The Cleanest Line

2nd-Annual Patagonia Retail Cycling Challenge Begins!

Patagonia employees can be a competitive lot, particularly when it comes to scoring bragging rights. Throw some nifty schwag into the mix and you've got the makin's of a serious throw-down. This update comes courtesy of Nick March, in Patagonia's Dealer Services department. Nick's a dedicated bike commuter and Chief Numbercruncher for Patagonia's Bike to Work Week Cycling Challenge. Check out Nick's report below, and click here to read about last year's hotly contested race. Stay tuned to see which store earns the right to claim the most pedal pushin' miles this week.

Welcome back to this year’s Retail Challenge! The retail stores are back this year to compete for store pride and a sweet new Cruiser. The criterion for this year’s Challenge is a little different than last. Rather than being measured by the average amount of participants the stores are trying to rack up as many miles as possible from May 10th – May 18th using only human-powered transportation. These miles include the round trip between home and work by each employee. The store with the most miles at the end of the week takes home a shiny new cruiser, compliments of New Belgium Brewery.   

The weekend results are tallied and it looks like we have a great turnout so far in the retail sector. Westport is leading the pack with 213 miles followed closely by Palo Alto with 201.2. It’s been an epic journey for many in the Midwest and east coast, battling intense thunderstorms but still staying dedicated to the human-powered transportation!  It looks like its going to be another tight race this year and there’s plenty of time to rack up the mileage.  Stay tuned to find out how your local store is performing!

List of Store's and their average number of participating cyclists

• Westport               3.5
• Palo Alto               7.5
• Portland                6.5
• Santa Monica         6.5
• Reno Outlet           6.5
• San Francisco         6.5
• Boston                  8.5
• Pasadena               6
• Freeport Outlet       2
• Seattle                  4
• Soho                     10
• Boulder                  7.5
• St. Paul                  5
• GPIW                     4
• Denver                   2
• Salt Lake Outlet      4.5
• Washington DC        5
• Upper Westside       3.5
• Atlanta                   2
• Cardiff                   1.5
• Santa Cruz             1.5
• Dillon                    5.5
• National Average    4.98

It's Bike to Work Week - Listen to the Dirtbag Diaries after your Ride Home

Once again it's time to leave the car in the garage and clean up your commute. It's Bike to Work Week and we'll start it off with a new episode of the Dirtbag Diaries. Fitz Cahall, host of the podast, has this to say about episode 19:

Life was good. The approaches were short. The routes straightforward. The work wonderfully mindless. After a long dry-spell of writing, a job as a climbing guide at Smith Rock was like a vacation from life. I was 22 again, not a failing writer struggling to pay the rent. It was too good to last.

Through the years, I’ve tried to escape words and journalism, but the writing life always has a funny way of creeping back into my world. This time it came in the form of a 230-pound cameraman with a fear of heights, a fast talking New York producer and a 30-year-old broadcaster trying to return to her childhood. It turns out you have to earn your 15 seconds of fame.

Listen to The Dirtbag Diaries:
Episode 19 – The Human Mule (mp3)

Like what you heard? The RSS feed, subscription link to iTunes, and contact information for future story ideas are all available at www.dirtbagdiaries.com.

[Big thanks to Adrienne for this week's custom masthead.]

Update: Changed title and edited post to discourage listening to iPod while riding. Thank you Todd.

Happy Belated Mother’s Day

Even though this comes a little late, I really want to wish all the moms out there a happy mother’s day. Thank you for all that you do, and all that you give up, in order to help your children prepare for life on their own. Hope you had a great day yesterday.

[Photo by mama bear from her post My Carpool.]

Eruption in the Backyard: Kris Tompkins Reports on the Chaiten Volcano

If you’ve ever been far away from loved ones when disaster hits, you know how Kristine Tompkins (Patagonia co-founder and former CEO) and her husband, Doug, feel right now. They are in Argentina, while miles away, one of the Chilean national parks they founded, Pumalin Park, is threatened by the ash and toxic gases spewing forth from the Chaiten Volcano. This volcano, which has not erupted for thousands of years, sits at the southern end of the Pumalin Park near the city of Chaiten and has been erupting since May 2nd forcing thousands to evacuate.

[From Kris: "Photo Taken from our farm at Pillan, looking over at where we live, 17kms from the volcano."]

Kris has been keeping the Chouinards updated via email; hit the jump for some excerpts and insight into how the situation is changing daily.

