Imagine you’re mountain biking down a lush, green trail in the Tetons. Your nostrils are flooded with smells of evergreen and a damp forest floor covered in pine needles and the occasional bear scat. You come around a bend and see what appears to be an abandoned bright-red mountain bike on the side of the trail. You stop and look around for its owner, confused as to why they left it. Then out of the flora pops up an excited woman with a vibrant grin holding a jar of huckleberries. This is Vanessa Chavarriaga Posada, a BIPOC (Black and Indigenous People of Color) woman who is changing the way we interact with the outdoor spaces we inhabit.
Chavarriaga Posada, 24 years old, was born in Colombia. She split her childhood among Colombia, Mexico, and the U.S. in an immigrant household where her parents tried to simultaneously preserve her Colombian culture and help her assimilate to a new culture. “A lot of that meant keeping your head down and working really hard,” she said. “There wasn’t a lot of room for sports.” She was always picked last in gym and found the idea of running a mile daunting. Her childhood home was an apartment with no green spaces to explore. She spent her time indoors reading books and learning to play the violin; her understanding of the outdoors came from watching The Parent Trap, a movie about white families at summer camp.
While living in Michigan at the age of 15, Chavarriaga Posada’s white friends encouraged her to attend a summer camp in the Tetons. She got scholarships to the camp and made up for the rest by weeding neighbors’ lawns — one of the first of many experiences where she had to work extremely hard to acquire what others got handed to them. Chavarriaga Posada road-tripped across the country to the Tetons to attend camp, hiking, camping, and basking in the mountains for the first time. She hadn’t considered this experience to be a possibility for her, and yet found herself in the mountains feeling liberated and seen for the first time in the outdoor culture. She knew that she had to chase that feeling as long as she lived.
Hooked, Chavarriaga Posada returned to Michigan and got a job at a local gear shop to afford the luxuries of outdoor activities. She found herself surrounded by fancy bikes and gear that she couldn’t yet afford, but with her foot in the door she started to save. The first piece of equipment Chavarriaga Posada bought was a bright-purple Mountain Hardwear down sleeping bag she’s practically lived in ever since. She found it so liberating to be able to sleep wherever she wanted. “I didn’t even need my bed anymore.”
“Everything is so new to me, it feels like I’m getting to experience childhood for a second time. I’m like a kid in a candy store,” she said of that awakening. “There’s just so much to experience.” She’d been dipping her toes into different activities: hiking, trail running, ice skating, and backcountry skiing. In 2019, Chavarriaga Posada bought her first mountain bike, aptly named Cherry. Owning her first bike at the age of 21 felt incredibly exciting, though she had to continue to work hard shifting the narrative from “something white people do” to taking up the space she deserves. “Being an adult learner is tough because it’s hard to not compare yourself to folks that have been doing this stuff their whole life,” she said.
While Chavarriaga Posada sometimes meets people who make her feel like she doesn’t belong, she’s discovered the liberation of showing up. She tried to fit the one-size-fits-all mold she saw from other people who were involved in outdoor recreation. “I’m now realizing that did a lot of harm to me because I was negating who I was and I wasn’t taking up space in ways that are beautiful,” she said. Chavarriaga Posada was reflecting on her most recent trip to Colombia where she rode a bike as her main transportation. Every time she went out, she was on a borrowed bike often wearing shoes that were two sizes too big for her and a helmet that made her look like an alien from outer space, and it didn’t matter. “One of the most beautiful things about my culture is that we all have such big families and everything is met with so much joy and celebration,” she said. She didn’t need fancy gear or tools; she was able to experience joy fully by not being afraid of letting herself experience joy. “There’s nothing to prove to anyone else. There’s no wrong way to take up space on a bike. The more of us that believe that, the more we can start to change the culture.”
Chavarriaga Posada struggled to find a similar sense of community in the U.S. until she started to find people on Instagram who were going through the same awakening. Although there are relatively few of them in this social network group and they’re all geographically isolated, she found that social media became a tool to connect this community in a rewarding and powerful way. Chavarriaga Posada connected with people who lived 700 miles away because they were brown and liked doing the things she liked to do. It was scary the first time she drove eight hours to meet people she didn’t know in Moab for a BIPOC mountain bike meetup toward the end of 2020, and combined her culture and her love for the outdoors. Her fears melted away the first morning when she met a group of positive and welcoming people, a group of people that understood her and her experiences without needing to share an exchange of words. She found herself experiencing fear, community, and safety in ways that she hadn’t before. Chavarriaga Posada used her mountain bike as a tool to connect with herself and these new people in her life. “A bike creates a lot of access for me,” she said. “It’s a really empowering tool to own or just be able to get on a bike and move myself up a hill or flow down a trail.”
Like most of us in the U.S., Chavarriaga Posada was raised with a separation from the natural world, including the food she ate. “Being able to learn about edible berries and mushrooms that exist in these spaces has allowed me to connect a lot more deeply to the land,” she said, “and have an intimate relationship with it that can’t be modified or defined by capitalism because it’s much more profound than that.” Chavarriaga Posada’s main mentor in foraging is none other than Doug Peacock (if you’ve ever cracked open an Edward Abbey novel, you might remember the character shaped after him). A man in his late 70s who has lived and studied grizzly bears in Yellowstone for over 50 years, Peacock took Chavarriaga Posada under his wing. The unlikely pair became great friends and still trade love and joy through stories today. Chavarriaga Posada could call Peacock up and ask him where to go, and he’d place a vague X on a map. One of her favorite parts of foraging is how it forces you to slow down and move more purposefully through the environment. “We’ve always been taught that our movements in the outdoors need to be fast and hard. We have to summit a peak, conquer a climb, or crush a downhill on a bike.”
Chavarriaga Posada reflects on how wonderful it is to just slow down and walk through the woods with “no other purpose than to observe what’s there.” When our objectives are the end, we lose sight of everything else around us. Chavarriaga Posada’s favorite part of foraging is the constant reminder of how abundant life is. “It’s good to see that there is abundance in this world and it’s something foraging always teaches me,” she said. “If it’s huckleberries or chanterelle or whatever we’re looking for, there’s always enough.” She quickly found that the foraging community is quite similar to the rest of the outdoor world in which people like to withhold information and have their secret spots with a sense of ownership. Chavarriaga Posada is a big advocate for sharing because she knows that if we operate from a place of abundance, we have nothing to be afraid of. If we operate from this idea of “my spots are going to get taken and then I won’t have any,” there’s no joy in that, it’s just hoarding. It’s the opposite of what Chavarriaga Posada believes in. There are ties among the berries and the bears and the bikes. It’s the representation of a world that is possible if we’re open to it, and it’s a good challenge to practice.
Spending time with Chavarriaga Posada is a privilege and a joy that not many get to experience. Between her multiple jobs, grizzly bear research, food sovereignty work, working with nonprofits, and more personal work such as writing for Melanin Basecamp, she’s busy. If you do happen to find yourself sharing a chairlift or a bike ride with her, you’ll find that she can easily change your entire way of thinking. You will discover how disconnected you are from what’s around you in a way that doesn’t elicit guilt. “What’s more important is to decolonize my relationship with nature and help others do the same through open-access education.” Chavarriaga Posada’s goal isn’t to shame people for what they don’t understand. She wants everyone to be able to experience the immense joy she has in the outdoor world.