Table of contents for August 2015 in Outside

Outside|August 2015

ENCYCLOPEDIA of GEAR: BETWEEN the LINES

Gear Nuts In the middle of our fifth week of working on our Encyclopedia of Gear, I got embroiled in an e-mail thread that now, with 24 hours of distance, seems a little fanatical. The other parties involved were copy chief Sean Cooper, senior executive editor Michael Roberts, and senior editor Jonah Ogles—the latter being the designated point guard, dishing out sidebars and revisions for three months to make this issue a reality. The debate, which spanned 800 words, involved whether we should cut what seemed—to Sean and me—like an extravagant amount of verbiage on kite design to make room for what seemed—to me, at least—a criminally overlooked entry: Knife, Swiss Army. The ex change wasn’t heated, but I think fervent and sweeping are fair descriptors. Which side won isn’t…

4 min

Outside|August 2015

The Best Little Boat in the West

TO THE UNTRAINED EYE, a whitewater dory is a modified version of a traditional New England dory: the small boats (rarely longer than 20 feet from stem to stern) that were used by 19th-century cod fishermen to ply the gale-wracked sea waves off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. That rich North Atlantic heritage, however, is cheerfully cast aside by the fishing guides who live and work along a pair of rivers in the Pacific Northwest, where the shape of the classic whitewater dory (known as a drift boat on the McKenzie River and a river dory on the Rogue) is said to have been conceived, from scratch, right there in Oregon during the twenties and thirties. According to this story, credit goes to local boatwrights who invented a wickedly lively…

3 min

Outside|August 2015

Birth of the Boots

TAKE OFF YOUR FOOT- wear and look inside. What does it say? If you’re reading this while wearing rock- climbing shoes, mountaineering boots, ski-touring boots, hiking boots, nordic ski boots, or telemark boots, chances are good you’ll see some variation of Made in Italy printed on them. Which means that what’s on your feet was either designed, molded, glued, or sewn in or around one place—a northern Italian town called Montebelluna. Here, where the Venetian Plain bunches like a door-stopped carpet against the foothills of distant white mountains, is the cradle of alpine craftsmanship for the foot. These days, thanks to the globalization of manufacturing, we rarely know where our stuff comes from. Yet Montebelluna and its scarperi (bootmakers) have endured. The generations-deep wisdom that abides here has made this…

12 min

Outside|August 2015

OUTSIDE ENCYCLOPEDIA, MAKING OF THE

TEN Minutes after his wife, Nicole, went into labor that then executive editor Sam Moulton hit send on his e-mail memo for the issue. 53 Individuals who contributed the remainder of the ideas 281 Ideas submitted for consideration. ONE HUNDRED and NINETEEN Entries that made it into the issue. one Entry on duct tape. 13 Years creative director Hannah McCaughey has tried to get such an article in the magazine. (Read it on page 32.) CONTRIBUTORS Dickman, Kyle Former editor of our Essentials section. Dickman wrote the entries for letters S through V (pages 78–85). OLDEST PIECE OF GEAR: An heirloom Chuck Box cooking kit. “A wedding gift from Dad.” Fedarko, Kevin Contributing editor and former Grand Canyon dory guide. Fedarko wrote “The Best Little Boat in the West” (page…

3 min

Outside|August 2015

Runaway Inflation

THE BOYS ON THE CLOWN bikes flash ahead, with oversize tires making easy work of the serpentine trail beside the Minnesota River. I’m chasing my trio of guides on a borrowed Salsa Beargrease carbon fat bike, its tires more than twice as wide as those on my regular mountain bike. The bulky rubber eases through muddy hairpins and f loats across lengthy sand traps. I track smoothly through rock gardens and over intestinal tangles of roots. I haven’t had this much fun on new gear since I first strapped on fat skis and pointed them into fresh powder. Aren’t these rigs supposed to be piggish and slow? Weren’t they built only for snow? The Pugsley was an epiphany. THE FAT TIRES FLOATED ON THE HARDPAN and plowed through new pow.…

