Outside in Appalachia Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Women Find Freedom and Confidence Outdoors Together

For friends, Becka, Holly and Katie, findings spaces where they feel safe to speak, act and think the way they want can be hard to find.

Getting outdoors, often with one another or other female companions, is one place the can do that.

A rainbow emerges during a women-only backpacking trip

During a recent two-day backpacking trip in the Dolly Sods Wilderness in Tucker County, they recounted some of the freedoms they feel afforded in the wilderness.

“Just like feeling comfortable and ease of conversation,” said Becka. “That just tends to be sometimes different between genders. Not always by any means. I don’t know.”

Friends Holly (left) and Becka rest during a Dolly Sods backpacking trip

They said for them, it’s important to be comfortable in a group of friends. And as you age that can sometimes end up being people of your own gender.

“It’s easier to go pee,” said Holly to laughter.

Becka agreed. “I will say we felt comfortable talking about a lot of things in this group,” she said.

For many women, female-only settings provide a relief from constant sexuailzation, pressure to be a particular way and a safe place to speak, act and think the way they want. In West Virginia, where there are abundant natural places to spend time outside, some summer camps exclusively for women, are helping young women experience that freedom.

The sun shines through after all day rains on a women-only backpacking trip in the Dolly Sods Wilderness

All Girls Summer Camps

High Rocks is one of them. Located in Pocahontas County, High Rocks offers programming for middle and high school girls.

Executive director Sarah Riley said the importance of having access to female-only reclamation, especially for young women, cannot be understated.

Reporter Kara Lofton’s dog Bo begs for a bite of breakfast during a backpacking trip in the Dolly Sods Wilderness

“When young women have the opportunity to be outside and in a wilderness-based setting in a forest setting together, they are able to let go for a second of the way the world sees them and give themselves the space and freedom to explore who they are in their own skin without thinking about how they look in the mirror or how other people perceive them, and that’s just an incredibly liberating and powerful and deeply healthy thing that all women need to have space to do,” she said.

There could be some validity to those concerns. A recent survey of 5,000 people conducted by #SafeOutside, a grassroots initiative that aims to combat sexual harassment and assault in the climbing and outdoors communities, found 47.3 percent of women and 15.6 percent of men said they had experienced sexual harassment or assault.

From left to right – Katie, Holly and Becka share a laugh during a break from hiking.

For Riley, female-only recreation is not just about freedom from a hyper-sexualized world, but a space where cultural expectations about what is it means to be female is broadened. When girls are in the wilderness in an all-women setting, she said, it’s easier for them to step up, learn confidence and take on leadership roles.

“So for some people it may not seem like taking a challenging hike is the same thing as, you know, entering an engineering major as a freshman,” she said. “But being able to have early, often challenges and have a strong sense of yourself as a powerful person of will with confidence, who can like move forward, who is strong in your body, and smart and able to overcome challenges even when they seem hard at first.”

Friends hike together during an all-women backpacking trip in the Dolly Sods Wilderness

Ukiah Louise is a rising high school freshman who has been participating in High Rocks summer camp for a couple of years.

She said her experience at High Rocks has been transformative for her self-confidence.

“When I first came into High Rocks I was like really kind of shy and I kind of had some self-love issues and even after that first two weeks I was much more confident and I could speak to people better and I could actually go up to people and start a conversation,” said Louise.

The group rests by the trail head after almost 24-hours of hiking in the rain.

Louise said she thinks when girls overcome challenges in outdoor settings such as building a campfire, sleeping in the rain or orientering on their own, they realize their own abilities to do whatever they want to do.

“I just felt a lot better about myself in general and was more confident in lots of different places,” she said.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Marshall Health, Charleston Area Medical Center and WVU Medicine.

Outside in Appalachia: with Dogs

Studies have found that American millennials lead the country in pet ownership, fueling the $69 billion pet industry — an industry that has grown three times since the mid 90s.

This could be a good thing for our health. Other recent studies have found that dog ownership has many positive benefits — from reducing allergies to counteracting negativity. And it’s not just millennials who stand to benefit. A 2017 study of older adults found that owners of dogs are more active than those without, walking about 22 minutes more a day. Besides being good for your mental and physical health, walking often gets you outside. And as explored earlier in this series, getting into nature has significant mental health benefits.

The big question is — how do you explore the outdoors with your pets safely?

“Our pets, as a general rule will do anything we ask them to,” said Dr. Mark Freeman, an assistant professor of veterinary medicine at Virginia Tech.

Freeman said dogs will keep trying to please us as long we ask them to keep trying.

“So, it’s very easy for a pet to become overheated and to become exhausted because their number one goal in life is to please us and to make us happy,” he said. “So, as long as we keep throwing that frisbee they’re going to keep chasing it, even to the point of complete exhaustion.”

