Embed outdoor recreation in every neighborhood for all to enjoy physical, emotional, and social benefits.
Trout fishing, mountain biking, hang-gliding, bouldering and open-water, long-distance swimming. Our lakes host national bass fishing tournaments, our crags bring in the nation’s best climbers, our trails, its best runners.
When Outside magazine named Chattanooga as the Best Town Ever – the only town in the US to receive the honor not once, but twice – it did so because of our unrivaled abundance of natural resources and access.
One of the world’s largest regattas happens here every fall. American Ninja Warriors move here to climb. A long-distance open water swim that draws people from around the world. Bird-watching, hunting, bow-fishing at night under a full moon.
Ultramarathons on trails, marathons on roads, Ironman races. A whitewater course worthy of the 1996 Olympics. One of the most elaborate and complex cave systems in the United States.
Within 30 minutes of downtown, we boast some 200 miles of trails - including many that are adaptive and compatible for adaptive mountain bikes. We’d wager no other US city has as many trailheads close to its urban core as we do. We have urban trails, rural trails, trails connecting both. The list is known throughout the South: the Cumberland Trail, North Chick Creek, Stringers’ Ridge, Aetna and Raccoon Mountain, Walden’s Ridge, Prentice Cooper, Ritchie Hollow, Lula Lake, Lookout Mountain, Cloudland Canyon, Moccasin Bend, Enterprise South, Riverwalk, Alton Park connector, Reflection Riding, Brainerd Levee and more.
We have volunteer and nonprofit groups devoted to preserving and promoting all of this. Last summer, one coordinated partnership between county government and four separate nonprofits built a 200-acre mountain bike multi-use trail system on the side of a mountain. Another group cut the ribbon on a 34-mile river-to-cloud connector trail on Lookout Mountain – or Tsatanugi – from the city streets below.
One Chattanooga neighborhood - among the poorest, lowest-performing, most neglected communities in the state - sits only two miles away from one of our city’s richest, most affluent and high-performing neighborhoods.
Our outdoor scene is racially narrow, often reflecting only a thin segment of the racial or ethnic diversity of Chattanooga.
A few years ago, Anthony Beasley received a most unexpected phone call. It was Outdoor Chattanooga calling.
We’d like to offer you a job.
Beasley, an African American male, had never heard of Outdoor Chattanooga, which promoted all the things he’d never done: mountain biking, rock climbing, hiking, canoeing.
Today, Beasley is one of our finest Outdoor Ambassadors; he spends his mornings, afternoons and evenings mentoring, supporting, encouraging and uplifting Chattanooga teenagers and children who, more than likely, would never find themselves climbing a rock face, canoeing the North Chick Creek or mountain biking down Walden’s Ridge.
Through his Outdoor Leadership Club, Beasley teaches emotional intelligence, self-awareness, communication skills and calming techniques. Most of all, he teaches confidence. We squash the stereotypes, he likes to say. They build fires, roast S'mores, raise tents, raise expectations.
Across town from Beasley, neighbors in Red Bank began wondering: what if we fixed up and offered free bikes to kids in the community? Volunteers started meeting once a week, soon forming the White Oak Bicycle Co-Op.
Today, the co-op has partners across the state, as volunteers continue to rebuild donated bicycles and offer them to community partners for use with clients. White Oak Co-op teaches bicycling in Tennessee schools, first installing bike racks, then teaching students – elementary to middle to high school – about bike safety and joy.
Around the same time White Oak began, Shawanna Kendrick invited friends to skip their usual weekend brunch and, instead, go hiking. The morning was transformative, as Kendrick and friends – all women of color – fell in love (again) with the outdoors, nature and the wild.
Soon, Kendrick launched H2O, a new organization with a glorious goal to provide “a safe space for women of color to connect and reset in the great outdoors.” This summer, she and six women of color traveled to Tanzania, and successfully summited Mt. Kilimanjaro.
The city’s new Parks Plan addresses the need for greater equity and racial involvement. There’s painful history to be acknowledged and tremendous listening that must take place.
We have champions across the city: nonprofits, families, public and private leaders, gutsy, DIY individuals who start working, come hell or high water.
A safe space for women of color to connect and reset in the great outdoors.