Slaying Giants with Grassroots

This post was submitted by Patagonia grantee Monty Bassett from the Sage Foundation.

January 17th, 2005, in a remote village in the middle of a vast British Columbia wilderness, Roy Quock, an 84-year-old elder of the Tahltan tribe, discovered that his band chief had been touring the world, at the invitation of the World Bank and the Canadian government, promoting the benefits of industrial mining on aboriginal lands. Roy heard on the radio that his chief had been speaking in Guatemala at a mining conference and boasted that he’d negotiated for six mines – four of them open pit, and a giant coalbed methane project – all to begin in his territory within a year.

“Enough is enough!” said Roy and he and his younger brother, Bobby (83), trundled down to the band office. Upon discovering that the chief was away (meeting with Shell in Calgary) they said, “We’ll wait.” and they did. With three dozen other elders they waited for eight-and-a-half months until their Chief was turffed, thus starting an environmental fight that would lead to barricades, arrests, and a protest ad appearing in the London Financial Times.

Zoe Hart Becomes Fourth American Woman to Earn IFMGA Mountain Guide Credential

A big CONGRATULATIONS goes out to Patagonia Ambassador Zoe Hart who just passed her Ski Mountaineering Guide’s exam to earn her IFMGA mountain guide credential! This makes Zoe the fourth American woman to earn her IFMGA, or International Federation of Mountain Guides Associations, status. This is the highest level of credential available by a professional mountain guide anywhere in the world and is recognized in over 20 IFMGA member countries.

[Zoe Hart tapes up on St. Exupery, Patagonia, Argentina. Photo: Maxime Turgeon.]

As some of you may know, since 1997 it has been possible for American guides to earn their international certification through the American Mountain Guides Association (AMGA). At this point in time there are approximately fifty American IFMGA guides in the country. To accomplish this, one must take a series of courses and pass three exams: Rock Guide, Alpine Guide, and Ski-Mountaineering Guide. Additional courses are required as well, including Wilderness First Responder and an American Level 3 Avalanche certificate. To put this in perspective each course and each exam lasts between 7 and 14 days, and you are required to have a certain number of guiding days between each course and exam! This is a long, arduous, and often expensive process of educational courses culminating in certification exams.

Patagonia is a benefactor partner and has long been a big supporter of the AMGA’s mission.

[Editor's note: Steve House was the seventh American to earn an IFMGA pin, way back in 1999, and was a former director of the AMGA's Alpine Guide program. "Pin" refers to a highly coveted cast-pewter pin IFMGA guides traditionally wear to identify themselves to fellow mountain guides. The only American women to earn IFMGA pins are Kathy Cosley, Margaret Wheeler, Olivia Cussen and, now, Zoe Hart. Way to go Zoe!]

Your Feedback at Work - Critical Mass

Product Feedback. Boy do we get a lot of it . . . From fit to function to fashion, from price to purpose to product names, customer feedback is one thing we've grown to rely on. We believe our customers are more passionate and outspoken than the norm. And while that means there's some folks out there who are hard to please, our quality just wouldn't be the same if it weren't for their willingness to ask for something better.

Case in Point: the Critical Mass Bag. Long-time customers have seen many versions of this bag, each with its die-hard proponents and detractors. It was born of our own selfish desire to toss the day's gear into a sack, throw it over a shoulder, and be on our self-propelled way.

The feedback we get from you comes from all angles: e-mails, phone calls, blog posts, letters (yes, people still write us by hand), magazine reviews, and surveys. But what do we do with it? Frankly, we get so much input that we could never respond to all of it. Since we can't respond to everyone directly, this post is a modest attempt to show how your feedback shapes our design decisions.

Green Neoprene?

Recently there has been a lot of talk in the surf world about “green” wetsuits (1, 2, 3, 4). Most of the claims revolve around the use of neoprene made from limestone rather than petroleum. I asked Todd Copeland, who works on Patagonia's Fabric Development team, to shed some light on these claims.

Many of us at Patagonia wear wetsuits but until 2005 none of us had ever developed one. When we first sought to get into the business, we went to visit the raw material manufacturers to learn how neoprene is made, what kinds of materials are available, and their relative advantages and drawbacks, including environmental.

A wetsuit is basically made of foamed rubber, sometimes called a sponge. It can be laminated on one or two sides to fabric, usually polyester or nylon in a jersey knit. The pieces are glued and/or stitched together to make a wetsuit, and then the seams can be sealed to prevent water leakage.

