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Nefarius
Big Wall climber
Fresno, CA
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Mar 13, 2007 - 07:56pm PT
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HAHAHA! We can always count on you, can't we, Dingus?
Thanks!
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AKDOG
Mountain climber
Anchorage, AK
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Mar 13, 2007 - 08:10pm PT
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A lot of people are posting about having a 20 year old piece of clothing from Patagonia that is still in good shape. I am by no means a full time climber and I like Patagonia’s stuff. But even as a weekend warrior I have eventually worn out all my Patagonia stuff, multiple pairs of shorts have been retired because of too many holes and worn out seams after hard use. I have an old Patagonia pile jacket that has you can see through. I have a Patagonia soft shell that has changed color from too much use in the sun. If you have 20 year old gear that is still in good shape it is from lack of use. Take your Patagonia jeans up a Joshua Tree off width they won’t last as long as wearing them to the movies.
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Hawkeye
climber
State of Mine
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Mar 13, 2007 - 08:14pm PT
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sheeesus. you think i am gonna use that expensive ssheet outdoors? you mean other than taking it downtown? dewd.
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Magritte
climber
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Mar 13, 2007 - 09:29pm PT
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Woah Randomtask. The road to the right of the Cascadel Arch? That's a primo area. I'm the road to the right of the road to the right of the arch. Are you still on the road to the right of the Arch?
The other stuff ... my bad. I've been disappointed, you're only disappointed when you expect too much.
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happiegrrrl
Trad climber
New York, NY
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Mar 13, 2007 - 09:31pm PT
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CosmicCragsman should post a picture of this old Patagonia fleece from....like 20 years ago, maybe more, that he added pink trim and....was it a Penguin print? I can't remember. But I saw it, and it was clear he wears it all the time(and used to live in Jtree and still climbs there), and the thing actually does look....well, unique for sure. But it looks like it hasn't even entered middle age yet.
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Largo
Sport climber
Venice, Ca
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Mar 13, 2007 - 09:38pm PT
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You'll have to excuse my nicotine deprived desperately withdrawling rants about Patagonia. As though anyone there cares what I say about any of it. I guess part of the reason it's a flashpoint is that Patagonia is one of the few stable things that's always been around since I first started seriously climbing in 1971. I sort of learned how to be a climber and a person by copying the attitudes and general existential vibe of the old Chouinard catalogues. They were like my high school yearbooks, and like most all American climbers, Chouinard and Patagonia are things we have aged with, all of us togethe. In that sense Patagonia is a kind of unstated spokesman for a lot of people of my generation--not so much by choice, but because the company reflects values and ideas that are at least in the wide sense are important to most of us. I can lampoon Patagonias new age vegetarian kitchen but I'd much rather eat there than at Fat Burger. And while I bash the precious ad copy that goes along with photos of folks haning out in Mexico or surfing or kayaking or whatever, I'm more likely than not going to enjoy doing those same persuits.
I guess what I'm saying is that a lot of have come to expect perfection out of Patagonia according to our own view of what perfection actually is or should be. That's why I was taken back by reports (probably not true) that several of the Ambassadors had been dumped outright. This is probably not at all true and even if it is there's always another side of the story. Either way, when I really think about it, I might balk at lionizing Yvon Chouinard and mock a lot of the rhetoric and neo-hippie, eco-seer, simmering lentil, drop-into-the-essence flowstate groment with the awe-shucks humility and the higher virtue biodiesel wankamataz, I'm rather proud of what that company has done.
JL
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slobmonster
Trad climber
berkeley, ca
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Mar 14, 2007 - 12:02am PT
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John, you write:
"I sort of learned how to be a climber and a person by copying the attitudes and general existential vibe of the old Chouinard catalogues."
At this point in our history, many of my particular generation (I'm 32, and I've been climbing since I was 14 or 15) learned to "be a climber" via much of your own writing. When I visit Camp 4 and my friends over in the corner, in the big white tents, it's patently obvious that most (if not all) of us have been emulating your own vibe... whether we mean to or not.
Remember the '98 Valley season? Dean, Timmy, Sue Nott, Leo, Cedar, Heidi, et al. come to mind, trying to stay out of trouble with the man, climbing walls faster than they'd as yet been ascended, Scotty Burke working the Nose. Add onto their august sportsmanship the tacit Camp 4 chicaney --and the legends that grow from such things-- and we now have our (perhaps) fourth generation of so-called dirtbags.
FWIW I'm fairly confident that all Patagonia's Ambassador/Athletes make a solid living wage, enough to purchase real estate. As they should.
