Last month, Brown Girls Climb traveled to the south to attend the Color the Crag Climbing Festival. The festival brought together over 300 Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) from around the world to climb together! The festival also provided an opportunity for all the BGC leaders to meet one another and reconnect.
Before the party got started, we found some time to connect and climb together and appreciate the land of the Creek, Cherokee, and Chickasaw (specifically what is now known as Horse Pens 40). Our national leaders Jael Berger, Laura Edmondson, Brittany Leavitt, and Bethany Lebewitz, put on our best lip and some of our favorite Mountain Hardwear gear, to get a few burns in before the festival. We left the south feeling reinvigorated from the weekend.
The picture of climbing for many of us brings up a pretty standard image – it’s plaid, technical cargo pants, greys, browns, guitars, and a lot of coffee and beer. Our climbing though can completely different – it’s lipstick and Selena; it’s outrageous laughing, dancing,mangoes, political outrage, and a whole lot of color.
If you are a woman or femme of color, chances are you’ve been told “We don’t do that”, “That’s dangerous!”, “That’s not what WE do”, or you hear, “You don’t wear that to the crag”, “Those aren’t the right shoes for that climb”, “Real climbers do ____”. We get a whole lot of that.
Well, our response is pretty simple: “Oh yeah? Watch us!” Our communities are creating the culture of climbing we want to see, hear, touch, and taste. We’re taking those doubts we hold or are told to us and transforming them to create a stronger community of climbers that encourages one another, shares our experiences with each other, re-imagines what sustainability and outdoor conservation looks like for us, and celebrates the best part of what makes our cultures unique.
Our climbing is a shared experience and our style is a fluid expression of who we are and how we move. We are defining the culture of climbing and are unapologetic about climbing outside the boundaries of what’s expected from us. So watch us climb, redefine, create, and uplift. We’ll climb with a puffy and a pair of hoops because we can.
Special thanks to Mountain Hardwear for providing the gear to make our pre-Color the Crag celebration that much more colorful, and to our hermanita Janelle Paciencia for capturing our experience together and holding down karaoke during the festival.
