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2009-07-16T15:16:00.002-05:00

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Short Lessons Said Aloud, Part Two

2009-07-15T16:07:00.012-05:00

"Pariah Canyon (Detail)," by Anne Hughes, on the wall at PEMBAbase

Being involved in the outdoors always brings lessons. Sometimes, these lessons are the things that you most need to know in that given moment. (Funny how this works...) This is part two in an as-of-yet unfinished series of the lessons I've learned from a lifetime living outdoors, in no particular order, without a lot of detail:

"Depending on who is reading the menu on a given day, sometimes your name is 'lunch.'" - Humans don't like to be at the bottom of the food chain. We go way out of our way to make sure that it never happens. We put up shark-nets, take out bounties on apex predators, kill black-widows (and even daddy long-legs) on sight. I've seen people cry (tears, literally) for the right to kill a rattlesnake here in Wisconsin that's so rare that it takes biologists three years just to find one. Going into wilderness means accepting that you are going into wildness. I kept saying this to myself as I walked alone down Pariah Canyon, a narrow slot in Southern Utah. Ahead of me somewhere was a small mountain lion. I saw the fresh tracks in the mud, complete with places where it had stopped to look back at me. I was nervous. Every once in awhile, I found pools of bubbling urine, rich with the strong cat-smell. At some point, the canyon widened enough for the cat to hide, and I'm sure she watched me walk right past. (I walked with her for several miles, and for some reason I decided that she was a "she.") It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway: It was one of the best trips of my life.

"All the platitudes about summits are true." - There's a million of them, and I haven't found one that isn't true: "There's always a false-summit," "The summit is only half the journey," and "The summit is only the excuse for the journey" are three that seem to me to be the most true. Yep, yep, and yup.

"Accept that you need to go the full distance to make it count." - On the West Buttress route on Denali, there's something so horrible that you have to see it to believe it. Many people doubt it openly as a "guide's tale" until they see it for themselves. Very near the top of the mountain, about an hour or so from the summit, you have to lose over 300' of elevation, and then climb a steep fin for about 500' to reach the true summit. It's called The Football Field. An uncounted number of people have turned back in despair at this point. To them, the summit just seems too far away. The return trip back up that lost 300' is daunting, too. Funny how people give up a goal after having come all of that way, just because it turns out to be a little bit harder than they thought it would be. Don't be like them. If success weren't hard, it would be easy, and everybody would do it.

"If you can see thestrals, nobody else much needs to know." - In Harry Potter’s world, if you can see thestrals it means you’ve seen a death. Yes, I can see them, too. These are the stories I don't tell, although I think about them sometimes. Some people are eager to know all about it, and some people are eager to tell all about it. I’m of the mind that it’s not something that needs to be shared. The bare bones of what happened and why are important, inasmuch as these are the details that teach and protect others. Don't dramatize a death just because you happened to be nearby, or were involved in some capacity. No matter how you tell it, everybody is the hero of their own stories. By definition, the story of somebody's death isn't about you, so just leave it be. And - also - remember the dead by how they were as they were living, not how they were when you saw their bodies, last.

"Watch out for those dang Star People." - While sleeping in a tent in the middle of a glacial moraine in the remotest part of Tibet, did you ever get up to go outside to - well, er - do some business, and then suddenly see a bright light in the sky, only to go right back to your tent to have your tent-mates tell you that you were gone for over three hours? Um, yeah, me neither...

To Be Continued...

Son of the Irish

2009-06-09T11:49:00.002-05:00

In May of 2004 I made the decision to move to California to climb. I had good friends in Madison and Menomonee and was overall pretty happy with life in town. I wasn't exactly sure where my life was going or what I wanted to do but I could have seen staying in Madison for a long time.

More and more though I started to think about what it would be like to live near an area like Bishop. I made the choice and decided to go for it. I was going to move to Mammoth Lakes, an hour north of Bishop. Having merely lined up one interview and a possible place to live I loaded up my Mazda MX-3 with everything I could and drove for three days to get there.

As soon as I got to Mammoth I found my pad and made my way down to the Buttermilks. It was beautiful. I couldn't have been happier to have these as my local boulders.

I spent a couple weeks trying to line up a job and a place to live. With a little bit of luck I was able to secure both. I was set.

On one of my first few trips down to the Buttermilks I was working the Cave Problem on Grandpa Peabody and a man and his wife came around the corner. He started to fondle the start holds for Evilution and muttered something about them being greasy. I was, and still am, enthralled with this line. Jason was one of my climbing hero's and I was in awe of the problem. I couldn't believe that this man could do the moves and I went over to him and scoffed something like "You gonna try it?". I tried to be as sarcastic as I could since I saw the man as inferior to the perfect climb.

I was wrong, obviously, and very naive. I learned more about climbing, trying hard and so much else that afternoon climbing with this mystery man. He took me around the Buttermilks showing me classics, must do's, what not to do's and future projects for me. He insisted that I needed a tour and that he was the man to do it. Off we went.

He first showed me the Birthing Experience which is hands down the craziest problem I've ever done. You start by crawling into the start hole and sitting in a giant hueco. He gave me no beta and told me to just "get in it!". After humiliating myself thoroughly he relented and showed me how it was done. I followed after him.

He took me over to the shrimp boulder and really started to teach. He said I should get on Perfectly Shrimp. It was a V6 and therefore out of my league. After I said that he laughed and told me that if I can fall on a V4 I can fall on a V6! I started to get the painful moves and couldn't believe it! I was climbing on a V6!!!!! It was mind blowing.

After a while I was falling at the crux, just slapping at a sharp crimp. It's funny that I can pinpoint such a major point in my climbing to this period. It's exact. He changed how I climbed with two simple pieces of advice.

"Look at the hold and just grab it!" he said. "Don't slap the hold, you gotta grab it with your fingers! And stare at the thing. Don't let it out of your sight. Ever." I came back a couple days later and did just that. It was almost liberating to climb the problem and realize that there should never ever be ceilings with climbing. I wish he had been there to enjoy it with me.

My mystery mentor, his wife and myself continued on to the Buttermilk Stem and we both climbed this amazingly fun problem. He of course did the sit and I did the stand. It was there that I finally learned their names.

Marci and Michael Reardon.

It was months later that he had his massive soloing day in Joshua Tree and his name would become synonymous with free soloing. I truly enjoyed following his exploits and looked up to him in most everything he did. He had strict ethics and I respected that even if I couldn't abide by them.

Without him knowing it he changed how I climbed and how I looked at so much of life. We exchanged a random e-mail here and there for a while until his untimely death. I've still got the last exchange saved and I look at it every now and then. He ended with the phrase below. I wish I had another chance to climb with him.

"See you out there, just remember to never say, "Take!"

All best,

Michael"

I wish nothing but the best for the families of the Jonny Copp, Micah Dash and Wade Johnson. Climb safe everyone.

An Ode to Friday

2009-05-22T13:11:00.004-05:00

There's nothing like Friday...

Some Fridays, when Janice is in a particularly chipper mood, she is known to do the "LEKI dance."

But as they say, "it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye." Or in today's case, my birthday plant. You see, we were enjoying the helicopter toys Mr. Canoelover gave us, when I sent one a little too hard, a little to close to my poor Aloe vera, slicing off at least four of its leaves. We keep finding pieces scattered around the office... Lesson learned.

Short Lessons Said Aloud, Part One

2009-05-19T07:35:00.001-05:00

Outdoors, you learn things sometimes. Even if you can't put these lessons into words, they stick with you. Here are a few of the lessons I've learned by being outdoors, in no particular order, without a lot of detail:

"If a bear walks into your tent, punch it in the nose." - Okay, I didn't actually punch the bear. I hit it with my shoe. (Yep, on the nose...It's a long story.) The bottom line is that if the thing you fear most comes suddenly and uncomfortably close to you, just do what comes naturally, next. It will probably turn out okay.

"If you are struck at by a rattlesnake, be sure to check whether or not you were bitten." - This seems self-evident, but it warrants emphasis. I was struck at by a rattler, and - somehow convinced that my non-existent, cat-like reflexes had saved me - I didn't check for a bite. (Weird, huh?) Fortunately, that snakebite was dry. It could've been bad.

"Just suck it up and do the dirty work." - I've mucked out flooded corrals, climbed into pit latrines with waders on, and been up to my elbows (and deeper) in offal of all sorts. Sometimes you've just got to do it. It never stinks as badly as you thought it would, and - anyway - you get used to it. You'll clean up okay, even if you have to wait awhile.

"Don't be afraid to ask for a cuddle, and a foot massage." - Hypothermic and nearing frostbite, I finally admitted to my climbing partner that I might be in trouble. He dug us in, threw me into the hole, and climbed in next to me. He then warmed my bare feet against his belly. Okay, it was a little awkward, but this might be the only reason why today I still have ten toes like everybody else. Ask for help when you need it.

"Sometimes horrible things happen, so live through them, thankfully." - There's such a sudden shift between a great day climbing, and the worst (or last) day you've ever had. Gravity, water, momentum, and weather are intrinsically violent forces of nature. I've fallen into crevasses, been caught in avalanches, and was somehow leaning one way when leaning another way might've ended badly. (Read: "Cut in half by a giant rock.") Frankly, I'm here now because I have been lucky. I'm thankful for this. Every day, count the blessing of being alive. It could be different.

"Don't sleep in your car in a vacant lot in the red-light district, you might get mugged by prostitutes." Oh, dang, would you look at that we're out of time! Sorry, but this story will have to wait for another day...

This Made Our Day

2009-05-14T11:01:00.002-05:00

We get letters, and some are better than others. This one made our day. It comes to us from Lindy Speizer-Smith, who recently left LEKI to spend more time with her family.

We're gonna miss her.

Ecocities: Cities Can Save the Earth

2009-05-14T10:03:00.001-05:00

(originally posted at the Urban Wilderness Institute)

Could it be that the root causes of our environmental crises are linked to the biggest things we build - cities?

So argues Richard Register, founder of SF Bay Area's Urban Ecology, author of Ecocities: Building Cities in Balance with Nature, and activist urban planner, writing in a recent Foreign Policy in Focus brief. Our automobile dependence has many direct ecological and social costs, but the most insidious consequence is how cars have reshaped our cities over the last 100 years. Register writes: "Many of us caught in this infrastructure find it extremely difficult to get around in anything but the car. The distances are just too great for bicycles, the densities just too low to allow efficient, affordable transit."

The challenges are significant, but Register has reason for optimism:

We can change our cities. In fact, our cities have already changed. Portland has frequent transit that’s free in the downtown area, and has designated a “urban growth boundary” to limit the expansion of the city’s urban area and preserve nearby farmland and other open spaces and a thriving and very dense new residential and “mixed-use” center in the Pearl District. The rooftops in Tel Aviv, Israel and dozens of Chinese cities sparkle with solar hot-water panels. Copenhagen’s pedestrian street, the Støget, has been growing steadily since 1962 and now stretches more than two miles.

But we can do more, much more, to redesign our cities for pedestrians and bicyclists, taking up very small areas of land in more compact development. Taller buildings with rooftop gardens and solar greenhouses can be linked by pedestrian connections between rooftops and terraces above ground level, making city centers intimately accessible to people on foot. As we add population and ecological architecture in pedestrian/transit centers, we can gradually eliminate the unsustainable suburbs.

We'll need to start rebuilding our cities to incorporate Register's ecocity concepts - pedestrian/transit-oriented infrastructure, replacing sprawl development with nature/agriculture, and integrating renewable energy systems - if we are to meet the triple threat of climate change, biodiversity loss, and dwindling (cheap) fossil fuels. Rethinking our cities as places that both humans and non-human nature can call home is a place to start; cities that are friendly for pedestrians and cyclists are likely to welcome trees, restored streams, and urban wildlife as well.

Read the whole article at Foreign Policy in Focus, and learn more about the ecocity at Ecocity Builders.

Climbing Gears

2009-05-08T14:30:00.000-05:00

courtesy of: Madsen Cycles

Happy Weekend.

Where The Magic Happens

2009-05-08T14:19:00.005-05:00

My friend Todd valued one resource above all all others. Well, make that two resources: About equally he valued "Firepower," and Time. Firepower is something that somebody has as a talent or gift, and while you can develop Firepower mostly you need to be born with it. Time, on the other hand, is something that we all have and most of us waste.

Not so, Todd - he lay awake at night thinking about wasted time. They say that the poet Keats was passionate and prolific about writing because he knew that he would never have enough time in his life to get it all done. I think that perhaps Todd knew the same thing about himself, and this is what drove him to be such a prolific climber.

These days, as business people in the outdoor industry (or anywhere), there are many demands on our time and attention. I don't intend to list them here. (That would be a waste of time, after all.) What seems obvious though is that we all need to do more things working together as groups. We can save time, dollars, and resources if we do.

The question is: How can we work together more? There are already too many tradeshows, and yet more are being added all the time. Why is this? Well, obviously nobody has quite hit the model, yet. No single tradeshow addresses every need, and - perhaps - no one tradeshow ever will. As one person put it on Twitter: "Too many tradeshows - regional and national - apparently the solution is to add another?"

Yeah, maybe that is the solution.

Last summer, we here at Pemba Serves were part of an initiative to start a new regional tradeshow here in Madison. One of the ways that we presented it is that by having a strong, dynamic regional show we all - reps, retailers, and vendors - saved time and dollars. We did some analysis of this to state our case. Basically, we compared the cost in dollars, gas, and time of ten reps visiting ten stores versus twenty people all coming together at the same time and place to get work done. We discovered some interesting things:

Traveling the territory is 7 times more expensive and used 7 times as much gas as having people come to a centrally located show.
For ten reps to visit ten stores, it took almost 14 times as many man-hours as going to a show.
The opportunity costs for these same rep man-hours total over $27,000 for the reps, and just under $400,000 for the manufacturers that employ the reps.
For reps in the Midwest, the average wholesale order needed, per store, to break even on the road (in just gas expense and time) is almost $4500. By contrast, to pay for the time to travel to a centrally located tradeshow, a rep only needs to generate a little over $2600 in wholesale orders, total. (With the time left over, reps can - Hey! - make more sales...)
Because shows are far more efficient and effective by creating more sales (and for retailers, discount) opportunities for the amount of time allowed, shows are a more profitable use of time for everybody.

[Note that all of these figures are for one-way travel, only. In other words, the real expense of two-way travel is roughly double what's quoted, above.]

For those who are curious, you can check all of the analysis yourself. (There's a lot more that can be done with this spreadsheet, for sure, and feel free to do so.) From a cost/benefit, ROI basis, there's no question that group events such as tradeshows (Training Events, Consumer Shows, and so forth) save dollars, gas, and - in particular - time for reps, retailers, and vendors.

Shows are where the magic happens, for sure.

Fortunately, time is something that we can all manage better. If time and attention are our most important resources, let's manage our businesses accordingly. So, see you at the shows!

Super Natural Running

2009-05-06T11:04:00.004-05:00

The video needs to load for a couple minutes before it will play, but it is obviously worth the wait. Props, Nike.

I'm pretty sure we are ripping off this idea for the upcoming Montrail sales meeting..

Wisconsin Driving

2009-04-30T14:03:00.003-05:00

A few weeks back Katie and I took a short trip up to Taylors Falls to climb for a bit. The climbing itself was a ton of fun and we had a blast. I'd been wanting to boulder there for a while now and it was good to finally get up there.

On the drive up to Taylors Katie and I kept on noticing large animal statues on the side of the road. At each one, Katie would proceed to freak out a tiny bit, get really excited and insist that we stop on the way back to take a picture with said animal statue. After a little prodding I got into it and figured that we'd stop at three exits on the way back to take pictures with the animals. I figured it'd break up the drive a little bit but I had no clue how many we would actually find. I'm still in some amount of shock about it. Wisconsin is an interesting state, to say the least.

Katie and the Tin Man, just outside of Taylors Falls, at a Junk Yard, I think.

One of my personal favorites. The cul-de-sac with a stop sign. Love it!

Katie and the giant Cowboy Mouse near Tomah. Mind you that this "welcome" sign is well over an hour from ANY Wisconsin border.

And the backside, for anyone who was wondering...

For those of you that don't know, the Cow Pie is a chocolate-y treat.

These next few are all from a furniture store in between Baraboo and the Dells. Yup, that's a bear with a gun.

And a Moose......

Katie isn't quite that small. I actually think this bed may be bigger than our current apartment. Scary.

Another Bear and another Moose just for good measure.

We found this little guy by accident when we got off the highway for a Dairy Queen. No wonder I don't climb any harder than I do.

