
Below is an excerpt from the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Adventure Gap by James Mills published by Mountaineers Books (reprinted with permission). This excerpt comes from the afterword - a reflection on the decade following the first all-Black summit attempt on Denali, North America’s highest mountain.
After our wonderful adventure in Alaska, I can look back over the past decade with pride and awe at how much has been accomplished. By the summer of 2014, one year after the expedition, the team members were invited to various events across the country, appearing in front of thousands of people. They shared slideshows at speaking engagements with audiences ranging in size from twenty to four hundred. Billy Long was featured on the cover of Sierra Magazine and in the NOLS alumni publication, The Leader. Media organizations - from NBC Nightly News to the Huffington Post to Backpacker Magazine - covered stories on the expedition. The response from audiences and readers was overwhelmingly positive. Despite the unfortunate pushback we received from folks who believed the expedition was unnecessary or overrated, people in communities across the country were excited to hear our compelling story.
Tyrhee Moore.
Rosemary Saal, Erica Wynn, and Adina Scott at 14 Camp.
Later that same year, the team won the prestigious Outdoor Inspiration Award from the Outdoor Industry Association, and we produced a documentary called An American Ascent with Wild Vision Films. In 2015, Expedition Denali team members Billy Long, Rosemary Saal, and Tyrhee Moore journeyed to Washington, DC, along with me and the film’s co-producer and writer Andy Adkins. In a private screening for almost two hundred high school students and representatives from several youth-focused nonprofit organizations, we presented our story at the White House.
Although I never admitted it out loud, I secretly hoped that our mountaineering adventure would pique the interest of President Barack Obama. Unfortunately, heartbreaking headlines throughout that week made a personal visit with the commander-in-chief impossible. On June 17, 2015, nine parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, were shot and killed by a racially motivated terrorist during a bible study. Among those slain was Reverend Clementa Pinckney, the pastor of the church and a former South Carolina state senator. The murders drew the nation’s attention to more important matters. On the day of our film screening, President Obama was scheduled to give the eulogy at the funeral of Reverend Pinckney. The sad irony of these circumstances clearly illustrates why expressions of Black representation like Expedition Denali are still so profoundly necessary in twenty-first-century America.
Stephen Shobe at Windy Corner.
In the state where the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter, the Confederate battle flag still flew over its capitol. As Reverend Pinckney’s funeral procession rolled slowly past South Carolina’s state capitol building where he once served, both the flags of the United States and the State of South Carolina were lowered to half-mast in his honor. But by state law, the flag of the Confederacy could not be taken down for any reason, including the death of one of the community’s most prominent Black dignitaries. We had hoped to celebrate Expedition Denali with President Obama. Instead, while we screened our film, he sang “Amazing Grace” in front of a grieving crowd and a troubled nation.
Our team gathered at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building that adjoins the White House. As the events in the film unfolded, the young people in the audience, mostly people of color, sat watching, their attention riveted. We proudly shared our story on stage to an auditorium of wide-eyed future explorers. Afterward, we fielded several questions about the expedition and the prospects of getting more people of color into the outdoors. But the query of one young man in particular made the entire project - everything we had done over the previous four and half years - completely worthwhile:
“Do you think I can do something like that one day?”
The Adventure Gap is available for purchase at our Seattle Program Center Bookstore, online at mountaineersbooks.org, and everywhere books are sold.
This article originally appeared in our winter 2025 issue of Mountaineer magazine. To view the original article in magazine form and read more stories from our publication, visit our magazine archive.