Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) for your first-ever backpacking trip is a challenging undertaking. Making a movie about it at the same time adds another dimension of difficulty entirely. That’s exactly what Gary Wilkerson and his friend Mary Jeanes just did. Their film Black Outside debuted on September 3, 2024.

Black Outside starts with questions of race. But it leads Wilkerson far beyond them to find truths about himself and the world he would never have discovered otherwise. Wilkerson told GearJunkie that the experience changed his life.

“I feel like I was supposed to do this,” Wilkerson said when we spoke prior to the film’s release. “It grew me up in a way. It kind of kicked some of the kid dust off of me that was still kind of there.”

This project started as a silly idea he and Jeanes had during the height of the 2020 COVID pandemic. When Jeanes took the idea to a production company that signed onto the project, though, it became very real very quickly. Before they knew it, the two friends were setting off from the U.S.-Mexico border bound for the northern border with Canada, saddled with video equipment and a mission to make a movie.

It took Wilkerson and Jeanes 6 months. But they eventually arrived at the U.S.-Canada border, successful.

Black Outside is now available to buy or rent on iTunes, YouTube, Prime Video, Google Play, and any other TV On Demand platforms.