Part 1 of this series was the series of events that led me to start work on creating a revolutionary new piece of footwear that might hopefully satisfy one of the most infamously picky fishing customers ever in terms of both riparian performance and financial viability (who are we kidding, Yvon Chouinard has not built a wildly successful company without a serious nod towards profitability, despite the nice idea of “letting his people go surfing”). …
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A year and a half ago I did a post with the story of the Patagonia River shoes, and at the end I “promised” to do another on the story of the Patagonia Fishing Boots. It’s taken me a long time, but with a little help from a friend (more on that later) I’m finally able to sit down and share this tale. Firstly, I am not a fisherman. I love all sorts of outdoor…
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Ashley’s birthday is in mid-November, which can be a challenging time of year; a bit early for good skiing, a bit late for summer-type activities, it can be pretty cold, and the nights are long for camping. This past weekend was no exception, but since we got shut down on another European bike tour this summer and the window was closing for viable bike tours until spring she decided that a southwestern Utah bike tour…
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While generally I love fall, I have often said that the best fall season is when it’s warm warm warm….and then the switch is flipped and it starts snowing, and thus it is winter. This keeps the trails and mountains still accessible for hikes and runs pretty late and then builds up a decent snowpack quickly that hopefully will enable some snowpack stability. But the truth is that my ideal scenario rarely happens; more often…
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The folks at American Whitewater have been kind enough to indulge me by publishing a series of articles about packrafting in their 2020 issues. As a result, there’s no doubt that both of the people who read the articles are charging out and buying packrafts as we speak! According to the editor of the magazine I’ve said all there is to be said (he clearly doesn’t know me very well!) and this will be the…
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A few years ago I wrote a blog post I audaciously called “The Art of Conversation”, which no doubt plagiarized the title of some book and in which I talked about my perception of how to have valuable conversations (in fact, after I wrote that sentence, I googled it, and indeed, there is a book! Maybe I should read it…) Since then I’ve not only thought about conversations a lot, I’d like to think I’ve…
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In the spring of 1980 the Pacific Northwest was all abuzz about Mount St Helens. Our local snowcone of a mountain: was coming to life with small eruptions that left ash streaks that lay vivid against the late season snowpack. It was fun and interesting and a good reminder that our volcanoes were only dormant, not dead, though having crawled up Mount Hood the prior year (it took our group something like 10 hours to…
3 CommentsMany moons ago, at the beginning of the era where kayaking seemed to be exploding in popularity and some idealistic lads and lasses thought that they might be able to make a living paddling rivers, I went to the Kern Fest; an annual river festival in Kernville, which was The Rendezvous Spot for the surprising number of river lovers in SoCal, and for a week in the spring, also a magnet for people from all…
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This year the editor of the venerable American Whitewater Journal has been kind enough to indulge me (and the rest of the vast packraft world?) by letting me write a series of articles about packrafting. It’s been a really fun project so far. The first introductory/history article is here, and the second (using the River of Return trip as an example of what a packrafting trip can be) is here (starting on page 24). The…
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