The Cleanest Line

UK Premier of Chris Malloy's 'One Track Mind' at TYF, Wales

Here's an announcement from one of our Welsh Patagonia partners. Our independent dealer on the west coast of Wales, TYF Adventure, is a big little business in the UK’s smallest city, St David’s.

TYF is an outdoor retailer and adventure provider (coasteering, climbing, surfing and much more) in a city with a population of 1600 that sees 500,000 visitors a year. Being based in a coastal national park, surrounded by cliffs, beaches and islands has had a big impact on everything they do – salt-water wild places are in their blood.

Through Patagonia, TYF have been introduced to the folks at 1% For The Planet and over the last three years have donated £40,000 to environmental charities.

Ross and Alice from TYF were travelling and surfing out in California this autumn and met up with Chipper Bro (Patagonia’s core surfer-worker-ambassador) who took them to see the car park. Solar power car ports are pretty neat as it goes, but the humble car park took on a new tone for them in the company of nine-time world surfing champion Kelly Slater, veteran champ Tom Curran and 500 others. This was also the first showing of Chris Malloy’s film ‘One Track Mind’.

Man Gives U.S. Wild Utah for Christmas

Idealists are frequently told that "hope" is not a strategy. Perhaps not, but it breeds inspiration, and inspiration is nothing if not the mother of the marvelous. And hope and inspiration together . . . Why, don't they create the foundation upon which all great strategies are formed?

On December 19th, Tim DeChristopher confessed in hushed tones to his roommate that, in fact, he didn't have a plan. What he had was a strong desire to protect a landscape he loves, and a hope that he could still do something about it. So Mr. DeChristopher did something truly unprecedented--something inspiring--and in so doing, accomplished something truly marvelous. In short, his simple, solitary action short-circuited the inexorable machinations of the U.S. gover'naut and their attempts to push through an eleventh-hour sale of some prime Utah wilderness. He did this in the span of a couple of hours, armed with little more than a paddle and a purpose.

The government action in question was the much-contested auction of nearly 200,000 acres of wild Utah situated near some of its most vast and ancient treasures: Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Park, and Desolation Canyon to name a few. Realizing that letter writing and picketing, no matter how tireless, were not going to halt the sale of this acreage to oil and mining interests, Tim DeChristopher placed his picket sign down in front of the BLM building where he was protesting and chose a new course of action. A columnist for a local paper here in Reno offers this description of the events:

So there was De Christopher, at the BLM office in Salt Lake City on the morning of Dec. 19, along with about 200 other unhappy folks. He thought about the times he had written letters to congressmen, had protested outside of government offices, and had signed petitions. “What the environmental movement has been doing in the last 20 years hasn’t worked,” he told the Salt Lake City Tribune later. “There comes a time to take a stand.” And then, following a positively inspired hunch, he took one.