Trailblazer hopes to become first black female winter mountain leader in the UK

A trailblazer hoping to become the first black female winter mountain leader in the UK has said she is “determined” to encourage other women of colour into the field.

Carla Khouri began her foray into the mountaineering world in her teens when she developed a love for the outdoors largely due to her time in the Air Cadets from the ages of 12 to 19.

She has been a freelance outdoor teacher for roughly 14 years, and is also a Duke of Edinburgh assessor and the UK community lead at Merrell Hiking Club – a community which aims to empower, inform and inspire female hikers, regardless of race or colour.

Carla Khouri’s love of the outdoors began in her teens (Gintare Sukyte/Merrell Hiking Club)

Her aspiration to become the first black female winter mountain leader, which is linked to a qualification from Mountain Training, has been a “personal goal” of hers for a while.

The Winter Mountain Leader Award allows people to take groups of people walking in mountainous areas in the UK in full winter conditions.

“It is a winter qualification and in terms of winter, what they mean is the conditions for snow and ice”, the 48-year-old who is based in Havering, Greater London, told the PA news agency.

“There’s only limited places in the UK where we can get that, in Scotland mainly, and there is a very narrow window and I don’t live there.

“I’m spending my winters in Scotland getting the skills and experience that I need and you have to build up a portfolio of experience before you can even get onto the training course.

“Once you’ve done that, you then need to do a period of consolidation, before you can then apply for the assessment.”

She said working towards the goal has involved a lot of time and commitment, which includes her living away from her family.

Carla Khouri hopes to encourage more women of colour into hiking (Gintare Sukyte/Merrell Hiking Club)

“It’s a personal goal that I really want to do”, she said.

She added: “The data is brought about by people volunteering that information, so there may well be a black female winter mountain leader out there, but not a single person has volunteered that information.

“I was shocked when I received this data but it made me even more determined to strive towards it and help others into mountaineering.”

She said that for her, hiking helps her to feel “connected with nature”.

“I feel calm, I feel at peace, I feel part of nature.

“I was born and brought up in inner-city London – it’s not a place where people tend to become mountain leaders from and I was brought up in a single parent family and in social housing and I was given the opportunity as a young teenager to join the Air Cadets.

“I did my Duke of Edinburgh there and those experiences ignited something inside me that made me really love the outdoors and that was why it was important for me, as a teacher, to help young people have similar experiences to me.”

She said that she has faced several obstacles when entering the profession, which include being a woman in a male-dominated environment.

She has been a freelance outdoor teacher for roughly 14 years (Gintare Sukyte/Merrell Hiking Club)

Discussing statistics linked to the Mountain Leader Award – a nationally accredited scheme from Mountain Training designed to train and assess those who want to lead groups on mountains throughout Britain in summer conditions – she said there is still a way to go to get those from different backgrounds into the field.

“Since the inception of the award in the (1960s), there’s approximately 25,000 people who have earned the award,” she said.

“Approximately 20,000 of those are males and only 5,000 are female and of those 5,000 females, there are only two black women, one of them being me.

“Being a woman, being a woman of colour and being an older woman – in my 40s, were obstacles, but I didn’t want them to stop me doing the thing that I love doing.”

She wanted to be a role model for others, with her desire to motivate other females of colour into the space being her “main motivation”.

“My main motivation is representation, so that people can feel like they can do it and there’s someone there that looks like them, out there [hiking]”, she said.

“It might not mean that they become a mountain leader, but it might mean that they get outdoors and they might experience things that they perhaps wouldn’t have done had they not perhaps seen a black female hiking guide out there.

She has commended the work of groups including Muslim Hikers, which “give people that space to feel like they belong in the outdoors”.

She added that brands have a big role to play in making people feel represented.

More information about Merrell Hiking Club can be found here: https://www.merrell.com/UK/en_GB/hiking-club/