The Tilt-A-House nearby Portage. Many thanks to Katie for seeing this one at 70 MPH on the highway. Almost missed it!

How could you possibly guess what's coming next?

Yup, a giant Elephant with eyeglasses....

At a Citgo, nonetheless.

And then we took a wrong turn and didn't get back on the highway. What should we find?? A big ol' cow at a cheese haus. Obviously.

Hard sit start on the udders to a brutal topout over the slopey bulge.

And there you have it. Mind you, this is WITHOUT stopping at another exit in Black River Falls that would have gotten us another 3-4 giant animals as well. I wrote down the wrong exit number. Oh well.

"I'm SO Excited!"

2009-04-23T10:06:00.000-05:00

Misa is our child with the "instant-on" switch. She can be in a dead sleep - snoring louder than you can imagine any small five-year-old girl snoring - and she'll suddenly pop open her eyes brightly and say,"Good morning, Daddy!" Honestly, it would be frightening if it weren't so darn cute.

Most days, she wakes up in our bed. The other morning just after I awoke, I was watching her snore and she sat straight up and giggled: "Good morning Daddy! I'm SO excited! Are you excited too?"

I rubbed the sleep from my puffy eyes and rolled my tongue over my teeth to fight back the morning-breath: "Um, yeah, I guess I'm excited. What are you excited about?"

She was bouncing on the bed by this point: "I dunno! I forget! But, I'm so excited!"

If I could bottle this type of pure joy and sell it, I would be a very rich man.

In the past few weeks and months - hey, for well over a year - I've been talking to people who could sure use a bottle of the stuff that Misa exudes. They have puffy eyes and clenched jaws, and are just plain harried and worried, all the time. They talk about "getting back to basics," and "scaling back." These words are spoken in a resigned, diminished way. Sometimes, they are fearful, and even angry.

"The world is changing. Times are tough. I'm just waiting for things to get back to normal."

If "normal" means "as they always were," this is probably going to be a long wait. Personally, I don't know for sure what the future holds, but I'm dead certain it won't be anything like our recent past. The world is changing, times are tough.

Still, I wake up each day excited to get to work. I work with great people here at Pemba Serves, with our customers, and with our vendors, too. We all work in a great industry. The really exciting thing for me is because things are changing so quickly and so radically, every day we all get to come to work and wrestle with the question: "What if we were to write the book about the Outdoor Industry again: What would that look like?"

I'm not sure how it's going to turn out - I imagine that it'll be a page-turner - and I'm excited every day to get up and write the book. I've addressed earlier how important it is for us to sell our culture rather than just our stuff. But - Jebus! - we in the Outdoor Industry are in the business of selling FUN. If we can't get excited about what we're doing every day, then who the heck can?

One twitter experiment with measurable results.

2009-04-17T09:29:00.007-05:00

There's been some back and forth of late relating to Twitter being a good use of time and attention. While I understand the perspectives of both camps I often see myself wandering between the two. Some days I need long stretches of uninterrupted time to be productive. Other days I really enjoy the paths that twitter presents and I make connections that I might not have made otherwise

With that in mind we did an experiment these past few weeks. We dropped a rock in the Pemba Serves Twitter pond and watched the ripples. To do this we used a url shortener called tr.im to measure the traffic on a specific tweet.

If you follow Pemba Serves on twitter or facebook you may recall seeing a variation of this tweet over the past few weeks.

Here are the tr.im stats from March 24th through the end of the program yesterday.

These stats measure the number of users that kept the address http://tr.im/hKB2 intact that was initiated on @pembaserves and @pembanews.

So, what is Twitter good for? In this case it's good for raising $788 to provide kids with transformational outdoor experiences that they might not have had otherwise. A contribution that would not have been possible without the social currency that Pemba Serves or our followers have generated through this new medium.

Thanks to everyone who re-tweeted and clicked.

Control Freak

2009-04-09T16:43:00.007-05:00

I'm guessing there aren't a lot of golfer-climbers out there. Leisure activities tend to map to lifestyle and your average country club member and a Camp IV dirtbag are unlikely to share the same hairdresser. They may, however, have more in common than you think.

I have two friends who land at opposite ends of the middle-aged lifestyle spectrum. One is a huge golfer, an every-waking-hour, never-sees-his-kids kind of golfer. The other is a backcountry addict, an ex-NOLS, cache-to-cache kind of camper. But when you ask them why they do what they do, their answers are remarkably similar.

Bill, the golfer, will say he loves golf because it's just him and the ball. When he steps up to the ball, everything else falls away. What's left is the kind of purity you don't find in everyday life. He can hit the ball well. Or he can blow it. But it's entirely up to him.

Rick, the backpacker, explains backcountry travel in almost the same terms. When he's sitting cross-legged in front of a white gas stove two days walk from the nearest road, life is very simple. He explains it in terms of possessions. "Whatever I need," he says "is within arms reach. Lighter, knife, pasta, I know exactly where it is and what it's for."

In the end, they both do what they do because it gives them a sense of control. Activities like golf and camping strip away the endless tangle of variables that we have to deal with in everyday life. On any given weekday, there's no telling what life will throw at you. What's worse, there's no telling if you'll be equipped to deal with it. Sports are different. Complexities are eliminated. Problems are limited to those we can anticipate or have encountered before. Even failure can be ascribed to something as simple as elbow position or a clogged fuel jet.

Back in real life, you've got a business to run. And with the economy throwing you curve balls and the future as dark as it's been in a generation, why bother thinking about how Rick and Bill spend their free time? It's worth considering because it's one of the primary reasons humans play games: we want a sense of control. And your job is to sell stuff to humans who play games.

Whether you're planning a product launch or fitting a pair of boots, remember that part of what you're selling is a sense of control. Especially when real life gets tough, people turn to leisure activities for comfort and confidence. Keep that in mind when you present outdoor gear to consumers and you might gain a little more control yourself.

A special guest-post from Chris Harges of Satellite Design, an outdoor-industry graphic design firm.

The Most Environmental Company?

2009-04-01T23:29:00.019-05:00

The request came via email from a friend. "I have this acquaintance who is on the board of directors for this uppity company who is looking for a list of the most environmentally innovative companies." I thought this would be a perfect question for the Twitter community, and a list of the expected and unexpected rolled in:

Teko, Burt's Bees, Dr Bronner's Magic Soap, Urban Outfitter's "Urban Renewal" concept, To-GoWare, TerraCycle , Alchemy Goods, Solio, Seventh Generation, Patagonia, prAna, and Subaru.

My vote? All these companies mean well and are trying hard, but all are building consumables that need consistent replacement. My vote is a company that, to my knowledge doesn't have an eco-gene in its DNA, Lodge Cast Iron. Lasts forever, is cheap, and works better than most hyper-expensive cookware. Almost all chefs claim it is an essential tool in their kit. It's non-stick, you can beat the shit out of it, throw in in a fire, crank it to 500+ degrees, and scrape it clean with a chisel. No-soap cleaning, a scrub with coarse salt, and back on the stove to dry. Not to mention the instructions to prepare a skillet for a lifetime of use is to fry up a couple of pounds of bacon.

Not real glamorous I know, but I believe it is time that we peel our attention away from the recycled, up-cycled, and low-impact, and focus on the hyper-durable. It is the items that we buy once and never replace that have the highest value and lowest impact, and should be the heroes of environmental manufacturing.

PEMBAspeaks is honored to host this guest post from ThePiton. Check out ThePiton blog, or follow on Twitter.

Photos: PEMBAway II

2009-03-30T10:58:00.002-05:00

We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.

We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.

Lao Tzu | Tao Te Ching : v11

The New Influencers

2009-03-30T06:00:00.002-05:00

PEMBAnote: Recently, we've open up PEMBAspeaks to select guest bloggers, and what follows is the first of these. We're very pleased and proud to host Sara Lingafelter from TheClimberGirl.com, and look forward to more of her contributions.

During the last few weeks, I've had several discussions on Twitter and in real life with some of my new friends in the outdoor industry about "influence." I'm an avid recreational climber, so most of my time is spent interacting with folks in the climbing subsegment; until recently I've had relatively little exposure to the larger sports and outdoor community. As participation among industry folks increases on Twitter, there have been more conversations across segments, with folks from the broader industry sparking or joining in on discussions.

Recently, Kris at SportsOneSource.com posted an item on Twitter discussing the effectiveness of athlete and celebrity endorsements. That triggered a healthy discussion among Kris, Pemba and Larry at Amazon about the importance of social media, face-to-face interaction, and how to identify influencers in segments like climbing, which are less traditionally "competitive" than other segments of the sports and outdoor industry.

In climbing, influencers don't necessarily come from the #1 spot in the latest comp. So, where do they come from?

The real world.

She's probably getting a little tired of hearing it from me (though I'm sure her sponsors aren't), but Steph Davis is an example of a professional climber doing it absolutely right.

Steph has always done it right - she climbs hard, inspires through her climbing and her writing, and has a long history of connecting with the community through direct involvement, slideshows, and through film. In "Outdoor 2.0," Steph is an example of a pro who Gets It. She has a well-written, content-driven, and interactive blog, where she responds to reader questions and features her sponsors in a non-intrusive way. Taking it a step further than most, Steph has embraced social media, including regularly interacting directly with the climbing community on Twitter. Notice the key word, there: "Interacting." She participates in conversations with the rest of us "normal" climbers as if she's just one of us, I suspect because she just might be just one of us. She tweets about her efforts on her backyard climbing wall, and her choice of cams in between tweets about her vegetable garden and her tile project. She chimes in on gear questions, with advice on brands she works with and those she doesn't. She comes across - at all times - as warm, genuine, credible and human. All of these factors make her an example of the type of ambassador that companies should covet.

Now, I'm not a pro. I'm just another "climber with a writing problem" (the original is @redheadwriting, and I've never read five words strung together that I so wished I'd written myself.) Lately though, a few folks in the biz have taken an interest in what I do (thank you, Pemba and Larry.) Some folks even believe that little ol' me has some influence within my relevant community. I'm starting to get asked by folks in the industry, "How do you do it? What makes you special? Why do folks care what you think?"

Um...

Re-read that paragraph I just wrote about Steph. I write a content-driven blog, chock full of trip reports, photo essays, training experiences and insights, stories from my climbing life, as well as gear reviews and product spotlights. I participate in, and foster abundant discussion among readers. I engage with the community (and neighboring communities) via interactive participation on Twitter and other social networks. I tweet about my climbing life, and my life outside of climbing. I am always at the ready to chime in on gear and training questions, based on my real life experiences. I like people, so I'm naturally warm and human in my online interactions. I get outside more than the average weekend warrior, so while I'm not sending sick hard or floating up jaw-dropping free solos, I do have enough experience and authority to be credible. All of these factors, apparently, make me an example of the type of influencer that companies are starting to watch.

Brands and people who work with brands need to look outside the competition circle to identify influencers who connect with their intended audience. It's not as complicated as it sounds. The new influencers - professionals and the rest of us - are already out there, doing what we do, because we can't help it. I'd blog and tweet and review gear even if nobody listened to a word I say - I love doing it, that much. I'd imagine that someone like Steph gets to where she is because she loves it, that much. And, there are people like both Steph and I in each little corner of the sports and outdoor industry.

Beyond just letting the pros and bloggers do their thing on their own, brands can benefit from building closer relationships with new influencers like me. I blog, write reviews and tweet about the products and brands I love, because I use and love them. I don't review products that I'm not truly in love with, whether that product is bought for full price at retail or provided by the company for the purposes of the review. If I encounter a product I'm not truly in love with, I let the supplier know through private channels, in case they care to listen to my feedback. I'm someone who trusts my life to my gear every time I go out - from my rope, to my baselayer. As a result, I have strong feelings, and generate valuable feedback, whether publicly or privately.

But I'd do all that whether the industry pays any attention to me or not.

The benefit that you in the biz get from paying attention to folks like me, and appreciating what we do, and connecting with us through social networking, and getting to know us as people through trading tweets or commenting on our blogs is increased loyalty, if you're so inclined. Just like a climbing partnership, with careful attention and through shared experiences both epic and mundane, we can build a certain mutual respect, trust, and loyalty.

I have a short list of brands that I've relied on since my early days of climbing (or earlier), and with whom I've connected through Twitter or through those of you reading who "get" what I do and see value in it. Those brands are the ones I look to first when I do my own shopping, and the ones I think of first when I need to make a recommendation to someone else. Partly, it's because those lines are the biggest dots on my radar given limited time to keep an eye on the market - they're what I know best without having to do any research. Partly though, it's because I dig seeing people making a living doing what they love, which the best of you are doing. If I can do what I'm already doing, in a way I believe in, and it means one of my "Twitter friends" is going to have a brightened day at work, then that's a pretty sweet deal all the way around.

I think it goes without saying that your professional ambassadors might be able to take a page out of the "new influencer" playbook, if they haven't already. The "rules" we play by are pretty simple. Be nice. Answer questions. Be honest. Communicate with both personality and professionalism. Let love of life, and sport, be contagious for readers. The pros who will make the most effective "new influencers" are the ones who naturally play by those rules.

Getting to Know Sara...
Sara Lingafelter is a climber, writer, gear junkie, attorney and half-time dog mama based in the Pacific Northwest. In addition to blogging about the climbing life at RockClimberGirl.com, Sara is the unofficial #climb community den mother on Twitter, where she met and grew fond of Pemba Serves and the people involved.

Over the years, Sara has developed an appreciation and fondness for the outdoor industry and its denizens, and is considering making a career shift in that direction. For now though, Sara adores her work with the Puget Sound Partnership, a Washington State agency with the mission of restoring the health of Puget Sound by 2020; at First Ascent Law PS, her private solo law practice; as Spiritual Advisor to the Kitsap Vertical World Climbing Gym; and as a freelance writer and editor.

In her free time, Sara climbs as often as possible at home crags between Squamish, BC and Smith Rock, OR, and is a prolific writer lacking the patience necessary for the print cycle. In addition to her own sites and guest posts here at PEMBAspeaks, Sara is a reader blogger for Climbing Magazine and gear reviewer for rockclimbing.com. Sara lives in the Pacific Northwest with her half-time dog Hana, a seven-year-old yellow labrador retriever.

Rattlesnake Mound

2009-03-20T12:07:00.002-05:00

It's like Where's Waldo, just with Katie...can you find her?

Katie and I took a day off yesterday and went up to Rattlesnake Mound. It's a fairly new area and is pretty cool. A tornado came through a couple years ago and took out most of the trees in the area. Everything felt wide open but it got really windy at times. Made for a cool atmosphere though.

We warmed up on the House Boulder and got warm pretty quick. In the sun it was perfect out and we were down to t-shirts and sweating. After packing up our stuff we went over to Chaos. It is on my list for the year and I wanted to give it a good flash go since it was very much my style. I promptly blew the flash by missing the first hold and went to work on it for real. I was able to get all the moves worked out pretty quickly but my skin was suffering badly from a solid month of not climbing more than once a week.

Chaos is about 6 moves long and is full on power crimping. For me the crux is going to be bumping from the first tiny crimp to the second, bigger, crimp. I couldn't quite put it together yesterday but we may be going back tomorrow for more. It should go down then. The moves are all really fun and it was a good effort by John to put it up last year. Well done sir!!!

After getting completely cold at Chaos we went over to the sunny side of the bluff again to explore a little. We found a nice little boulder with about 5-6 really fun warm ups. There is potential for some more but it's a nice little boulder and has cool exposure to it. The setting is unique and was a great way to cool down after a great day.

I approve!!!

Lessons of Xegar

2009-03-18T11:06:00.012-05:00

We spent ten days in Xegar. Every day, we watched it rain, waiting. Prior to our sojourn in Xegar, we spent ten days crossing Tibet on muddy roads, over landslides, through floods. We expected our gear to be waiting for us in Xegar, as it was sent from Beijing before us. Instead, we waited in Xegar for our gear, for ten days.

On the dark morning of the twentieth day after leaving Beijing, I woke to violent shaking; the single bulb above my bed swung from side to side. Along with everything else, I was very sick. I heard somebody shout from another room,”Earthquake! Earthquake!” Relieved that the shaking wasn’t some further manifestation of my illness, I rolled over and went back to sleep.

A few hours later, the first of six trucks that carried our gear arrived. Eighteen hours later, the last truck rolled in. Mostly, our boxes had been packed upside-down. Rightways, they were waterproof; upside-down they were water-tight. In the monsoon rains they filled completely with water. All of our gear was soaked. Some things could be dried – tents, bags, climbing equipment – but the toilet paper and chocolate chip cookies were all waste. We spent two days drying some stuff and trashing others before finally leaving Xegar.

