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With his new platform, Mills was finally able to write about the relationship people of color have with outdoor spaces-his goal since the beginning. He took it, but was laid off quickly thereafter when the recession hit in 2008.įinally, in 2009, he created his own media organization, The Joy Trip Project-a blog, website, and podcast covering outdoor recreation, conservation, and sustainability. Based on the success of his piece, Mills was offered a full-time position at the publication. Rather than write the story as an article, Mills decided to create an audio segment, which became the first episode of SNEWS’ inaugural podcast. He reached out to a friend who worked at Outside Business Journal (at the time called SNEWS) about taking on the assignment. Mills decided he wanted to cover the funeral. A story had recently been published about a friend of his, the rock climber Todd Skinner, who had died in an accident in Yosemite. He found one, as luck would have it, while surfing Outside magazine’s website. Three years later, he began to look for opportunities in his old stomping ground, the outdoor industry. In 2003, he became a business reporter for the Wisconsin State Journal to hone his journalistic skills and break into the business.

“ I was working for Columbia at the time, and all I could do that day was sell shoes.” Being able to tell stories seemed like a better way to make a dent in the world’s problems.

“ When it happened, I realized the whole world had changed,” Mills says. It wasn’t until the September 11th attacks, however, that Mills decided to commit himself fully to that path. His wife was a reporter for Wisconsin Public Radio, a career he greatly admired, so he started to consider journalism as a means by which he might be able to affect change. Mills wanted to help the industry understand how much it lacked in terms of diversity-but he didn’t consider his position as a sales representative an effective way to do that. As an industry, we weren’t doing a good job of expanding the market to emerging demographics. “The outdoor industry wasn’t talking to the people I went to high school with and many of the people I went college with. “ I started to get frustrated that we were only selling products to each other,” he says. By the mid-2000s, he had gone from advocate to skeptic based on what he saw as the insular and blinkered nature of the outdoor economy. At 25, he became TNF’s regional Midwest sales representative, and although he was good at it, it started to change his perspective of the industry. “I didn’t realize I was different.”Īfter graduating from college, Mills sold camping equipment at REI and worked as a guide and outfitter before eventually transitioning to The North Face’s customer-service department. “Growing up, I assumed everybody had some outdoor experience,” Mills says. As a child, he belonged to a Los Angeles Boy Scout troop that regularly embarked on camping and hiking trips around Southern California. Mills’ fascination with the outdoors began early in life. The result, a book of stories exploring the narratives of Black Americans in the outdoors, is called Unhidden, and it’s forthcoming from National Geographic. That interest took him on a research trip through history.

“ It was the beginning of my interest in the relationship between people of color and the outdoors-specifically in regard to national parks,” he says. If there was one story about Black people in the outdoors he wasn’t aware of, he realized, there were probably many more. The conversation with Burns was a revelation for Mills. “I lived and worked in Yosemite for several years, and I was hearing this story for the first time.” “ The Buffalo Soldiers were in Yosemite in 1909?” He could hardly believe it. “Wait a minute ,” Mills recalls thinking.

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“What are you going to do to tell the stories of non-white people in this documentary?” Mills asked Burns.īurns explained that the series would surface narratives of Black people in the national parks that haven’t historically received media coverage, like how the Buffalo Soldiers, a Black cavalry in the Civil War, were the first protectors of Yosemite in 1909.

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While interviewing filmmaker Ken Burns about his documentary series The National Parks: America’s Best Idea at Outdoor Retailer, the journalist and founder of The Joy Trip Project asked a question that would eventually alter the course of his professional life. In 2008, James Edward Mills’ perception of American history was changed forever.

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