The Cleanest Line

Introducing the Common Threads Initiative - Reduce, Repair, Reuse, Recycle, Reimagine

“Recycling is what we do when we're out of options to avoid, repair, or reuse the product first. That's why I am so impressed with Patagonia for starting its Common Threads Initiative with the real solution: Reduce. Don't buy what we don't need. Repair: Fix stuff that still has life in it. Reuse: Share. Then, only when you've exhausted those options, recycle.” –Annie Leonard, author of The Story of Stuff

In the 18th century Lancashire's cotton mills and the budding clothing trade helped fuel the Industrial Revolution and create the modern economy. Now it's time to reverse the engines – to help create the next, more sustainable economy. Today, we are pleased to announce the launch of our Common Threads Initiative: a partnership between our customers, eBay and Patagonia to make, buy and use clothes more sustainably, with the ultimate aim of keeping the clothes we sell from ever reaching the landfill.

Strawberry Jam

Thanks Colin. The jam was awesome!

Surfing Waimea Made Me Bigger - An Excerpt from No Bad Waves: Talking Story with Mickey Muñoz

Our friends on the Patagonia Books team are proud to announce a new title by Mickey Muñoz called No Bad Waves. The book was a collaboration between Mickey, who recorded the stories in a series of interviews, Jeff Divine, who culled through Mickey's extensive photo archives, John Dutton, who massaged the transcripts into shape, and Peter McBride, who combined the words and images into what we think is one of our best books to date.

Today we're happy to give you a taste of the the book. Instead of a long narrative, No Bad Waves features a collection of short stories like this one about Mickey and the first group of West Coast surfers to ride Waimea Bay.

Surfing Waimea Made Me Bigger

The next time I went back to Hawai‘i was in 1957 when we spent the whole winter on the North Shore and ended up surfing Waimea. That winter, I rode some big waves and came back with extreme confidence.

The group of us over there had talked about riding Waimea and had gone by to look at it. Waimea appeared to be the last place on the North Shore that was rideable when everywhere else was closed out. A bunch of us had gathered, and we were standing on the road to check it out. I can’t remember who suggested we go out, but, “OK, let’s do it!”

Ray Anderson 1934-2011

Patagonia’s friend Ray Anderson, the visionary founder and chairman of Interface, died last week at the age of 77. Ray was an intelligent, soft-spoken entrepreneur, engineer, and businessman who, on reading Paul Hawken's Ecology of Commerce in 1994 called it a “spear into my heart,” embraced environmentally conscious business practices, and became a tireless spokesman for better behavior on the part of business. We interviewed both Ray and Paul in our video “What Is Quality for Our Time?” (pictured) which you can find in our Footprint Chronicles and Video Gallery. Paul has graciously granted us permission to post his moving tribute to Ray.

We, who were so fortunate to know Ray Anderson, were in awe. He was many people: a father, executive, colleague, brother, speaker, writer, leader, pioneer. But I am not sure any of us quite figured him out. On the outside, Ray was deceptively traditional, very quiet sometimes, an everyman, all-American, down-home. He was so normal that he could say just about anything and get away with it because people didn’t quite believe what they heard. He could walk into an audience and leave listeners transfixed by a tenderness and introspection they never expected or met. Business audiences in particular had no defenses because they had no framework for Ray.

Was he really a businessman? Yes. Was he a conservative southern gentleman with that very refined Georgiadrawl. Yes. Was he successful? For sure.

On Tumplines

Today’s post – about one of the simplest pieces of gear we’ve ever made – comes from Patagonia’s founder, Yvon Chouinard. It originally appeared in the 1980 Chouinard Equipment Catalog. [Photo: Yvon Chouinard screengrab from The Simplest Solution and 180° South.]

When I was at a ski show recently, walking by the booth of one of the largest pack manufacturers, a salesman/designer insisted I come in to look over his new pack design. He was terribly proud of it. We spent twenty full minutes going over its sophisticated load distribution features and anatomically S-curved frame, welded with tungsten/inert gas and its wonderful bag made of 420-denier Super-K-coated eight-ounce parapack nylon held together with 18 stitches per inch of cotton-wrapped Dacron thread. Finally, after reaching a fever pitch of enthusiasm and exhausting every aerospace term he knew, he stepped back beaming proudly. As his eyes gradually returned to their respective sockets he asked, “Well Mr. Chouinard, how do you like it?” I shrugged. “It looks like you’ve put a lot of thought into this thing,” I said, “and it certainly looks and feels good with all this display foam in it. But I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you. I carry all my loads with a tump line now. And with one of those it doesn’t matter what you have on your back – a fearsome astro loader like this or a sack of potatoes.”

That riled him a bit, but he didn’t know how I’d reached my tump line conclusion. In 1968, in the jungles of Colombia, I injured my neck while diving into a shallow river. Shortly after that faceplant, the muscles on one side of my neck atrophied, which in turn, has caused me classic back problems – nagging lower back pains and various muscle spasms. I’ve seen orthopedists and chiropractors and I’ve read every book I can on back problems. The consensus is this: most back problems are caused by a weak back or stomach muscles. Great. So how do I exercise muscles that have nerve damage? And I can’t stand to do any sort of exercise for exercise sake anyway...

Travel Riding

The Patagonia crew extends a hearty welcome to Josh Dirksen. Josh joins fellow snowboarders Ryland Bell, Forrest Shearer and Taro Tamai in our ambassador lineup. Josh is widely known as one of the great understated riders in the sport. With over 20 years snowboarding and a pro career spanning over a decade, Josh is one of the few athletes in the circuit who's been riding professionally longer than he can remember. We caught up with Josh recently in Europe, where he spends part of the year, the other parts being spent in the search for snow and surf. He can still be found in his long-time home base of Bend, Oregon a few months out of the year.