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joane
climber
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Mar 14, 2007 - 08:24am PT
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Hi Magritte,
Just a quick note to your re-post on the scandalous stuff. I think if you re-read your post on what you wrote that consumers should be aware of you'll see where I'm coming from, (you write that there are misstatements at least or outright lies on the biodegrable stuff which presumably has a definition somewhere for advertising, using foreign child labor, which many orgs will find warrants intervention of same nature, etc. etc etc.} It sure is great that there wasn't a lot of name calling and your follow up post to mine is essentially saying you didn't mean it to be scandalous so hey that's important. And for sure it's important to check out the truth. But good will and reputation for people and companies is how we all get along. So great, investigate, but I think the conclusions should bear some relation to facts, not gossip. Anyway, thanks for getting back to my comment, I appreciate it.
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jstan
climber
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Mar 14, 2007 - 10:27am PT
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Thread getting better now, though one should never have to apologize for creating a new art form.
Being alive is a long educational process by the end of which you have learned who your friends are; the whole time knowing you will never completely agree with anyone. It is like being joined at the hip to a monster, and being thankful for the company.
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Staples10
climber
Jeffrey City, WY
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Mar 14, 2007 - 11:20am PT
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There is rampant speculation about Patagonia's profits. Has anyone actually seen their books? I doubt it, since it's closely held but an examination of their income statement compared to other competitors would shed some light on this thread. The only person I know who worked at Patagonia said YV was largely hands off, until he'd come in and say, "We're moving to organic cotton" and then leave it to the managers to figure out how to implement the decision and not bankrupt the business. If the business is still run this way, with YV making sudden, sweeping strategy changes w/o regard for the financial consequences, it's possible that Patagonia is less financially strong that many here are assuming. And this would undermine some of the greedy bastard rhetoric posted on this thread.
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G_Gnome
Boulder climber
Sick Midget Land
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Mar 14, 2007 - 12:08pm PT
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A lot of theorizing there but I doubt you would find them financially weak.
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Patrick Sawyer
climber
Originally California now Ireland
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Mar 14, 2007 - 12:23pm PT
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My only contribution to this thread has been to enquire about Yerian’s whereabouts and to just say that I think Ron is a fine man, at least he was always friendly with me.
I figure that is about 1¢
So now for the other cent.
Why is everybody getting so worked up about this? Especially when the facts are/were not known. As mentioned, Patagonia is a company and companies don’t operate very long in the red, unless they are supported by a government, such as Halliburton (couldn’t resist a bit of politicking), or should I say, by the taxpayer. So profit is a key to running a successful company. Duh.
Of course, YC and his financial people want to watch costs. If a company goes out of business, where does that leave its employees? As well as the management? The answer is obvious.
Ethically, I haven’t followed Patagonia’s activities much, but they do seem to rise above the standards of most companies.
I waited before posting anything to this thread (outside of the aforementioned) to see if what, if any, facts came out before commenting. So it seems that three of the eight rock climbing ambassadors have parted company for whatever reason. Was it to do with any actions that one two or all three did that brought adverse publicity to the company? I certainly can’t say, and since I deal with PR people and press officers all of the time, the company may not say, at least the full story. We may hear from one or all of the three about what happened, but if there are sour grapes involved, or personality clashes, I’d take with a pinch of salt any story I heard.
But, to reiterate, I couldn’t really care that people parted company with Patagonia, though if they were really shat upon, that would make me view the company more negatively.
Let’s all get a life, especially the trolls, and let this thread drift into oblivion and become thread dead.
Oh my gawd, I bumped this thread with this post. Eyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
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Raydog
Trad climber
Boulder
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Mar 14, 2007 - 12:33pm PT
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go LARGO:
" I might balk at lionizing Yvon Chouinard and mock a lot of the rhetoric and neo-hippie, eco-seer, simmering lentil, drop-into-the-essence flowstate groment with the awe-shucks humility and the higher virtue biodiesel wankamataz"
you nailed it.
Thanks.
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TwistedCrank
climber
Hell
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Mar 14, 2007 - 01:52pm PT
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I think it all went to hell in a handbasket when Brooke Shields started espousing Patagony warm and fuzzies when she was a college kid at Princeton not taking the football physics classes she was supposed to take.
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Wade Icey
Social climber
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Mar 16, 2007 - 04:33pm PT
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what the hell...beats working bump
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Matt
Trad climber
places you shouldn't talk about in polite company
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Mar 16, 2007 - 04:40pm PT
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so...
then...
was that delicate arch thing really a "Not-So-Free Solo"?
"Fifty grand a year will buy a-lot-a beer"
(what was the name of that band from back before MTV went hip-hop?)
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Jaybro
Social climber
The West
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Mar 16, 2007 - 05:49pm PT
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Timbukthree
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bvb
Social climber
flagstaff arizona
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Mar 16, 2007 - 09:36pm PT
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you used to be a candle in the wind
now you're just a big shot in the dark.....