We didn’t make it far. The earthquake altered the course of a river, which in turn washed out the last bridge between us and where we were going. A small, crumbling strip of dirt connected the bank with the bridge, and that was it. Less than 10K out of Xegar, and we were stuck, again.

Our LO was fatalistic: ”It won’t be possible to go to the mountain. We will only charge you $XX,XXX.00 to take you back to Beijing early.” Liaison Officers are paid per expedition – successful or not - and they get paid a portion of everything they are able to charge. They also get a portion of any funds that are left over from the expedition’s budget. The quicker the expedition finishes, the more money they make, and the sooner they get to go home.

We unloaded our gear from the trucks, and moved it all out onto the bridge. We pitched our tents and moved in. We decided to live on a bridge in central Tibet for as long as it took to get off of it, but only if we were moving in the right direction. The LO said,”This is very irregular. We will charge extra for this.” He got back into his Landcruiser and returned to Xegar.

We schemed ways to get our gear across the river to our destination. One of our drivers tried to make it, and failed spectacularly.

We walked miles in each direction to find a better crossing, and found one that we thought might work. The LO was unconvinced. Bob Skinner stripped down to his BVD’s and his cowboy hat and strode in his boots purposefully towards the glacial river. “I’ll show ‘em how to cross a damned river!” he growled.

The LO - visibly shocked at the sight of Bob’s bare white skin - gasped and protested. What followed was a game of Red Rover at the water’s edge, with one mostly naked cowboy against a line of shocked and prudish CMA authorities. Bob stepped forward, prepared to break through. The LO said,”We’ll find a way – please, put your clothes back on.” We went back to the bridge with nothing settled.

That afternoon, we formed a fire-brigade to pass stones into the hole in the bridge. “This is ridiculous,” said Sibylle Hechtel, and she was right. There was no way that we could fill the hole with rocks and our bare hands. I was dispatched to Xegar with a wad of cash on a mission to buy shovels. The LO assigned a young interpreter to go with me.

“There are no shovels in Tibet,” he said as we walked into town. He then bolted into the first store we came to, and I followed, confused. He spoke with the man behind the counter in rapid-fire Chinese, although the man was Tibetan. There was a moment of silence, followed by a question in Tibetan that I took to mean,”What did you say?”

The interpreter turned to me and said,”This is the best store in Xegar, and they have no shovels. This man say that there are no shovels in Tibet. They don’t have them here.”

“This is a candy store,” I said, pointing to the rows of sugary sweets,”We need a hardware store.” I walked out with the interpreter already pursuing to block my way.

“We must leave Xegar,” he said,”You will not find shovels here.” I stepped around him and walked down the road towards the next store. Turning a corner, we came across a work-crew repairing the dirt road. There were dozens of people working. Each one had a shovel. “Here are our shovels,” I said and reached into my pocket for the money to buy them.

He grabbed my hand and pushed it back into my pocket: ”You will not buy these shovels! These are not for you!” I thought of Bob at the river’s edge, and wondered what he might do, now. My inner Bob said pretty clearly,"Deck the sonofabitch!" Somehow, this didn't seem like the best idea, although I was tempted. Instead, we stared each other down, inches away from each other. “Why not?” I asked.

“These people, these shovels are not theirs. They cannot sell them to you. If they do, they go to prison,” he said. The wad of Chinese Rinminbi burned in my pocket, enough to buy all of the shovels there, and then some. With me I had the equivalent of a year’s salary for each of the workers. I thought of bullet-holes and blood spatters – evidence of firing squads – that I saw on the walls in Lhasa and Xigaze and Xegar. I didn’t doubt what he said about the workers going to prison for selling me a shovel. And I knew he would turn them in, just to make the point. I turned back towards the bridge without saying another word.

The whole way back to the bridge, he went on in a theme: “If you need anything – shovels, food, trucks, ANYTHING – CMA gets it for you. You get nothing on your own. NOTHING. We get everything you need. Only CMA. ONLY CMA, you understand?”

I understood. Sadly, it wasn’t the first time that I had encountered people whose only goal was to thwart the goals of others. It wouldn’t be the last, either. Sometimes, people do this for profit. Profit is what motivated the CMA. That, and they wanted control, which is the primary way that they make profits.

Other times, people thwart others because they lack a vision of their own, and fear change. Not able to imagine a different outcome or process than what they already know, they fight with all that they have just to keep the status quo. These people respond to a vision or goal with only “That won’t work.” Then, they do everything possible to assure that their prediction comes true. The saying goes,”Whether you predict success or failure, you’re right.” Only with one of these can you be accurate 100% of the time. More than anything, people who fear change find comfort in making correct predictions about the future. By contrast, others believe that the best way to predict the future is to create it.

We got off the bridge by hiring trucks that were stuck coming from the other direction. We were only able to hire four and we needed six, and we had to ditch our bus. So, we went to the mountain in stages over the course of several days. We rode on top of the loads . Where necessary, we siphoned gas from our trucks to fill empty tanks on the other side, hand-carrying the fuel across the bridge. The thing about the bridge at Xegar is that it wasn’t about getting across; our goal was beyond the skyline. It would’ve been easy to get caught up and thwarted by a roadblock, but that wasn’t what we had in mind when we set out. Our goals were bigger than the small obstacles that got in the way.

The takeaway? As Todd always said: “Stay on mission.”

Go Outside, Dangit!

2009-03-06T19:03:00.002-06:00

I've been rather despondent lately. The weather and other assorted home projects have kept me from getting my USRDA of sunlight, and its taken its toll. I'm not really a morning person anyway; rising early isn't really in my vocabulary, and when it has to happen, there usually needs to be superhuman doses of caffeine involved to avoid a homicide investigation.

What's more is that come winter time, I'm prone to outright hibernation if someone or something doesn't kick my butt once in a while - this morning, it was the dog. From the hour that the alarm went off, until I finally gave up trying to ignore her (an hour and 15 minutes), Bindi-Roo jumped in the bed on top of me, plowed her nose under my arm, tried to dig me out of the quilt, and attempted to run out of the room with the covers. There is little to be done to dissuade a determined Cattle Dog - over the last 4 years I've learned that I won't ever win, the best I can hope for is a split decision by the judges. Bindi had somehow gotten the idea in her little noggin that going for a hike would be a fantastic idea. A check of the weather revealed that, yes, she was right. I put on a few clothes, grabbed her leash and one LEKI Carbonlite Antishock pole, and we were off.

Now, I'm pretty dang lucky with location. The Mississippi Valley Conservancy owns a nice portion of land, immediately behind my house (La Crosse South Blufflands) and a great trail goes through it. Its not a technical hike, by any means, but its also a little steeper than your average walk in the woods. From the trailhead, you take a short walk down, then it winds a pretty consisitent uphill path for the better part of a mile. The trail crests on the ridge, defined by a small rock formation, then its mostly a downhill loop back. Hiking back here with the dog is fantastic - because there is [sadly] hardly anyone back there, and she can run, run, run...if you have or know a herding breed, you know what a great releif it is to let them run.

We've had a lot of melting lately. In the woods, snow still blankets most of the ground, a couple inches deep, and the trails are, well, ice. Hence the pole. No matter for Bindi-Roo with her built in crampons.

I noticed a few tire tracks while on this hike, and to whoever the biker is - kudos! This is not an easy singletrack once you gain the ridge.

Now, some people who hike, walk, backpack...whatever with dogs always seem to have their faithful companion, at their side or trailing a little ways behind. Not so with Bindi-Roo. Aussie Cattle Dogs are notoriously independent and curious clowns. Hiking with Bindi means maintaining a pace while she sprints ahead, or off into the woods after an imagined critter, or off into the woods after a real critter. Every time, she runs ahead, stops, then looks back as if to say "Will ya hurry up?".

Its not above the Cattle Dog to see a deer and think "Hey, I can get that!", not really aware that their tiny 40-odd pounds of Dingo ancestry isn't likely to catch, much less bring down anything other than a new born fawn. So, hiking with Bindi-Roo means that every two or three minutes, I'm calling out "Bindi, GET back here!" - which to her credit, she does every time. I think its because I have food.

We follow along the singletrack path, coming up to the top of the ridge. Its been a gorgeous hike already - sunlight feels good. Getting out in a nice calm day feels good. It feels good to get a hike in. It feels good not to be staring at some computer or tv screen, or to be stuck on the spin trainer staring at the same DVD you've been riding to all winter. It feels good to have this trail, these woods, all this scenery, and all the available outdoor activity coming back into the daily routine. I can tell Bindi's enjoying it too, because she's playing the clown and posing for the phone camera.

We get to the far end of the smaller loop, and I see her slowing down a bit. I'm not the only one who's a little out of shape from this winter - she's been relegated to the occasional snowshoe hike and walks around the neighborhood - usually cut shorter because those big radar dishes she has for ears can freeze pretty quickly, and its been a cold, windy one here. She's had her run in the woods, knows these trails well already, and tells me in no uncertain terms that "This has been great - we should make our way back and EAT!" I once heard someone talk about Cattle Dogs being happy when they're tired - because they smile when they pant. Makes sense to me!

We head back to the trailhead, and as its mostly downhill, I'm definitely watching my feet. Its slick, but I'm making decent time...all the time I've been using trekking poles, I wonder why I hadn't started using them earlier. I'm also thinking about the money I'm going to be spending this spring for another set, because I'm in love with this Carbonlite.

The new Aergon grip is fantastic in my palm - I'm top-gripping the pole for balance downhill, and the shape of the grip fits perfectly in my hand, also angling the pole perfectly out in front of me. I really couldn't think of a better way to design a pole.

I'm not all that thrilled when I look at pricing - no one ever is - but the weight is non-existent, everything about the Carbonlite is fantastic. Worth every penny.

On our way out, we take a little detour - road less traveled if you will. The nice thing about the last two major floods we've had along the river valley is that some of the erosion of the sandy soil away from the rocks has exposed some nice winter features. Like this one.

(This is my climb. Its hard to tell from the picture, but its about 30' tall, with a small ledge in the middle. I'm not a superman with grading climbs, but my guess is that its WI2-ish. A little bit of vertical with the ledge in the middle and a nice ramp to top out on. I call it "Be Careful With That Axe, Eugene", and yep, I'm allowed to name it because I led it several weeks ago during a vertical ice scouting mission. Its not Sweet Mother Moses, but its a block away from home. I wanted to see if it was still up, because its the first year this has ever formed, and I forgot the camera when I climbed it.)

We make our way back home - and for those of you who think I'm a crazy dog person who anthropomorphizes his dog, just try and tell me she's not glaring at me in annoyance at having to get wiped off before going inside.

So the moral is - Go outside. Even if its to just go take the dog for a walk. Its beautiful weather, this long winter looks FINALLY over, so its time to stop hibernating and go do something. Yet again, I'm taking life lessons from my dog - I could do worse, I think.

Midwestern Adventurer Andy Knapp Undergoes Immune System Transplant

2009-02-26T11:14:00.001-06:00

Veteran Midwest Mountaineering buyer and lifelong adventurer Andy Knapp has a staggering list of accomplishments:

Circumnavigating Lake Superior by bicycle in 1964
Bicycling from Minnesota to Alaska and back in 1967
A 500-mile solo backpacking trip through the Brooks Range in 1972
Climbing Mt. McKinley in 1979
Bicycling across Europe in 1984
Sea kayaking solo across Lake Superior from Isle Royale to Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula in 1993
Circumnavigating Lake Superior by sea kayak, without resupply in 1996

In 2003, Andy was diagnosed with Stage 3b renal cell carcinoma. After undergoing treatment, Andy celebrated the fortieth anniversary of his 1967 trip with another ride to Alaska. All told, Andy has logged over 156,000 human powered miles.

Facing months of recovery and a 30% chance of success Andy began his immune system transplant this week.

Anyone here would dream of heading out the door on any one of Andy's past adventures. Today though, we can join him on his latest.

Andy is currently blogging through his treatment at www.andytknapp.blogspot.com. Please take the time to visit, send out some healing thoughts and maybe even leave a comment for Andy to read.

:: gearjunkie's profile of Andy
:: Andy's induction into the Midwest Mountaineering Hall of Fame

A Quick Thought

2009-02-23T21:28:00.002-06:00

This thought is probably more appropriate for Twitter, but - really quickly - how many outdoor businesses are multi-generational?

We work for a lot of founders - it's pretty much our thing here at Pemba - so by definition these companies are mostly in their first generation. (Petzl is a notable exception, as it's strongly in its second generation and perhaps working into its third.) There are a few outdoor manufacturers that have gone beyond one generation, but not many. We work with a few retail stores that are in their second generation or beyond: Fontana, Backcountry Outfitters, Fin & Feather, Hoigaard's, Champaign Surplus, Scheel's, and Laacke & Joys come to mind (sorry if I missed anybody...) Some liveries and guide services have made it into the second and third generation. There are a handful of second-generation reps around, too. Beyond this, who's out there?

By comparison, there seem to be a lot of multi-generation ski shops, shoe stores, and bike shops. (For the moment, let's not talk about jewelry stores, auto manufacturers, and breweries...) Maybe we should count them to know for sure, but it seems that there are more of these than there are multi-generation outdoor stores.

This brings up some questions: Is it just that we're a young industry? Or is it that we're not handing our businesses and culture down to our kids? If we're not handing these things down to our own kids, how do we expect to get other people's kids involved in the outdoors, tomorrow?

Thoughts?

Barbies In A Basket; or, Why We Love Hannah Montana

2009-02-13T12:49:00.007-06:00

Straight from the horse's mouth, off of our Twitter Feed: @DarkTower - Amazon's stated goal yesterday: Anything with a UPC available to ship from an Amazon warehouse.

We love Hannah Montana, we really do. In my family, we watch her just about every night, along with Raven, Zach and Cody, The Wizards of Waverly Place, and just about anything else that Disney throws at us. I would like to say that this is just because we have young kids, but we would probably watch the Disney Channel on our own, just us parents. The fact is - and it's a secret so don't tell anybody - we do watch without the kids.

(Dang, did I just say that out loud? Well, forget I said it, okay? Totally wrecks my image, I know...)

This is pretty amazing, considering that outside of Dirty Jobs and the occasional sporting or political event, we watch no other television. The shows on Disney are fun, refreshing, have good values, and - mostly - they remind us of the TV we watched growing up. The plot lines are right out of I Love Lucy, I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, and The Brady Bunch. Of course, the Disney versions star preternaturally charismatic, talented t/weens that make us wonder how far Disney has come with their animatronics technology, but that's okay. (Note to self: Is Stepford a Disney product? Hmmm...) Mostly, they're just really likable kids you might want to know in real life, or at least seem to be.

By contrast, then there's Barbie, who turns 50 later this month. She's not showing her age (she's plastic, after all), but make no mistake: She's old news. We have two daughters, and one is thirteen and the other is five. When you have daughters, the Barbie products just come with the territory. We've never bought either of them anything Barbie, and yet each Christmas or birthday there's another one there, somehow. It just happens, and all the little shiny bits of plastic bling pile into a big basket. Last year, our thirteen-year-old spontaneously gifted her life-time collection of Barbie stuff to our five-year-old, so we had to get a bigger basket. I'm not sure that the dolls have moved, since. To our girls, Barbie has lost her mojo, and I'm not sure she ever had it with them, anyway.

On the Disney Channel, there are no product ads, at all. This is strange in a day when even PBS has Chuck E. Cheese and cereal ads. Forget about being ad-free with Barbie, where even the ads have ads, and all of it for more plastic stuff. What Disney advertises instead is their culture. When you watch Disney, you only see ads about Disney. And these ads aren't about Disney stuff, they're ads about other Disney franchises: Upcoming movies, new televisions series, music from their latest teen phenomenon, and the like. They also have PSA's about being active, the environment, and "doing your best." These PSA's are downright inspiring. Good stuff, really; I'd show them to Team Pemba during our PEMBaway retreats if I could get copies.

Where Disney succeeds and Barbie fails is that they get that it's all about perpetuating their culture, from generation to generation. They already hooked my wife and me when we were kids, and by writing just enough from our childhood into franchises geared to our children, they are assuring that we help hook our kids on Disney as well. Plus, we actually like to go to Disneyland; stepping on one of Barbie's plastic high-heeled booties in the middle of the night, not so much.

This is a lesson that we in the outdoor industry should take to heart. We need to do a better job of selling our culture across generations. We've gotten away from this, perhaps because it's easier to make metrics that support product-oriented advertising. The theory here is that if you take out an ad that features a purple jacket, you can watch to see if sales increase in purple jackets, and thus justify your ROI. (Don't get me wrong: ROI is a good metric, but it's not everything.) Or maybe it's because we in the outdoor industry have long hung our hats on esoteric expeditions to far-flung places. Never mind that most of us don't have time anymore even to dream about such things, the truth is that long before Messner declared that we'd killed the impossible these expeditions stopped capturing our imaginations. The remote isn't that remote, and even if it is, it's far-far-away in our minds, today.

