Written by Monica Rojas, 2024 Upstream Care for Place Fellow

My family of origin were not ‘outdoorsy’ people. The joke growing up was that the closest my parents ever got to camping was a Holiday Inn Express.

My mother had done the outdoors as a child growing up in the suburban wonderland of Bloomington, Minnesota. As the tail end of the baby boomers, she had camped, shot squirrels, skied, and visited cousins still living and working the family farm. As an adult, she had simply decided the outdoors wasn’t for her.

My father was a city boy through and through. He was raised in Santiago, Chile, a concrete metropolis. He, too, visited the family farm as a child, though all the stories he told us of those visits ended with him making a fool of himself. Then as a teenager, he moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Wilderness was never part of the equation.

And so that was how they raised us. We traveled to lots of cities around the world, visiting art museums, history museums, military museums, really any museum. But by then, there were no family farms, in either country. No connection to the landscape, no real connection to place.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I discovered the landscapes of Minnesota outside of the Twin Cities. I discovered camping, the State Park system, and the sound of wind, whistling through the world.

I am a full convert now. I love being outside and I have been raising my kids in the outdoors. We have visited all 71 of Minnesota’s State Parks, camping at about a third of them. We are members of the State Park hiking club, where we have fallen in love with identifying fungus, stopping at bodies of water to cool down our feet, and eating snacks on benches. There are so many ways to enjoy Minnesota’s Natural places and I feel so grateful to have discovered my favorite ways.

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