Breaking Stigmas at High Altitudes: Jonathon Flores of Outdoor Adventures+

Jonathon Flores of Outdoor Adventures+ loves to gain elevation.

group of hikers with backbacks dressed in winter gear on top of a grassy hill

Since 2020, he’s led BIPOC groups to incredible vistas across California. Recent treks have gone to the top of Mount Whitney (elev. 14,505 feet / 4,421 meters) and Sandstone Peak (elev. 3,114 feet / 949 meters).

image of male sitting on a rock on top of kearsarge peak — Jonathan planning his next move atop Kearsarge Pass (11,709 feet / 3,569 meters).

But as you’ll learn in our chat, OA+ isn’t just about rising to the highest peak. The brand is also about elevating one’s understanding.

It’s about having a deeper meaning about the land we walk on.

OA+ helps others understand how fragile our ecosystems are and how we, as hikers/backpackers/trekkers, can do our part to protect them.

As an individual, Jonathan uses his Instagram platform to lift his followers’ understanding of how mental health issues spread across the racial and gender divide.

No doubt, you’ll want to reach new heights in this episode. (I wanted to say that you’ll “get high,” but my mother might be reading this.)

The Rundown of Our Chat

Here's what you'll learn in this interview with Jonathon. The timestamps represent where in the video you can hear that particular discussion.

[03:02] How OA+ ambassadors have grown his brand

[06:34] The catalyst for Jonathon to speak on behalf of mental health issues

[08:21] Why he speaks about men’s mental health

[11:35] The importance of Leave No Trace and land acknowledgment

[17:47] Lightning round, including Jonathon’s shoutouts

Want to Learn More about Jonathon Flores and Outdoor Adventures+?

Here's the full video of me speaking with Jonathon.

Lisa: Hello and welcome to another episode of DEIB Outdoors. I'm your host, Lisa Kalner Williams, and today we have a very special guest joining us, Jonathan Flores from Outdoor Adventures Plus.

Outdoor Adventures Plus is based in Central California and provides BIPOC outdoor education and experiences. Its motto is connecting people to nature with every adventure. Welcome to the podcast, Jonathan.

Great to have you.

Jonathon: Thank you for having me, Lisa.

Lisa: Really excited to have this conversation. First, I'd love to know when you started. Tell me about the beginning, when was it, and what prompted you to begin this brand?

Jonathon: We started right before Covid hit. It was in March of 2020 it was myself and a few friends they invited me to go hiking in Zion National Park in Utah.

We kind of just spent the weekend hiking and venturing around in Utah and Arizona and back to Utah. Our motto is to be able to connect people to nature with adventure.

So it evolved and people started to join us on hikes you know, what we kind of just put ourselves out there.

Little by little, people would join and then the 3 friends that I had stepped down and said, "Here you go. This is all yours and you can do with it what you want." And here we are.

Lisa: Wow. And I'm sure the timing was incredible that it happened right before everyone had nothing to do, but go outside if they wanted to hang out with other people.

That's great. And so then you took it from the Utah adventure and brought it to your home base in Central California.

Jonathon: Yeah, as soon as we got home, we brainstormed a little bit and introduced it to the community here in Central California. And it took shape.

Lisa: That's great. I'm super intrigued. So, you had a good think about what you wanted it to be. Part of it would include the name. What is the meaning behind the plus sign? Because it's Outdoor Adventures Plus.

What is that plus?

Jonathon: The plus means everything else. It means everything and anything having to do with the outdoors. We started off solely on hiking, introduced backpacking, from backpacking we introduced trail running from trail running we introduced paddleboarding. It just took shape and now we're able to offer all these different things to possibly people who don't hike, but trail run, people who don't like hiking, but they backpack and this year, I I kicked off an ambassador program to the community.

Every single person that I selected to help me to lead events all specialize in something different. I have somebody who does lead pro runs slash road runs , because she does a lot of marathons and ultras I have another lead who he specializes in backpacking. I brought somebody else in that is going to start helping us with cycling as well as climbing.

So I kind of handpicked different people to help me in areas that I'm not as strong, but eventually I would love to learn to be able to do that. So that's what the plus was in Outdoor Adventures.

Lisa: How fortunate it is that you had so many people from different parts of the outdoor world want to be an ambassador so that you have that breadth of, of activities.

One thing I did want to talk about because that's the area that I know the most is, is hiking. I mentioned to you earlier before we officially started, I'm from Boston. There's not tons of elevation. We, we have a decent amount, but when I see yours, I've seen your YouTube videos. I was like, Holy Toledo.