If we're focused solely on selling the shiny plastic stuff, we're really just waiting to be shucked into the big bucket in the garage. It seems a truth already that mostly we are just selling to ourselves. We have to find ways to be more relevant to our customers' daily lives, and to find ways to be more relevant to more people, also. Culturally, we should own the green market, bicycle commuting, local recreation, and family activities, and we don't. The fact is, we don't even own our own customers anymore.

While we wrestle with the idea of adopting new distribution channels, our customer is already going elsewhere. It's seems old-school to think about being the "first" or "only" distributor of a given item in a given market - most of our customers are already ahead of us, and are in fact leading the way, away. While many spend time worrying about somebody else who's selling the same stuff, others - like Midwest Mountaineering, not incidentally - just focus on designing an experience that perpetuates their culture.

We're not an industry that can thrive by selling things. To be successful, more of us need to spend more time selling our culture, and less time worrying about selling stuff.

Bedwetters

2009-02-02T16:50:00.003-06:00

Katie and I are leaving in one week for a trip to Little Rock City in Chattanooga, TN. We both can't wait to leave and are very very excited about getting out of Madison. We've got a list of problems that we want to get on and cannot wait to get on real rock. Plastic is getting real old right now.

I found this video of a climb called "Bedwetters" on www.B3Bouldering.com. Jamie runs a fantastic site and always has worthwhile and fun stories on there. Definitely check it out for a few minutes and take a look around. He has a very refreshing outlook on hard climbing both in and out of Colorado. I also like that he's a Michigan boy at heart.

The problem itself looks phenomenal and I can't wait to try it. While it might be a bit over my head I've always been a proponent of trying things that are "too hard" for me. It's good to have goals and i've surprised myself more than once.

If anyone has any recommendations for climbs we need to do while we're down in Chatty let us know.

Kowabunga, Las Vegas!

2009-01-29T01:52:00.006-06:00

"I just have to ask," said the man on the elevator after a few minutes of uncomfortable silence,"Why?"

"Why not?" I said. I mean, to this question - sometimes - what else can you say? If I had been in full drag and wearing a monkey for a hat, he probably would not have blinked twice. But in that I was just about to surf the Strip, I think that even for Vegas this was a little unusual.

After all, I was holding a skateboard as big as me and a stick that was even bigger. Okay - yeah, granted - I'm not that big, but this is a big board and it's obviously out of place in the MGM Grand here in Las Vegas. And really, I can't explain the Big Kahuna Stick even to people who ride. (Some things just need to be experienced...)

Things got a little weirder even when I got out onto the Strip. I rode past one man who wore live parrots as jewelry. People tried to sell me things that really shouldn't ever be sold. Others offered to buy the board, and the stick, and - well, I think - maybe even me, but hey, this is Vegas, Baby. It ain't nothing personal, it's just that everything here has a price.

But for an hour, as I moved slowly north on the Las Vegas Strip and then turned around and came back to the hotel, I was the lone surfer on a neon-lit wave of polished concrete. Wave after wave of people parted around me like bait-fish before a passing dolphin. I passed the Bellagio as the fountains erupted, and the mists from them were like spray from a chlorinated sea. If this wasn't real, it was the next best thing after ten straight days of outdoor tradeshows, indoors.

When SIA moves to Denver, I won't miss this town much. But - hey - tonight Las Vegas, thanks for the ride. Thankyouverymuch!

(Elvis has left the building...)

Simple Tools

2009-01-20T12:33:00.003-06:00

My grandfather Durward was a plumber. In the Forties and Fifties, he took his family all around the West so that he could work on projects as large as dams or as complex as housing projects. For a good part of the year, they lived in a big wall tent. My Dad and his brothers hunted rabbits for Grandma's stewpot while Grandpa worked. From the pictures and the stories, life was right out of a novel by Stegner, or Steinbeck.

I have some of Grandpa's tools on my desk. When I’m thinking – as I’ve been doing a lot lately – I sometimes hold these tools just to feel them in my hands. The truth is, I like to hold the tools because they make me think I can figure things out, even when at times the answers aren't so obvious. I say to myself,"Grandpa was a tradesman who used simple tools to do amazing things."

Okay, yeah, it's hokey. But it helps.

To me, today – January 20th, 2009 - feels like the official start of the New Year. In any case, it’s the start of a new era, and I haven’t felt this hopeful in a long, long time. Part of this hope flows from the feeling that – beginning right now – we can match hard work with open-ended opportunity and in the process create something entirely new. Today, “innovation” becomes a by-product of “possibility,” rather than purely a response to “limitation.” Hope is a simple tool with rough, well-worn edges, and there’s no denying the weight of it when you hold it in your hand.

As is the case with most of the country, we at Pemba Serves had a challenging 2008. We had good challenges that came from opportunities and hard challenges that came from setbacks. We weathered each of them to the best of our abilities. We were largely successful, and sometimes – honestly - we failed. We lost good people, and brought some new people onto our team. At times, the opportunities came so strongly it felt like we were drinking from the firehose. Other times, it seemed like we were just in over our heads.

Still, we managed to get some things done. We took on large new initiatives and - surprisingly - achieved most of them. For 2008, we offer our thanks to our partners: We wouldn’t be here without you, and we’re glad you stick with us.

For 2009 and beyond, we have some new things in the works. First and foremost, we want to expand upon the "Done Daily" theme that we began to develop in the latter part of 2008. To this end, we’re going to refine the ways in which we communicate with each other, our friends, colleagues, and customers. (No secrets here: This here interweb thingy will play a part in this.) We’ve challenged ourselves to look at the standard clinic model and see if there’s a way we can do it more effectively. We’re going to find new ways to do what we do with an eye towards sustainability. And, we want to open the conversation about best-practices in our little niche of the outdoor industry.

As always, we’ll have a few WAP’s, too. (That’s “Wild Ass Plans…”) Some of these actually stick, it seems. At the very least, the wild ideas make our work more interesting. Well, at least to us, and that makes it more fun to do what we do.

Fun, hope, good people, and some inspiring goals - not a bad tool-kit for 2009. Now, it's time to get to work...

Inspired by the past

2009-01-16T09:46:00.007-06:00

After reading Brian's last few posts about some of the more obscure, harder lines at Devil's Lake, I wanted to post some old pictures I had of both of the climbs he wrote about.

First up is Jenga. It's towards the top of the west bluff talus field at Devil's Lake and is really hard to find. Peter was taking us all around the west bluff one day and we stumbled upon it. He looked at it for a second and remembered that it was, in fact, Jenga. He'd done the FA a few years prior. The name comes from all of the rocks at the base that he rearranged to make a better landing. Said it took him hours to clean up the landing, but the line is completely worth it.

The next couple of shots are of Hefty on the Keymaker. This problem was done in 2003 by Brian Sandona and is still unrepeated. He gave it a tentative V11 and it's a great contender for hardest climb at the lake. The crux involves a bad left hand crimp and a waist level lockoff. There seems to be more interest in this year(Brian, Nic, Me??) so maybe we'll see a repeat soon.

Every year around this time I start to get antsy to get outside and start climbing again. This year is no different and I've already planned out a couple of trips. I should have my list of 2009 goals next week or so. Hopefully I'll complete more of the climbs this time....

Extra Special Shout Out

2009-01-15T11:50:00.005-06:00

Special shout-out to the IT guy for braving the snow-covered roads and -12 degree weather to diagnose Brad's computer problem. Turns out the screen wasn't working because the computer was sleeping. We can't really blame Brad, he's a Mac-guy after all, but it is agreed that he can no longer claim the title of in-house IT support.

Special Shout Out

2009-01-15T00:27:00.003-06:00

Just FYI: Janice was up past midnight tonight ushering in the last of the early deadline MHW orders. I posted this on our Twitter and Facebook feeds, but wanted to get it here, too.

Thanks for the extra effort, Janice! That's friggin' DEDICATION!

Happy New Year - Get After It

2009-01-01T15:00:00.004-06:00

Less Is More

2008-12-25T08:00:00.002-06:00

Team Pemba craftmanship of a recent vintage. Gordon the Gecko says,"Green is Good."

For eight of the last ten years, Team Pemba has sent out hand-made cards to all of our colleagues, customers, and assorted FOP's (Friends of Pemba...) All right, so we've missed two years in a row, including this one. We just didn't get them out this year, so please accept our apologies.

When we've made cards, we choose 100% recycled card-stock, create a potato press out of an interesting graphic, and go to town on production line card manufacturing. (Often, there's beer involved...) It takes a couple of days, and the cards are always a lot of fun to make. As we still see them here and there from time to time, apparently they are also fun to receive.

Last year, Christmas was almost perfect for me. By this, I mean that I only received a couple gifts. I'm hoping that some year I score a zero, but that's a slim chance as Vera and the kids will always get or make me something. (And, the truth is, I love what they get me and especially what they make...) Meanwhile, I just don't need much.

So far, this year is looking good. We only received two Christmas cards at PEMBAbase, and our only gift was a donation in our name to help protect the rain-forest. I guess we can thank the current economic environment for this downturn in gifts and cards, but I'm hoping that this is a trend that will continue in years to come. I'm no Scrooge, but - honestly - there are just better ways to contribute to the greater good than by sending us gifts or cards. We've received lots of eCards and thank-you notes via e-mail, and this is about as good as it gets. After all, less is more, except in the area of giving thanks.

So, in this vein, we do want to take this opportunity to thank our colleagues, customers, and friends for another great year. It's a pleasure to work with you, to know you, and to be able to do what we do. We wish you joy in this season and peace and prosperity in the year ahead.

Thank you. Thank you very, very much.

Where's Pemba?

2008-12-24T09:33:00.005-06:00

All over this video.

Watch this clip of the Iditarod Trail Invitational from NY Times' multimedia library, then post back here in the comments with your thoughts and an inventory of Pemba's products. There might be a Sea to Summit eVENT Compression Dry Sack in it for the most complete list...

More on the Iditarod Trail Invitational at Alaska Ultra Sport.

12/13/08

2008-12-19T11:05:00.004-06:00

There are certain dates that stick in your head. This is one of them.

Last saturday Katie and I went to the Vilas Zoo to walk around and play for a little bit. At the first exhibit, the buffalo, I asked her to marry me. She said yes, thankfully, and we had a fantastic day at the Zoo. One we'll never forget.

I love her. More than I ever imagined I could. She complements me and makes me a better person when I'm around her. It's perfect.

I feel very lucky that I get to spend the rest of my life with someone that makes me so happy and I wouldn't have it any other way. We still smile and giggle when we call each other our fiance'. The whole thing has been very surreal for both of us and I hope that everyone gets to experience this feeling.

Needless to say, I'm very excited to have another "Schultz" in the family....

"We live in an amazing, amazing world..."

2008-12-15T13:56:00.001-06:00

"...and it's wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots"

The Last Day

2008-12-10T13:13:00.005-06:00

It's always sad. Especially when you know that it's the last one.

The last day of the season is a bittersweet experience. You ride the fine line of wanting to finish up your projects before the snow sets in and yet you still want to just sit back and enjoy the day.

While there will be other days and trips throughout the rest of winter, the Wisconsin rock season is all but over now. We've got anywhere from 6 inches to a foot and a half of snow on the ground now. There are more than likely going to be a couple of frigid outings full of tarps, brooms and space heaters. Chances are that if the snow sticks around until February I'll get frustrated with the gym and try to do another Southern Illinois trip over a weekend. Maybe I'll even camp in a Wal Mart parking lot again. Just to get the full experience.

Until then, memories and pictures of the last day will have to suffice. This fall season has been one of my most rewarding yet. Not because of any particular sends, in fact very few took place. In terms of numbers, Fall of 2007 was my best ever, but it wasn't even close to being my favorite. This year stuck out because every single day that we went to the boulders we had fun. There wasn't a single day that I didn't have a good time. I spent time with friends and was able to let go of pressures that used to bog me down.

It was perfect. I really couldn't have asked for a better fall. It's been a long time since I've had this much fun climbing.

It'll be a new year soon with new goals and dreams. More than anything I'm excited to see what next year has in store for me. Maybe I'll finally step up to the plate and finish off Sandstone Violence. Maybe...

PembaServes.com Temporarily Down.

2008-12-05T12:29:00.003-06:00

Beginning Friday December 5th at 5pm the PembaServes.com web site and email will be temporarily down over the weekend while we migrate our services.

Communications can be directed to PEMBAbase at (608) 250 2400

Email and web services should be back online on Monday.

Something Xtra

2008-12-02T22:29:00.011-06:00

Brad enjoying the ride and the lightshow from the back of Vera's new/old bike.

If you've been following along you might remember that a few projects have been occupying my spare time and attention for - well - about this last calendar year. Yeah, I've been building vintage bikes, part by part. It's a fun hobby (all right, a passion) and it keeps me off the streets. Well, scratch that: It's a fun hobby that keeps me ON the streets, and that's a good place for all of us. Check out project #2, recently completed:

Vera's 25+yo Diamond Back Ascent, refurbished, retooled, and pimped-out as an Xtracycle.

Paint courtesy of Cyclart, labor at Williamson Bicycle Works.

Today I ran a majority of my business and personal errands in the saddle. I live across the street from PEMBAbase, so this doesn't seem like such a big deal. Really, it isn't. Dozens, hundreds, and thousands of people ride every day here in Madison, so I just joined them. So what if it was cold and icy today? It was really fun taking the two young kids to school while pulling them in their trailer, and it was doubly fun riding double on the Xtracycle this evening when I picked up Emma from dance. Plus, I got to run the DLG in the dark, and that was really cool.

What I've noticed is that when I run errands on bike - or on skateboard, or even while walking - I enjoy the process. I may leave the office stressed and tired and thinking of the next thing, and somewhere en route this all goes away. By the time I return, I'm ready for whatever's on my calendar next.

You know, it's just the opposite when I drive. When I drive for my errands, it takes about the same amount of time as when I take other modes of transport. And I worry. I worry about getting to my destination on time, about finding parking, traffic, one-way streets, and other things that I need to do. I'm distracted by the stuff that's piling up for me to do while I'm driving. When I commute by other methods - say, by cycling - I find that the end becomes the reason for the process, and not the other way around. I become more aware of the moment and less concerned about what's happening next, or what I might be missing by spending time in a car.

As a small business owner and a father of three kids - believe me - I can use every break I get, no matter how small. Riding five minutes back and forth to the bank? That's all right by me, that's all right by me.

Rare As Wild Tigers

2008-11-25T09:45:00.009-06:00

It's hard to be a rep. I'm not whining, mind you. Just sayin': It's hard to be a rep.

Think about the skill-sets needed in order to be a good rep in this industry. For one thing, to be a rep in the outdoor industry it helps if you have an A-game and/or preferably a passion in one or more outdoor sports, such as skiing, climbing, or paddling. You've got to be professional, interpersonal, driven, and willing to work hard for little (consistent) pay. You have to be able to move seamlessly from the bro' environment at the local climbing gym to the back boardrooms of Nordstrom's, sometimes even without changing clothes. (Just try pulling that one off...)

You have to love travel. Not the exotic, going-somewhere-foreign-and-beautiful kind of travel, but the pedantic, non-glamorous, stale-coffee travel that brings with it an intimate familiarity with every backwater roadhouse between here and Topeka. You have to be willing to leave home, family, and friends behind to do it. To make matters worse, often you drive right past some of the territory's best climbing, paddling, and skiing in order to get to that next destination. Mostly, you do this in the middle of the night...

It's no wonder that reps are getting fewer and rarer as each season passes. The rep shortage in this industry is one of those "don't-want-to-look-at-that" problems that everyone acknowledges and yet no one can really solve. It's like the worldwide shortage of honeybees. No one knows what's causing it or what can be done about it, but people in the know say that the loss of honeybees is directly related to the looming worldwide food shortage. Turns out that the bees are the major pollinators. They make things grow, and bloom, and bear fruit. Without putting too fine of a point on it, this is what reps do, too.

With all of this in mind it's sad that in this past week we've lost two reps in this territory: Sunday Park and Jenn Whitely have each moved on to bigger and better things. Of course, Sunday worked with Brian, Vanessa, and crew at Ames Adventure Outfitters; Jenn was for years with the Holton Sales Group. They have each moved on for the best of reasons - to spend more time with their families - but we'll still miss working with them, and we'll miss their work, too. They made people excited about their brands, their sports, and this industry. Reps like Sunday and Jenn are as rare as wild tigers, and - once gone - just as difficult to replace.

