I feel like breaking.

The . In one brochure, a white man stands boldly, precariously, in Rocky Mountain National Park, gazing at a massive rock face. He wears a full pack. He is ready to tackle the impossible. The poster salutes 鈥�100 years of getting away from it all.鈥� The parenthetical is implied if not obvious: for some.

In a from 2000, a Black man named Robert Taylor was asked about the hardest things he faced during his through-hike of the Appalachian Trail. He鈥檇 recently completed both the AT and the Pacific Crest Trail. 鈥淢y problems were mainly with people,鈥� he said. 鈥淚n towns, people yelled racist threats at me in just about every state I went through. They鈥檇 say, 鈥榃e don鈥檛 like you,鈥� and 鈥榊ou鈥檙e a nigger.鈥� Once when I stopped at a mail drop, the postmaster said, 鈥楤oy, get out of here. We got no mail drop for you.鈥� 鈥�

It will be several months before I realize that most AT hikers in 2016 are unaware of the clear division that exists between what hikers of color experience on the trail (generally positive) and in town (not so much). While fellow through-hikers and trail angels are some of the kindest and most generous people I鈥檒l ever encounter, many trail towns have no idea what to make of people who look like me. They say they don鈥檛 see much of 鈥渕y kind鈥� around here and leave the rest hanging in the air.

The rule is you don鈥檛 talk about politics on the trail. The truth is you can鈥檛 talk about diversity in the outdoors without talking about politics, since politics is a big reason why the outdoors look the way they do. From the park system鈥檚 inception, Jim Crow laws and Native American removal campaigns limited access to recreation by race. From the mountains to the beaches, outdoor leisure was often accompanied by the words whites only. The repercussions for disobedience were grave.

鈥淔or me, the fear is like a heartbeat, always present, while at the same time, intangible, elusive, and difficult to define,鈥� Evelyn C. White wrote in her 1999 essay 鈥�.鈥� In it she explains why the thought of hiking in Oregon, which some writer friends invited her to do, fills her with dread. In wilderness, White does not see freedom but a portal to the past. It is a trigger. The history of suffering is too much for her to overcome. This fear has conjured a similar paralysis nationwide. It says to the minority: Be in this place and someone might seize the opportunity to end you. 颅Nature itself is the least of White鈥檚 concerns. Bear paws have harmed fewer Black bodies in the wild than human hands. She does not wish to be the only one who looks like her in a place with history like this.

Perspective is everything.

There are 11 cats at Bob Peoples鈥檚 in Hampton, Tennessee. When I ask Peoples how he keeps track of them, he responds, 鈥淭hey keep track of me.鈥� We talk about the places he鈥檚 hiked and the people he鈥檚 met. 鈥淕ermans have the best hiking culture of any country,鈥� he says. 鈥淚f there was a trail to hell, Germans would be on it.鈥� The chance of precipitation the next day is 100 percent. When it drizzles the rain plays me, producing different sounds as it strikes hat, jacket, and pack cover. Of the many reasons to pause while hiking, this remains my favorite. The smell and sound of the dampening forest is a sensory gift, a time for reflection.

The first bumper sticker I see in Hot Springs, North Carolina,听says that April is Confederate History Month. A week later, I stay in a hostel near Roan Mountain, Tennessee, next to a house that鈥檚 flying a Confederate flag. Hikers who鈥檝e hitched into town tell me that the rides they got were all from drunk white men. Be careful, they warn.

I reconsider going into town at all. It鈥檚 near freezing. Two days ago, I woke up on Roan Mountain itself in a field of frozen mayapples. Today I wear my Buff headband like a head scarf under my fleece hat. When I walk a third of a mile back to the trailhead alone the next morning, I look at the neighbor鈥檚 flag and wonder if someone will assume I鈥檓 Muslim, whether I鈥檓 putting myself at risk. I lower the Buff to my neck and worry that I鈥檓 being paranoid. Six months later, the San Francisco Chronicle will report on a woman of color who was hiking in Fremont, California, while wearing a Buff like a bandana and returned to find her car鈥檚 rear window smashed, along with a note. 鈥淗ijab wearing bitch,鈥� it said. 鈥淭his is our nation now get the fuck out.鈥� She wasn鈥檛 Muslim, but that鈥檚 not the point. The point is the ease with which a .

Two weeks later, at Trail Days, there鈥檚 a parade celebrating current and past hikers. A Black man with the trail name Exterminator aims a water gun at a white crowd as he moves along. He shoots their white children. They laugh and shoot back with their own water guns. This goes on for 30 yards. I pause to corral my galloping anxiety. He is safe, I tell myself. This event is one of the few places in America where I don鈥檛 fear for a Black man with a toy gun in a public setting.

