About the Founder
James
Founder, Ascend Bro Hikes™
Home, work, and the trail
I’m from LA. Been in Atlanta long enough that it’s home.
I started this in March 2025 for a selfish reason: I couldn’t find the room I needed. As a Black man. As a queer man. Somewhere I didn’t have to translate myself at the door, manage the temperature, or decide which parts of me were coming inside. Gyms weren’t it. Bars weren’t it. So I went walking, and I brought people with me.
The founding story
The room I needed.
80+ hikes later, that’s still the whole idea. Get outside. Put the armor down. Let the trail do what a waiting room never could.
What we’re actually building is a chosen family for men who’ve been carrying too much alone — Black men, queer men of color, anybody the world taught to stay braced. Isolation hits us harder and kills us quieter. This is the answer I know how to make.
Credentials in practice
Systems that hold.
My day job’s been enterprise tech for fifteen years — systems that hold under load, quietly, so nobody has to think about them. Turns out that’s most of what I do here too. I practice yoga and work as a restorative bodyworker, so I’ve got a physical understanding of where stress actually lives. It’s the shoulders. It comes out on a trail.
The why behind Ascend
I’m also a nudist and a photographer.
Twenty years of making art about the human body, and the lesson never changed: most men have never once been looked at without judgment. Being seen is where the repair starts.
“We move with purpose.”