Can you just give a sense if people are not familiar with your brand or haven't seen your videos? What are some of the hikes that you go on? What do people see on these hikes?

Jonathon: A lot of people think, you know, California it's one of those places that everybody wants to come to the palm trees, the beaches. And don't get me wrong. You can get all of that here in California, but we've gone to the Eastern Sierras plenty, which is home to the tallest mountain in the contiguous United States, Mount Whitney. We backpacked that last year.

We've gone to Kearsarge Pass, and you catch about seven alpine lakes before you get to the pass. And I think that pass was at 11, 760 feet above sea level. Mount Whitney sits at 14, 500 feet. I could be getting that wrong. You can fact check me later on that.

Lisa: Sure, but it's, it's a couple digits more than what we have here.

Jonathon: Then we've also hosted coastal hikes, which are like in the Santa Monica mountain range, and the tallest mountain in Santa Monica is Sandstone Peak, but you get 360 degree views of the Pacific Ocean, Catalina Island, the Channel Islands to all the cities around on top of the other mountain range.

Lisa: There's such diversity in the topography and the types of hikes you can go on. And like you said, it's not the stereotypical palm trees. Though you could do that too.

I'd also love to know more about the work that you've done, at least through Instagram talking about mental health. That was part of the reason I entered the world of hiking was to improve my mental health.

I also love in the content that you put out is your recent focus on men's mental health as well. How do you see the intersection of mental health slash men's mental health and Outdoor Adventures Plus?

Jonathon: I had no idea what I was doing when it came to mental health until my daughter was diagnosed with it, with anxiety and depression.

Then you start looking into things and trying to understand it because obviously this is completely new to me.

Growing up I was told, don't cry, you know, be a man, all this other stuff. Having a daughter that's, that changes the dynamic because I can't do that. I have to adhere to her emotions , with my wife being a great help as well, guiding me along

it was one of those things that I said, well, I have this platform and why not bring some kind of awareness to it? Cause I think everybody has a platform and some either misuse it or they don't use it to its full capacity.

I just reached out to certain people who I felt like were going to be able to share their story so that they knew that there was other people out there, you know, that looked like them, that had these struggles, and to let them know that they weren't alone.

First series that I had, I think it was back in 2021 I had a therapist who shared her background and shared statistics with us. And then I had an ultrarunner who also shared her story and how the outdoors has impacted her mental health and how, how it's helped her.

I also spoke with a young man in that series as well, because I wanted to also have that focus on men because men, you know being, Hispanic or Mexican American, and being raised by men who were raised a certain way as well.

So I wanted to have him on there because same, I wanted men to know that we do have struggles and it's okay to share those struggles with other people, you know, to be vulnerable.

This year it was the first year where I actually posted a lot of things for men's mental health, because I had no idea that there was an actual men's mental health, just like I didn't know that there was a BIPOC mental health awareness month either.

And I was really surprised that I got a lot of positive feedback from that and I wasn't expecting it. I just, I wanted to put it out there to let people know and people started to share stories .

It took off and I was actually really surprised with the positive feedback from everybody. It opened my eyes to something completely different and new.

I hosted a live on Instagram, and it was obviously just me, you know, sitting on my own for, I think it was the month of May for Mental Health Awareness Month. And I just wanted people from the community to jump on to kind of either share their stories or maybe just share with the community on what they do to help their mental health.

Maybe next year I'll be able to have men in June, to jump on and share their stories and actually have conversations with them. I'm going to continue to use the platform for that.

It's an important thing to know is all mental health and mental illnesses isn't the same. But we can all work together to raise the awareness to break that stigma so that everybody is a lot more comfortable speaking about it, sharing their stories because sometimes I think we fail to realize that our stories might help somebody else who's struggling.

It's kind of where I wanted to go with it and a learning experience for myself.

Lisa: That's the beauty of you saying, "Oh, wait, I have a platform, and I'd like to use it to teach others, to show others," but you're learning as well. It sounds like it exceeded your expectations. I love how it evolves.

The other thing that I've also found super interesting about your group is , I'm kind of lumping them together, but stewardship of the land.

And so first would be the Leave No Trace aspect, and then also land acknowledgements. And I would love for you to explain why those two things are important to you and your brand.

Jonathon: Well, I think Leave No Trace is kind of one of those things that's a self explanatory thing.

We don't sit at home and throw the trash on the floor, right? We get up and we go to the trash can. So the same rule applies for when you're outdoors. Some people think that eating the apple or eating a banana and throwing it, it's going to decompose.

