18 minute read
The Reluctant Ambassador
Climber Manoah Ainuu isn’t sending world-class routes. He doesn’t want to be a symbol or a spokesperson. But still, he’s changing how many people look at the outdoors.
Words MARK JENKINS Photography LUKE WEBSTER
“I started realizing I bring something else to the outdoors,” says Ainuu, who was photographed on the flanks of Mount Rainier in June 2021.
Mand had a role in the documentary Black Ice. Yet he didn’t start ice climbing until 2015, when climber Conrad Anker took him under his wing and introduced him anoah Ainuu is bobbing his head, his to the icefalls of Hyalite Canyon outside dreads gently swaying. The cool, Bozeman, Montana. mellifluous rhythms of Mulatu Astatke, “He was a soft-spoken, nonfather of Ethiopian jazz, float around us. confrontational kid passionate about
Reefer is in the air. Ainuu is wearing his climbing,” Anker tells me by phone. flowery green shorts and doing a little “He was working two jobs and trying to shuffle in his sandals. The sun is so intense go to school.” that photographer Luke Webster has “I couldn’t afford all that gear,” says stripped down to his skivvies. Spokane Ainuu. “Ice axes, ice screws—Conrad alpinist Nick Sweeney has his hoodie up gave me what I needed to get started. and a can of hazy IPA in his hand. Even I was hooked from the first time I sunk
I have my shirt off, unwisely burning my tools into ice.” alabaster white body. We’re all wearing Anker became his mentor, spending dark sunglasses like a blues band. days teaching him the craft, and soon
We could be at a concert, or on the enough Ainuu was sending steep ice beach, but we’re not even close. The four around Bozeman. “We need to make space of us are at 11,300 feet on the eye- at the table for people of color—make searingly white Emmons Glacier on the space at the crag,” Anker says. “We need to north face of Mount Rainier.
Ainuu bumps the soundtrack to the heavy beat of a reggae dub band.
Having climbed in Ethiopia and experienced the underground music scene in Addis Ababa, I ask Ainuu how he got into Ethiopian music.
“My mom is Ethiopian. She grew up north of Addis in a city called Dessie,” he answers. “So this music is part of my heritage.” Ainuu’s dad is Samoan. His parents met on a nondenominational mission in Kenya, got married, and moved to California in 1988.
“I was born in South L.A. in 1995, and we moved to Spokane, Washington, when I was 10. I went from being just another Black kid in the hood to the only person of color in my elementary school—180 degrees from L.A. Honestly, if we’d never moved to Spokane, I never would have gotten into the outdoors.”
Manoah Ainuu (pronounced a-newoo) is a Black ice climber. Now 26, he’s been on the cover of Alpinist magazine open the doors and take down the fences. For a long time, I don’t think the outdoor community was really making an effort.” Anker is right. He and I are the same age and have both been climbing around the world for four decades. When we started climbing, the folks at the crags were white and mostly unwoke. Hell, there were hardly any women. Lynn Hill, Annie Whitehouse, Catherine Destivelle, Alison Hargreaves, Wanda Rutkiewicz—a mere handful. Unlike in other sports—like track and field, basketball and football— in climbing the journey to become inclusive was a long time coming. When Anker and I climbed Everest together in 2012, we finally had some representation, with three women climbers—Dawa Yangzum Sherpa, Emily Harrington and Hilaree Nelson—and one Black climber, Phil Henderson. But there still was a very long way to go.
Ainuu, who was born in South Los Angeles, moved to Spokane when he was 10 and then fell in love with ice climbing near his current home in Bozeman.
Due to unseasonable avalanche danger, the team scuttled a plan to ascend Rainier’s highly technical Ptarmigan Ridge and instead climbed the Emmons Glacier.
“We need to make space at the table for people of color— make space at the crag.” —Conrad Anker
With Conrad Anker’s help and mentorship, Ainuu tried ice climbing in 2015. Just four years later, he appeared on the cover of Alpinist magazine.
Ainuu and the rest of the crew ascended Rainier in conditions in which every other guided team was heading downhill.
Webster, Sweeney, Ainuu and yours truly originally intended to climb the Ptarmigan Ridge of Rainier, but the rangers at White River dissuade us. “Two feet of fresh snow on the summit. The avalanche danger on that route will be extreme,” says one ranger with years of climbing experience.
