"Hiking ruined my life…"
Hi, I’m Victoria and I started Plus Sized Outdoors as a YouTube Channel and Instagram Account to help educate and inspire people who don’t fit the outdated image of who enjoys life outside.
I’m a queer, fat adventurer who loves to share my knowledge and passion for the outdoors. In 2015, I was working a job that was supposed to open up doors for the life I wanted. - the life I had prepared for: living for my job and working all the time. The facade that I had convinced was reality was starting to crack - I was feeling stuck; unchallenged. I needed something more, but didn’t know exactly what. I didn’t grow up in the outdoors - the closest I had come was the beach. The world of nature was uncharted and unknown, but for some reason, all I wanted was to go on a hike. I only knew of one person who hiked, so I asked her to go on a hike with me. She told me to pick a trail - OK. great… how do I pick a trail?
I chose a trail that was 3 miles - doable, right?! After all, it was so pretty! At that time, I had no idea how to read a trail profile, so the trail had 1,200 feet of elevation gain… in the first mile. Most of the ascent was filled with “what the $@&% was I thinking? and “why do people do this?” in between gasps for air.
Once we reached the summit, I was dumbfounded by the amazing view and starting to understand why people do this - little did I know that soon it would all become crystal clear. On the descent, we came across a stream crossing that was too wide to step across and too deep to walk through, but there was a log across with short branches sticking up all over it. Paralyzed by the fear that I would trip and be impaled if I set foot on the log, I was on the verge of walking through the stream in my mesh sneakers in November. My friend talked me off my “ledge” and helped me over the log in two easy steps, telling me where to put each foot and literally held my hand through it. Once I was across, it felt as if the whole world had cracked open. I finally understood why people pushed themselves in the outdoors. I realized that I was far more capable of things than I ever thought possible. I had learned more about myself in those three miles on that trail than I had in the previous 5 years.
When I returned to real life, the things that I had previously invested so much time and effort into no longer seemed important. I no longer wanted a life only lived for my job - a life of adventure and filled with intention suddenly seemed much more appealing.
Hiking ruined my life… well, the life I thought I wanted. Suddenly my world burst into flames and I was reborn into this new world in the outdoors. New possibilities. New dreams. New opportunities. New things to learn. The more I hiked, the more enthralled I became. With all this enthusiasm, something was still off. All the research I did and all the images I saw, one thing was all the same - all the imagery was of the same type of people: young, skinny, often straight, white, men. All the marketing. All the pictures. Everything. It made me start to think that I wasn’t welcome in this newfound playground.
I scoured social media looking for people like me that loved to be in the outdoors and slowly started to find what I was looking for. The one thing I was also hoping to find was instead of just seeing people like me outdoors, was how to get outdoors for people like me by people like me. One day, I was listening to a podcast of an interview with Sam Ortiz - a plus-size climber, mountaineer, photographer, and adventurer who has become an amazing influence in the movement to diversify the outdoors. She was asked where her motivations came from to start her social media account. Her answer has stuck with me ever since - she stated that she is trying to be “the role model she needed and still needs today.” I had spent so long looking for someone to do the thing I was looking for. I then realized that I had the experience and knowledge to be that person for other people. And just like that, Plus Sized Outdoors was born.
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