What the Outdoors Community Gets Wrong About Deaf People

In our All Access issue, we're spotlighting how the disability community is making the outdoors more accessible for everyone. Explore the package here.

Growing up as a Deaf person in the 1970s, Sonya Wilson's school life was less than ideal. Like many other Deaf children, she and her classmates experienced language deprivation, and their teachers and families lacked the proper resources to communicate, which meant she often felt isolated and frustrated.

To escape the classroom, Wilson and her Deaf friends would take off into the Nevada desert on their bikes, climbing anything they found along the way. As she puts it, "Nature became my home." Ever since then, Wilson has been chasing that connection.

The first time Wilson saw others climbing was on those same trips as a kid. She remembers watching people at Red Rock Canyon — looking closely as they scrambled up rocks and tackled boulders — but without Deaf role models in her life or in the wider outdoors community, she never thought it could be her conquering that same canyon until many years later. It wasn't until an outdoors class at college in California, when Wilson was 19, that she first officially roped up and took on Stoney Point, a popular and well-loved climbing route in Los Angeles.

She notes this was pre-social media, with no YouTube tutorials to follow. Women climbers were rare enough, let alone Deaf women climbers, so Wilson faced plenty of barriers when she was getting started. "Many people view deafness as a loss, they don't view it as identity. They view it as something that needs to be fixed," she tells PS.

Audism, or the discrimination or prejudice against Deaf people and those who are hard of hearing, is commonplace in wider society and outdoor communities alike. What these people fail to recognize is the existence and beauty of Deaf gain, which acknowledges deafness not as hearing loss, but as a form of sensory and cognitive diversity that can benefit the greater good.

Wilson shares that often people tend to be close minded and not creative or imaginative with how they approach and communicate with Deaf folks. Deaf people, when given the opportunity, can teach hearing people so much and how easy it really is to work together.

"Deaf people have other senses (call them superpowers if you will) that hearing people don't have," Wilson tells PS. "Having strong awareness, focus, and being less distracted, Deaf people see things and pay more attention than hearing people. So often we're protecting hearing people in that sense and catching things that they don't."

"Checking in with each other and being super in-tuned with our surroundings is always priority," Wilson says. All these qualities that come with being Deaf enhance her experience in the outdoors, she tells PS.

Now, more than 30 years since that college class, Wilson has created the thriving American Sign Language (ASL) Climbing Network; been the subject of a documentary short film, "Elevated" about her work produced by Spruce Tone Films and presented by Eddie Bauer; regularly hosts workshops and climbing retreats; and is the first Deaf Ambassador for Eddie Bauer. Still, these accolades didn't come easy.

Her community building began in 2012, when Wilson set up a Deaf climbing group online and invited climbers to join her at ASL climbing days at the climbing gym she attended. When she started climbing with Deaf folks on the regular, she realized how much easier it was to learn from one another when everyone was using the same language, ASL.

If you are a hearing ally climbing with Wilson and her crew, you will need to become accustomed to Deaf Standard Time — a different, less punctual way of moving through the day, she says. When setting out for a day's climbing, the ASL climbing group she leads always accounts for DST, including extra time to talk, share stories, and reconnect while taking a break from the hearing world, in which it can be exhausting for Deaf folks to exist. These moments are sacred. "Community always takes precedence," Wilson says.

One of Wilson's favorite climbing activities is the annual ASL climbing and camping retreat she organizes in Joshua Tree, CA, now entering its eighth year. She brings together Deaf-owned businesses to support the campout and works with a local women's climbing group, Athena Rock Climbing, run by hearing allies and interpreters to operate climbing clinics and set routes for the trip.

When collaborating with hearing climbers, Wilson emphasizes the need for visual demonstrations alongside sign language interpretation, but notes it is not a one-size-fits-all approach. "Not every Deaf person is the same; people's needs are going to be different," she says. "People must recognize the need to ask the Deaf people they're working with, 'How can we support you? How can we best work together?'"

Although she didn't meet Deaf climbers or hikers when she was younger in Nevada, Wilson knows now that they were always there, finding their own ways to exist in the outdoors. In terms of how we can make nature more accessible, Sonya says it starts with Deaf communities being seen as a standard part of outdoors communities. "Right now, folks are still surprised to see us, so I look forward to the day that people go hiking or they go climbing and they're not surprised to see us out using ASL and doing these activities," Wilson says.

"The world must recognize and see that Deaf folks have always been in the outdoors, and we will always be there."

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Hannah Turner is a disabled writer and journalist living with complex chronic illnesses. Her writing focuses on disability, anti-wellness culture, and pop culture. Her words have appeared in many places, including PS, Refinery29, Mashable, and Dazed.