Given how hard it had been for the four of us to get our schedules to match, we’re reluctant to bail on the big mountain. Instead, we decide to attempt the far easier Emmons Glacier, a trade route up the northeast side of the peak. We hike up past the Inter Glacier in just a few hours, camp around 9,000 feet at Camp Curtis and continue onward the next morning to Camp Schurman, 9,500 feet, at the base of Steamboat Prow. On the way up, several dozen guided clients, all of whom had been turned back by the snow conditions, pass us as they head down.
“We dug a pit at 11,400 and found a weak layer at 6 centimeters and another weak layer at 65 centimeters,” one Rainier guide tells me. “We decided the avalanche danger was too high and turned around.”
When we reach Camp Schurman, multiple teams are retreating. There isn’t a single climber on the Emmons. Webster and Ainuu appeared to be swayed by the multiple reports of bad conditions, but Sweeney and I are less impressed.
“Let’s just go up and have a look for ourselves,” I suggest. Which is exactly what we do.
By noon the sun is blasting the glacier—turning the snow to oatmeal mush—so we find a perfect little campsite in a notch between old seracs, stomp it out with our crampons, set up our tiny tents and proceed to party. We lounge all afternoon, listening to jazz and reggae on Ainuu’s portable speaker. As soon as the sun drops over the summit and the air temperature plummets, we set out on a recon.
The avalanche pits dug by the guides are just 100 feet above us. We climb into them and examine the evidence. The weak layer at 6 centimeters has consolidated due to the day’s high temperatures. The weak layer at 65 centimeters is real, but so deep as to be unaffected by the weight of humans.
This seems evident by the fact that we haven’t seen a single slide in any direction on any slope of any angle. In contrast to what the Rainier guides had said, I feel the avalanche risk is relatively low.
“Let’s climb a little further up and do more assessment,” I volunteer. Not 300 feet higher we are on crunchy névé. I realize that the avalanche pits had been dug in a snow deposition zone that was unrepresentative of the rest of the route. In the end, we recon almost 1,000 feet above our 11,300-foot camp and find the snow solid and unscary. Satisfied that the route is safe, we descend back to our tents, eat dinner, pack our packs and crawl into our sleeping bags.
On the hike into Rainier, I tried to talk to Ainuu about what it was like to be a Black climber, but he seemed evasive and uncomfortable. He told me, “I’m just an ice climber, man, nothing special. There are hundreds of guys better than me.”
There was a reason I was trying to plumb Ainuu’s feelings about being an experienced Black outdoorsman. For the past decade, I had been heartened by the increase in the number of people of color climbing, kayaking, backpacking and just generally getting outside. But the numbers remained disproportionately small. I had just read a disturbing paper—“Diversity in the Great Outdoors: Is Everyone Welcome in America’s Parks and Lands?”—by Resources for the Future, an independent nonprofit research institute, that said:
Data from the U.S. Forest Service,
National Park Service and Fish and
Wildlife Service suggest deep inequality in the ethnic/racial mix of visitors to our public lands. While the most recent U.S. census shows that non-
Hispanic whites make up approximately 63 percent of the U.S. population, they comprise between 88 and 95 percent of all visitors to public lands.
African Americans comprise only 1 to 1.2 percent of all visitors and
Hispanic/Latinos between 3.8 and 6.7 percent; both groups are underrepresented as visitors to public lands relative to their presence in the population at large.
Ainuu and the author share a light moment as they topped 11,000 feet. Soon they would lean into the sunny conditions with reggae and beers.
“Listen to that quiet voice in the back of your head,” Ainuu wrote in a 2019 Instagram post. “Never be afraid to bail and turn around.”
Why, today in 2022, after Barack Obama was president for eight years, are there still so few people of color in the outdoors, and especially in the world of climbing? Ainuu clearly didn’t want to talk about it, so I did my own research. Here’s what I found.
Some of it is socioeconomic. Compared with traditional American sports— running, basketball, football, even soccer—climbing is expensive. Just getting shoes, a harness, a rope and a rack will set you back $1,000. Want to ice climb? Boots, tools and screws will run you north of $1,000. This is beyond the means of so many young Americans. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the poverty rate in the U.S. in 2019 was 10.5 percent, but the poverty rate for Blacks was 18.8 percent and 15.7 percent for Hispanics—which reflects an obvious divide but also shows that nationally more than 80 percent of Blacks and almost 85 percent of Hispanics were not in poverty. For both Black and Hispanic groups, these were the lowest rates of poverty on record. That’s a positive trend, but it cannot mask the fact that across the country, the percent of Blacks living below the poverty line is roughly two to three times the percent of whites in poverty, depending on the state. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, of the 10 states with the highest poverty rates, nine are socalled red states.) A report by the Center for American Progress states, “African Americans own approximately one-tenth of the wealth of white Americans.” In 2016, the median wealth of a white family was $171,000, compared with $17,600 for Black families and $20,700 for Hispanic families.
