DIVA spoke to founders Lucy and Yasmin about their amazing new initiative that is blowing up on social media
BY BETHIA WYBORN, IMAGE BY @A8LIA
The TikTok group Dykes Who Hike has taken the internet by storm, but who are the powerhouses behind this queer walking group?
When Yasmin Message and Lucy Cooper sat down to organise a small queer-inclusive hike in March, they had no idea the impact they would have seven months later.
The pair only met in January and decided to create a Whatsapp group after enjoying a hike themselves. Their promotion of their first hike from Seaford to Eastbourne consisted of a TikTok explaining which trains to get and an Instagram post of a woman jumping with a comic sans headline stating “This could be you” with a link to the chat.
“Oh my god, we were so nervous after that post. We were messaging each other ‘What if no one comes?’, it was safe to say we were very stressed,” says Yasmin.
Leading up to the hike on 23 March, Lucy and Yasmin started to notice that the WhatsApp chat was slowly gaining more members.
“I would check the WhatsApp chat every hour and ten more people would have joined. When we got to a hundred members it just felt surreal,” adds Lucy.
The first hike wasn’t perfect, with an ungodly amount of hills and the pub at the end too small to fit everyone in, but with 60 members in tow, there wasn’t one person who left with a frown on their face.
“After that hike, we learned a lot about organisation and planning but we instantly knew we wanted to do it again. We started frantically booking off weekends when we were both free.”
“These events are about community more than anything. A lot of queer meetups are built around nights out and drinking but we wanted to start something that could feel like you could join by yourself and meet new people,” Yasmine explains.
The pair described how walking with someone can mean you have a deeper conversation with them.
“You don’t have to stare into their eyes awkwardly, by going out together you’re experiencing something special. Even if you don’t speak to everyone by the end of the day you come away knowing there’s a community of people just like you,” Lucy says.
@lucyc00per Gary knows! @dykeswhohikeldn on insta for the deets of our walk on Saturday 4th May #fyp #dykeswhohikeldn #london #walkinggroup ♬ original sound – lucy cooper
With 13.5k followers on Instagram and over 200 people on the Dykes Who Hike waiting list, it’s certain that groups like this are wanted and needed.
“This is important for young people but it’s also important for people who are a bit older as well. I was talking to a 34-year-old lady from Ireland and she said gay marriage was illegal when she was growing up so she had to come out later in life. For them it’s almost like a second chance to be your authentic self and have fun around other queer people,” Lucy explains.
Yasmin adds: “We’ve been on hikes and heard stories about how new friend groups have been made from our meetups. Some of them have organised to climb Snowdon, without us!”
When the second hike commenced just outside of London, the pair knew they had created something special when 200 people turned up.
“We had no idea how many people were coming so we were both in shock seeing the amount of people at the train station. We were both running on adrenaline the whole day.”
“When the day was over me and Lucy were just speechless, we looked at each other and thought ‘What just happened?’. It was when someone came up to us at St Pancras and said ‘Thank you, this is the safest I’ve ever felt in a queer space’ that we bawled our eyes out on the train ride home,” Yasmin says.
Join the Dykes for Hikes waiting list here: outsavvy.com/organiser/dykes-who-hike
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