What inspired Gaze at the National Parks?
Dusty Ballard: Before we started traveling together, a totally organic discovery was our shared love for long walks. We had been friends for a couple years at that point, and it was the first beautiful day in spring in New York City, so we wandered up to Central Park and over to Riverside, and I said, “Wouldn’t it be funny to walk all the way to Battery Park?” So we ended up doing that. We started doing these marathon walks, it would take us all day, and we would finish with dinner somewhere. Then, we started doing that with national parks and trails.
Mike Ryan: We started traveling together in 2016 for the first time, and we took our first national parks trip in 2017. In 2018, we went to Acadia National Park, and that’s where we were like, “Wouldn’t it be fun to start a shared Instagram account?” While on a hike, the name came pretty much immediately: Gaze at the National Parks. We’re all about wordplay.
DB: After we came up with the Instagram account, we thought to try a podcast format and we came up with the format in five minutes: one trail, and what we do on a hike. It figured itself out real fast.
Why is creating this space important to you?
DB: There’s a thriving queer outdoors community, and it’s great for those who know about it, but not everybody does. We felt that community should be reflected in the podcast space, and we wanted to highlight queer-sounding voices. I know I would have been comforted to hear a queer-sounding voice talk about that stuff when I was a kid. The only voices I ever heard were uber-masculine straight-sounding people. We wanted to recreate the experience of talking to two people who just got off a trail.
MR: We’ve also made a point to really highlight and underscore the importance of queer history, and queer people in park spaces. As two gay men who host the show, I don’t feel like it’s a “gay podcast.” It’s an accessible show for everyone, but because of the format and the humor and how we structure everything, there are inferences and points of contact for queer culture and individuality.
Between your main parks episodes, centered on trails, you have Trail Mixes and Pride Mixes, which are one-off episodes with conversational formats. Can you tell me more about those?
MR: Much of the show is education-based, driven by our own curiosity, to talk about things beyond just the trails in the national parks. Some of my favorite episodes are those that relate to science or Pride. It opens up a doorway for a lot of people who may not think about those things.
DB: We knew that we wanted to be weekly, so purely out of hope to gain audience, Trail Mix became a space to dig into something that we didn’t get to cover in our trail episodes. It’s become a space for science, for environmental justice, and for interviews, which has just been the most wonderful thing. It’s also a place where we get to call out things like injustice at monuments in national parks, giving full context for when those Confederate monuments were put up, and why the timing was also an act of racism and injustice.
What else do you wish more travelers saw or knew when in national parks?