Some of it is access. There’s a free basketball court in practically every neighborhood in America, and there’s a football stadium even in Nowhere, Texas—you can just walk over and practice—but the crags, until the invention of climbing gyms (which almost always require an expensive membership), were always out there beyond the city limits. According to a 2020 Conservation Science Partners study, 68 percent of African Americans and 67 percent of Hispanics in the U.S. are nature-deprived—meaning they live in regions deprived of the benefits of nature, including “access to clean water, clean air and a diversity of wildlife.” Only 23 percent of white Americans have limited access to nature. This research also found that low-income families are more likely to be nature-deprived, especially non-white, low-income households. For example, a whopping 93 percent of people of color in Connecticut are naturedeprived, compared with only 10 percent of whites; in Wisconsin, a state wellknown for outdoor recreation, 78 percent of all people of color are nature-deprived, versus just 13 percent of whites.
And some of it is representation. For the past century, the only faces of climbing—other than Sherpas—have been mayonnaise white. White males have dominated the sport from the
beginning, Edward Whymper to George Mallory to Bill Tilman, Hamish MacInnes to Yvon Chouinard, John Long to Tommy Caldwell to Adam Ondra.
“Representation matters,” says Anker. “People of color are underrepresented in the outdoor community. When they see someone who looks like they do, they feel empowered.”
Case in point: 21-year-old Memphis indoor climber Jarvis Dean met Ainuu at the Memphis Rox climbing gym and community center two and a half years ago. “He was the only one who looked like me,” effuses Dean by phone. “I was blown away. Here was this ice climber who was Black. I know it sounds crazy, and I might be exaggerating, but to me he was like the first man on the moon. I even asked him to take a picture with me.”
Memphis Rox is one of only two climbing gyms in the country that has a “pay what you can” policy. If you don’t have the money for a membership, you can volunteer in its community garden or with its lunch program or with its Community Closet, which provides basic household needs—such as toilet paper and clothes— at a reduced cost.
“Manoah really impressed our staff when he came here,” Jon Hawk, director of gym operations, tells me by phone. “Sometimes climbers aren’t so stoked about getting to know novices in the gym, but Manoah was very approachable. He would talk to anybody and really listen. It’s one of his strengths.”
Dean says that Ainuu’s love of climbing is contagious. “Manoah, Kai Lightner, all the people of color are representing. They’re inspiring not just Black people, but all people. It’s like a rock being dropped into the reservoir of humanity. It makes ripples. And the longer it goes on, the bigger the ripples get.”
But it didn’t appear that that was how Ainuu felt about himself. At our glacier camp on Rainier, I asked him how he felt about being a role model.
“Honestly, I’ve been struggling with that a lot,” he says. “It feels like a heavy burden. I know I’m not the best ice climber around. I know so many climbers better than me. For the first couple years I had impostor syndrome real bad. But then I started realizing I bring something else to the outdoors. Climbing isn’t the main priority in my life. My main priority is my wife, Rachel. Then my family and friends.” Ainuu says that what drew him to climbing wasn’t so much the challenge as the social connection. “I grew up really shy, so the social aspect of climbing was a big draw for me,” he says. “The climbing community mattered as much to me as the climbing itself.”
I ask Ainuu who his own heroes were growing up. I suspect he might say Muhammad Ali or Michael Jordan or Serena Williams. Or maybe Martin Luther King Jr. or John Lewis.
“My family, especially my mom and dad,” he answers. “My mom started the only Ethiopian restaurant in Spokane; it’s called Queen of Sheba. And my dad. My dad beat cancer. Chemo, all that, and he kept his head up and showed me how to be a brave human.”
This answer forces a realization on me. It’s me—along with the outdoor industry and outdoor media—who want Ainuu to be a hero, but that isn’t what he wants. He’s just a quiet guy who likes to ice climb. The Black heroes of my life were not his. They were little different from other famous people of any color. They were an abstraction. I was just some white guy mistakenly assuming that every Black athlete feels a duty to be a spokesperson for equality and equity. I was the one who wanted Ainuu to be a role model. By simply being silent, perhaps he was trying to tell me that he does not want this role. Despite what other people said, Ainuu has no apparent passion for “representing.”
