Shopping All the Way to the Woods by Rachel S. Gross

Author:Rachel S. Gross
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300270082
Publisher: Yale University Press

Expert outdoorspeople had access to high-end equipment in the 1950s and early 1960s, but ordinary outdoor enthusiasts struggled to find affordable and effective goods for leisure-time activities. While friends of outdoor company founders and climbers such as the Holubars in Boulder (Holubar Mountaineering) and the Andersons in Seattle (REI) could turn to the resources at hand, those who didn’t live in outdoor hubs or have personal connections to company owners had a more challenging path to acquiring their own kits. In the second half of the 1960s, as more outdoor stores opened across the country, the supermarket model of outdoor stores provided access to a far wider range of consumers.

Generally, the new stores opened in locations with populations already interested in outdoor sports. Hubs included Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Boulder. And generally, many company founders had been young men who were avid participants in their sports and saw room for improvement in particular types of equipment. They often had military backgrounds or experience in the field of engineering, and they often got the support of their wives in the form of sewing, selling, and beyond. In the Bay Area, for instance, where young people skied, camped, backpacked, and climbed, the North Face did well, as did Sierra Designs, building on the longer history of the Ski Hut. Many people who worked in the outdoor industry in Boulder cited Roy and Alice Holubar’s shop as their inspiration, including Dale Johnson of Frostline, Gary Neptune of Neptune Mountaineering, and George Lamb of Alp Sport and Camp 7.13

These participants and their stories, however, hide the fact that by the late 1960s the outdoors was a big business, and there were plenty of reasons to be involved beyond being an outdoor enthusiast with a good idea and a romantic, countercultural vision. The origins of three outdoor stores—Patagonia in Ventura, California; Eastern Mountain Sports in Boston, Massachusetts; and Columbia Sportswear in Portland, Oregon—show that while the notion of an anti-business hippie climber selling to his friends has some truth, the growth of the industry in the 1970s was far more complicated and varied. Together, these stores are representative of retail changes in that decade, specifically the rise of specialty clothing stores more broadly.

In Ventura, California, a decades-long business partnership and friendship began with a rebellious teenager sulking at her parent’s beach home. Kristine McDivitt—known as Kris—had already decided she would not go to a posh boarding school that her oilman father wanted her to attend when she met Yvon Chouinard at the beach. Chouinard, a twenty-something climber, would have called himself a dirtbag at the time. Since 1957, he had been making his own chrome steel pitons and selling them to fellow climber friends, and the customers who followed. Chouinard was part of the Yosemite climbing crew at Camp Four. The makeshift business became a more established one as Chouinard Equipment emerged as the climbing industry standard. Kris McDivitt’s life changed when she met Chouinard, who was by then beginning to sell clothing under the label Patagonia.

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