Parks Stewardship Forum

The outdoor recreation industry is heavily influenced by a dominant, heteronormative culture—a culture that defines the experience not only for the participants but also the people working within the industry (Warren 2015; Holland, Powell, Thomsen, and Monz 2018). Those interested in advancing a career as a professional in the outdoor recreation industry, particularly related to outdoor leadership and adventure guiding, are often required to engage in a variety of unique living situations, arrangements, and contexts. This may include, for example, moving to rural and remote communities that sit adjacent to wildlands where many outdoor recreation organizations operate their programs. It may also require extended overnight trips with shared housing and rooming arrangements that require a level of intimacy with people they work with that is uncommon to most employment settings. Unique to this field, then, is how entangled personal identities are in the professional settings where one works with colleagues and serves their participants, a phenomenon that creates distinctive challenges to individuals who have non-dominant identities. This case study follows the career of a transmasculine outdoor recreation professional, Zach, as their career in the outdoor industry traverses multiple sectors (ski patrol to wilderness therapy) and geographic locations in North America (New Mexico to Alaska). Two semi-structured interviews were conducted with Zach, along with a photo elicitation exercise where he/they shared photographs that communicated a deeper meaning of his/their lived experience. In the sections below, you will learn about the experiences that Zach had through his/their career within the outdoor recreation industry and how his/their queer identity shaped his/their professional and personal experience in these spaces.