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Scroll through dozens of outdoor brand websites and you’ll read the same sentences: Everyone belongs outside. Nature doesn’t discriminate. All are welcome here. Those words are free to say. The actual work, the kind that changes who shows up at a trailhead or a campground, costs something those sentences don’t: money, data, and a willingness to look at what’s actually kept people out.
This episode’s guest is Sally Steele, and this conversation goes straight at what breaks a family’s connection to land in the first place, and what it takes to build it back. Sally Steele is a tech founder, nonprofit executive, and ordained minister. She’s the co-founder and CEO of Outdoorithm, a platform that makes it easy to find the right campground for your family, and of Outdoorithm Collective, a nonprofit that brings underrepresented families onto public lands for rest, nourishment, movement, and community. A 2024 REI Path Ahead Ventures Embark Fellow, she lives in Oakland, California, with her husband Justin and their four daughters.
Sally and Angie talked about:
- Finding her family’s name on the Wall of Names at the Equal Justice Initiative’s Freedom Monument Sculpture Park
- How slavery, then sharecropping, disrupted her family’s relationship to land for generations
- Growing up without any exposure to national parks or outdoor recreation
- The barriers to belonging outdoors: logistics, the cost of gear, and physical and psychological safety
- Why “will I be physically safe” and “do I belong here” are two different, equally real questions
- The unspoken hierarchy of outdoor activities, and why hunting and fishing get left out of it
- Scarcity mentality, geotagging, and the difference between gatekeeping and entitlement
- How a conversation on the drive home from Yosemite became the idea for Outdoorithm
- Building a “Community Vibe Score” for campgrounds, modeled on the Negro Motorist Green Book
- Outdoorithm Collective’s free family camping trips, and the five mantras that anchor them: camp as it comes, leave anyway, nobody solos, dirt don’t hurt, and take up space
- Why cultivating belonging on public lands is part of what protects them
Check out these resources:
- 🌐 Outdoorithm
- 🏕️ Outdoorithm Collective
- 📱 Outdoorithm on IG
- 📰 “Why Being Black and Outdoorsy Is a Whole Thing” — NPR
- 📰 “Embracing Our Relationships with Whiteness in the Outdoors” — Melanin Base Camp
- 📰 “The Achilles Heel of Trail Running” — Melanin Base Camp
- 📰 “Five Reasons Why You Should Keep Geotagging” — Melanin Base Camp
- 📰 “Does Geotagging Matter?” — Femignarly
- ➡️ The Cairn Project on IG
- ✨ The Cairn Project’s newsletter
- 🥾 Become a Trailblazer
- 📅 Summit Scholarship Foundation
Like this episode? Leave a 5-star rating and review on your podcast app!
You can help us close the gender gap outdoors and beyond:
- Become a Trailblazer. Your Adventure Fundraiser makes wilderness experiences possible for girls and women.
- Check out the Summit Scholarship Foundation.
- Send this episode to a friend who’s ever felt like public land wasn’t really meant for them.
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In this episode of the See Her Outside Podcast, host Angie Lake talks with Sally Steele, co-founder and CEO of Outdoorithm and Outdoorithm Collective, about what psychological safety really means for women and people of color spending time outdoors. Sally Steele explains that physical safety and psychological safety are two different questions: will I be hurt out here, and do I actually belong out here. Both shape whether someone ever tries hiking, camping, or backpacking in the first place, and both are barriers the outdoor industry rarely names directly.
Sally Steele traces her own relationship to public land back through her family history: first slavery, then sharecropping, then decades of policies that kept Black families out of many national parks and campgrounds, including a Shenandoah National Park that had only one campground open to Black campers in her father’s lifetime. She didn’t grow up spending time outdoors herself, and didn’t know national parks existed until a hike in college. That gap between generations is exactly what she’s trying to close for her own four daughters.
That work led to Outdoorithm, a tech platform that gathers campground data (amenities, reservation links, historical weather) from over 11,000 campgrounds into one place, so that finding where to go and what to bring is no longer the barrier. It also led to Outdoorithm Collective, a nonprofit that takes underrepresented families on free camping trips and provides all the gear and food. One of the platform’s most distinctive features is its Community Vibe Score, built on real camper reviews and modeled on the Negro Motorist Green Book, so that a solo woman, a Black family, or a queer camper can check whether a campground has felt safe for people like them before they go.
Listeners will come away with practical language for a barrier that’s often felt but rarely discussed out loud, plus Outdoorithm Collective’s five camping mantras: camp as it comes, leave anyway, nobody solos, dirt don’t hurt, and take up space. It’s a conversation about reclaiming land, not from scratch, but as something that was always meant to be shared.