People will leave them off trail or leave them on the side of the trail. But what people don't realize is that stuff you're bringing from home with pesticides and things that are on it, that when a wild animal comes to eat or consume, it can either sicken them or it also just, it doesn't decompose as fast as people think that they do.

I mean, it's trash regardless. But I figure when we are hiking or backpacking or whatever it is that we're doing outdoors, the importance of making sure that the trail looks nice for people to want to come back to.

So we kind of implement that in where you can get the community together by sharing and letting people know. We did one for Earth Day this year in Ventura, and we took it to the place where Earth Day was actually founded.

Lisa: Whoa, cool.

Jonathon: There was a huge oil spill in Santa Barbara and we wanted to take people to the area that it had affected and where Earth Day started, because We wanted to kind of give them the realization of how real this was and is still. So we went there, went to the beach, picked up cigarette butts and trash that people just leave on the side of the road.

We picked up about 70 plus pounds of trash just from, you know, the beach alone. But you want to get the community involved. Put yourself out there and say, "Hey, we're going to provide gloves, bags and trash pickers." And there's a lot of people who are like.

Oh, yeah, I want to go help. I want to go do that. There's a lot of people in this community who are very LNT or Leave No Trace forward because they want to make sure that if I'm bringing 40 people to go on this hike, I'm going to make sure that 40 people are picking up trash and they're packing out what they packed in.

And that's why they put trash cans, you know, at trailheads. And it's not for you to go and unload everything that's in your car into that trash can.

Lisa: Thank you, yes.

Jonathon: We tell people, maybe don't put it in the trash and just take it home with you. And some people will take it all the way home, they'll dump it in her trash can, you know, we'll never have to see it again.

But also going into the land acknowledgement, it's, I think that's one of the big things, is it because we are on.

Yes, you can go into history and yes, you'll have your people who are, you know, America all the way. And it's just, it's one of those things that you have to really allow yourself to take off the blinds and to really see that the indigenous community is very alive and thriving today, more than ever, because now they have social media.

To put themselves out there to let people know, hey, we're still here.

Lisa: Despite everything.

Jonathon: Despite everything, yeah. You know, like, in Bakersfield, we do dwell in the land of the Yokuts. You go to L. A., certain parts of Ventura, Santa Barbara, you got the Chumash. You also have the VentureÃ±o Chumash.

Southern California, you have the, the Tongva people. You also have the Fernandina Tataviam people. You go way north, you know, to you can go to Monterey and you got the Was it the Carmel Rumsen?

You also have further, further north, the Yurok, the Yurok people. They're the ones who kind of dwell in the area of the Redwoods.

They're still here. They're still thriving. And they're trying to teach the next generation of Indigenous people, you know, within their tribes to continue that lineage and to continue their stories and their history. So I think that's why it's very important.

When we're on the hike I kind of reiterate and let people know this is the land that you guys are on, you know, respect it. You know, the trails that you're trekking on are trails that people use to go from one point to one point to trade with another tribe. There's just so much history.

It doesn't matter where you're at, whether it's in Massachusetts or in California or whether it's in Mexico alone or, to the, the coldest place of the world, wherever it is. There's indigenous people there .

To acknowledge them is allowing yourself to learn something. You, you're opening your mind to actually learning something and actually maybe even reiterating it. If you start your own group, or if you take people on the same hike, you're like, "Oh, I remember what he said," , so there are two are sharing those stories of the people better.

Lisa: It's part of the plus of the Outdoor Adventures, you're learning even more than just the topography and elevation.

Well Jonathan, we have the lightning round now where I ask a couple questions. Not as deep thinking, though I loved our discussion so far on that.

The first one is: what has your favorite hike been in this past year?

Jonathon: One of my favorite hikes to do in Southern California is in the Santa Monica Mountain Range, and it's known as Sandstone Peak, and that's the highest peak in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Like I said, it gives you a 360 degree view of the ocean, to the city, to the further San Gabriel Mountain Range. It's just one of the most beautiful places to hike, but also catch a sunset. So if you're ever in California, look up Sandstone Peak via the Mishe Mokwa trail, which Mishe Mokwa is from a tribe, the words are from a tribe in, I think in the Michigan or Great Lakes area, which actually means mama bear.

And that story alone, if you ever want to look it up , Mishe Mokwa means mama bear, but it was also in a sense where she was swimming with her cubs and made it to shore, her cubs didn't make it.

And they basically form these islands in that area of the Great Lakes area. So the Santa Monica mountains adopted that name for that trail. And then when you really think about the story, the cool thing is, is that, you know, it says that she climbed on this dune and basically settled there watching over her cubs because she couldn't do anything and they form those islands. And she is a sand dune, because obviously everything got covered.

