White people simply love to spend their free time walking up and down mountains and sleeping in the forest. Search "hiking" in Google Images and see how far you have to scroll to find a nonwhite person. Ditto rock climbing, kayaking, canoeing, and so on. That white people love the outdoors is so widely accepted as fact that it's become a running joke. The website Stuff White People Like has no less than three entries on the subject: "Making you feel bad about not going outside" (#9), "Outdoor Performance Clothes" (#87), and "Camping" (#128). The latter entry reads, "If you find yourself trapped in the middle of the woods without electricity, running water, or a car you would likely describe that situation as a 'nightmare' or 'a worse case scenario like after plane crash or something.' White people refer to it as 'camping.'"

That quote is almost certainly how most blacks, Latinos, and other minorities view hiking and camping. The Outdoor Industry Association—the top outdoor-recreation lobby in America (and based in Boulder, naturally)—insists that outdoor enthusiasts "are all genders, ages, shapes, sizes, ethnicities and income levels," but research by their own nonprofit organization, The Outdoor Foundation, shows underwhelming diversity. Its 2013 outdoor participation report notes that last year, 70 percent of participants were white. "As minority groups make up a larger share of the population and are predicted to become the majority by 2040, engaging diverse populations in outdoor recreation has never been more critical," the report reads. "Unfortunately, minorities still lag behind in outdoor participation."

In a front-page story today, The New York Times details these very problems facing the National Park Service—only one in five visitors to NPS sites are nonwhite, according to a 2011 study cited in the article—and the "multipronged effort to turn the Park Service’s demographic battleship around." Clumsy metaphors aside, the article does a respectable job at detailing the various efforts—namely outreach, all-expenses-paid trips, and creating more national monuments recognizing minority figures in U.S. history—to increase minority participation. Less complete are the reasons the Times gives for that low participation.

Many white Americans who grew up going to the parks had towering figures of outdoor history — not to mention family tradition — blazing the trail as examples. And those examples, like Daniel Boone and the fur trappers of the Old West, tended to be white.

I'm white, and have been hiking since I was a prepubescent. I assure you that I wasn't inspired by outdoorsmen of yore, if I even knew their names. I grew up in the Northeast, raised by parents who have never pitched a tent. My love for the outdoors formed over summers spent at a sleepover camp in upstate New York, where we'd go on days-long trips in the Adirondacks. That is, I fell in love with the outdoors because I had the means to do so. I don't know what Camp Dudley charged in the '80s, but today a month there costs $4,800.