Patrick Dunn
Primary Outdoor Sport: Climbing
Sunrise or Sunset: Sunrise
Favorite Beverage: Spindrift
Non-Outdoor Hobby: Cooking
Climbing Snack: Salami and Cheese
Favorite Season: Spring and Fall
Guilty Pleasure: Key Lime Pie
Favorite Marvel Movie: Captain America because Chris Evans is so fucking hot.
Three Words to Describe You: Friendly, Excitable, & Humble
“I grew up on the Jersey Shore, but in a really unique little town that was basically between the beach to the east and a place called Pine Barrens to the west. I was ten minutes from the beach and five minutes from dense pine forest. So I grew up playing in the woods. It was a place that I went when there was turmoil at home. So the outdoors was a place for me to go to like get away from that and find some solace in life.
I've always loved the outdoors. I grew up surfing and love going on hikes and backpacking trips. I started rock climbing when I was in high school. My love of all of these activities was really strong, but I struggled to feel like I was comfortable being in those spaces. So I would say that my really diving into outdoor sports didn't start until I was in my mid twenties, when I started to feel more comfortable in my sexuality and being more open about it and not feeling like I had to hide it. That was when I really started to go on big backpacking trips, started climbing outside, and learned how to lead climb.”
“Looking back, I wish that I had gone to college for Outdoor Ed, because I think that it would have been a really great career path for me to go on, but I didn't feel comfortable with the idea of doing that back when I was a teenager. So I went to art school instead for photography, but after two years of art school, I was kind of like, ‘I hate this. Why am I doing this? I don't actually want to do this with my life.’ I went to art school because that was kind of the safe thing to do, as a gay man and living in the world that I was living in. It felt like art school and living in a city was where I needed to be, but ultimately I was there for two years and I was like, ‘I actually don't really like this. I want to go be in the woods again.’
So I dropped out of art school and I went and worked for the Maine Conservation Corps for three months doing trail work. Then, I went and worked at a ski resort in Colorado. It was making that decision and doing those two things that really set me on the course of eventually getting to where I'm at now. So I feel like I've kind of always known that this is the path that I need to be on in life, but I got off track a couple of times and had to find my way back.”
“When I moved to California is when I really committed myself to climbing. There was always this overarching feeling of not really feeling comfortable being my true authentic self in those spaces because I wasn't sure if people would be super homophobic. I was just afraid to find out.
I think that for me, community has been something that I've struggled with a lot, just feeling like I'm always the only gay guy around. There’s a lot of aloneness in that. I feel really lucky to have found communities of people who are very accepting of me, but at the same time, it still feels really lonely when you're with a group of people on a regular basis who don't really understand your journey in life. I've always wanted to have more people to connect with on that, who understand my journey in life and understand the background behind why I react certain ways to certain things, or why things are more scary to me.That's just something that I haven't really had very much of for a lot of my climbing career.”
“I decided I was going to try to figure out how to start an Out in the Wild a long time ago.
I remember I used to go on a ton of backpacking trips. I had two good friends that I would go on backpacking trips all the time with, and I had another good friend who I went on climbing trips with. One of the great things about all three of these people was that they all were very emotionally aware people. So we often had really engaging, deep conversations whenever we were on these trips together.
It would just come up a lot about how I wished I could date a rock climber or a backpacker so that I could be dating someone who did similar things to me. Now looking back, I don't want to date a climber, but back then I really wanted to. It was really lonely to often be the only gay man in a space.I'd be on these trips and we would talk about it. Eventually, I was just like ‘I'm going to start a queer guide company.’”
“What I found out was that wilderness therapy was a really easy outdoor industry to get in to because people were so needed in that industry. They would pay for your WFF, which I needed in order to be a climbing guide.
I also knew that I had to start climbing a lot more in order to become a climbing guide. So I needed a work schedule that would allow me to do that. So I applied for wellness therapy jobs and I ended up getting the job in Bend. I moved to Bend to basically learn how to be a guide.
I worked in wilderness therapy for two years, got my WFR, did a ton of climbing, got all of my SPI requirements, and took my SPI course. Then, I started guiding for Chalkstone. I worked as a guide. It was great. In that time, I started the Queer Climb Nights at Bend Rock Gym. I was in talks with the management at Bend Rock Gym about starting like queer specific classes and clinics.