But here in California, you have the Catalina Islands and Chattel Islands. And you have Point Mugu and they have this huge sand dune mountain that's there as well. So they kind of just adopted it and implemented it.

Lisa: Amazing. I'll link to that and I'll find the story, and I'll link to that too about the, the two, the mama cubs, and the cubs cool.

The second of the three lightning round questions is what is something you typically put in your backpack on hikes that most folks don't.

Jonathon: Aside from the 10 essentials, I have a liking for Tajin peach rings.

Lisa: Oh my god, they're really good. So if you don't know Tajin, everyone, it's like spice.

Jonathon: Like a chili powder that people put on their fruit and whatnot.

Lisa: Yeah, especially where you are. All right. I'm going to hit you up for some peaches next time.

Cool. And then the 3rd question is dealing with paying it forward. So, this platform is all about shining light on folks who are bringing diversity and belonging to outdoor recreation. What would some of your shoutouts be if you have one person, a bunch of people that are doing great things to bring diversity and belonging to outdoor rec?

Jonathon: I would have to shout out my friend Justin. My friend Justin is the founder and lead of Just Trek, where he's not only a outdoor , group lead, but he also has the JustTrek podcast, and he uses that platform to highlight people such as yourself people in the community, people that are unique and that he looks at, and he brings not only their outdoor story, but he brings also their kind of like an origin story, where it kind of gives you more background of the individual, and it ties those two together.

AllTrails, obviously, because I am an ambassador for them they gave me the opportunity to do that at the beginning of this year to be able to offer something to people who may be new to hiking and need that help looking for places and things, and all trails is basically the place to go. It's the app you use.

As well as Athletic Brewing. It's a non alcoholic beer. They too took a chance on someone like myself to become one of their ambassadors. Like I said, you know, when you start seeing people who look more like you. In a sense of the color of your skin or, you know, the way it features.

And I'm also a big guy. I mean, I'm, you know, 280 pounds. Plus pounds, you know, and but I, I, I can move, I can get out there and do things.

Lisa: Obviously!

Jonathon: And they, they allow us to, to be ambassadors for them to represent their brand that they're too, they too are trying to grow. I think Athletic Brewing, they're based in Connecticut, but they also have a California location here in San Diego as well. So, you know, thank both of , those brands.

Jeff Hester, who's the founder of the Six Pack of Peaks Challenge. He started here in SoCal and now has the Six Pack of Peaks Challenge almost throughout the United States.

He started something that was very inspirational with conquering the six peaks here in California. They were the tallest, made it available to everybody who wanted to do the challenge.

And it grew into this organization where they continue to do that and they continue to expand to highlight these areas of beauty each state and letting people, you know, get into this challenge to be able to complete.

I appreciate the work that Latino Outdoors is doing, you know. Jose is doing an excellent job and, and they're opening chapters, in different areas throughout California.

Lisa: And Boston. Just letting you know.

Jonathon: Yeah. Oh, there you go. I would love to interview him and tell you the truth, but I love what he's doing in that in that aspect.

It's amazing what he's doing, especially with getting the Latino community out there and letting them know that, hey, you know, your ancestors did this. You know, and it's a part of your culture and who you are, because that's what they did.

Vic, who's a part of LA Trail Killers, which is an LA-based group. He's doing things as well. He's worked with Adidas and, and Nike as well.

And Highlander Adventure, which is like a branch off of Spartan Race.

They wanted to offer something for the backpackers, the outdoor adventure, right? It's kind of like an a backpacking festival in a sense. Where you backpack to checkpoints and do all these things. They're based out of Croatia, but they, like I said, they use people such as ourselves to be able to market and to push it to invite people to join in on these experiences.

Veronica, who runs a group called Sweats So Guud. She can tell you the whole story, but she is one who offers more of the wellness aspect of the outdoors where she invites people, they do yoga, they do meditation and they do sound baths.

Lisa: I love that. You gave an awesome list.

Well, Jonathan, it's been a great discussion. I've learned so much. It makes me want to go to California. It's been a long time for me and yeah, I would love to just see all that nature. Even if a tenth of what you talked about, if I got to experience that, that would make, that would be a bucket list item for me.

Thank you for explaining how Outdoor Adventures Plus came to be and how it's morphed over the years. Thanks again. We had a great, great time chatting with you.
Jonathon: And thank you, Lisa, for having me on here. And whenever you do decide to come to California, message me and we'll put something together and go on a hike.

Lisa: Awesome. Thank you.