Really, it's true: There are fewer than 2000 tigers left in the wild, and there are certainly fewer reps than this in the outdoor industry.

During the last major economic downturn in 2002 following 9/11, a number of reps left this industry for good. While some are still around in other capacities, many are doing other things entirely. There's no accounting for the loss of passion and firepower, but there's no question that we're a weaker industry because of their departure. What's concerning is that we can probably expect a similar winnowing of the rep force in the near future, as market conditions, changing job descriptions, and sheer burnout take their toll in the coming months. Some welcome this, and see the opportunity in scarcity. Job security weighs out over professionalism, in this mindset. We here at Pemba have always taken another position, though: There is no end-game in being the last rep standing.

Reps are as critical to this industry as bees are to the food chain, or as tigers are to the jungle. You don't need to be a biologist to know what happens when you take the pollinators or the predators out of an ecosystem. This industry needs reps, and needs good ones at that. We need to keep the good reps we have and foster the development of new ones. We need to find a common ground of benefits, best-practices, and shared resources and infrastructure so that reps, the lines they represent, and the stores they serve all thrive in common.

Vacation

2008-11-19T16:16:00.012-06:00

It was awesome. Not a whole lot to say other than it was the best vacation I've ever been on. Relaxing, fun, enjoyable. You know, all the things a vacation should be. We had perfect weather and fantastic climbing conditions. We only had to drive an hour, which was a nice bonus. Plus, now Katie has a new found love for the PCS.

Have you scheduled your preview yet?

2008-11-12T15:23:00.007-06:00

Operators are standing by...

A little bit of Canoelover in me...

2008-11-05T12:22:00.006-06:00

I know it's not an Odonate, but it kept me entertained when I was too tired to climb on vacation last week. Thanks for the inspiration Canoelover...

I'll have more on said vacation later on this week.

Early Morning Starts

2008-10-27T12:38:00.006-05:00

Katie and I went bouldering again on Saturday and I think it's fair to say that both of us were a bit burned out on our current projects. Katie's fingers are starting to hurt from one of them and I felt sort of lazy on mine. Not all that inspired, to say the least. It was dreary, cold and windy Saturday afternoon and the climbing didn't last all that long.

Instead we went around the park and took a look at some of the new areas that were developed this past summer. We were both pretty psyched on the problems at the Deer Cove areas. Varied rock with pretty cool holds and fairly nice landings. Always a plus. Then we went over to the Cox Hollow boulders and walked up to a boulder that we were at 2 years ago. It was the same time of day and same time of year and was neat to be sitting there again, together. We both remembered that day and Katie has some pictures that I took of her, in her glovebox actually, on that particular problem. It was definitely the highlight of the weekend for me.

Fast forward to Saturday night, lying around watching "The Office" on DVD. Out of nowhere Katie said that we should go back Sunday morning before she had to work at 11. She wanted to try her project once more, after she thought up some new beta. At 6:30 the next morning we were a little less enthusiastic but still decided to go. I think Katie's exact words, when I asked her if she still wanted to go, were "I'm 70/30 right now".

Our bed was warm and comfy but we went anyway. It was so cold and windy out! It probably didn't help that the problem got NO sun at all. Katie was frozen and tried to warm up on the sharp crimps. Pain, and frigid, conditions won out in the end though.

Having another hour and a half left before we had to leave we went over to Deer Cove. It turned out to be way better. Sunny and a little breeze made for perfect conditions. It was about 40 degrees and Katie finally admitted that those were the best conditions to climb in. Soon I'll get her to break down and admit that she's a boulderer.

I hadn't pulled on rock yet but made a flash attempt on Grounded for Life, a really cool overhanging arete. I pulled on and made it through to the last move and then promptly dabbed on the rock behind me. A quick go to try the last move and then I put it all together a few minutes later. Such a fun problem!!! I was kind of astounded at how nice it felt to complete something!! How quickly we forget.

Katie did everything but the last couple of moves and we were blown away with how much fun the whole morning was. All day long I kept on thinking that this is what climbing is supposed to be. Fun, not work. It's always nice to have those little revelations and reminders that it should be enjoyable.

The Weirdest Ones

2008-10-20T10:04:00.005-05:00

So, normally when we go out bouldering we're the weirdest ones out there. Among all of the campers, hikers, horse riders and families, walking around with giant pieces of foam attached to our backs generally singles the climbers out amongst the crowd.

Not this Saturday.

These guys were.

You may remember me talking about the battlers in the costumes with the fake swords and armor a couple of weeks ago. Well, they were out in force this past Saturday. As we drove into the park we kept on seeing little pockets of these guys. Then we turned the corner to go to Group Camp B and they were everywhere. Both Katie and I were stunned. Hobbits, Elves, Nerds, Warriors, whatever you want to call them.

I think the most confusing part of all of this were the 4 people dressed up as Power Rangers. Their costumes did not leave a whole lot to the imagination. Just try to squeeze an adult body into one of the Power Rangers costumes designed for a kid. Not pretty.

That's all I'll say about that for now, the website does it more justice. As for the climbing, it was fantastic. Katie made great progress on both of her projects and I've unlocked the last key piece of beta for mine, much thanks to Remo for that one. Here's a shot of Katie on Split Personality. I'm beginning to learn how to use the flash correctly now. It's been fun to start taking pictures again.

One of those days.

2008-10-13T09:53:00.013-05:00

So Katie and I went out to Governor Dodge again on Saturday. It was one of those days that was just perfect, start to finish. It was so nice and I think we both needed it. We had breakfast at Tex Tubbs and then made our way out to the boulders. I had bought a new flash for my camera earlier that week and it was really fun to play around with it and experiment a little. After a little bit of toying around I got the wireless flash to work correctly, most of the time at least, and the result was pretty cool. I'm excited to try it out some more this fall. There was one car in the parking lot when we arrived and when we left we were the only ones there. Perfect. The temps weren't the best but there was a nice breeze and we made due.

It was great. I love fall. Can't wait for next weekend.

Here's a shot of the throw on Highly Executed. Out of all the pictures Katie took of me on the throw, this one stuck out. I love how you can see the whole problem and how the wall opens up as it goes away from the camera.

I decided to pull out the monkey face on this one. Classy.

After a few minor meltdowns and some entertaining falls, Katie got her left foot to stick again and made some progress on Hangman.

Split Personality has some of the most painful holds at Dodge with about 5 really painful moves up a short, dark wall. The holds suit the problems location and general feel. It's often really dark and has a gloomy, almost damp feel. It makes taking pictures there tough and kind of interesting. The wireless flash was a huge help here. I'm really looking forward to shooting this problem again.

Katie was so close to this. It's always tough to decide whether to go to this boulder first in the day or last. You're pretty well guaranteed to lose all of your skin, so your day might end sooner than you want. I'm expecting a send in the near future.

Best part about bouldering.

Like I said, I'm really excited to go back and take some more pictures at this boulder. It's got a really cool feel to it and the positions it puts the climber in are pretty photogenic.

Temps are supposed to be cooler next week so hopefully we'll have some completed projects to talk about. I can't wait. Oh, and apparently the people who dressed up last weekend in Medieval armor and such were playing "Ring Toss". Lord of the Rings reenactments. Yeah. Awesome. I hope we didn't get a spell cast on us....

Climbing on the short rocks...again

2008-10-07T13:16:00.003-05:00

So, Katie and I made another trip to Governor Dodge this weekend. The weather was much cooler and conditions were so much better. It kinda reminded me why I like Sandstone. Every fall I'm reminded of why it's so good. The leaves were starting to change and the rock felt nice and grippy.

We spent most of our time on the "Execution Bloc" and only stayed for a few hours as we'd been at the gym the night before. There are a bunch of problems in a pretty condensed area with eliminates seemingly everywhere. We both made progress on our respective projects and Katie sent one of the problems she was working on. Always fun. I spent all afternoon working out the moves on Highly Executed and felt really good on it. It's a fun, rising traverse on a series of big slopers. All of the holds are skin and user friendly so it was a perfect place to hang out for an afternoon.

Unfortunately, I forgot my camera. And of all the days to forget it, this one was a doozy. Driving into the park we saw 8-9 people fully decked out in Medieval armor. Yep, that's right......Armor. Trash can shields, molded metal chest and leg protection, realistic looking swords and chain mail body armor. Not to mention some pretty sweet helmets. If that wasn't enough, a minute or so after we passed the warriors, we passed another group of battlers at the bathroom. They were sporting some super stylish neon accents on their clothes and were shooting a day-glow Nerf crossbow into a box. Needless to say we drove past both of these groups at about 2.7 miles per hour with our jaws open. I was crushed I forgot my camera. Crushed.

All that said, I'll have it for the next session for sure. I'm also getting a new flash for my camera this week so I'm excited to start using it. Hopefully I'll have some pictures next Monday or Tuesday for you to check out.

Twenty-nine days...

2008-10-05T19:20:00.002-05:00

... and counting.

maps.google.com/vote

The climbing of the short rocks.

2008-09-29T15:19:00.006-05:00

I went climbing this past Saturday at Governor Dodge with my girlfriend, Katie. It was fun to get on real rock again and try out some new shoes. Unfortunately it was about 80 degrees and humid so I spent most of the afternoon dripping with sweat. I worked out the first couple of moves on Sandstone Violence and the beta came back to me pretty well. I'm looking forward to giving it some more concentrated effort in the next few weeks.

Here are a couple of pics from the day. No real sends but just a fun time lying around on pads. Maybe a little too much time spent dressing Frank up in different shoes....

I had forgotten just how awkward this landing was. I must have fallen 2 or 3 times when the pads slid out from under me. Frank was nice enough to cheer me on in the background.

Katie looking strong on the hideously painful crimps of Split Personality. No send on Saturday but it'll come soon I'm sure.

Here's Frank in the Muira VCS. I'm still not totally sure where his head is. It's in either California or Nevada, I know that much. Katie thinks he needs a tail. Any thoughts from our loyal fans?

Frank in the Scarpa Boosters. Katie thinks he needed a better spot. Although, he did hit the "X"....

It took me a couple of seconds...

2008-09-25T15:11:00.002-05:00

but then I got it...

Create your own caption.

2008-09-19T12:27:00.000-05:00

A Slight Update...

2008-09-19T09:57:00.003-05:00

So, earlier in the year I posted a list of climbs I wanted to do before the end of the year. After a summer of relaxing and eating lots of cookies instead of climbing rocks, I've adjusted the list a touch. So here it is. My fall tick list. Assuming I can get back into shape this should be somewhat doable. I've taken out all of the routes for now as my psych seems to be landing on the short rocks. So here it is, my Fall 08 wish list....

Alpine Club - V9 - Devils lake - Possibly the two hardest moves at Devils Lake....in succession.

Beautiful Soup - V8 - Devils lake - Hard, but doable. More of a warm up for the next one...

The Keymaker - V10/11?? - Devils lake - Un-repeated and proud. Very very high on the priority list.

Sex and Chocolate - V7 - Devils lake - Classic slopers on Quartzite. Need to wait for the cool temps though. Another warm up for something better to come...

Sex and Chocolate Direct - Project - Devils Lake - A direct finish to the previous problem. There are holds on the upper wall but I've spent a good part of the last year and a half trying to ignore just how thin they are.

Sandstone Violence - V8 - Governor Dodge - I've got a very definite personal vendetta against this problem. I worked out the beta. Got within two inches of pulling the FA. Then got hit by a 7 pound block of sandstone and lost all interest in it. My prediction, it'll be sent by the end of October.

Illusions of Paradise - V7 - Governor Dodge - Looks like a pretty cool problem. I haven't seen it yet but people have been saying good things. We'll see.

So there it is. Considering I'm in about V4 shape right now, I had better get on it and start ticking these things off. I'll be sure to keep all of our loyal fans up to date on my flailing. Preferably with lots of pictures.

People's Place in Parks

2008-09-18T10:55:00.003-05:00

(originally posted on theCORgroup: Conscious Outdoor Recreation)

"A federal judge ruled Monday that the Bush administration's plan to allow more than 500 snowmobiles a day into Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks was not in keeping with the National Park Service's responsibility to protect the parks."

The New York Times goes on to report that the judge contended "park planners had failed to reconcile their mission to protect the parks' environment with the increase in air pollution, the disturbance to wildlife and the impact on visitors that the snowmobiles would bring."

Environmentalist applauded this ruling, but I worry that the question of access is more nuanced, and we need to have a more serious discussion about what our parks and protected area mean to us ecologically, culturally, and recreationally, and what constitutes appropriate use.

Here is an example from a different perspective: American Whitewater is a paddler advocacy group that "restores rivers dewatered by hydropower dams, eliminates water degradation, improves public land management and protects public access to rivers for responsible recreational use." They historically have been very successful in forging partnerships with other stakeholders to mutual benefit. However American Whitewater finds itself embroiled in a conflict over the Wild & Scenic Chattooga River. Many rivers with Wild & Scenic designation are open to paddlers; canoeists and kayakers are generally considered legitimate backcountry users, akin to hikers and fishers. In public comment on paddler access to the Upper Chattooga, creek boating was compared to mountain biking, adventure sports at odds with wilderness values, and ATV's on hiking trails.

I agree that there are activities that are fundamentally incompatible with our wilderness values, and should be limited in parks and protected areas. The trouble with these debates is that our wilderness values remain undefined. 'Wilderness values' are interpreted by user groups to further political agendas and to exclude other users. Proponents of 'silent sports' are quick to fight the expansion of motorized transportation in protected areas, but without a comprehensive examination of our wilderness values - as enunciated by government agencies and the user groups - we risk more political maneuvering and inconsistent policy decisions.

The National Park Service has the mission to preserve "unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the national park system for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations." Balancing access and preservation is no easy task, but without examining what our 'wilderness values' really mean to us, it seems impossible.

My Inner Pete Townshend Is Screaming

2008-09-15T09:56:00.011-05:00

As you may know, I have a few dumb projects that occupy me in my spare time. I've recently refurbished my vintage Benotto, and I'm building up a vintage cruiser from scratch. I'm also working on a super-secret Pemba-related project that may not work out at all. (Suffice it to say for now that it shares a theme with the other two projects.) I call these things "dumb" because - in the end - they'll probably not serve any practical purpose, at all.

Basically, I turned the Benotto from a perfectly ridable beater into a priceless work of art which really shouldn't ever be ridden; now that I'm almost done making it, I often wonder if I actually need a cruiser; and as for that Pemba-project, we'll just have to see. In an effort to simplify something that's pretty straight-forward already, I may just be making it much more complicated.

So it goes. So it goes more often when a passion grabs hold of somebody, and I think I may be that somebody.

Yesterday, I rode around in the rain on my CX bike. I never made it to the mud, though. Instead, I went from bike shop to bike shop and back again here in downtown Madison. On a wild hare, I was looking for some of the last vintage parts that I need for the cruiser project. (Oh, and for another rebuild that I'm considering, too. Forgot to mention that...)

There's a bike shop just down the street from PEMBAbase. Walking in there was like walking into a diamond mine. Among their vintage parts was one sparkling gem that I've sought for some time.

"Hey, is that a 36-Hole original Phil BMX there?" I asked, barely concealing my excitement. This is a hard-to-find front hub from Phil Wood that goes for a pretty penny on eBay. I've been out-bid twice while trying to get this hub.

"Yep, sure is," said the kid behind the counter. He handed it to me, just like that. It was perfect, clean, with just enough patina to make it interesting. I spun it around in the light, watching as it glittered in my hand.

"Say," I said as I held the jewel,"You don't happen to have a vintage Deore XT crank set around here, do you? That would totally make my day."

"I think we might - Let me check in back," he said and walked off, leaving me with the Phil.

That's when I first heard my inner Pete Townshend, screaming: "Run! Run for the door! You've got it in your hand! This is your chance! Now RUN!"

From the back of my brain, I heard the opening riffs and a line from a David Bowie song: "The feeling comes out better from a stolen guitar, you're not messing with the Spiders from Mars!"

Before I could consider how far it was to the door, the kid came back and the moment was gone. I've said it before: I think I may be possessed.

Truths are revealed in moments like these. I know what you're thinking: You're thinking that maybe I found out that I'm a shoplifter at heart. Nope, sorry. There's a difference between hearing the devil inside yourself, and listening to him. Listening to this devil is what made Pete Townshend bolt for the door with "borrowed" guitars (that he would later smash on stage - ooops!) As with most people, I've learned not to act on what the devil inside of me whispers, or - as the case may be - screams.

