Chris Hill
May 10, 2022
If there’s one thing that sets Sierra Club Outings apart from other travel operators, it’s that our trips serve a higher purpose: to establish lifelong connections between people and the wild places that should be protected. It’s a powerful idea that has galvanized generations of conservation-minded travelers for over 100 years. Yet few people understand the connective tissue between these trips and the Sierra Club’s organizing strategy like Chris Hill, who is both a volunteer trip leader and the senior campaign director for the Our Wild America campaign. From a young age, Chris learned to find joy and healing outside, where she established a lifelong passion for backpacking, climbing, snowboarding, and fly-fishing. “Being outdoors,” she says, “is the closest feeling to home for me.”
This love of the outdoors dovetailed with Chris’s professional career in 2011, when she became an organizer with the Sierra Club Maryland chapter and organized a trip by kayak to a polluting coal plant that needed to be retired. This trip, which was directly connected to the advocacy campaign, began the journey for many Sierra Club members to fight the plant to retirement. “It was really eye-opening to see the connections people made when they could see firsthand the pollution the coal plant was causing and the dire need for clean air, clean water, and healthy neighborhoods.” She later moved on to the Sierra Club’s federal office in Washington, D.C., and then to the Our Wild America campaign, where she now leads efforts to create and protect more nature for future generations to combat the climate crisis, and reduce the nature equity gap to connect all people to the outdoors. After eight years at the organization, Chris says one thing has remained the same: “the understanding and importance that Sierra Club Outings have to our advocacy and organizing efforts.”
As part of the Our Wild America campaign, Chris works closely with the Sierra Club’s Outdoors for All team, which envisions a “just, equitable, and sustainable future in which all people benefit from clean air, clean water, and equitable access to the outdoors.” As a black woman, an avid outdoors person, and an environmental advocate, Chris feels a particular resonance with the nexus between conservation and outdoor equity. Not only did she rarely see anyone who looked like her in outdoor spaces while growing up, but fewer than half of all people in the United States live within walking distance of a park, she says, highlighting the great disparities in access to the outdoors, especially for low-income neighborhoods and communities of color as a result of discriminatory policies on the control and use of land and public transportation. “Understanding the multitude of barriers that exist for BIPOC communities in getting outdoors and improving access is so important,” she explains, adding that “ensuring equitable access to the outdoors would have wide-ranging health, economic, and societal benefits.”
“It was really eye-opening to see the connections people made when they could see firsthand the pollution the coal plant was causing and the dire need for clean air, clean water, and healthy neighborhoods.”
Chris’s extensive relationship with the outdoors and advocacy took a new turn in 2018, when she completed her training to become a volunteer leader with Sierra Club Outings. Of her many experiences, all within Alaska, two stand out as all-time favorites. She describes her visit to Cape Krusenstern in northwestern Alaska, on the coast of the Chukchi Sea, as a relaxed trip “filled with joy wandering the hills at leisure, learning about the history of the area, observing the vast flora and fauna, and searching for musk ox on far-off ridges.” Every so often, the group would sit down to take a break while the trip leader painted a watercolor of the landscape or a flower and shared intriguing facts about the area. The other trip, a raft journey on the Tatshenshini River, holds a special place in Chris’s heart as it introduced her to Haines, Alaska, where she now lives, and it’s also where she met her husband, Greg. Though the trip was riddled with storms and sideways rain, there were also incredible days filled with sun as the river meandered through massive mountains and past glaciers and lakes filled with icebergs. “I remember at dinnertime the guides would tell us about the First Nations land we were on and the stories of the campaign to stop a massive copper mine and road through the heart of the area. Being disconnected for so long on ‘river time’ was so rejuvenating and healing.”
In 2019, Chris partnered with the Outbound Collective to tell her story in a short film, Where I Belong, which appeared at numerous film festivals and won Best Short Film at the Conservation Film Festival in 2021. She is currently taking a break from planning trips with Sierra Club Outings, but she’s eager to get back to it soon, and she continues to be active at the intersection of the outdoors and advocacy. She recently embarked on a nearly two-week trip packrafting and backpacking in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. “It was an amazing trip connecting my friends to an important place and being able to provide them with the tools to create change when they get home.”
Keep an eye on sc.org/outings for a chance to explore Alaska with Chris. In the meantime, you can watch her short film here.