The Southern Poverty Law Center . On November 16, 2016, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy posted information about racist trail graffiti on its Facebook page. It showed up along the trail corridor in Pennsylvania. The group was encouraging anyone who encountered 颅鈥渙ffensive graffiti or vandalism鈥� to report it via e-mail.

Starting in 1936, amid the violence of Jim Crow, a publication known as the functioned as a guide for getting Black motorists from point A to point B safely. It told you which gas stations would fill your tank, which restaurants would seat you, and where you could lay your head at night without fear. It remained in print for 30 years. As recently as 50 years ago, Black families needed a guide just to travel through America unharmed.

There is nothing approximating a Green Book for minorities navigating the American wilderness. How could there be? You simply step outside and hope for the best. One of the first questions asked of many women who solo-hike the Appalachian Trail is whether they brought a gun. Some find it preposterous. But one hiker of color I spoke to insisted on carrying a machete, an unnecessarily heavy piece of gear. 鈥淵ou can never be too sure,鈥� he told me.

As a queer Black woman, I鈥檓 among the last people anyone expects to see on a through-hike. But nature is a place I鈥檝e always belonged. My home in South Florida spanned the swamp, the Keys, and the dredged land in between. My father and I explored them all, waving at everything from egrets to purple gallinules and paddling by the bowed roots of mangroves. This was before Burmese pythons overran the Everglades, when the rustling of leaves in the canopy above our canoe still veered mammalian.

Throughout my youth, my grandmother and I took walks in Miami, where I鈥檇 hear her say the words tuum nifas. It meant a delicious wind, a nourishing wind. These experiences shaped how I viewed movement throughout the natural world. How I view it still. The elements, I thought, could end my hunger.

Little has changed since. Now the rocks gnaw at my shins. I thud against the ground, my tongue coated in dirt. I pick myself back up and start again.

Every day I eat the mountains, and the mountains, they eat me. 鈥淟ess to carry,鈥� I tell the others: this skin, America, the weight of that past self. My hiking partners are concerned and unconvinced. There is a weight to you still, they tell me. They are not wrong. My footing has been off for days. There were things I had braced for at the beginning of this journey that have finally started to undo me. We were all hurtling through the unfamiliar, aching, choppy, destroyed by weather, trying not to tear apart. But some of us were looking around as well. By the time I made it through Maryland, it was hard not to think of the Appalachian Trail as a 2,190-mile trek through Trump lawn signs. In July, I read the names of more Black men killed by police: Philando Castile, Alton Sterling. Never did I imagine that the constant of the woods would be my friends urging, pleading, that I never return home.

That was then. Back home in Oakland, California, now, my knees hurt. I struggle with the stairs. I wonder if it鈥檚 Lyme disease from an unseen tick bite. The weight I lost has come back. My arms, the blackest I ever saw them after weeks in the summer sun, have faded to their usual dark brown. The bruises on my collarbones from my pack straps are no more. My legs aren鈥檛 oozing blood. My feet haven鈥檛 throbbed in four months. I am once again soft and unblemished and pleading with my anxiety every day for a few hours of peace. My timing couldn鈥檛 be worse. The news is relentless. Facts mean nothing. The truth is, I don鈥檛 know how to move through the world these days. Everything feels like it needs saving. I can barely keep up.

Who is wilderness for? It depends on who you ask. In 2013, Trail Life USA, a faith-based organization, was established as a direct response to the Boy Scouts of America鈥檚 decision to allow openly gay kids into their program. A statement by the group made the rules clear: Trail Life USA 鈥渨ill not admit youth who are open or avowed about their homosexuality, and it will not admit boys who are not 鈥榖iologically male鈥� or boys who wish to dress and act like girls.鈥�

Roughly two years later, news outlets profiled the Radical Monarchs, a group for children of color between the ages of eight and twelve, intended as a Girl Scouts听for social activists. Headlines like 鈥淩adical Brownies Are Yelling 鈥楤lack Lives Matter,鈥� Not Hawking Girl Scout Cookies鈥� highlighted what an intersectional approach to youth activism could look like. Organizations such as Trail Life USA and Radical Monarchs show opposite ends of the outdoor spectrum. For conservative Christian men, religion is used as a means of tying exclusionary practices to outdoor participation. For people of color, the wilderness is everywhere they look. They don鈥檛 need mountains. Wilderness lives outside their front doors. Orienteering skills mean navigating white anxiety about them. They are belaying to effect change. And even then, their efforts might not be enough.