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Brian in SLC
Social climber
Salt Lake City, UT
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Mar 25, 2007 - 01:05pm PT
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Interesting...
-Brian in SLC
http://www.jacksonholenews.com/article.php?art_id=1567
Climber Potter, Patagonia agree to split the synchilla
Climbing ambassador is out of sponsorship job following climb of Delicate Arch.
Dean Potter's relationship with his sponsor, Patagonia, hit a snag with his free-solo ascent of Delicate Arch in Utah last year, which also brought criticism from the climbing community. While he said he learned a lesson, Potter wonders whether too many regulations prevent people from experiencing wild places on their own terms. NEWS&GUIDE PHOTO / ANGUS M. THUERMER JR.
By Angus M. Thuermer Jr.
March 21, 2007
Dean Potter and his wife, Steph Davis, two of the most accomplished mountaineers in the world, will no longer be rock climbing ambassadors for the Patagonia outdoors clothing company, Potter said this week in Jackson.
The split between the famous couple and the well-known company comes almost a year after Potter made a controversial ascent of Delicate Arch in Arches National Park, Utah, last spring. The latest development in Potter’s high-profile career, which moved into dicey terrain following the arch ascent, will put him at arm’s length from a company that has pioneered environmentalism around the globe in a fashion never before seen.
Potter, a superb alpinist, rock climber, slackline walker, BASE jumper and aerialist, is breaking such new ground in the mountain scene that Alpinist Film Festival organizer Christian Beckwith labeled him a “climbing provocateur.” In Jackson to attend that gathering last weekend, Potter said in an interview that he and Davis would end their relationship with the Ventura, Calif., firm, owned by Jackson Hole homeowners Yvon and Malinda Chouinard.
“Patagonia does some really amazing things for the environment that are much more important than my climbing,” Potter said. “Their mission is a really important one and I wouldn’t want to affect that in a negative way.
“My thoughts about being free were too risky for them to back,” Potter said. “The negative effects are too big for them. ... So we went our separate ways.”
Potter’s lanky build, shaggy mane and bold tactics have made him a name as he has racked up speed alpine ascents and solo climbs that astonish. He became the first person to solo both Fitzroy and Cerro Torre in Patagonia, Argentina, and turned heads by walking a rope over dizzying and deadly drops.
Today he is pushing the limits of climbing as he seeks to ascend mountains, jump off them and glide in a suit fitted with fabric “wings” to land with a parachute at the base of his next objective. Yet as he sought the freedom of the hills with his envelope-pushing feats, Potter ran into conflict with conservationists, and a large part of his climbing community, with his ascent of Delicate Arch.
Park officials, who thought climbing on arches already was prohibited, imposed new restrictions on climbing, while climbers attacked Potter in Internet forums. They and conservationists even accused him of damaging the fragile feature after a photographer shot pictures of grooves thought to have been caused by the dragging of a rope across Delicate’s sandstone face.
And while he has apologized for his ascent, Potter wonders whether there still is freedom in the hills, or whether our remote places are so regulated one can no longer go there, as John Muir once did, to find one’s soul.
Raised in New Hampshire as the son of an Army soldier and U.N. liaison, Potter, 34, told a film festival audience he grew up as a “misfit kid.” He played in the woods, a rebel hunting and fishing. His first climbing was on Joe English cliff.
“My parents forbid me to go there,” he said. “You had to break in.”
Climbing without ropes on routes that are traditionally safeguarded with mountaineering hardware, he and his buddies had their first brush with death. “No one taught us rules,” Potter said.
Childhood dreams of flying may have played a role in his quests, Potter said. Ultimately, it was in nature and on the cliffs that he found solace.
“I had my problems with attention in school,” Potter said. “It didn’t happen with climbing.
“The main thing that’s drawn me in is the heightened awareness that danger brings, that beauty brings,” he said. “That seems to bring out the extra power in me – when I’m really alert.”
“The mountains for me are about chasing after freedom and following impulses,” he said. “I’m not for rules, taking away freedom.”
Part of his relationship with the mountains are efforts to walk ropes, known among climbers as slacklines, strung between rock towers and walls. He also is a BASE jumper – one who leaps off buildings, antennae, spans and earth features – with a parachute. But BASE jumping is illegal in national parks, and slacklining is under fire after his walk between The Gossips, sandstone towers in Arches.
Potter argues that his BASE jumping and slackline walking do not harm the environment. Prohibitions against them “are bringing us farther away from our spirit,” he said.
Such thinking led him to the ascent of Delicate Arch, the landmark on Utah license plates and an image engraved on the back of medals awarded at the Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. Potter climbed the roughly 60-foot-tall formation of Entrada sandstone last spring without a belay rope, a feat publicized with photographs and a video.