Then COVID hit and everything kind of fell apart. I had a lot of time on my hands and so I started Out in the Wild, basically started an Instagram account and a website and made stickers. That was the start of Out in the Wild. Six months later, I hosted my first program here at Smith.”
“I started Out in the Wild because I wanted to create a space where queer folks could feel comfortable in the outdoors. I especially wanted to make sure I created a space where QTBIPOC folks felt safe and comfortable and that was going to be hard because I’m a six foot five cis white guy. I spent a lot of time thinking about this and that was really important to the process of starting this program.
Another huge part of Out in the Wild was that I knew that there were already so many queer people who liked doing things in the outdoors, but maybe didn't feel the confidence to do it, like myself when I was in my early twenties and like late teens. There was this wall for me where I would go and I would be really into something but then I didn't feel comfortable being the gay guy who didn't really know what he was doing. There was this aspect of my identity as a gay man and feeling like there's so much judgment about that already.Then, if you don't really know what you're doing, there was a fear of being judged even more.
So for me, a huge part of Out in the Wild was creating a space to teach technical skills to queer people so that they can feel super comfortable and confident in what they're doing in the outdoors.That's the piece that really makes the community be able to grow because it creates knowledgeable queer climbers who can then teach their queer friends and it starts to snowball.”
“The thing that inspires me is how climbing really forces you to be introspective and build self-awareness and perseverance. Inherently, with the nature of rock climbing, we are pushing ourselves. We're doing something really scary. We’re doing something hard. But we're also doing it in really, really beautiful places.
The combination of those things creates such a unique opportunity to grow as a person, to develop really valuable skills and become better versions of ourselves. Because we have to be more self aware in order to overcome blocks that are keeping us from achieving our goals. That requires being introspective and thinking about how we're feeling about things and how we're talking to ourselves and how we're talking to others.
It's having to do those things that causes you to be more connected to yourself which opens up the pathway for all of those things to be happening. I feel like it's like this perfect combination that allows you to do that.”
“One challenge for me has been dropping my perception of how well I climb and how that’s inappropriately connected to my self worth or how I view myself. When I wanted to make that shift in my climbing, it was also when I was starting Out in the Wild and Out in the Wild ended up taking precedence over that. So my climbing diminished significantly over a quick period of time, without me really noticing it.
That was a really hard time for me. It was when I really had to confront this whole idea of my self worth and my value and how what I think of myself cannot be connected to how well I'm climbing because it doesn't really matter.
There's so many things about rock climbing that I love that motivate me to go do it. It's not just climbing really hard and proving that I can climb something really hard. It's about learning about myself. It's about connecting to myself. It's about learning perseverance and achieving goals. It's also about connecting with nature and finding a flow state, finding a state of mind that's focused. Being able to see things in the natural world that I don't really notice except for when I'm rock climbing, like when I'm halfway up a pitch appreciating the fact that there's three geese just honking overhead. How that happening is part of this live painting that I'm living amongst all the things that I love about rock climbing. Being out with friends and connecting with community is just this really fun thing. That's the thing that I love about climbing.
My hope is that people can connect with why they love rock climbing and that the climbing community in general can transition away from this achievement focused mindset to more of a connection to self and others. A deeper connection to like the sport rather than just hyper focused on how hard do you fucking climb because it's not all about that.”
“When I walk up to a climb, it doesn't matter how many times I've climbed that route before, every single time is going to be different. Every single time is going to have different factors that are going to affect how well I do. So I think that nature is almost this storyteller and I'm reading it in the moment and interacting with it.
I remember last fall, I came and climbed. It was when I was really not in a good place with climbing. I climbed Phone Call from Satan, which is 5.9, but literally one of my favorite climbs because it's so fun to me. I climbed it and I got like twenty feet from the top and the sun broke out behind a cloud. It was like six o'clock so it was just that warm orange sunlight and it came out of the clouds and warmed my body. Then, two geese flew overhead in that exact moment and I started crying. I've climbed that route fifty times probably. I've guided that route so many days. Then this random day last year, I had a fucking beautiful moment on it and I fucking sobbed at the top.
We think that we kind of have nature figured out, especially as climbers. I think a lot of climbers think that they can think their way into climbing something, but ultimately, nature's always going to present you with different things to think about. We have a little bit of free will to do what we want and achieve our goals, but mostly I think it's just kind of needing to go with the story the world and the planet and nature are telling that day.”