What drives this devil, though, is passion. Instead of listening to this devil, I've learned to listen to what he is talking about. These whispers often reveal to me my own passions.

Passions can drive you, and not always in bad directions. In life, and particularly in business, it's important to harness your passions. Life gets stale without passion, and so does business.

So, as a result of my recent passions I might end up with a couple of extra bikes (and they'll be beauties, believe me...) By investing some of this passion into Pemba Serves, even if I end up with something that doesn't quite work I may just end up somewhere where we need to be. Either way, there's not a lot of harm in it.

Unless, of course, I get arrested. Dang.

Wisconsin Ranked Second Most Bike Friendly State

2008-09-09T14:02:00.005-05:00

Wisconsin continues to top the active lifestyle lists, this time a close second on the League of American Bicyclists first annual Bicycle Friendly States ranking:

Wisconsin's second place ranking is a result of their high use of available federal funding for cycling related projects and programs, statewide counts of bicycle usage and model policies... With a thriving bicycle industry and growing advocacy movement Wisconsin looks to move to the top of the list.

We are fortunate to have such support for bicycling in the state. Madison tops the League of American Bicyclists' Bike Friendly Communities list, and the mayor's office is committed to improving our ranking. Statewide organizations such as the Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin do fantastic work, and more than our share of manufactures call southern Wisconsin home. Planet Bike deserves special recognition, donating 25% of their profits to bicycle advocacy.

With autumn weather arriving, now is arguably the best time of the year for cycling in southern Wisconsin. See you on the bike path.

so...sea kayaking doesn't suck

2008-09-02T10:48:00.009-05:00

Most of the paddling I've done has been whitewater canoeing and kayaking. I've certainly ventured out on the Madison lakes and the (mighty) Yahara River, but primarily to train for whitewater races. I'm not an adrenaline junkie, it's just... well, maybe that has something to do with it. More to the point: I seek the pairing of 'the outdoor experience' with the technical and physical challenges of whitewater paddling. I find the aesthetic and spiritual qualities of 'wilderness' that many of us seek in our outdoor adventures are enhanced when coupled with overcoming physical and mental obstacles, and an element of risk.

That said, my work with theCORgroup - Conscious Outdoor Recreation has challenged me to consider local options for outdoor recreation. In the upper Midwest, this includes sea kayaking. Without debating if a six-hour drive to Lake Superior is a 'local recreation area,' I have discovered that not only does sea kayaking not suck - I could actually see myself getting into this.

For Labor Day, my partner and I joined two friends for a long weekend of paddling along Painted Rocks National Lakeshore. It was a last minute decision to join the trip, but fortunately Pemba has a warehouse brimming with camping equipment, so borrowing the essentials missing from my personal gear warehouse wasn't a problem. It was also a chance to finally test some of the new gear whose merits I've been extolling during the last month of trade shows (they all met our high expectations, phew.. see appendix). Canoelover, does this make it a tax-deductible expedition?

My partner was a novice sea kayaker, but a quick study. Which is good, as we were racing daylight, a headwind, and choppy water to meet the group who had arrived a day earlier. We made it with the sunset to spare.

The sea cliffs were amazing. And the water crystal clear. Lake Superior is like the Caribbean plus conifers. Sunday we had more time to explore and poke around the arches and sea caves. The weather was perfect, and we practiced some rescues to cool down a bit.

As we broke camp and hit the water for the paddle back to the cars on Monday, I was getting some last photos of the group with the sea cliff backdrop. Lo and behold, they were joined by a cormorant, Phalacrocorax auritus. (Interestingly, nesting Double-crested Cormorants disappeared from Lake Superior in the 1970's due to toxic contaminants, but the populations have since resurged to historic highs). This fellow was heading my way, and after a couple of close-ups, opted for a more auspicious pose. 'He' - I need either an Audubon guidebook or a gender-neutral pronoun - hung around for a good five minutes, exploring the hatch of the Impex Force, agreed it was a lovely boat, then moved on. After a minute to collect myself, I decided definitively that sea kayaking does not suck, and started the paddle back.

Maybe Impex Kayaks will buy this picture. Alas, no logo.

Gratuitous Gear Review:

Jetboil HELIOS - Not surprisingly, it really does get the water boiling faster than any other stove I've used, but - to my delight - it simmers better too. Making couscous was a snap. The design raised some skeptical eyebrows when I set it up for Saturday evening, but requests for prodeals were quick to follow. For the record, I used exactly a 100gram fuel canister for 2 hot breakfasts and 2 hot dinners for four, including simmering and boiling unfiltered lake water.

Sea to Summit DRYBAGS - Not a new product, but the whole dry bag range from STS is solid. I used the ultralight ULTRA-SIL Dry Sacks, the LIGHTWEIGHT Dry Sacks, the rugged BIG RIVER Dry Bags, and of course the eVENT Compression Dry Sacks. To reiterate the company line, the Ultra-Sil bags are best for backpacking and canoeing applications (where they live inside a backpack or portage pack) - I didn't have any problems, but for a little more weight and extra durability I'll stick with the rest of the range for whitewater and sea kayaking trips.

Petzl MYO RXP - Petzl's new programmable, regulated headlamp. Freakin' bright (140 lumens). Getting the food bags up on the bear pole was simple with this floodlight. And you can program the different light levels, so I can set the first light level to the campfire-circle-friendly 8 lumens, and ramp it up from there. Looking forward to running and skiing with this lamp, but not on this adventure...

Mountain Hardwear VIPERINE 2 - This is Steve's favorite tent in the line, and I was pleased with my decision to demo this one. Good usable space, a funky look, fantastic ventilation (especially on this 2009 model), and quick to set-up. I'm starting to get a hard time for bringing a different tent on every trip, but thus are the hazards of being a gear rep.

She's a little bit bigger now....

2008-09-01T13:24:00.009-05:00

So, the bunny we got this past April is close to being full grown now. We checked and she's a she. Her name is Dash, thanks to "The Incredibles". Thought I'd take some pictures and give all of our loyal readers an update.

She's bigger, but not really any smarter....

Katie keeps on insisting that the misbehaving is all my fault. I normally deny it but I'll take credit here. I put an animal cracker up on the table, next to the paper. She got close at least.

Bigger, Better, Faster...

2008-08-27T09:10:00.005-05:00

MORE.

So, much of the drama from the little revolution that we were involved with this summer has already passed. As of last week, there's a tacit - if fragile - agreement between all involved to have one local summer show next year. Not incidentally, we've also agreed to have the show prior to OR Summer Market. (Stay tuned for dates and details...)

This all sounds good. I've long been a passionate rep advocate; there's no end-game in being the last rep standing. We reps need to work together for the benefit of reps, retailers, and vendors alike. One unified show accomplishes this better than two divided ones, no question. Still - and this bears repeating - MORE was not just about dates.

This seems to be a genuine surprise to many. Little wonder. In the heat of the moment it's doubtful that anybody read what MORE was about, and I'm certain that next to nobody was listening. (We were all too busy trying to shout one another down.) Maybe this is an opportunity to revisit the original mission. While MORE had six talking points, the main idea can be summed up in one sentence: Current market conditions demand a more vibrant and timely local trade show.

Arguably, MORE accomplished this. We can debate the particulars, flaws, and merits of the MORE show forever, but to most who were there MORE was a slam-dunk event. And, true, some of the most valid criticism is coming from those who weren't there. It goes something like this: "Why should we spend more money to do the same business?"

This is a good question that deserves an answer.

There are many who feel that the lowest possible expense structure yields the best business return on investment. If this were true all specialty retail stores would look just like Walmart. We're in a specialty business and to a rep we don't sell anything that anybody absolutely needs, and neither do our customers. We do sell premium products that tap discretionary budgets. When you're trying to convince people to spend money that they don't need to spend, presentation is important to success.

To this end, many of our retail partners have invested in making better presentations in the past year. Uncle Dan's moved two stores to bigger, brighter locations. Alpine Shop moved one of their stores to a better space across the street. Midwest Mountaineering created even more promotional events. In fact, most of our retailers invested heavily in promotion, infrastructure, merchandising and even consulting in this past year. (Many also launched online sales forums also, but this is another conversation.)

Let's not forget our vendors. By example, in the past year three of Pemba's vendors moved headquarters to bigger, better, more feature-rich locations. Almost all improved their tradeshow presence, too. Many polished infrastructure, invested in new computer tools, re-arranged staff to create more efficiencies. And - yes, even in these days of rampant lay-offs - most of our vendors hired for new positions.

OIA, our national trade organization, has invested more dollars this past year into education, outreach, political advocacy, and research. SNEWS started sending out newsletters more frequently, and revamped their once-per-year magazine. Outdoor Retailer improved both of their markets in definable, palpable ways.

Meanwhile, in response to all of this investment, we reps have continued to show product from the same rolling racks and grid we bought thirty years ago. (Sometimes we even stand up.)

It's true that reps are under pressure. Expenses are shifting to us and job descriptions are being stretched further than ever before. With the rise in expenses and the relatively flat market, most of us took a big pay cut this year. But the only way out is through. We need to invest in growing our businesses. Our customers, our vendors, and the market requires this.

This isn't a bad thing, far from it. The truth is that a strong, vibrant local show saves reps both time and money. Gas is going to stay at $4 per gallon. Average hotels in the US will still be $100 per night. Air travel is becoming prohibitive. By creating more attractive regional tradeshows that draw and hold more attendance, we save money. (How many retailers spent less than one day at ORA last week?) Even if the up-front investment in dollars is higher, the return is also higher in both dollars and time.

Why not spend four days getting work done well than four weeks getting it done poorly?

Ken Barmore (one of the founders of Outdoor University) once said that working with reps in a group is like herding cats, and that working with specialty retailers and small vendors wasn't much easier. We're all individuals, after all. (We wouldn't be in this industry if we weren't.) Since Ken's herding cats metaphor rings true, which would you rather do: Chase a bunch of felines around a room trying to get them all in a corner at the same time, or open a can of tuna and have them all run to you?

In a nutshell - or, rather, in a can - this is why we still need MORE. And to reiterate, it wasn't just about dates.

Bells Ringing Somewhere

2008-08-25T11:58:00.005-05:00

It's hard to believe that as recently as five years ago the #1 management priority at Devil's Lake State Park was controlling the overflow from the CCC parking lot. Climbers used to park on both sides of the road when this lot was full. The DNR put up signs forbidding this and got really aggressive with tickets. DL is Wisconsin's busiest park, and among the highest used state parks in the country. Used to be - not too long ago - that if you wanted to park in the "climber's lot" you needed to get there by 9am.

Not anymore. Or, at least, not on Saturday August 23rd at noon. Check these out:

On the positive side, the campgrounds were booked solid for the weekend. However, there were only three or four groups climbing on the bluff, and fewer still hiking. Most of the day action at the park was over at the beaches, with parking lots there at about 30% of capacity.

There are too many factors at play to try to figure out what's happening here. It seems that industry trends point to fewer user-days at use in the parks, with an increase in family camping. But, this is just from memory.

Bells started ringing from somewhere when we drove into this empty parking lot. Whether they were bells of recognition or bells of alarm, I'm not sure yet. It's just worth noting, and watching.

By the way, for all of the best and most popular climbs at Devil's Lake, on weekends there's no waiting...

Ultralaminaman!

2008-08-20T23:22:00.004-05:00

Sing with us now: "The hills are alive with the sound of muuuusiiiiiic..."

Is that a red penguin, or a hairy nun?

Dave Schuster from Clear Water Outdoors enjoys being one of the few at the ORA show in Madison.

Workin' It

2008-08-12T00:45:00.003-05:00

Team Pemba, at our most seductive.

Steve, Bryan, Brad, Pete, and Janice giving all they got out at OR.

The Cowboys

2008-08-01T07:02:00.004-05:00

Twenty years ago today, we boarded a C-130 military transport plane bound for San Francisco from Pinedale, Wyoming. From there - after a requisite night of banquets and speeches - we hopped a much-larger C5a cargo plane (basically a flying warehouse with a 727 parked on top of it) to Maryland. There we picked up a high-altitude helicopter and some other supplies, crossed the country again to land in Anchorage, AK, and then winged out over the Pacific towards Japan. It was a whirlwind tour in two days, and after another two days in Okinawa we finally took off for Beijing, and – from there – ultimately to Tibet and beyond.

Through all of this travel, we were treated to fine dining, private rooms with fully stocked wet-bars, and military escorts to the VOQ.

This isn’t typically how a climbing expedition starts, but we were a bit different. We were Cowboys on Everest, and I was the team’s junior member. Honestly, this means that mostly I was along for the ride until I was told to stand-to, but – boy – what a ride!

Cowboys on Everest can accurately be described as perhaps the last of the old-school, siege-style, big-mountain expeditions. Because of this, we had some impressive sponsors and patrons. For example, technically we were on a White House sponsored mission to China, so the planes and the military lodging were part of the package. This was all courtesy of (then Wyoming governor) Dick Cheney, and another man who is the father of our current president. Apparently, he also had some sort of important job at the time.

(Yes, I’m aware of the irony – and don’t get me started.)

Outside of the occasional slide-show, I don’t talk much about this trip. This doesn’t really mean anything, though. I don’t talk much about many of my experiences. Partially, this is because my outdoor - and for that matter, most of my other - endeavors reside in a part of me that’s personal, and private. The moment of these experiences is far more important to me than the memory.

There’s also a bit of my own modesty at play, as you won’t hear me say: “Well, when I was on Everest…” That guy isn’t me. I just don’t need the cocktail-party conversation-starter.

But I digress.

The thing I wanted to share about today - the today of both now and twenty years ago - is that this was one of those life-changing events that continues to have impact. In life, we get these from time-to-time. Everyone has them really, both for the good and the bad. In either case, when a life turns radically on one event, it’s always seemed to me that this is a good time for reflection, and for thankfulness. While it might not seem this way at the time, the paths we’re pushed down are the ones that we are intended to take.

For this day twenty years ago, today I’m thankful, and still reflecting on what it means.

I may get back to you about the latter, but I doubt it.

Memories

2008-07-30T09:59:00.010-05:00

I'll keep the words to a minimum on this post and I'll let the pictures do the talking. I found a couple of CD's worth of pictures from a climbing trip I took a couple years ago. I love looking at pictures like this. Each one tells a different story. It's great.

So so close on the Sit Start. Came back the next year and got it 2nd go. I love that feeling. Love it!

Slushy Puppy and Slushy Puppy low. Everyone has epics at some point and the sit was one of mine.

Such a bad idea. That's all you can say for this. Offwidths are always a bad idea.

It's rare you see a picture of this boulder with no one actually climbing on it. I think that's why I like it so much.

Kelsen taking a lap on the Mulletino roof. I like the little bits of action with Kelsen and Tony. It adds a lot to what would normally be a static image. I'm a fan.

Heard On The Street

2008-07-29T14:06:00.006-05:00

Picture this: I'm standing on the corner of John Nolan and Northshore in downtown Madison - minding my own business - the lone guy on foot among a crowd of bicycle commuters. Out of the blue the guy next to me says,"So, are you the guy who swims in the lake every day?"

I should mention that I was wearing a full wetsuit. I also had goggles strapped over my bright orange swim cap.

I said: "Um, yeah, but really there are dozens of us. Really, I see eight or ten others every day I'm in the water. Really, I do. Really."

I don't know if he bought this. It's partially true. I mean, I sometimes see other swimmers in Lake Monona. Once, I counted eight of them, but they looked like they were part of a team or a club. It is - after all - the Wisconsin Ironman course. People do swim it every once in awhile.

It's also true that most swimmers drive, and put on their wetsuits in the parking lot right there. I'm probably the only one who walks, but then again it's only two short blocks away. I think I would look even stranger on a bike, in a wetsuit, but maybe I could pull it off. I guess I could skateboard, but how would I lock it up? It's probably better to walk.

(I don't think that my Vibram Five Fingers help my image that much, but I love them. Thanks Darren!)

The nice commuter said,"Well, good effort for you and all the others, then. Way to go." That made me feel good. The other riders at the light were trying hard to ignore me. Each had a studied ambivalence, and yet they were most certainly watching from the corners of their eyes.

While walking to the lake, I've learned to put on my best "Yes, I know I'm wearing a wetsuit" look. This is really hard to pull off while wearing goggles, but I try.

While I was in the water, I thought of all of the missed comic opportunities to the original question. I could've said:

"Why no, I don't know how to swim." (In my best Chevy Chase dry delivery...)
"Um, no, I'm on my way to work - I'm a safe-sex counselor for the State."
Or this, which would've been hard to pull off without sounding sarcastic: "No, I just really, really like neoprene."