Heat exhaustion is the biggest challenge. Dogs cool themselves by panting. Panting evaporates saliva, which cools the blood supply.

“In the summertime, when it’s hot, and especially when the humidity is high, that evaporation doesn’t occur,” he said. “So they pant and pant [but]… they don’t actually cool themselves. So it’s really important in the summer — when the temperatures are high, when humidity is high — that animals have access to shade, that they have access to lots and lots of water.”

This is particularly important for dogs with short faces like pugs, bulldogs and certain pitbull breeds — the shorter snouts mean less effective cooling and these dogs are even more likely to overheat.

Jonny Warner is a Charleston-based vet. He said his biggest concern is not just dogs being too active — but the time between periods of activity — particularly leaving dogs in the car while you ‘just run into the store’ for something or grab a bite to eat.

“If you’re doing outdoor recreation with your dog, you’re likely getting there in a car and the obvious one is just never leave your dog unattended in a closed car for any amount of time,” he said.

According to the American Veterinary Medical Association, the temperature in a closed car can rise 19 degrees in the first ten minutes. So if the outside temperature is 70, it can rise to 89. If it starts at 90, to 109. And the more time that passes, the higher the temperature rise.

The other thing dramatically affected by high temperatures is pavement.

“Seeing really significant burns on the pads of the feet is not at all uncommon in the summer,” said Freeman.

He said that could be an incentive for pet owners to stay off urban roads and get out to explore natural areas with pets such as parks, forests and wooded paths.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Marshall Health, Charleston Area Medical Center and WVU Medicine.

Outside in Appalachia: Getting Outside at Night

One recent evening at Blackwater State Park, naturalist Paulita Cousins was leading about two dozen visitors on a night hike by the lake.

“When it’s dark we’re naturally supposed to be …?” she asked.

“Sleeping,” the group responded in unison.

“And light,” she warned, “is actually messing up a chemical in our body to make us be healthy individuals.”

It may sound drastic, but exposure to light suppresses the secretion of melatonin, a hormone that influences circadian rhythms, and there’s some early evidence that lower melatonin levels might explain the association with cancer.

More than a third of American adults don’t get enough sleep, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the problem is even worse in West Virginia.

Despite being one of the darkest spots on the east coast, West Virginia ties with New York with almost 40 percent of residents reporting less than seven hours of sleep a night. Not getting enough sleep is associated with metabolic problems, issues with insulin resistance, and weight gain, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Interestingly, nationwide, sleep patterns look quite similar to maps of obesity and diabetes prevalence.

So if your circadian rhythms are messed up, how do you reset them?

“We did a study, actually a series of three studies, where we used camping as a tool to escape the light exposure you get in modern cities,” said Chris Depner, a postdoctoral fellow in the sleep lab of the University of Colorado Boulder. He was part of a study to see, if we escaped all electrical light, what would that do to our bodies and our biological clocks?

“Over a week, our biological clocks basically tuned themselves to the timing of sunrise and sunset,” he said. “So that means during the normal, biological or environmental night, our bodies were trying to sleep. And during the day, that’s when we were supposed to be awake.”

They then tested the hypothesis over just a weekend of camping.

“And we saw that about 70 percent of that effect happened over just the weekend,” he said. “So that means when – you think about that – on Monday morning when you wake up, your body is going to be more in tune with the environmental cycle versus perhaps if you’re living in the electrical lighting environment.”

While light of any kind can suppress the secretion of melatonin, blue light at night – such as the kind found on phones, computers and TVs – does so more powerfully. A Harvard study found that when people are exposed to blue versus green light, blue light suppresses melatonin for about twice as long as the green light and shifted circadian rhythms by twice as much.

What isn’t clear from the research is whether spending more time outside does the trick, or if simply dimming lights in your home and turning off the TV, cell phone and other electronic devices a couple hours before bed would suffice.

Counter Stress by Taking a Forest Bath

In the 1980s, some people in Japan developed a concept called Shinrin-yoku, also known as forest bathing or forest therapy. The idea is simple — natural areas offer calming, rejuvenating and restorative benefits to visitors. And yet even in a state as rural and forested as West Virginia, accessing natural areas can be difficult.

In bustling Morgantown, White Park is an oasis, with trails through wooded areas and a reservoir.

“The way they use that concept in Japan is they — in counter to a very stressful modern working society where people are overworked (they have one of the highest depression and suicide rates in the civilized world) — they developed these forest bathing centers that are outside the city,” said Sam Zizzi, a professor of exercise psychology at West Virginia University.

These forest bathing participants aren’t necessarily doing intense physical activity, but rather walking or sitting and meditating — without technology and with awareness.