12 min

Outside|August 2015

Fleeced

GREGG TREINISH IS DIS-mayed about what is coming out of his washing machine. “What I’m seeing is shocking. Every couple of weeks, I clean out the filter and put the contents in a 32-ounce Ball jar,” says the founder of Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation (ASC), a nonprofit that trains outdoor enthusiasts to collect data for environmental researchers. After roughly two months, Treinish says, “the bottle is more than half-full of the crap that would have otherwise been shed right into the waterway.” That crap is thousands of synthetic fibers shed from Treinish’s clothing during wash cycles (he captures them in an aftermarket filter), and the waterway is Montana’s Gallatin River. Treinish, whose organization receives financial support from a number of outdoor-gear companies, recently launched a campaign to track the…

6 min

Outside|August 2015

The Young and the Tentless

ON A FALL EVENING IN San Francisco, roughly 1,000 twentysomethings are mingling inside the Folsom Street Foundry, a former industrial warehouse that now houses an event and performance space. Gatherings like this are everyday occurrences in the Bay Area, but tonight the attraction isn’t an IPO party or a meetup for Stanford programmers. This is Outdoor SF, an event put on by a group of small Bay Area outdoor brands. For $15, attendees get a beer, locavore appetizers, and the chance to hang with the founders of new companies like Rumpl (maker of “highperformance blankets”), low-cost sunglasses upstart Sunski, and Hipcamp, which offers an Airbnblike interface for campsite reservations. Later, a young ex plorer named Gregg Treinish, who founded the nonprofit Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation, will give a slide…

5 min

Outside|August 2015

ENCYCLOPEDIA of GEAR

Up for the Downstroke While U.S. retail sales faltered during the recent economic downturn, the Andersons’ gear co-op just kept growing. U.S. RETAIL SALES (TRILLIONS) REI SALES (BILLIONS) A AIRSTREAM The original American road-trip trailer, designed in 1931 by Wally Byam, was inspired by Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis. Byam’s initial design involved a tent built atop a Ford Model T chassis, but the tent leaked. He then came up with the iconic teardrop shape, opened a factory in Ohio, and produced many aluminum models, like the Cruiser and the Wanderer. Airstreams were the first travel trailers to have kitchens, heating, insulation, and plumbing for bathrooms. Unlike some breakdownprone camping vehicles (see Westfalia, page 86), about 75 percent of the Airstreams ever made are still on the road. The…

74 min

Outside|August 2015

The Founding Fathers of Fun

Yvon Chouinard A 76-year-old climber, blacksmith, flyfisherman, and—as founder of Patagonia— conservation and business guru. Chouinard began climbing as a teenager so he could look into cliffside bird nests with the Southern California Falconry Club. Then, in the mid-1950s, he and some fellow climbers (see Robbins, Royal, page 76) lived in Yosemite’s Camp 4, scaling the park’s big granite walls. At the time, climbing was done using soft-iron pitons; hundreds were needed for Chouinard’s multipitch first ascents. So in 1957, he bought a coal-fired forge from a junkyard and started making his own. In 1965, he partnered with fellow climber Tom Frost to found Chouinard Equipment, redesigning nearly every climbing tool of the time. He founded Patagonia in 1973, introducing the iconic Synchilla fleece jacket in 1985. Although Chouinard Equipment…

3 min

Outside|August 2015

Fly Guy

“I’M A TRIAL AND ERROR dude, not a mathematician,” Tony Uragallo tells me in a bright Cockney accent. It sounds harmless enough, until you consider that Uragallo, a short 61-year-old with thinning white hair, skin freckled by the sun, and a hitch in his gait from a skydiving accident decades ago, is the world’s preeminent wingsuit maker. His suits have been used to set world records for the longest, farthest, and fastest flights. If you’ve seen the 2011 You-Tube video “Grinding the Crack” (29.4 million views and counting), in which Jeb Corliss dives from a cliff in Switzerland and f lies directly over an accomplice who is holding a bunch of party balloons above his head, you’ve seen an Uragallo creation. Or maybe you’re familiar with Englishman Gary Connery’s jump…

7 min