[Josh Dirksen, enjoying home-sweet-tent - his living quarters during 3 weeks of filming for Deeper in Alaska. All photos courtesy Josh Dirksen collection.]

TCL:  You have a home in Oregon, a wife in Switzerland and travel all over the world each year. Do you have a favorite place to come back to?

Josh: These days it does not really matter which place I head back to. It is more important who is around when I get there. I always look forward to seeing my wife, family, and friends wherever they are at.

The 48-Hour Dress

by Brittany Griffith

As the sun heated up our little apartment, I drifted out of my dream and awoke to a bizarre scene: people sprawled all over the floor, futon and tiny twin beds…I could hear chatter in half a dozen languages, clinking plates and glasses… the faint smell of tobacco, espresso and butter… a marching band playingoutside the open window. We had all really tied one on last night (and a chunk of the next morning) for Zoe and Max’s wedding in Chamonix, France. My muddied mind failed to function. I tried to assess the situation. What time was it? What felt worse: my jetlag or my hangover? Why had I slept in my dress? Who… the… hell… was typing?

I rolled past JT, got out of bed, stepped over the floor-bivied Janet, turned the corner, and there was Kelly, on the futon, typing away. Kelly! Was he already writing a TCL post about the wedding? That sneaky bastard!

“Whatcha writin’, Kelly?” I asked suspiciously. He and I both frequently write posts for The Cleanest Line and I was sure he was trying to beat me to the punch and be the first to write about the wedding. He looked like a little troll, propped up on a cushion, salt-and-pepper mullet wildly disheveled and wearing an unbuttoned rumpled dress shirt and Cap 2 Boxer Briefs (shudder). He was squinting intently at his laptop screen while furiously pecking at the keys. He looked up at me without moving his head, kinda like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

“Ah… no, no… I’m not really doing anything,” he muttered unconvincingly as he slowly continued to type.

Damn it! He really was already writing a TCL post about the wedding! Not only was he a better writer than me, he could get up with a Level-10 wedding hangover three hours earlier than me and write! Damn alpinists – why can’t they sleep in like normal people?

[Kelly, telepathically dictating to his laptop back down in town, and I on the train up to the reception. Photo: Jen Olson]

Tenkara USA Joins in Sharing Time-Honored Fishing Techniques with Patagonia Japan Employees

Fishing has always been about being simple, but 15 minutes of trout talk with a czech-nyphing double dropper can sometimes be enough to have you thinking precisely the opposite. A masterful style of fishing recently brought to Western rivers from the mountain waters of Japan presents a welcome antidote to the elaborate (and oftentimes extravagant) style of fishing that's come to dominate the image of fly fishing. Tenkara USA is a company dedicated to this style of fishing, and today's post, from company founder Daniel W. Galhardo, is about sharing the simplicity of fishing with others. - Ed


[Dr. Ishigaki doing a tenkara demonstration for Patagonia employees of different Tokyo stores. Photo: Daniel W. Galhardo]

Today tenkara, Tenkara USA and Patagonia once again crossed paths, this time in Japan with staff from a couple of Patagonia stores in Tokyo.

At the moment, I am sitting in my tatami room in the town of Kaida Kogen, Nagano prefecture in Japan. We just finished a hot-pot dinner, which topped off a day of teaching tenkara to four Patagonia-Japan employees. Over the next couple of days more people will join the tenkara class.

Interview: Snowboard Ambassador Ryland Bell

We're pleased to welcome Ryland Bell to the Patagonia Ambassador lineup. Ryland is a snowboarder who has spent all the summers of his life on boats in the Alaskan village of Elfin Cove (population 20), where his parents fish commercially. He can't think of a winter growing up when he wasn't riding on sleds, skis, inner tubes or whatever could slide downhill, preferably fast. When Ryland was first strapped into a snowboard at age 12 though, he knew he had found it. The 25-year-old rider now spends winter in Lake Tahoe's Squaw Valley and spring in Haines, Alaska. We caught up with him to find out more about what it was like growing up on a boat in Alaska - not to mention riding some of the steepest, most remote lines being ridden in North America today, some of which were featured in the film Deeper.

TCL: What stands out the most about your life growing up in Alaska?

Ryland: The amount of wilderness, and wildlife.

TCL: What's your favorite and least favorite thing about life as a fisherman?

Ryland: Favorite thing, being on the water, and the amazing views. Least favorite thing, getting up at 3 in the morning for weeks on end.


[All photos: Abe Blair, courtesy Ryland Bell collection]

From the Trenches series - Caring for your Down Clothing

Like flocks of swirling swallows or shimmering schools of tropical fish, our customers swoop in with mysteriously synchronized concerns and questions on a regular basis, prompting the need for ready answers. Times like these, nothing would be more handy than magically beaming knowledge out into the ether. Our very own Old School is here to do just that. He's stepped back from the front lines to answer some of these more popular questions.

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How Do I Wash My Down Jacket?

Perhaps it due to all the warnings about the perils of wet down, but it seems a lot of people are afraid to wash their down jacket. Down is remarkably tough stuff and though wet down has virtually zero insulation properties, getting it wet doesn’t hurt it in the least. Washing a down jacket is not much harder than washing a pair of jeans. 

There are 3 things you’ll need to wash your down jacket: down soap, a front load washer, and a dryer with reliably low heat. While you can use regular detergents, they can strip away the natural oils in down and don’t always rinse out cleanly so I recommend using a cleaner specifically designed for down. I find NikWax® Down Wash works really well but there are several other effective down cleaners on the market.