Throughout its 51-year history, Ski to Sea has featured a diverse set of racers, but certain demographics remain underrepresented — namely women of color.
In 2024, Brown Girl Magic will become the first Ski to Sea team on record to be made up entirely of women of color. The team was organized by sea kayaker Denice Rochelle, a Samish Island local and founder of the nonprofit The Bronze Chapter. It also features cross-country skier Tammy VuPham, snowboarder Charisse Surio, runner Abigail Tankersley, road biker Sylvia Spearman, canoeists Angeli Feri and Tina Blakey Parrish, and cyclist Stephanie Mills.
“Representation matters. It’s why we all joined together to do this now, together, as women of color,” Rochelle said. “We are really surprised that, as far as we can learn from the race personnel, there hasn’t been another complete women of color team in half a century.”
Rochelle recruited teammates through The Bronze Chapter, which she founded in 2021 to “[create] more opportunities for Black and Brown people to reconnect with nature and the outdoors, particularly in a more skilled and educated fashion.”
The Bronze Chapter provides safety classes such as wilderness first aid certification and self-defense for the outdoors and beyond. It also provides a variety of land- and marine-based experiential opportunities across Washington state for multi-ethnic and BIPOC families, youth and adults to connect with outdoor recreation, outdoor skills and each other.
Though she’d considered forming an all-BIPOC Ski to Sea team since founding The Bronze Chapter, Rochelle said previous years’ timing never felt right. But in the leadup to the 2024 race, she realized it was “now or never” and put out a call for teammates.
Women who responded expressed a similar sentiment: While they’d also toyed with the idea of racing, the timing or situation hadn’t felt right before.
Outdoor spaces have historically lacked racial diversity. Even in 2024, the 2023 Outdoor Participation Report from the Outdoor Industry Foundation shows the outdoor participation base is less diverse than the U.S. population overall. Racial diversity in outdoor spaces has increased compared to prior reports — but white people still make up 71% of the participant base, and only 9.4% of this base are Black.
Rochelle said the reasons behind this disconnect are nuanced, and The Bronze Chapter members often cite a lack of three key factors: community, skill and equipment. Outdoor sports can be expensive, so “being invited and having a welcoming, supportive space to be as a new person — or actually even as an experienced, skilled person — is really important,” she continued.
Feri sees her participation as reflective of barriers facing women of color in outdoor spaces. Despite competing in the canoeing leg, she teaches snowboarding for a nonprofit in addition to her work as a pharmaceutical researcher. Feri volunteered to canoe to fill an empty slot, which she suspects was unclaimed due to the cost of learning such a sport.
“There’s a lot of things I love about the outdoors that many people in the community I grew up in will look at and automatically exclude themselves from, because they don’t think that it’s a space that they belong in,” Feri said. Despite her accomplishments in snowboarding, she didn’t pick up the hobby until age 25. “Seeing people existing in a space that either looks like them, or whose identity aligns with theirs, gives them permission to exist in that space.”
Feri is a first-generation American and was forbidden to play outside as a child. But once she started hiking in college, Feri was hooked — and while canoeing might not be her specialty, she has enjoyed the opportunity to train for (yet another) new sport.
VuPham, who is a competitive snow sports athlete, expressed a similar sentiment.
“Across my travels in the Mountain West, I typically don’t see BIPOC folks skiing. It’s difficult enough to ski at the resort regularly, and representation of more specific types of skiing (like cross country, for example) in the BIPOC community is almost nonexistent,” she said in an email. “I knew the cross-country leg would be the most difficult spot to fill, and I wanted to rise to the challenge of learning to Nordic ski!”
Through Brown Girl Magic, Rochelle and her teammates hope to inspire other would-be racers so that, while they might be the first women of color team, they won’t be the last.
Rochelle described Brown Girl Magic as “solidly in the recreational category,” and said the point isn’t to win — rather, the most important thing is to be present and participate.
“Doing the thing and having fun, that’s what we’re about,” she continued. “And showing people that unsure things can be fun; scary things can be fun … If we wait for perfection, then we will not literally do anything. We’ll never go outside. We’ll never engage in new things.”
And while the racers joined Brown Girl Magic with the goal of being the first all-women-of-color team, Feri said a mutual love for outdoor recreation ultimately brought the team together.
“My younger self definitely had dreams of being outside, but I don’t think she could have fathomed all the things I have been able to see because I recreate outdoors very regularly now,” Feri said.
If Feri could talk to her younger self now, she’d have one thing to tell her: “Just you wait.” After all, she continued, “The outdoors is big enough for everyone.”
Cocoa Laney is CDN’s lifestyle editor; reach her at cocoalaney@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 128.