鈥淧eople on the trail, overwhelmingly, are good people, but it isn鈥檛 advertised for us,鈥� says Bryan Winckler, a Black AT through-hiker who went by the trail name Boomer. 鈥淚f you see a commercial for anything outdoor related, it鈥檚 always a white person on it. I think if people saw someone who looked like them they would be interested. It鈥檚 not advertised, so people think, That鈥檚 not for me.鈥�

Brittany Leavitt, an trip leader based in Washington, D.C., echoed this sentiment. 鈥淵ou don鈥檛 see it in the media,鈥� she told me recently. 鈥淵ou don鈥檛 see it advertised when you go into outdoor stores. When I do a hike, I talk about what鈥檚 historically in the area. Nature has always been part of Black history.鈥�

She鈥檚 right. Outdoor skills were a matter of survival for Black people before they became a form of exclusion. Harriet Tubman is rarely celebrated as one of the most important outdoor figures in American 颅history, despite traversing thousands of miles over the same mountains I walked this year.

鈥淗ow can we make being in the outdoors a conduit for helping people realize, understand, and become comfortable with the space they occupy in the world?鈥� says Krystal Williams, a Black woman who through-hiked the AT in 2011. The change is happening slowly, in large part because of public figures bringing attention to the outdoors. Barack Obama designated more national monuments than any president before him. Oprah has called 2017 her year of adventure. 鈥淢y favorite thing on earth is a tree,鈥� she told ranger Shelton Johnson, an advocate for 颅diversity in the national parks, when she met him in Yosemite in 2010. A recent 颅photo of Oprah at the Grand Canyon shows her carrying a full pack. 鈥淗iking requires no particular skill, only two feet and a sturdy pair of shoes,鈥� she said. 鈥淵ou set the pace. You choose the trail. You lock into a certain rhythm with the road, and that rhythm becomes your clarion song.鈥�

Halfway through the descent into Dale颅ville, Virginia, I found myself lying on the trail floor, wincing up at the canopy. I had taken a sudden tumble and was dazed. My right ankle ached badly, though my trekking poles had saved me from a truly nasty sprain. It was not a difficult stretch of trail鈥攕ome packed dirt, a few small rocks, 颅plenty of switchbacks. I felt betrayed and then ashamed. I could feel my confidence evaporating. If I couldn鈥檛 walk a well-groomed trail, what in the world was I going to do with the boulder scrambles awaiting me in the north? Falls could be fatal. At worst this one was a slight embarrassment, but it marked the first time I needed to forgive myself for what I could not control.

Every inch of my being by that point had been shaped by an explicit choice. In pursuit of Katahdin鈥攚hich I reached on October 1, after six months of hiking鈥擨 had wept and chopped off the long, natural hair, so poli颅ticized in America, that my grandmother had told me to always treasure. My afro was no more. I had left my skin to ash, my lips to crack. I wore my transmission-tower-print bandana like an electric prayer. The Appalachian Trail was the longest conversation I鈥檇 ever had with my body, both where I fit in it and where it fits in the world.

One of the popular Appalachian Trail books I read while preparing for my trek asked readers to make a short list of reasons why they wanted to do it. The author suggested we understand these reasons, down to our core, before embarking, coming up with something deeper than 鈥淚 like nature.鈥� I took out this document often when things felt overwhelming on the AT, when the enormity of the pursuit threatened to swallow me whole. Looking back, the list is a series of unrealized hopes. One line reads: 鈥淚 have always been the token in a group; I have never chosen how I want to lead.鈥� Another says: 鈥淚t will be the first time I get to discover not whether I will succeed but who I am becoming.鈥� The last line is a declaration: 鈥淚 want to be a role model to Black women who are interested in the outdoors, including myself.鈥�

There were days when the only thing that kept me going was knowing that each step was one toward progress, a boot to the granite face of white supremacy. I belong here, I told the trail. It rewarded me in lasting ways. The weight I carried as a Black woman paled in comparison with the joy I felt daily among my peers in that wilderness. They shaped my heart into what it will be for the rest of my life.

One of the most common sentiments one hears about the Appalachian Trail is how it restores a person鈥檚 faith in humanity. It is no understatement to say that the who, at times, literally gave me the shirt off their back, saved my life. I owe a great debt to the through-hiking community that welcomed me with open arms, that showed me what I could be and helped me when I faltered. There is no impossible, they taught me: only good ideas of extraordinary magnitude.

Rahawa Haile () is an Eritrean American writer whose work has appeared in Pacific Standard, Brooklyn Magazine, and Buzzfeed. She lives in Oakland.

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