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This Middle GA group brings diversity to the outdoors. How you can hike with them
As Pam Pinkston hiked the Brown’s Mount trail in Macon-Bibb County, she talked about how she started an Instagram account around five years ago.
“We’re really just a group that is trying to promote diversity in the outdoors, working towards getting people who don’t normally have access to the outdoor spaces, or just have never done it and don’t realize what we’ve got in the Middle Georgia area, and trying to promote those little known places like Brown’s mount, the Hitchiti trail, things like that.”
The Instagram group is called Southern Queer Folk Hikes, and they hike all over Middle Georgia.
Although Pinkston said the group took a while to develop, she hikes around five times a week, and she has around 10-15 members who join her regularly.
“The pandemic was actually pretty good for us because more and more people were getting out,” she said. “Slowly but surely, we’re gaining more people, and it’s not about numbers for us anyway. It’s really just about the quality of the hikes and people getting out here and enjoying it.”
How it started
Pinkston started hiking as a way to get exercise, but she mostly did it to improve her mental health, she said.
She spent 10 years in the Navy, and when she got out, she had some mental health issues and also some physical limitations that prevented her from running or biking. She ended up on disability and was officially diagnosed in 2012 with bipolar disorder and post traumatic stress disorder from being sexually assaulted.
She swam and continues to swim, but she said she needed an activity to get outdoors.
“I like to say dirt under my feet, trees over my head is a tonic. It does so much for my mental health, and I can tell if we skip it a couple of days in a row, I can tell that I’m missing it,” she said.
When she got out of the Navy in 2005, she got a bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan College in psychology. Although she decided to get the degree because she found she was good at counseling in the Navy, she said subconsciously she probably wanted to understand what was happening with her mental health.
If people would like to join the group, they can follow Pinkston on Instagram at @southernqueerfolkhikes and direct message her. She vets people before adding them to the group message in order to maintain safety.
The group hikes all over Middle Georgia, and Pinkston provides several different distances and difficulty levels each week.
Normalizing women’s health
Pinkston recently started a new series on her Instagram account where she talks about women’s health issues, she said.
She was diagnosed with endometriosis, a painful disorder during which tissue, similar to the tissue that lines the inside of the uterus, grows outside of the uterus, and had to have a radical hysterectomy to remove it.
“He had to remove it all, and it had infiltrated various organs, and that’s all because it took over 10 years to get anybody to listen to me. And, I’m not the only one,” she said.
Studies have shown that endometriosis takes an average of seven and a half years to diagnose, according to Forbes Magazine.
In response, Pinkston started the series where she talks about women’s health while she hikes because she wants to normalize talking about women’s reproductive health.
“There are huge disparities in healthcare, especially for women of color,” she said.
A group for everyone
Pinkston’s main goal of the hiking group is to create a safe space for all people to enjoy the outdoors and explore new trails, she said.
“As far as diversity on the trails, sure, I’m talking about the queer community. I’m talking about the BIPOC community. But, I’m also talking about people who look like me. The people who aren’t skinny, who don’t fit that typical, what you see in the ads for like Rei and Patagonia,” she said. “You don’t have to look like that to come out and hike.”
People don’t have to be fit to join them for a hike because they cover a wide range of trails. Dogs are always welcome, Pinkston said, but they have to be kept on a leash.
The group practices the Leave No Trace principles, which mostly means to leave the trails as unaltered as possible.
Although the coronavirus pandemic increased the amount of people hiking, it also increased the amount of trash Pinkston saw on the trails, she said.
In April, May and June of 2020, she said she would come out of a trail with a full Kroger bag of trash. She hopes people will take care of the trails so that they will continue to be open to the public, she said.
The group has only done day hikes so far, but Pinkston hopes to plan some overnight trips with multiple hikes in the future, she said.
“Because the outdoors has worked so well for me, I want to share that with other people,” she said.
This story was originally published June 15, 2021 5:00 AM.
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