The sponge is made from polychloroprene rubber chips, commonly called neoprene. These are melted and mixed together with foaming (blowing) agents and pigment, usually carbon black, and baked in an oven to make it expand.

To make the polychloroprene chips, the manufacturer polymerizes chloroprene monomers, which means reacting small molecules together to produce the large macromolecules (polymers) that make up rubber. There are two methods of manufacturing chloroprene monomer. The most common method – Method 1 – takes butadiene through a two-step process of chlorination and subsequent dehydrochlorination. The butadiene for Method 1 is derived from petroleum. The less commonly used method is to dimerize acetylene (react 2 acetylene molecules together to form a double molecule) and then hydrochlorinate the dimer. The acetylene for this Method 2 is derived from limestone.

Beach of the King - A Personal History of Playa Del Rey

DJ Dukesherer's path to becoming an author was less direct than the one that led him to surfing. Paddling the deep blue waters off the coast of Playa Del Rey with his father were a defining element of his childhood.

Mr. Dukesherer's ocean roots sunk deep into the sands of Playa Del Rey. Through his years, he's watched as sacred spots are paved over, developed, and forgotten. What's left of so many of these places is only memory. In what can only be called a labor of love, he's put together a paean to this treasured homeland: Beach of the King: Playa Del Rey/Westchester/Playa Vista, A Personal History.

Beach of the King is part history, part memoir, but all heart. As DJ says about his efforts to preserve what remains of this treasured spot, "I am looking to find a way to bring some positive education to the area, in hopes that we can avert any further madness." In the spirit of that, he's put together a local library series to support his self-published book, with a standing exhibit in 4 parts beginning July 12, 2008 and running through June 2009. The series is being sponsored by the Los Angeles Library, Playa Vista Branch. If you're a local and would like more information, please leave your comments/questions below.

From Beach of the King:

When I was very young boy, my parents took us to the beach whenever they could, and we would spend long days on the beaches of Playa Del Rey, in Southern California. We knew three beaches there, at Dockweiler State Beach: Gillis Beach, Toe’s Beach and The Pits. It was like having a resort in your own back yard.

We lived, then, about three miles from that beach. In those days, my father owned a very long--perhaps 18 foot--turquoise and speckled-white, hollow paddle-board. On sunny-hot summer days, he would paddle out at old Toe’s Beach in Playa Del Rey,  and cover miles on it; sometimes going as far south as Malibu, which was still accessible in those days. This was before the new channel was dug-- that now separates Playa Del Rey, from Marina Del Rey and Venice Beach.

[Photo: DOCKWEILER STATE BEACH, R.V. Campground]

Pat Europe Colleagues Get High Together

Yannick and his ski cronies from Patagonia Europe are stormin' the steeps again. While denizens of our beach hut (Patagonia Ventura) have got spring surf on the brain, and the tribe at the desert mountain outpost (Patagonia Reno) are stymied by the all-to-quick disappearance of the snowpack, our friends at Patagonia Europe are proving that sometimes the best way to enjoy the spring is to get as high as possible. For these folks, that means summiting the 4248m (13,937 ft) Mont Blanc du Tacul, a scant 45 minutes from the Patagonia Europe offices.

Below, is a rough translation of the trip outline. The full post (in the original French) can be found on his always image-rich blog, Team Dré Dans le Pentu. Like Yannick would say, "Point 'em straight down!"

April 27, 2008: Mont Blanc du Tacul on skis.

By Yannick, Tuesday, April 29, 2008 at 13:26
Category: "Going Out"

Beautiful morning forecast, with the afternoon becoming overcast and the snow up to 3000m rotten . . . the choice: Mont Blanc du Tacul.

Our start was early in the morning (5h Annecy), because of reservations, the telecabins were already full Friday. Three employees of Patagonia were smart and decided not to store their skis too fast:
-- Evelyn - Direct Sales Manager (who made the most photos below).
-- Guillaume - Marketing Assitant (télémarkeur, his first time at 4000m).
-- Yannick - I.T. Systems (myself).

[Top: Guillaume and Evelyn on the descent from the Auguille du Midi's top station (approx. 12,800'). Above: Looking toward le Mont Blanc from the top of the Auguille du Midi, only 3,000 more feet to climb. All photos: Yannick Clèvy]