“The Stories That Will Make a Difference Aren’t the Easy Ones”: Outdoor Recreation, the Wilderness Ideal, and Complicating Settler Mobility

Abstract

In this autoethnography, I read my history of and connection to outdoor culture, with an eye toward interrogating my complicity in historical and ongoing settler-colonial violence that has rendered my love of “the mountains” both possible and ostensibly unproblematic. In so doing, I unsettle (my) understandings of the connections between land, embodiment, masculinities, and able-bodiedness, exploring how settler attachment to the mountains is predicated on and serves to perpetuate, a(n ongoing) history of land dispossession. I also, however, consider a “different temporal horizon” through a discussion of settler futurity as it relates to outdoor recreation, complicating settler mobility in the process.