When I ask him about his goals, they aren’t about climbing or representing or the BLM movement. They are ordinary, personal goals. “I want to start an Ethiopian restaurant in Bozeman. I grew up working in my mom’s restaurant. I like the interaction with customers. I like serving good food to people.”
Ainuu is a vegan, and during our climb up Rainier he is far more excited to talk about his convictions regarding the preciousness of all forms of life than about his latest send. Indeed, we never really talk about climbing.
I ask Ainuu, a Black man with dreads living in Bozeman, how often he had experienced racism. At first he says, “Hardly ever.” But he thinks about it and rephrases: “I guess there are microaggressions, but I have learned just to shrug them off.” A moment later he tells me a story that happened in
Montana but could have happened to any Black person in any state in America.
He was driving too fast and a patrol car slid up behind him, lights flashing. He was on a narrow bridge, so he had to continue to the end of the bridge before he could pull over. The cop got out of the car and stepped up behind his window.
“Boy. Driver’s license and proof of insurance.” The cop had his hand on his holster and stood right behind Ainuu’s head.
The officer wrote him a $400 ticket for speeding, then wrote a $400 ticket for failing to pull over. The officer said he had to pay in cash, right there, on the road, or he would go to jail. Ainuu was too afraid to protest. He had just graduated from high school and had graduation money. Through his car window he gave the cop $800 in cash.
“He called me ‘boy.’ I’m usually pretty laid-back, but that really got to me,” says Ainuu.
Up on Rainier, our planned alpine start doesn’t happen. We sleep in. Having abandoned a hard route for an easy one, we fully give in to vacation mode. None of us has ever climbed the Emmons, but the route through the crevasses and around the seracs turns out to be quite obvious. In an effort to go light—ever the alpinist’s dream—Ainuu brought aluminum crampons instead of steel, which was a rookie mistake. Fine for snow, they actually pop off when front-pointing on blue ice. He is constantly readjusting them and apologizing for his bad decision. He isn’t a mountaineer; he is an ice climber.
We wander our way to the 14,410foot summit in four and a half hours. Other climbers came up the even easier Disappointment Cleaver route, so there are lots of folks about, but we don’t mind. We are taking our time, doing the chill tour. We spend an hour eating lunch just below the summit, descend to our camp in two hours and make it all the way back to the car and warm beers by late afternoon. It was just a romp in the mountains with friends— nothing death defying, nothing extreme—exactly the kind of thing Ainuu believes in. C limbing with Ainuu forced me to rethink my understanding of people of color in the outdoors. As a liberal white male, I marched in BLM protests. My wife, Martha, and I made posters of support and nailed them to the front of our house. We put the stickers on our cars. (Martha even went so far as to call out a guy who had a Confederate flag on his truck, getting into an hour-long argument and lucky not to get hurt.) I wrote op-eds about Black History Month, the 1619 Project and the meaning of Juneteenth. Having worked as a journalist for more than three decades, writing stories not only about adventure, but also about repression, injustice and violence, I believe in being outspoken about the value of diversity in a democracy. But not everyone does.
Manoah Ainuu does not want to be the cause célèbre of climbing. He hates being the center of attention. He does not want to have to pretend to be somebody he is not. He’s not vocal and has no interest in fighting culture wars. He’s a gentle guy who uses the word “love” a lot and likes nothing better than spending time with his wife. He admits that he hates social media and only occasionally posts.
But one Instagram post in April 2019 speaks volumes. “Since Rachel and I got married last August, I’ve been thinking a bunch about the duality of life and climbing,” he wrote. “A lot of us build our lives around climbing, which is one of the most awesome ways to live one’s life. Lots of great experiences and growth comes from this. Climbing, however, is not more important than life and the ones we love. Listen to that quiet voice in the back of your head—never be afraid to bail and turn around.”
I was hoping to reconnect with Ainuu after Rainier, but, perhaps because I was a journalist with questions, he didn’t respond to any of my texts, phone calls or emails. He made it quite clear—he just wants to be left alone. He just wants to pursue his passion for ice and rock like any white climber.
But think about it. What are political activism and social justice about, if not to create a world where all people can live the life they want, not the life we want them to live.
Ainuu, who has more experience as an ice climber than as a mountaineer, leads the way on the upper slopes of the ascent.
