Nonprofits bring “medicine of the mountains” to young people

Fresh from a weeklong backpacking trip in Wyoming’s Medicine Bow National Forest, 170 miles from her home in Denver, Mimi Kim joyfully recounted the epic adventure that delivered high mountain vistas, challenges overcome and precious memories shared with friends.

The experience was made possible by Big City Mountaineers, an Arvada-based non-profit that organizes backcountry trips for youths who might not otherwise get to experience the outdoors on such a grand scale.

“It was beautiful,” said Kim, 14. “We saw so many cool lakes and cool places where we camped, just beautiful scenery. I love the girls I got to go with, so that made it even better, and the scenery was just amazing.”

Like Colorado Treks and Camping to Connect, other Denver-based non-profits with similar missions, Big City Mountaineers provides “transformative outdoor experiences to youth from historically disinvested communities.” BCM does it by partnering with youth agencies that work in those communities. Kim participated through Denver City Lax, which creates opportunities for youths in “underserved neighborhoods” by providing access to lacrosse, academic guidance and “enrichment” experiences.

Kim’s backpacking trip three weeks ago was her second with Big City Mountaineers. Last year’s trip took them to the Flat Tops Wilderness northwest of the Vail Valley.

“It gives you so many different life lessons that you get to learn firsthand,” Kim said. “It’s also just a super-fun experience. Backpacking is not something a lot of kids get to do, especially ones that don’t have a lot of access to that type of stuff. Getting to learn all the things you get to learn is amazing for any kid of any age.”

Kids in the Big City Mountaineers program go on a series of three separate trips — a day hike, a “front-country” overnighter and finally the weeklong trip.

“When you’re backpacking, it’s not just about you,” Kim said. “A lot of stuff you do is for the good of the group. When we were doing some of the harder days – there’s a big uphill part, and there was a really steep part we had to go down – it was so helpful to have these other girls around you who were going through the exact same thing.”

Big City Mountaineers is a national organization that operates in Colorado from a headquarters in Arvada. Other regions are based out of the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Minneapolis, Boston and Birmingham, Ala. The cost is free to the youths who take part, and all of their equipment is provided. It is supported by fundraisers, donations and grants. This year it received a $60,000 grant from the Colorado Outdoor Recreation Industry Office.

“There’s a lot of research coming out now, and I think people who participate in outdoor recreation know this intuitively, that getting outside — especially immersive ways of getting outside — has enormous benefits for your mental health, your physical health, your social and emotional well-being,” said BCM’s executive director, David Taus. “The communities we’re working with are most in need of these sorts of experiences, and they are the least likely to go outside in this way.”

It started with a stabbing

When he was 12 years old, Dominic Lucero was stabbed by a neighborhood kid on the way home from Horace Mann Middle School in north Denver. That was in 1993, the year of Denver’s infamous Summer of Violence, when there were 74 homicides in the city. Nearly half of them were teenagers.

Lucero said he and the boy who stabbed him were in the habit of bullying each other.

“It was the culture of our people, of the machismo culture,” said Lucero, the founder of Colorado Treks. “I was taught to throw a jab and a hook before I was taught to say please, thank you, I love you and I’m sorry. I say Colorado Treks was established in 2016, but really it was established in ’93 when I got stabbed. Part of my spirit got taken, but something activated me.”

Like Big City Mountaineers, there is no cost for youths on trips organized by Colorado Treks. Outings include rock climbing at Staunton State Park, fishing clinics, horseback riding in the Flat Tops, camping, hiking fourteeners and skiing. It is funded through grants and a fundraising gala. The goal is to introduce what Lucero calls “the medicine of the mountains” to youths who may be in dire need of it.

“If my past, present and future is my 10-mile radius, what kind of life experience is that?” Lucero said. “When you’re not given access to the medicine cabinet, you’re talking about generations of illness — mind, body and spirit. How we heal here is through culture. We believe cultura cura, culture cures. Is it gang culture, is it drug culture, sex, violence? Or, is it the outdoor culture, the culture of music, sports? Culture cures, but also culture can kill. We try to reconnect and reactivate our culture and the identity of our indigenous culture.”

Lucero calls the rock-climbing outings “BIPOC on the Rock” to drive home that participants are reclaiming part of their heritage.

“We teach our participants when we’re rock climbing, these rocks have been touched by our ancestors for thousands of years,” Lucero said. “We’re reconnecting to them. We also acknowledge that lack of medicine has led to why our people in urban communities have more incidents of violence and substance misuse — because we’ve disconnected from this medicine for generations.”

Nature for healing, brotherhood

Camping to Connect is a mentorship program that uses outdoor recreation and immersion in nature to help young men of color working through issues that include mental health and “healthy masculinity,” It started six years ago in New York City, opened a Denver office in 2021, and began organizing camping trips last summer.

Like BCM and Colorado Treks, there is no charge for participants. All three organizations stress that people of color should never feel as if they don’t belong in the outdoors.