Outdoor Allies: Dani Reyes-Acosta

Ever wondered how you can do more for public lands but you aren’t sure where to start? Outdoor Alliance’s Outdoor Allies series explores how other outdoor adventurers got their start and their advice for how you can harness your passion for the outdoors into protecting the places you love. Dani Reyes-Acosta is a mountain athlete and storyteller rewriting the narrative of who plays outside and how we build community with others on this planet. Originally from Southern California, her mission is to inspire individual action and collective communion through self-care and self-determination found in the outdoors. Find her at DaniReyesAcosta.com or @NotLostJustDiscovering.

You do so many things outside! How did you get into the outdoors and how would you describe your relationship with the outdoors right now?

I started my outdoor journey as a young lass, walking our family’s dogs on the beach with my father and sisters. Swim team, an annual camping trip, and biannual ski vacations were formative part of my childhood.

In the past few years, my relationship has been focused solely on achieving: whether that means acquiring new skills, ticking peaks, or growing community, I’ve been driven by an internalized social need to attain success through a traditional “mountain athlete” path. But with a small farmstead in rural SW Colorado and a partner recovering from injury, I’m now working on integrating my adventure goals into a more balanced life—grounding, as it were. The now, in all its forms, interests me most.

This means longer days that look a little bit different from just romping through the mountains. It means sticking my hands in the dirt and spending time on relationships that feed my soul as much as it means achieving technical or endurance milestones. It’s an exercise in training my mind and heart as much as my body and skillset. It’s tough work, but what’s that they say…nothing worth doing is easy.

We’ve talked a bit about the issues facing mountain towns right now, from climate change to the high cost of living, and about how Latinx populations can be excluded or overlooked from mountain town’s recreation communities. What are some of the issues you think are facing mountain towns right now?

Photo by Carly Finke for Weston Backcountry

Housing, worker shortage, and transportation between satellite communities and labor hubs are all top-of-mind, at least in how they relate to mountain towns’ abilities to serve the tourist economy. Layered and complex, these are issues that need to factor in town planning, Short-term rental (STR) rules, and labor planning and support—all these issues are flashpoints in the ongoing conversation that’s largely divided along socioeconomic lines within these communities.

Even if we were to solve all the problems plaguing recreation economies of the American West, we’d still run into one huge fundamental problem: adventure is just another form of extraction. In the West, where mining towns often convert to tourist hubs, unplugging and escaping is simply a more modern version of dominating and denying.

Commodification of joy, nature, and human experience without an integrated awareness of social, cultural, and environmental factors play simply becomes unchecked exploitation.

And regarding the exclusion and erasure of Latinx/e populations from recreation communities: this is a highly actionable item that can be undertaken in partnership with local leaders from those communities. Whether you need help with culturally acute messaging, advice on relevant programming, or athlete role models from the community (✋🏽), we must be including all the voices that keep this economy growing!

What are the other advocacy issues you’re working on right now?

The Outdoorist Oath is the perfect intersection of adventure, planet, and inclusion: these three elements are intrinsically linked, and cannot exist without the other. To me, the Oath can help us fundamentally shift towards a more sustainable recreation economy, one that takes into account both individual and collective experiences.

Since the rise of the outdoor industry, recreationists have been pushed to adopt the same individualist mindset that is at the heart of many of our current environmental, social, and political problems. If we start thinking, believing, and acting from a place of reciprocity—with our friends, community, and strangers, places we visit, and those very different from us—then we might be able to start pulling apart the systems that commoditize our joy and ultimately lead to adventure as an extractive resource.

What do you wish more people knew about advocacy in the outdoors?

Don’t overthink advocacy: it can start with simply recognizing that something isn’t right, and taking small action to correct it. Whether that means speaking up when a situation isn’t ok (see something, say something!), working to hire BIPOC crew members for your next photo shoot, or spending a few hours trail building at your favorite local spot, change happens through an accumulation of many small actions.

Certainly, there are reading lists to note (here’s a great one from the New York Times for your summer!) and trainings to take (check out free offerings from the Slow Factory, a knowledge partner and climate innovation lab focused on addressing the intersecting crises of climate justice and social inequity), but start with something simple.

Take the free, short training from friends at The Outdoorist Oath to get started!

What do you hope the future of the outdoors looks like?

I hope our species gets its act together so that we survive the Sixth Mass Extinction! There will be no outdoors if we don’t learn to work together. A big part of this work centers cultivating local initiatives, involving all stakeholders across socioeconomic, language, and ability differences.

Whether that means investing in local agriculture, trail stewardship, or cultural initiatives, the outdoors is a place where all of us belong. We are not separate from nature—we are a part of it, and the way we treat the outdoors reflects the way we treat each other.

Lightning Round:

Favorite piece of gear right now: Medicine ball or gardening gloves!

On your reading list: How to Be Anti-Racist

Best close-to-home destination: Telluride, Colorado