Nelson Holland, 30, on an outing in Colorado. Holland, an outdoors influencer, recently visited Central Oregon, where he was called the N-word within a few hours of his arrival.

In a video posted Tuesday on Instagram and TikTok, Aurora, Colorado, outdoor influencer Nelson Holland, 30, recounts his trip to Central Oregon last weekend.

Holland is originally from New York City and has lived in Colorado for eight years. A year or so after moving there, he began dabbling in hiking, becoming more serious about it four or five years ago.

Holland, who is Black, is open about weighing more than 300 pounds, and said he created fatblackandgettinit, as his accounts are called, to encourage other people of size or color to get out and enjoy hiking and being outdoors. His short bio reads, “Defying physics for views.”

On TikTok, he has over 95,000 followers, and Instagram, he has nearly 7,000 followers. His presence has grown such that he’s begun to hear from various brands, he said, adding that he came to Bend for a photo shoot with Eddie Bauer, as well as to hike and climb at Smith Rock.

In the video of his Oregon trip, Holland begins, as he often does, by saying, “Stop scrolling, and let’s go check out some nature,” and he can be seen narrating as he walks on the Deschutes River Trail.

His next words, however, are not typical: “Been in Oregon three hours, already got called a racial slur. Yes, it’s the one you’re thinking,” he says. “That’s not gonna stop me though.”

Holland said he was walking on 14th Street near Simpson Avenue when the slur was shouted from a passing vehicle.

“I was in between the McDonald’s and Baldy’s BBQ, crossing the street right by the Safeway,” he said. “It did put a damper on the day for sure.”

Instead of walking back to his hotel room up the road at LOGE Bend, he took an Uber, “because I didn’t want to run into another conversation like that,” he said. He also took it as a sign to stay in his room that night rather than go to a bar, as he’d planned. At some point after the incident, he learned of the shooting death of Barry Washington Jr., who was Black, last year in downtown Bend.

“I wasn’t aware of some of the recent history in the town, and I was planning on going to a bar that night because I had plenty of time to kill,” he told The Bulletin. “After hearing about the shooting last year, I’m like, ‘Glad I didn’t do that.’ And I would’ve done it unless somebody called me a (N-word) in town.”

As of Thursday, the video had about 50,000 views and 14,000 likes on TikTok. On Instagram, it had about 9,000 views and 1,500 likes.

In the video, Holland later tries climbing for the first time with newly made friends from the photo shoot, including Jenny Bruso, the founder of Unlikely Hikers, “a diverse, anti-racist, body-liberating outdoor community featuring the underrepresented outdoorsperson,” according to unlikelyhikers.org.

On his social media post, Holland writes, “These amazing women literally turned this trip around for me and I can’t thank them enough.”

“I would love to come back there,” he said Thursday. “But I would only do it with a local, and the really sad thing about it is, like, I don’t even know if I want the local to be white or Black. Going out there with another Black person would be really after what happened, but like, that can easily happen to both of us. So yeah, maybe I need to go with both or get a group, but yeah, I know I won’t go back by myself, that’s for damn sure.”