The best part of this little ritual is coming home. My neighbors in the condo building have all become used to me walking through the garage in a dripping wetsuit. My wife Vera always thinks it's really funny, and the kids always ask,"Were you swimming Daddy?"

I guess if there's one bright spot to be gleaned from my own embarrassment it's that my kids will grow up thinking that - somehow - this is normal.

At least, I hope that this is a bright spot. It may just be their excuse for extensive therapy, too.

Oh well.

Needful Things

2008-07-18T10:02:00.008-05:00

So recently there's been some debate about whether I need an intervention, or an exorcism. As far as I can tell, they're leaning towards the latter. Janice keeps dousing me in (perhaps Holy) water, Pete's burning incense, and Steve is doing that strange chanting thing that he does. (Well, actually, he does that all the time, so...) While it's pretty much been decided that I'm not the devil after all, I may have been possessed by Needful Things.

I blame eBay, naturally.

I got it bad. After riding my brother-in-law's new cruisers in California, I was seized with nostalgia for my old paper-boy bike. I bought it in sixth grade and sold it several years later to the kid who took over my route. Coincidentally, he now lives in La Jolla, so while I was there I dropped him a line. Here's how it went:

Me, via e-mail: "Hey Andy, remember me? Long time no see, eh? Hey, I was wondering, do you still have that bike I sold you thirty years ago?"
Andy's response: "Have you been drinking?"

Needless to say, he no longer had the bike. We got together to have a few beers anyway, and I quizzed him about it, just to be sure. I'm pretty sure he's telling the truth. Pretty sure. At least, he looked me in the eyes and didn't blink when I asked. I've learned that this is a good sign.

(Is it a bad sign that Andy asked the bouncer to escort him out of the bar, and to make sure that I didn't leave until he was gone?)

So I Googled my old bike to see if I could buy it anywhere. It was a Gary Littlejohn 26" Three-Bar Cruiser. As it turns out, it's a collector's item now. Apparently, it was one of the very first BMX cruiser bikes on the market. The only one I found for sale was going for $3,000, and all of the rest are in museums.

Short of robbing a bank for the funds, I couldn't have one for money, trade, or personal favors. Actually, after some thought I drew the line at personal favors - for a man with a monkey on my back I still have some scruples. I'm still considering the bank heist, though.

So, I started haunting eBay's vintage yards, once again. You may remember that I spent this spring rebuilding my old road bike, and it's just about done. Luckily, there's a lot more vintage parts available for old BMX than there are for old road bikes, and there's only one standard so I don't have to do as much research to make sure that the parts will fit. I found an old three-bar cruiser frame that's only a few years younger than the Littlejohn, and a stack of gorgeous parts. Here's how I'm doing, so far:

Fountain of Youth? Do brand-new twenty-five-year-old parts make you younger? We'll see.

Now, I'm just waiting for the frame and fork to arrive. Everyone here is, too. The second it arrives, everybody gets the day off. Well, except for me.

I'll need some time alone with my things.

drama...

2008-07-11T20:09:00.003-05:00

I'm neither a Wisconsin native, nor particularly attached to the sport - and even I can't bear the suspense. My heart goes out to the rest of the state. We'll make it through, somehow...

link.

On "Mountain Madness"

2008-07-10T08:31:00.006-05:00

Pray for a brave heart: one that does not fear death, that counts a long life among the least of Heaven's gifts. - Juvenal

Climbers and paddlers generally get a tough rap in the press when it comes to accidents. "Climber falls at Devil's Lake." "Paddlers drown after running dam." These deaths are as unfortunate as any other, and as a paddler and climber, they give me pause. But a careful reading of the news article too often reveals it is a hiker venturing off trail that stumbles on the bluffs or a couple of novices who climb into a canoe for the first time, without basic safety equipment and unaware of the hazards downstream.

Is the news media ignorant of the distinction, or attempting to summarize the event in a short (and compelling) headline? Both, undoubtably, and it does these activities a disservice. Yes there is considerable risk in climbing and paddling. Training, experience, and sound judgement can mitigate some - not all - of this risk. But our activities deserve a fair accounting of both our tragedies and accomplishments, and I appreciate when journalists attempt to convey our motivation for climbing and paddling rather than painting all of us as adrenaline junkies, taunting death.

Timothy Egan writes a very fair op-extra on the New York Times Blog, discussing the recent fatalities on Denali. Similarly, the public comments are unusually fair - a real discussion on understanding risk, why we climb, and obligations to our loved ones back home. Obviously there are many answers, but I like Hugh McIsaac's suggestion:

Perhaps the gene which leads us on such adventures is the same one enabling our distant ancestors to travel thousands of miles in search of distant lands and new beginnings. The gap between triumph and tragedy is often very narrow. (post #17)

Today's Paper

2008-07-03T19:29:00.006-05:00

Not everybody had time to read today's paper, I know. As a matter of fact, fewer people have time to read it as each day passes, and this phenomenon is true all across the country. This has been a rough week for newspapers, actually. Truth be told, it's been a rough year. They say it may be the worst year ever for newspapers.

And we thought we had it bad in the outdoor industry...

But hey, I've been on vacation so this morning I took the kids to the local surf/coffee cafe and sat down to read the paper while the kids had donuts. Did you have time to read today's paper? I thought not. Me, I only get to read the paper when I'm on vacation, or when I'm traveling by plane for work.

Today I particularly enjoyed the weekly science section. Here are some of the headlines, with a synopsis:

"Birth Dearth" - Worldwide, the number of live births of boys vs. girls has been declining, and some think that a notable change is under way, driven by factors such as environmental contaminants and various types of stress.
"Death March of the Penguins" - Oil pollution, fishery depletion, rampant coastline development and climate change have all adversely affected penguin populations worldwide, many of which are now in sharp decline.
"Researchers Warn of Decline in Sharks, Disrupted Ecosystems" - In the past two centuries, the shark population in the Mediterranean Sea has plummeted 97 percent.

Okay, it's the science section so maybe we can expect a green bias. (Scientists are smart, after all...) But San Diego - with all of its military infrastructure - isn't known as a liberal bastion. Still, does anybody else see a pattern here?

Sometimes, I feel like John Nash, the subject of the movie "A Beautiful Mind." (No, I don't think that I'm brilliant, and I'm probably not crazy - well, at least not that crazy...) Every so often though, it seems that patterns just jump out of the paper like one of Nash's Cold War cyphers.

What is the meaning of this message?

Ponder this for a bit, would you? I'll be right back. Every time I read the paper I'm supposed to stuff the articles that jump out at me into a plain manila envelope and deliver it to a creepy estate on the edge of town.

Please don't tell my wife...

They Say It's Your Birthday

2008-07-01T12:01:00.002-05:00

Well, really, it's OUR birthday: Today Pemba Serves turns seventeen! Just think, pretty soon we'll be old enough to vote. Times like these make one reflective, don't they?

It seems like only yesterday when we were in swaddling clothes, wearing diapers, sucking on that cute little binkie. Okay, some things don't change: Almost every day is casual day at PEMBAbase, and sometimes Steve still wears his version of swaddling clothes (is that a ROBE, Steve?); we're happy to report that Pete's only wearing diapers at night now; and please don't ask anybody at the office about my binkie habit - I'm trying to quit. Still, in all these years a lot has changed, too.

In the summer of '91, as was my practice for many years I spent the month of June climbing in the Alaska Range. It was while on this trip that I decided to open my own retail consulting business. In those days, I worked for Erehwon here in the midwest. Among other things, I was responsible for their newsletter and other types of related promotions for the company. I had this idea that these sorts of things could be done free-lance for a number of outdoor stores at the same time. So this is what I decided to do.

As for the name, some has been written about this elsewhere. For the short version, Pemba was a yak-herder on an expedition to Tibet that I was lucky enough to be a part of in 1988. (For extra credit, check out Peter Breslow's award-winning NPR broadcasts, and also in the sidebar here.) Pemba made an impression on me, and I liked the idea of having an active-verb ("Serves") in the name of the company, too. In consulting - in repping also - you're only as good as the last thing that you've done, after all. The idea of being a rather passive noun (for example, "Services") just wasn't appealing, either. Frankly, it seemed a little generic, too.

Okay, so it's a trippy name, I admit. Maybe it's my degree in writing poetry shining through, ultimately. I blame Mary Kinzie.

So, a couple things happened upon my return from Alaska: 1) A war with Iraq had triggered a recession; and 2) My phone started ringing with other opportunities. I couldn't do much about the recession, and marketing dollars were being cut in outdoor stores everywhere. And, the opportunities were good: Michael Crooke called about working as a rep for Moonstone; Karen T'Kint wanted to know if I might consider repping Five Ten; Dion Goldsworthy was looking to revitalize Gregory, and he needed a rep, also; Roody Rasmussen convinced Steve Hudson at PMI/Petzl that he needed a midwest rep... And so it happened that way, and Pemba Serves became a sales agency.

We've been lucky over the years to work with a lot of great companies and people. Truly, we've worked with legends, and legends have worked with us. We've been very lucky, in general. We're thankful for every relationship, including those on our team, our vendors past and present, and - as always - for our customers, too.

Things have changed quite a bit in the repping world in the last seventeen years. Along with many others these days, we see a future where reps in the outdoor industry work more like business consultants than anything else. And so in this way maybe things have come full circle, and we're back to the original vision of who we were going to be. We'll see.

So, today, thanks to everybody who has helped to bring us another birthday. (In other words, thank YOU!) It's a privilege to work with you all.

Influence Pedaler

2008-06-22T21:35:00.013-05:00

Dan and his new ride. Okay, this one is for his wife.

We had been in California for all of an hour when I was overcome with an urge to visit a vintage bike-shop I had seen on our way into La Jolla. All that I had to say was,"Hey, let's to go the bike shop" to convince my brother-in-law Dan to take me down there.

Velo Culture is a cool, fun shop. Go there if you're ever in San Diego. They have fixie bikes of all vintages, with cool parts and a cool staff. In the market for an aero frame circa 1988? They have it, along with some kickin' disk wheels to round it out properly. Though small, it was a place I could've stayed for hours and hours. It's a good thing I didn't stick around. I would've spent some money that - really - I don't have.

So, I helped Dan spend some of his money, instead. Call it the Devil in me, but I like to exert my influence when it comes to anything FUN.

I said to the mechanic: "Hey, you have a lot of cool stuff here, but I think Dan here's more in the market for a cruiser bike. Got any of those?"

"Nah," said the friendly, pierced hipster with the full ink-shirt,"but if you go down the road to PB, you'll find one of the best cruiser shops anywhere." So off we went to PB. (That's Pacific Beach, by the way...)

Just a mile or two down the road from Velo Culture is Bicycle Discovery, and there we found cruiser heaven. So, of course, we bought two. Actually, Dan bought two of them, with strong encouragement from me. Oh, and with some good cheer-leading from the nice Jamaican sales-guy who helped us, too. When we got on for the test rides, he laughed and clapped and said,"That's the way you do it, Man!"

The whole experience was a lot of fun, the way that it should be. It was obvious that the staff at Bicycle Discovery was having fun while we were there. This wasn't just because it was a busy Friday. They seem to have fun all the time, and it was noticeable. I said as much to Dan, and he said,"Why wouldn't their job be fun? They work in a bike shop!"

"Sadly," I said,"that's not always the case." So many shops that should be specializing in FUN forget about this important detail, especially when economic times are tough. Sales shift to being about the product instead of about the activity, and this isn't good. Rutabaga in Madison likes to make the distinction really clear, to everybody: "We sell time on the water."

At Bicycle Discovery, it was obvious that they were selling California beach culture, with some fat tires and coaster brakes thrown in for added measure. Oh, and FUN was included, too.

ps: If FUN wasn't a compelling reason enough, I was able to take one of the new cruisers on its maiden-ride back to La Jolla and saw this sign en route:

National average just $4? Welcome to the top of the data-set.

Note the full-service option, too.

(Hey, it's La Jolla...)

Cross Training

2008-06-19T08:29:00.001-05:00

Coach said that I was supposed to ride two hours today. I crawled out of bed as best as I could at 5:30am, and was as psyched as possible.

For 5:30am.

Unfortunately, the tri-bike decided to misbehave a bit this morning. There was an easy fix, but the more I messed with it the more it ate into valuable riding time. The vintage Benotto is off at a spa in California for its 25th birthday, so that left the CX bike.

So - what the heck - I took it out.

I've been riding this bike on rainy days this spring, and you may know that we have had a few. Last fall, Pete showed me a little loop not too far from PEMBAbase, and it has a couple hills that help with intervals. Early in the morning there are a lot of dog-walkers on the trail. They were very polite, and they also looked at me as if I may have been breaking another law. (And since last weekend's adventures in lawlessness I have been trying to stay on the straight-and-narrow, I swear...)

The trail had changed radically in the few short weeks since I was on it last. It had become overgrown, and very green. There were fewer flowers, and more grasses and leaves. Instead of riding through calf-deep fresh spring shoots, I found myself shooting through tunnels of solid green. Leaves stuck to my helmet and shoes.

Growing up in Arizona and Wyoming, I learned to tell the difference between different sub-species of cholla cactus, and I know many Wind River Range native plants by smell alone. My friend Darren also grew up elsewhere, but he's done a much better job than I have at learning the spectrum of Wisconsin flora. I'm inspired by his skills in this, so I'll have to study some.

When you find a bit of nature and return to it again and again, you discover new things. The earth changes every day, and we only discover this when we take the time to notice. It's probably not for nothing that the best naturalists became experts in small plots of local land. Thoreau had Walden Pond, Aldo Leopold had The Shack, and Darwin developed his ideas on the small islands of the Galapagos. When you focus on the particular and revisit it frequently, change reveals itself to you in ways that are measurable.

In our industry, we often promote the biggest, wildest, and furthest-flung adventures. These sorts of trips capture the imagination, because at heart we're all aspirational enthusiasts. This isn't a bad thing per se, but it seems that we need to weave in the idea that there is just as much to discover in the Hundred Acre Wood, just down the road, every dang day.

"Act Your Age!"

2008-06-16T12:51:00.018-05:00

As young as you feel:

Vera - mother and step-mother to three - will turn 15 for the 29th time this summer.

We hear this all the time, and never seem to obey. Vera and I took out the new longboards, and rode them much of the weekend with the kids. There were no casualties, except for four-year-old Misa who stepped on one of the boards and had it slip out from under her. She has a really nice nose-scrape and a little bit of a fat-lip. When asked about it, she smiles and beams proudly: "I was skate-boarding!"

We had so much fun on them that we changed plans for Saturday's date-night. Originally, we were going to go check out the new-ish Sundance Theatre here in Madison, but we didn't want to give up our rides. So, we dressed as nicely as we dared and hit the endless asphalt bike trails around Madison. After some good cruising, we stopped first at one of the nicest Tex-Mex restaurants in town, and hardly felt out-of-place with our almost four-foot-long boards tucked under our table. After a few margaritas, we hit the night-time roads to get ice-cream on State Street. From there, we cruised some of the ramps up and down onto the bike path - and even went buildering in a few coveted locations - until it was time to relieve the baby-sitter, at 11pm.

Several things: 1) We both got smile-cramps from riding these boards; 2) Paths and roads we'd biked, run, or walked hundreds of times suddenly became very different because of our new mode of travel; and 3) No dinosaurs were wasted over the course of our date-night, and CO2 emissions were limited to our slightly-elevated respiration rates.

Which is more illegal - buildering or boarding at the Kohl Center?

Okay, so we broke a few laws, too: As it turns out, we later heard that you can get a DUI from riding a skateboard under the influence, and buildering - or boarding - on or around the Kohl Center is strictly verboten. At our age, we're really far too old to be breaking so many laws so close to home, but what does that matter? You're as young as you feel, really.

On Saturday, we each felt about fifteen: Slightly rebellious, completely independent, invincible, and - yes - even a little hormonal. What could be better?

ps: I ran some errands on the Fleetwood today, and discovered that we broke yet another law: You can't ride skateboards on the street! Thanks to the kind officer from the MPD who gave me a friendly warning today instead of a ticket...

Can You Spot Our New Toys?

2008-06-13T14:23:00.002-05:00

Hint: What products here don't we rep? Thanks Uncle Mike!

The Unintended Consequences of Fine Design

2008-06-13T14:06:00.006-05:00

We paid Steve a nickel to model a look that we're sure wasn't quite created on purpose. We call him "50 Steve." All he needs is a pair of highly authentic Vasque Triple-Crowns and he'd be all set for a hike uptown...