The climb won him more attention than he bargained for, and almost all of it negative. While he appears to have slipped through a loophole in national park regulations, critics were eager to point to grooves worn in the sensitive feature and blame them on Potter’s practice rope, or one employed by a cameraman. Moreover, the unwritten rule among climbers in Moab, Utah, Potter’s home along with Yosemite Valley, Calif., was to avoid confrontation with officialdom.
Accusation of egotism
“There are rules you know you’re not supposed to break – they’re not necessarily written,” said Sam Lightner, a Jackson Hole and Moab resident, climber and a board member of the national climbing advocacy group the Access Fund. “All climbers know we got the towers, everybody else got the arches.”
Wilson resident and Access Fund founder Armando Menocal said Potter was thoughtless.
“He let his ego get ahead of the overall interest of the climbing community,” Menocal said.
Reaction from the public and the Park Service to Potter’s climb was intense and immediate. Among the letters that flooded acting chief ranger Paul Cowan’s desk was one from U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah calling for action, Lightner said.
“We realized our climbing guidelines needed to be clarified last year,” park Superintendent Laura Joss said in a telephone interview from Arches on Monday. The result was a restating of what the park thought had been a ban on climbing named arches, plus a prohibition against the placing of new fixed climbing anchors. And by the way, no more slacklining either, the park said.
Joss would not elaborate on Potter’s climb.
“The incident is still under investigation,” she said.
Arches is now soliciting public comments on how to address climbing and what regulations to adopt permanently. Interim prohibitions have Lightner, Menocal and their ilk perturbed, and they blame Potter.
“He denied all other climbers the opportunity to put up routes on towers in what is probably the largest, last undeveloped area,” Menocal said. If Potter had done his climb without fanfare, “I believe it probably would have made a difference with the Park Service,” he said.
Lightner agreed. “Everybody understood you don’t rub the public’s face in climbing,” he said.
Potter took too long to apologize, Lightner said.
“He didn’t seem to care. If Dean had come out and said, ‘I screwed up,’ I think this would not have been as bad for us.”
Potter said he didn’t hurt anything, never broke a law. His cameraman used a rope to reach the summit, and Potter admitted to using a monkey fist knot to get a line over the arch. To practice for his unroped ascent, he employed a traction device on the rope. He said he never dragged the line over a part of the arch that would cause wear.
No top-rope involved
“The rock scars are actually from a top-rope, and I never used a top-rope,” Potter said. A recent e-mail from a climbing friend named a now-dead climber, one who once lived in Jackson Hole, as a previous ascensionist of Delicate Arch, Potter said. Perhaps he created the climbing-rope grooves.
“I’ve always respected nature,” Potter said. “People who know me know I would never hurt the rock. If I pounded the rock with a hammer or destroyed a tree ... that would be a mistake.”
“There wasn’t any legal reason for me not to climb it,” Potter said of Delicate Arch. “I didn’t see any moral reason not to climb it. I didn’t hurt it.”
Potter said he would not climb Totem Pole, the spire in Monument Valley that Navajo imbue with religious significance. Delicate Arch, despite its prominence on Utah license plates, doesn’t have the stature of that sacred Arizona tower, he said.
“I didn’t see a reason why it’s wrong, why we shouldn’t mesh with nature,” Potter said.
He didn’t expect the reaction he got, either.
“I thought values like freedom and being one with nature were such a common thread, it blew me away that other people found higher importance elsewhere,” he said. “It was sort of an embarrassing surprise. I think of myself as tuned in. It does make me think twice and try to be open to things out there.”
Potter said that today he is a wiser man: “I have hurt people’s feelings – especially with Delicate Arch. That’s something I didn’t intend.”
The feelings of his partners and climbers are most important, he said, calling the episode “a super learning mistake.”
The outlawing of slacklining, Potter said, he doesn’t comprehend.
“The Park Service never talked to me,” he said. “I really don’t understand that one.”
“I didn’t break any law, didn’t hurt the rock,” Potter said. “Something must have bothered them about filling this unowned space. I’m still baffled. What was wrong there?”
Instead of being able to commune with nature in his own way and pursue his sport to his limits, Potter said, he must travel instead to foreign countries. “The most wild places in our country are becoming the most confined places in terms of freedom,” he said.
In Ventura, Rob Bon Durant, vice president of marketing and communications for Patagonia, said Potter and Davis will cease their association with the company at the end of the fiscal year, May 1.
“Dean and Steph will not remain ambassadors,” he said, calling their departure part of a “natural cycle.”
There are no hard feelings, Bon Durant added. “Everybody’s on great terms,” he said.
Potter said that Davis also losing her position with Patagonia was the biggest blow. “She got dragged in and somehow exiled with me,” he said.
“Yvon and Malinda are really like family to us,” Potter said of the Chouinards. “We really respect them. We hoped to be with Patagonia the rest of our lives.”
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