David Kelso's voice is one that thousands of Oklahomans have come to know and love. For 30 years, Kelso talked to Oklahoma with a voice full of ease and friendliness on KOMA, a classic hits station in Oklahoma City, but in December 2019, Kelso was faced with a diagnosis that would have shattered most people.
"I was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer," he said. "My friend called me and he goes, 'Hey, man, why don't we go hike up Mount Scott and figure out how you're going to beat this.'"
Kelso and a group of guys headed down to the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge to hike. And they kept hiking. And they kept gaining more and more people who wanted to hike with them and seek out the positivity and the light.
After that hike, Kelso found peace and healing in "the church of the big trees" of nature. He also found a group of like-minded Oklahomans who also turn to the wild places for healing and clarity.
"it is a group of like-minded people who just enjoy each other's company and being outside. We all believe firmly that the outside is better than the inside. We believe in the church and the tall trees, that when you are walking in the woods, the repetitive nature of the steps kind of clears your mind," Kelso said.
"When we first started doing this, I needed to clear my mind. And it's just kind of caught on. We go outside, and we have great conversations with great people. We spend as much time looking for the positive and the light and the love as we can. And it seems to be working."
Thanks to the cancer specialists at Stephenson Cancer Center in Oklahoma City, experimental drugs and a good dose of hiking, Kelso is cancer-free. Other members of the Hike to Heal group have their own traumas and healing to work through. Some are also facing serious illnesses; others are survivors of domestic violence; others are battling addiction.
"I think everybody's trying to heal from something and some of us are just trying to get through the day," Kelso said. " A couple of months ago, this guy was hiking with us for the first time. I asked him how the hike was, and he said it was the cleanest air he's smelled in 15 years. He just got out of prison three months before."
Another hiker had been unable to walk more than about 100 yards since she got back from Kuwait a couple of years ago. When she joined the hike, another woman who was a kinesiologist and a physical therapist was on her first hike that day as well. She worked with the veteran and performed some manipulations on her body, and the two walked two and a half miles together.
"She called me crying. She said it was the longest she'd been able to walk since her deployment," Kelso said. "When I started gamma radiation and chemotherapy treatments, they told me that people who keep moving during treatment do better. And so we just started walking, and we've been walking ever since. We've walked up and down both coasts, we've walked on long trails and on short trails, and we walked with a lot of people and we walked with a couple of people. We just keep right on trucking."
For more information on Hike to Heal, visit the HiketoHeal group on Facebook.
Hike to Heal hosts biweekly hiking trips at various locations in Oklahoma.