Secret Sharer

2008-06-11T06:35:00.005-05:00

I have to give shout-outs to Odub this morning. He's a climber/rapper who has written a song about Todd Skinner. It's called "Float." I particularly like how he worked in so many of Todd's route names into the song. It's a perfect and unexpected musical tribute.

Todd was one of my oldest and best friends. I've been missing him a lot lately. I won't write about him here, this moment. Another old friend wrote a really good memory about Todd in her blog earlier this week, so you can read that instead. And be sure you check out the song. It's a keeper.

The Devil, You Say?

2008-06-07T13:45:00.006-05:00

In these past few months (and probably longer) I'm sure that some people think I'm the Devil. (Or - at the very least - they hope that I visit him - right quick - and preferably before July 22nd...) It seems appropriate then that this is the number that I was given for an event today.

Read it and weep. The Apocalypse is nigh. Behold the Destroyer.

On the other hand, this may just be an omen. I had three flats and two mechanicals and drew a DNF. Coincidence? I think not.

The Funny Pages

2008-06-06T15:17:00.004-05:00

Brazenly stolen from the paper this morning via iPhone - apologies for the grey image but it was a low-light environment.

As I was waiting for my coffee this morning, this editorial comic jumped out of the paper at me. (Well, not really...) Still, the paper was open to it and I noticed it right away. The funny thing is that this exact same scenario happened to Team Pemba when we were traveling to a recent sales meeting. We requested a hybrid, and were given a luxury full-size car, instead. In fact, the rental-car agency was all out of hybrids, and nobody wanted regular cars of any stripe. They even gave us a discount for our forced upgrade, because all of the economy cars were out, too.

So, the good news is that lots of people want to do the right thing. The bad news is that corporate America hasn't figured out how to deliver this 100% of the time, yet. (Okay, maybe not even 50% of the time.) The sad part about this car-rental company is that they had recently moved all of the Bay Area hybrids to one location, so that they could advertise that they had a "100% Green" rental location; too bad they gutted SFO of all of the hybrids, in doing so. I guess it would be easier to move 50 cars to one location and call it "100% Green." Beats having to buy several hundred hybrids, that's for sure, and these days the advertising rights for green are gold.

This reminds me: A company we once worked with had the internal motto of wanting to be "Green When Convenient." This meant that they wanted to get credit for "going green," but didn't necessarily want to do the hard work of re-crafting their business around sustainability. We're really glad to be working with companies now that are committed to making demonstrable changes towards sustainability, but this is the topic of another blog post...

Funny how you make connections, sometimes at a glance: In the same paper - positioned side-by-side with the editorial cartoon - was an article that predicted that oil would break a record today. And, in fact, it did. To bring this full-circle, Scott at the MORE show today shared that it's unlikely that we'll be able to land a bus-sponsor for the event. We had really hoped that this was an idea that would take wings. While there are strong leads for next year, this initiative was announced too late to fit into this year's budgets. And that's too bad.

Of all of the sponsorship ideas that were generated for the show, this was the only one that had "National PR Opportunity" written all over it. Plus, the purpose of revitalizing the local show is - in part - to reduce the amount of fuel consumed during the course of the bi-annual selling cycle. We've done studies that show that a strong local tradeshow can save 93% of the gas that would be used by ten reps showing their wares to the same ten stores. This is one of the rare times when somebody can actually do good and score a big hit at the same time. Do you know somebody who can find the budget for this opportunity? I mean, can you - dear reader - tap the right source for this funding?

(Did we mention that a journalist-friend wants to try to sell this story to NPR? - Hey, we're going to keep trying to sell it up to the very end...)

Meanwhile, enjoy the funnies, and the daily news. This oil issue is bound to get funnier, every dang day.

The Battle of Helm's Deep - A Polemic

2008-06-04T00:09:00.005-05:00

Warning: What follows is a polemic that I wrote several days ago en route back from San Francisco and the Mountain Hardwear sales meeting. You could say that I was inspired. I started it on the plane and was so excited about it that I asked Steve to drive us back from the Milwaukee airport so that I could finish it. I polished off the last sentence as we pulled into Madison.

I was so proud. Then, after I posted it (you may have seen it briefly) I reviewed it the next morning. My best and favorite critic - my wife Vera - read it too. She called me on what I already knew. Her question put it best:

"Who are you writing this to, and why? What new are you bringing to the table that isn't already out there?"

(One smart lady, my wife, she is.)

So, I pulled it. I've wrestled with this for the past few days and haven't come up with an answer, particularly to her last question. But I've decided to post it anyway, more or less as a way to get a conversation started. I like balanced arguments, and I believe in the dialectic. There's bound to be a better way to think of this stuff out there, and perhaps one of you can help me find my way...

King Theoden: "What can men do against such reckless hate?"

Aragorn: "Ride out and meet it."

Like Orcs from Mordor, change is descending upon our Middle Earth. Rather than the goblins of legend, these threats to us all are very real: Global warming, dwindling resources, and the resultant economic and political uncertainty are scarier than any troll. And this is the good news. It could be far worse.

Oftentimes in human history, change has arrived at the point of a sword: The Romans conquered Europe, the Spaniards enslaved the Americas, and the Nazis rolled into France. The current threat to our environment is no less dire, yet unlike these times in history we still have an opportunity to choose the outcome. It's time now to choose positive change, before other less desirable options are forced upon us. Just because Orcs don't exist doesn't mean that the Orcs gathered at our gate are any less threatening.

It's time we ride out to meet them, and this is no mere metaphor. We as a culture and - in particular - we here in the outdoor industry need to lead this charge. (If we don't own the battle for the environment, then who will?) About once in a generation - or perhaps even once every other generation - are we given the opportunity to create fundamental change. This time for this is now. We need to change the way that we live, work, and play.

This is more than a matter of making the choice between "paper or plastic?" Recycling, composting, and waste reduction are merely a start. Higher gas-mileage vehicles are a stop-gap measure at best. No one doubts that $4 gas is here to stay, and this is just the beginning. We need to re-examine every aspect of our supply chain, every detail of our business and personal practices, and every nuance of our message. Actions, language, and mind-sets need to be in alignment, and not just with a few of us. This is something that we all must do.

There are those who disagree. There are those who would gather what resources they can and wait out the siege of Orcs. "It's always worked before," they say,"We've gathered at Helm's Deep many times and we've always outlasted them; we'll be back at our farms by spring planting time, you'll see."

To these folks I say: The foot-soldiers of antiquity had no answer for Roman chariots; the cliff-dwellings of the Anasazi were long-vacant before the conquistadors even arrived; the Germans simply flew over the Maginot Line. No conservative/defensive movement in human history has ever guardedly saved itself into the future. Change is the way of the world, and evolution is inevitable. Species and cultures that cannot or will not adapt go extinct. Dig a few inches down into the soil and you'll find fossils and relics of those who have come and gone before.

History favors innovators, those who ride out to meet change and greet it with new ideas, new tools, and new resolve. Resolve is most important. Gandalf had no magic powerful enough to defeat the Orcs on his own, but he was willing to be the shining white beacon and lead others on the charge. The Battle for Helm's Deep was not won with the wave of a wand - or by cowering in the caves with the children and old men - but by the determined swinging of a thousand swords.

We're actively looking for new ways to do things, new things to do, and new ways to think and speak. Pick up your sword, saddle your horse, muster what magic you can, and ride with us.

The Definite Article

2008-06-02T21:12:00.001-05:00

Maybe it's time that we change articles. For many years now we in the outdoor industry have been talking about "Done In A Day" activities. We should change from the indefinite ("A") to the definite ("The") article. In other words, we need to start talking about "Done In The Day," instead.

The reason is that people would benefit from getting outside on a daily basis, close to home. Instead of a long drive to a multi-pitch day climb, encourage people to go bouldering locally instead. The closest mountain bike trail is a half-a-day away? Put knobby tires on the old road bike and explore the nearest dirt road, CX-style. Just about every major metropolitan area in the Midwest has a trail close to downtown (ask us - we've been there), so go trail-running on one of these local paths and get to know it. Most people would be surprised to know that the local trail changes every day, all year around. Even a mile-long local loop can catch someone's attention when it's visited a few days a week. The same is true of the local pond, stream, or lake, so get out and paddle it regularly.

There are a lot of good reasons to think "Done In The Day" instead of "Done In A Day." Taking advantage of outdoor recreation opportunities right outside the front door is good for one's head, body, the environment, and the local outdoor shop, also. The bell-curve of our industry is shifting to the right. Basically, we're aging, we have more responsibilities, discretionary time and dollars aren't what they were, and we just can't do the things we used to do.

At the same time, the younger generations that we're trying to court have lots of available distractions competing for their time. While we are trying to get youth more involved and inspired by multi-day activities, it may be more effective to start out in smaller doses. On day five of a backpacking trip kids really miss cold-milk-and-cereal and their Wii console, while an afternoon in the local nature preserve can be a life-changing experience.

We here at Pemba Serves have come to this "Done In The Day" paradigm, naturally. As our time has become more limited, we've wanted to get outdoors in a meaningful way so we've added new ways to play. Local trail running was the start for most of us, then came the CX bikes. In addition to these out-the-door activities, open-water swimming, snowshoeing, skate-skiing, Nordic Walking, fly-fishing, and road-biking are things we can do right from PEMBAbase - no car required. (It's true: We do go Nordic Walking just for the fun of it, although Pete would prefer to go for a Parkour session.) Shortly, we'll add paddle-boarding and long-boarding to our stash of games, too. (While they sound similar, one's for on-water, the other for the bike-paths...) We like to get outside, we want to do it more often, and like everybody else these days we seem to lack time, dollars, and gas to go on the long trips.

It's also worth mentioning that all of us climb indoors at least a few days a month. While this is an indoor activity, climbing is also an outdoor sport. Doing it indoors is fulfilling in its own right, and it gets you ready for those times when you get to touch actual honest-to-goodness rock. (If you don't believe me, just ask Steve - he's a Plastic Prince that crushes real stone in his bare hands...)

This shift in articles from "A" to "The" is something that we believe in, strongly. As you've read, Pete was so inspired by it that he helped start a not-for-profit to promote the idea. While it's exciting to think about traveling abroad for those once-in-a-lifetime trips, the truth is that there's more benefits available to everybody if people take time to get to know the daisies, right out the front door. And, you can do this on a daily basis.

Things To Watch As Gas Prices Climb

2008-06-01T19:41:00.000-05:00

Straight from today's headlines, some things to think about as gas prices reach record highs and promise to stay there:

From the good news department, more people are using public transportation. And, companies are sending less junk mail. These are silver linings on otherwise dark clouds: With politicians and corporations hungry to find a short-term solution to these long-term changes, we should all be concerned about the threat to our public lands, particularly in oil and gas-rich Alaska.

Meanwhile, what are you going to do this summer? Consider a "Staycation," and advocate others to do the same. We as an industry need to find our niche in these new paradigms, and recreating close to home - outdoors - is more than just a talking-point.

(More on this theme, later; talk amongst yourselves...)

Ethical Play

2008-05-22T11:27:00.008-05:00

As some of you may know, I've been working on getting a non-profit organization off the ground - theCORgroup - and we've been getting some press lately. Madisonians, look for us in the Isthmus' Recreation section this week. Also online.

A little background: theCORgroup - Conscious Outdoor Recreation - started with conversations about the inconsistency between the outdoor recreation community's very refined backcountry/LNT ethic, and all the driving we are doing to get to the backcountry. As outdoor enthusiasts, our passion for the outdoors can't really be separated from our environmental consciousness - but striking a balance between hardcore wilderness experiences and minimizing transportation impacts is difficult... especially when we're hurting for backcountry skiing, whitewater paddling, and multipitch climbing here in the upper Midwest. theCORgroup has grown out of these tensions to explore how we can continue to have meaningful experiences in the backcountry, while being attentive to the true costs of being there.

We propose a new wilderness ethic - a frontcountry ethic - that applies some of these Leave-No-Trace principles to our daily lifestyle. Folks should still go on that sweet Colorado ski trip... but maybe just once a year, and consider trying to bike to work a little more often the rest of the time. I'm still going to West Virginia this fall for the Gauley River Festival, but you can be sure we're going to be packing my little Chevy Cavalier to capacity!

We're not telling people not to go into the wilderness, we just want to promote more critical discussion of how to do it responsibility. As for me and the Pemba Team: we're exploring opportunities for local recreation. There's plenty of this in Madison, but I've also been pleasantly surprised by all the Rails-to-Trails, river corridors, and quality urban parks all along my clinic routes. Stay tuned for more on Urban Wilderness, but check out that Isthmus article in the meantime, and let is know what else we should be doing as an industry to promote Conscious Outdoor Recreation!

Important Bizness Meetings

2008-05-22T10:40:00.004-05:00

Pete sinks a stretch-shot at the Dane during a rainy day in April.

Yeah, we work hard here. Really we do, sometimes even to the point of excess. As you may have read here or elsewhere, we've recently asked an old friend of ours - Tom McMahan - to become our Minister of Fun. His job is to come once every other week or so and make us have fun, whether we like it or not. (He practically had to shut off Janice's computer while she was using it to get her to drop everything and join us.) We thought you might like to see a couple of our recent outings with the Minister of Fun himself. Don't worry, there will be many more.

Lunch on the Capitol Lawn en route to Olbrich Gardens by bike.

Parental Control

2008-05-14T09:55:00.005-05:00

It's amazing how much control parents can have over their children sometimes. Obviously not always, but a good portion of the time a kid grows up to be much like either one of his parents. In my case, it's my dad. No doubt in my mind.

Growing up I idolized him, as a good kid should. He was, and still is, the epitomy of who I want to be as a person. So many of the lessons I've learned throughout my life I've learned from him. I'll be forever grateful for that.

Even our chosen professions, he's a pharmaceutical sales rep, are eerily similar. I still have very vague memories of a "take your son to work day". Dressing up in black slacks and a button up shirt. Having my parents put on a tie for me, clip on of course. I even think it may have been a bow tie to make it even better. It was fun seeing what he did for a living. Seeing what he did while I was away at school.

Now I'm sitting here 15 or so years later traveling through Michigan, and while it's not pharmaceuticals, I get to talk about and play with products I use every day. I get to work for really cool companies that sell some of the best gear on the planet. It's fun and I couldn't be happier doing it.

What brought all this on? I was tooling through some of my old pictures from Mammoth and found some of him. My roommate and I took him climbing one day while he was visiting. I can't explain how much fun it was to finally teach him something! To show him something new and to do exactly what he had been doing to me my entire life.

Here is a picture of him on one of the climbs. Since then, he found out he had adult onset diabetes he's lost about 40-50 pounds. I couldn't be happier for him.

If my memory serves me right, about 10 days after this picture was taken it snowed a foot and a half. Mind you, this picture was taken in early May. More on that in a few days though.....

Birthday Challenges

2008-05-09T11:29:00.009-05:00

I found this old picture of me on one of my many failed birthday challenges. I've always been in the school of thought that if you complete a birthday challenge, it was too easy. If you fail but still come close to completing, kudos. You pushed yourself proper. If you fail with a horribly miserable tally of completed challenges, you're just not cut out for birthday challenges. I fall into the last category having had multiple catastrophic failures.

About 10 minutes after this picture was taken I walked over to clean off the topout of my next problem, Pinball Arete. In short order I slipped and fell, 8 foot stick brush in hand, into one of the worst landings at the lake. Luck was on my side and I walked out wanting to try to complete the rest of the challenge. My leg ended up stiff as a log after trying my next climb and I couldn't climb or walk normally for a couple of weeks.

Lesson learned. I haven't attempted a challenge since. By the way, what does everybody think of purple??

Proudly showing off the farmers tan.

This is one of the coolest moves I've done at Devils Lake.

Fritters are so good. Thank you Greenbush.

There is a rumor going around that Vera is looking for some old pictures of Brad in his lycra and mullet days. We'll see if he can compete with these. I'm going to wager a guess he'll be able to beat me.

Pacific Coastal Range Expedition

2008-05-02T09:55:00.003-05:00

I added a new link to our "Pemba's Playmates" list earlier this week and I wanted to make sure all of our loyal readers check it out. Claire Porter, formerly of Midwest Mountaineering, is hiking as much of the Pacific Crest Trail as she can this year. Unfortunately her partner had to bow out early due to a herniated disk so Claire is hiking the rest of the trip solo.

We're wishing her the best of luck this year and hope that the trip goes well for her. Check out her site and updates at pcrexp.com. She has a pretty cool interactive map as well so you can keep up to date with where she's been.

In more Midwest Mountaineering news, congrats to Andy Knapp for being inducted into the Adventurers and Explorers Hall of Fame. Check out the SNEWS article here.