“Pay attention to sounds, pay attention to the senses, the changes, the smells,” said Zizzi. “And then they were measuring what was happening when they put them back in the urban environment. So how long did the tranquility — how long did the stress relief — last? So they were seeing effects that were lasting weeks and months and changing their cardiovascular profile.”

According to a 2017 study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, pulse rate and blood pressure dropped significantly after subjects participated in a short forest bathing program. But the thing is — you don’t need to go to a specific “center” to experience these benefits.

“Forest bathing in its essence is really being mindful of your environment and exposing yourself to your natural world, but it could really be anywhere,” said Zizzi.

Access to green spaces is usually an urban conversation. But Zizi argues it’s one we need to have in West Virginia as well.

“The easiest choice used to be the best choice for physical and mental health,” he said. “And right now that’s not necessarily the case in our environment. That’s not necessarily only West Virginia either. But the system does make the easy choice sometimes quite difficult.”

Meaning that even though people in rural areas are by default living closer to trees, they also may not have easy access to walkable trails, parks and greenways. If it’s not easy to go outside and walk around, people aren’t going to do it. Professor Christiaan Abildso works with Zizzi and joined us at White Park. Abildso focuses on health policy and says there are active things the state legislature could do to change improve access.

“Honestly, we could dedicate 10 percent of our transportation budget to non-motorized projects,” said Abildso.

Meaning adding walking paths around ballfields so parents can move while their kids are playing sports, connecting existing parks to sidewalks, and expanding roads to include bike lanes so people don’t need to get in a car at all.

“If you think of rural America, industrial America was built on two things: rail and water. Right?” said Abildso. “So now that those things are going away, we have the remaining railbeds to convert to rail trails and we have rivers that if we clean up we could be out paddling if we provide access.— That can be expensive. But if we can provide access, that would be amazing.”

“Those are the type of solutions we have to get,” said Zizzi. “And they’re happening in areas in West Virginia, but they’re one-offs — they’re in that county, but not in the other 54. So they’re starting to happen, but it needs to be — you know obviously, for larger changes, for us to get in the middle even, we would need progressive, amazing policies.”

In the meantime, they said, get outside any way you can. And leave your phone at home. You might just find that a quick nature bath is just the thing you need.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Marshall Health, Charleston Area Medical Center and WVU Medicine.

Outside in Appalachia Part 2: Kids in the Park

About ten years ago, the National Park Service noticed that fewer kids and families were using the parks. And they wanted to change that.

So in 2009, they partnered with the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation to launch an initiative to help families unplug, get outside, and connect with their local natural resources. The initiative, called Kids in the Park, soon expanded to encompass pediatricians like Erin Regan who are trying to combat childhood obesity, diabetes and excess screen time by writing “scripts” for kids to go outside.

“If I have a kid who is overweight, a kid who is spending a lot of time in front of the TV — we ask about screen time at every check up — I’ll make the offer,” said Regan. “We just have a placard up in our waiting room, and so anyone who is interested who notices that and who wants to participate can ask about it, and we’re happy to have them participate as well.”

Regan has observed that kids aren’t moving nearly enough and they’re spending far too much time in front of screens. As a result, they’re restless, and have a harder time managing their emotions.

“Everything sets them off — I don’t think they feel like they’re in control. They don’t know what to do with themselves.”

Her daughter, 6-year-old Hannah, sits at her dining room table munching on an apple as she describes making “fairy dust” from leaves and seeing a turtle while at a Kids in the Park event earlier this year.

“My favorite things to do are probably run around and play with nature and make things with nature.”

Her doctor-mother said the science shows that kids who move more focus better and maybe even learn better.

On the Trail

At Occoneechee Mountain State Natural Area in Hillsborough, N.C., Kids in the Park director Jason Urroz walks through one of the Kids in the Park Track trails. He stops at a colorful sign where two mascots — a dog (Track) and a dragonfly — are depicted in bright colors explaining the different activities kids can do.

“It attracts kids to want to come over here and look at the sign,” he says. “And then you’ve got the directions of the map telling you how long the trail is and these are the trails in this park. A nd while you’re hiking this trail, use these different brochures on your hike in order to learn about the pond life or the trees or go on a hide-and-seek scavenger hunt.”

As kids complete a hike or brochure, they can register online for little gifts such as stickers or a bandana. Additionally, if a child has registered for the Park Prescriptions program, when they log a hike or other activity, their pediatrician gets a message and that information is added to his or her medical file. The hope, Urroz says, is if they can get the kids excited about getting outdoors early in life, it will become a life habit.

“We try to make our trails 1-2 miles in length so they’re not overly strenuous and kids have a good time and they see different things and want to do it again,” says Urroz.

