James Edward Mills talks about why the face of outdoor adventure must change

James Edward Mills and I met some years back when I eavesdropped on his conversation at the Outdoor Retailer show in Salt Lake City, Utah, with Michael Kennedy, then editor-in-chief at Alpinist. Mills and Kennedy were discussing a team of African American mountaineers who were training to climb Denali. Mills, in fact, was in the midst of drafting a piece for Alpinist about what he termed “the adventure gap” (later published in Alpinist 40). What were the reasons, wondered Mills, for the underrepresentation of African Americans and other people of color in the great outdoors?

I finally got a chance to interview Mills myself last year, and we chatted about Expedition Denali, his 2014 book The Adventure Gap and the power of narrative. This November, I called him again, post election, to gauge his thinking about the future of his projects.

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