Ecotherapy for All

The problem: costly recreational gear preventing you from getting outside and trying something new. The solution? Sharing your love of the outdoors with others!

At Ecotherapy for All, we’ve been talking about the importance of public spaces for access to practices like ecotherapy or meditation. But what about helping people whose outdoor self-care involves more technical activities? While we believe nature is everywhere and for everyone, for certain activities, the right gear is essential to keep you physically safe and prevent injury.

There are a few options for solving this problem, depending on what your ecotherapy or outdoor recreation community looks like. We’ll start with a few free options, then dive into what Quiptu, a new peer-to-peer gear rental platform for Indiana and Colorado (U.S.), is doing to expand access to adventure.

1. Use what you have!

Any good adventure involves some amount of creativity. Can you lace your old boots a different way to make them more comfortable? (Yes, you can!) Can you hack your regular backpack straps to be more comfortable for a longer day hike? (Probably!) Will your regular gym clothes carry you through a through hike? (Totally, I’ve done it before.)

For simpler activities like day hikes or car camping, while you still need to be prepared and safe, there are many ways to repurpose things you already have to meet your need. (As an example, when we didn’t have a water storage or filtration system for a short car camping trip, my partner and I packed a mega-jug filled from our kitchen sink into our car. Problem solved!)

2. Connect with others who can share their passion, their knowledge…and their gear.

When you try something for the first time, it can be intimidating to be around people who have been involved with that hobby or sport for a much longer time. Embrace being a beginner and find someone who loves to talk about their gear, or their tried-and-true techniques, or their favorite spots to go walk/hike/run/ride/paddle/climb. They’ll appreciate your questions, and you’ll get lots of notes on how to get started or build your skills.

Mutual aid and investing in your community involve not just sharing interests and information, but services, skills, and resources too. It may take some time to find the right group of people who share your hobby AND want to literally share it with you by lending gear, but it’s worth keeping an eye out for these people and keeping them close when you find them. We build power as a community when we share our resources, and that includes helping others access the outdoors in the same ways we love to.

3. Rent gear from a peer-to-peer platform like Quiptu

While there’s an app for everything these days, many of the best things in life are offline and outdoors. But as it turns out, an app can help get you there. The peer-to-peer gear rental platform, Quiptu, aims to get gear into the hands of more “dabblers,” people who are trying a new outdoor activity, straight from gear owners who can pass on not just their equipment, but their knowledge too. I got to talk with one of the co-founders of Quiptu, Josh Roche (who started the platform with John Laughlin) about the origins of Quiptu and how it tries to get gear in the hands of more recreation-curious folks.

The idea for Quiptu came from a gravel mountain biking adventure gone wrong—or not exactly wrong, but way more cumbersome than it needed to be. Josh borrowed a bike for a trip, had to dismantle it, ship it from Indiana to Montana, reassemble the bike (in his Uber driver’s backyard), and even then ended up with knee pain from an incorrectly sized bike for his height. Josh shared, “It was cumbersome, it was intensive, and it was pretty expensive…I thought, so many people are going to be precluded from doing this because of the logistics and the cost.”

Even though different outdoor activities require different kinds of gear or different levels of specialization, affordability is an issue across activities. “47% of Americans don’t engage in outdoor activity and 18% of them don’t do it because of the cost,” Josh shared from a study he came across when learning about the market. He calculates that to include 35-45 million people. “That’s staggering. That’s something that we as a society, I think we’ve progressed to the point that hopefully we can come up with solutions to that, to have that not be the barrier.” Quiptu is trying to address that barrier by giving people the option to rent gear from people in their own communities, to try things out before they invest in big-ticket gear.

On top of cost, trying a new activity or sport can be intimidating if there’s a lot of gear involved that you might not know how to use yet. One of the aspects Quiptu focuses on is not only exchanging gear from gear owner to renter, but also creating community where people can ask questions or share recommendations. “It doesn’t have to be a huge endeavor,” said Josh. “We’ve had people rent kayaks from their neighbors and just go out on a local lake for the day. And that’s amazing, that’s exactly how we want people to get initiated. The dabblers. They’re not sure if this is right for them, so they get a chance to get their toes wet.”

Trying things and exploring within and outside of your comfort zone is one of the key benefits of Quiptu. Josh explained, “Camping is a great example of this. For a lot of people, the idea of camping is so daunting. Car camping is awesome. Glamping is great. Yes, we encourage car camping–throw a Coleman grill in the back and you got your cooler and a big ol’ tent for the family–here you go. It doesn’t need to be this big ordeal. I would say for most people that’s how you get introduced. So how do we make that process a little bit easier by not making it a $700 purchase to get my family out the door? You make it an $80 purchase for the whole weekend and the family’s going to love it.”

Renting is definitely an underrated option for getting outdoors more in Josh’s mind: “I think that’s just the mindset of asset culture in the United States…Purchasing something just because you think that that’s a better choice than renting without understanding, do I really like this thing? I think that’s where so many people go wrong. I’ve made that mistake! If there was an easy way to try this out for 30 bucks before I spent a hundred on it, that’s a huge difference!” Like most things in life, having a wider variety of options creates more equitable opportunities for people to get involved.

“There are just so many activities that people are precluded from for a vast majority of reasons, but when you get down to the nuts and bolts so often it’s just the finances of it. So many people think ‘I either have to buy this or I can’t do this.’ Being able to just rent something for one day or a weekend is not widely accessible for so many people.” Quiptu is changing that (so far, in Indiana and Colorado). You can rent gear or list your own on Quiptu.com.

4. Buy used, when you’re ready!

Once you’ve decided to invest in your own gear, buying used is a great option for reducing the price, and helping the environment. There are things that shouldn’t be bought used (like helmets, since they are only usable for one impact and you don’t know the product history second-hand), so talk to your new gear community for advice or do your own research. And as you collect gear that supports your time in nature, consider how you can share that experience with others too.

An Affordable Outdoors Relies on Collective Action

There is always more work to be done at the systems level to make getting outdoors more affordable and accessible. Even factors outside of parks, like public transportation and investment in green spaces, are important for our overall goal of making nature more inclusive.

I’m hopeful about the future of peer-to-peer platforms like Quiptu and how they can shape the outdoor industry and communities. I know that community connection and sharing resources, knowledge, and opportunities make our outdoor communities more engaging and can support more people in finding their own form of self-care in the outdoors. As we share, we grow community. As we grow our community, we grow impact. Regardless of if you borrow, rent, repurpose, or buy your gear, the important thing is that you’re getting outside and enjoying the benefits of time in nature.

Thank you to Josh Roche, co-founder of Quiptu, for taking the time to talk about Quiptu, gear culture, and building a more inclusive outdoors.