Simply.StephanieDenise: outdoors, travel, adventure.
Hi, I’m Stephanie.
I grew up thinking “outdoorsy” meant something I wasn’t: someone else’s build, someone else’s body, someone else’s weekend. Then I started going anyway. A trail in the morning. A tent I pitched wrong. A solo drive to a lake I’d never heard of. None of it was clean or photogenic. All of it changed me.
Simply.StephanieDenise is the space I built for the version of that story I wish I’d found earlier. It’s a lifestyle blog about the outdoors, travel, and adventure, written for women who want the real version, not the performance of it. Women who want to feel strong and soft in the same week. Women who’d rather be expanded than impressed.
Here, you’ll find writing about solo travel and what it actually teaches you, trail reports that leave the hard parts in, slow mornings and long drives, and the quiet work of coming home to yourself. The posts move between trail and table, between adventure and rest. I write about rest the same way I write about altitude: with respect. Both matter. Both count.
I’m also a Black woman who hikes and camps and shows up in these spaces on purpose, because so few people who looked like me did when I was looking. Representation is threaded through everything I make, but I won’t lecture you about it. I’ll just keep telling the truth about who I am and where I go.
If you’re here, I’m glad. Pour something warm. Stay a while. There’s room for you.
— Stephanie Denise