Known Traveler: Ron Griswell, Eco Explorer

As Ron Griswell tells it, he first caught the bug of exploring the outdoors very close to home—in his grandmother’s backyard in the rural Inner Banks region of North Carolina, in fact. 

His grandmother’s home was surrounded by farm fields and populated by horses, goats, and chickens. Griswell would spend many hours frolicking freely among the flora and fauna. 

“My outdoor journey started in those moments of play at my grandma’s house,” Griswell, 34, told Only in Your State. “I was watching her water her hydrangeas, running amok in the fields, and catching crawdads in the ditch near the house. I was connected to nature.”

Decades later, Griswell is working to inspire that same level of wonder and curiosity in nature that he experienced as a child in others—particularly for people who look like him. He has co-founded two nonprofits—HBCUs Outside and Boyz N the Wood—and grown a large following as a social media influencer known simply as The Outdoorsy Friend as an extension of this mission. 

The work isn’t easy, as Griswell is trying to reverse a long-standing trend many centuries in the making. The outdoor recreation space hasn't traditionally been one known for its racial equity. Data from the National Park Service reveal this “nature gap.” Although people of color represent roughly 40 percent of the U.S. population, 70 percent of visitors to national forests, national parks, and national wildlife refuges are white. 

Griswell experienced this disconnect directly. In middle school, a family road trip to the Smoky Mountains marked his first time seeing mountains and continued to feed his love for the outdoors. He went to summer camps where he’d paddle rivers, hike trails, and spend long nights around a campfire. As he got older, however, he began to feel a distinct tension between his passion for the outdoors and what was expected of him as a young Black man.

“Am I supposed to be doing these activities because suddenly I’m ‘white’ because I’m doing them?” Griswell says. “Society says I’m not supposed to be doing these things.”

From that point forward, the outdoors were less of a priority for Griswell, until he went on a service learning trip to Belize years later while a student at North Carolina AT&T State University. On that trip, he suddenly found himself snorkeling, trekking through jungles, and asking himself why he stopped getting out into nature for all those years.

Griswell knew he had to make a major change in his life to get back in touch with what made him feel whole. Before too long he found himself taking a multi-year break—he calls it a “sabbatical”— from college and working as an intern in outdoor education with an organization called Wilderness Inquiry in Minneapolis, Minnesota. 

At first he was sure he had made a big mistake, moving to Minnesota in one of the state’s coldest winters on record with little idea of what might come next. The more he dove into helping to lead the organization’s educational programs like its Canoemobile “floating classroom,” however, the more Griswell felt he was in the right place at the right time. He knew he was aligned, again, with his inner North Star. 

I knew that no matter where life took me, I was going to be doing this: submitting myself fully to the sanctuary of nature and sharing that experience with others

As Griswell’s work continued in Minnesota, he realized his work needed to expand. As he looked around, he began to notice that few of his peers looked like him.

”The only time I was working with other people of color was when we were working with inner-city youth, for the most part,” Griswell says. “No one on my team reflected the way these students look or even I look. To me, that was an issue.”

That realization eventually led to Griswell co-founding HBCUs Outside, a nonprofit that works to equip HBCUs (like the one Griswell attended) with the resources needed to expose students to outdoor experiences they wouldn’t have otherwise.

Griswell’s other nonprofit, Boyz N the Wood, grew out of his experiences being asked by other Black men to take them out into nature. On one trip, Griswell brought eventual Boyz N the Wood co-founder CJ Goulding and two of Goulding’s friends to hike on Mount Le Conte in Tennessee. It was the first time Griswell had been on an outdoor experience exclusively with fellow Black men. He says it created an opportunity for the sorts of deep conversations and brotherhood he’d never experienced before. 

“I’d never felt this sort of community in this sort of space before, where we all were out here not just to be in the outdoors but also for the link to mental wellness, physical health, and brotherhood. I’d never been in such a safe space before.”

Griswell knew he couldn’t gate-keep what he experienced on Mount Le Conte, and that trip formed the kindling for Boyz N the Wood, an organization that’s continuing to thrive. Boyz hosted a retreat in Boulder Creek, California with 35 men this spring and has two more—outside of Atlanta and Chicago—currently scheduled for the remainder of the year. 

Beyond that, Griswell is looking at a busy calendar of speaking events, influencer campaigns, and more activities all linked directly back to the mission that started some three decades before in his grandmother’s yard. 

For some trips, his family—his wife, Linea Johnson, and son, Levi—will be joining him, and on others he’ll travel solo. And he’ll be sharing his journey—and the mission underpinning it—every step along the path with his followers on Instagram and beyond. 

His hope across all his work is to help inspire his audience to “tap in” to nature any way they can, even if it’s just in their own backyard. In a sense, he says, we can all be influencers spreading the word of what can be gained from even a little bit more time spent outside—no mountain climbing required, unless that just so happens to be your speed.

“Is there a local park near you? Can you go out in your yard or maybe have a windowsill garden?” Griswell says. “You may see all these people doing these grand adventures, but all these smaller moments are also the outdoors. Start close to home, start with what you have, and share those experiences with people. They could be inspired to do the same thing.”

This article is part of our Known Traveler series where we highlight creators who share inspiring travel and lifestyle content. Check out the full edition for Eco Explorers.