Outdoor Learning

Sean Higgins — the education manager for North Carolina State Parks — says for him, the program is about helping kids explore boundaries and learn experientially.

“Kids have been throwing rocks in streams and running through the forest for tens of thousands of years and kids more and more are indoors – they’re indoors more than any previous generation,” says Higgins. “They’re spending time on videogames and on screens.”

Higgins says he thinks a lot about what kids get from videogames and thinks it’s a feeling of control — getting to make decisions without an adult steering them.

“I think kids can get those same things outdoors. I think things like the Kids in Parks TRACK trails give kids the opportunity to make decisions, you know, which topics do I want to explore on the trail? It gives kids the chance to achieve things,” he says.

And it seems to be working. Urroz says 54 percent of kids who participate are first-time visitors to a park and 11 percent of kids were first-time hikers.

Pediatrician Regan has only been writing scripts for about six months and says for her, it’s too soon to see if the program is having an impact on obesity, diabetes and screen time. But anything that encourages kids to get outside and get them excited about it, is a win. She says she realizes getting outside can be really tough for working families, but making an effort makes a difference.

“My husband and I both work, so we really do our best to spend a lot of time on the weekends doing things, getting out of the house, not being inside and plopping in front of the TV yet again,” says Regan.

Although there are Kids in the Parks locations all up and down the Blue Ridge, only one park in West Virginia currently participates — Harpers Ferry National Park in the eastern panhandle. Urroz says he’d love to get some more West Virginia parks on board – all it takes is for a park to reach out and say, “Hey, we’d like to participate!”

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Marshall Health, Charleston Area Medical Center and WVU Medicine.

Outside in Appalachia Part 1

A little over a decade ago, a psychologist named Richard Louv coined the term “Nature Deficit Disorder,” meaning that human beings, especially children, are spending less time outdoors, to the detriment of their mental and physical health. It’s not an officially recognized medical disorder. But health professionals from various fields are embracing the idea that America’s shift toward sedentary, indoor lifestyles is harming our health.

“Well, research has shown that people feel better, it improves our mood! Nature is a healer,” said Scott Geller, a professor of psychology at Virginia Tech. For the last 50 years he’s been studying how psychology and the environment interact.

“It’s been shown clearly that nature, that the environment, increases subjective well-being. Now, if we’re stuck behind the television, indoors and we’re sitting on that couch — couch potatoes — we’re missing opportunities to get up and moving. And, of course, there’s a health benefit to moving, and the environment naturally inspires us — once we’re out there — to keep moving.”

Ross Arena is a professor of physical therapy at the University of Ilinois Chicago who focuses on something called “healthy living medicine,” which is using exercise and nutrition to prevent and treat chronic disease with a much greater community focus. He advocates “moving away from the hospital and more towards where people live, work and go to school.”

Arena said the health benefits of being active are not reserved for people training for marathons or gym rats.

“Movement is highly beneficial,” he said. “Instead of ‘let’s talk about exercise,’ let’s talk about movement and actually thinking about three facets of that: so your steps per day, your sitting time, and then participation in a structured exercise program. And all of those are independently valuable. When you synergize them together, they’re even more valuable.”

And the easiest way to do that, he said, is just to go outside. Walk around your block, do yoga on the back porch, visit the local park. And bring the whole family.

“Like a lot of behaviors, what you practice within the families, tends to be what happens,” said Earle Chambers, a researcher at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

“So your dietary choices are reflective of whoever is the one making the meals in your home, and it’s the same thing with activity. If you don’t live in a family that’s particularly active, then you tend to not be as active too,” Chambers said.

Familial inactivity has resulted in an all-time high of childhood obesity, diabetes, hypertension and asthma. Despite a myriad of outdoor recreation resources, Appalachia in particular has shockingly high numbers of these diseases – and so far, they’re continuing to rise.

For addictions researcher Peter Thanos, getting outside and exercising could be a tool for preventing and treating addiction.

“Chronic aerobic exercise had an impact on brain chemistry in a way that is consistent with what we know in terms of decreasing vulnerability to drug abuse,” he said. “And this was something that was very, very profound.”

Thanos is referring to research published last month in the online journal of the American College of Sports Medicine.

“Because aerobic exercise has this effect at essentially restoring the balance of brain chemicals in the brain,” he said. “That same imbalance is what’s also found for individuals who have either a vulnerability or dependency for opioids or other drugs.”

Basically, the experts agree – getting outside, being active and enjoying nature are all hugely beneficial to human health. So this summer, I’m heading into nature and inviting you to come along as we find hidden gems, hiking favorites and rivers worth exploring, Outside, in Appalachia.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Marshall Health, Charleston Area Medical Center and WVU Medicine.