GoLite Warehouse Sale in Boulder This Weekend!

GoLite's awesome semi-annual warehouse sale is this weekend!

Friday, April 23
8am-8pm

Saturday, April 24

9am-5pm

Sunday, April 25

9am-5pm

6230 Lookout Road

Boulder, CO 80301

I've been going to this unbelievable warehouse sale for several years now, since it was in the GoLite office truck port and parking lot. It's always been worth the drive to Gunbarrel during lunchbreak, and it's usually worth the wait in line at the door.

In fact, the wait line at the door has been almost empty the last few times I've gone. That's not because the event is less popular, but because the GoLite team got smart and realized that you want people waiting once they've committed to the purchase, not before they've had the chance to sample the wares.

This is a well run sale with good merch and good prices. GoLite rents out several thousand square feet of empty office space and fills it with tables, racks, and bins of perfectly good merchandise that is still in season. I haven't bought a large quantity of stuff there -- maybe 3-5 items -- but they've always been retail ready and never cosmetically flawed or wonkily cut.

GoLite has been consistent about offering this sale and they've promoted it well, which means the community knows what to expect -- it's becoming local tradition to lighten our wallets for lightweight gear. It's easy to find and easyish to park. The sale itself, though it can be ungodly hot during the summer when the office space has no AC, is not so crowded as to be elbowingly unpleasant, but just crowded enough to inspire you to lust for gear, shop with a glint in your eye, paw through the bins, and lose your inhibition and DIY a dressing room.

BUT! Man, the checkout line can be brutal. The price of no line in the door is a long line at the register. This is my kind of shopping, though -- I want to be convinced I really need the gear and really like the price before I'll commit to a half hour checkout line. I'm not sure what GoLite can do but add to its existing battery of 12 cash registers. They've got all the discount pricing in a nice POS database and all the employees (poor bastards) seem to know what they're doing. It's just that most of the people who go to the sale seem to buy many items, which takes time to ring up.

If you can find a designated sucker shopper, give them a print out of the gear you want from the GoLite website with your size preference and two color options then make sure you're accessible by phone. You might need to bribe them first or apologize later, so think about how you'll thank Geeves when s/he gets back to the office. And whatever you do, act thrilled with what they got for you, even if it's the wrong color or doesn't fit. It can be agonizing to make a purchasing decision for yourself in the midst of a warehouse sale much less make a judgment call for someone else. So don't be an ingrate. Accept effusively, pay promptly, and sneak back to the sale later to get what you wanted.

(But don't try to exchange without a receipt! Those poor warehouse sale staffers are harried enough from the frenzied crowds, being on their feet all day, trying to help edgy shoppers find just the right size and color shirt at bargain prices, and keeping one eye peeled for shoplifters. Just suck up the loss and shop for yourself next time!)

In the past, GoLite has had a price list available. I'll see if I can score one and post it here. Check back on Friday afternoon.

Obviously, the prices are pretty incredible -- that 30-90% off price range is legit, though most gear seems to be in the 50-60% off range. My favorite piece of "warehouse wear" is this Wisp Wind Shirt, which I bought at the sale for $20 ($30 off) and have since found to be key gear for running in the Colorado springtime. 

Update: Here are the price lists! (Click to enlarge.)

 

REI Runs Its First TV Ads

 
REI, which enjoyed a 6.9% increase in sales from 2007 to 2008 because of increased interest in the low-cost, outdoor vacations, is running its first two TV spots during the holiday buying season this year.

The first ad features a group of hikers huddled under a rock during a rainstorm. "For instant friends, just add water." The second ad features a mother and daughter on a summit sharing a slice of bread with peanut butter at dusk. "They discover a 4-star restaurant has nothing on 4 million stars."

See the ads on REI's "Find Out" campaign on YouTube. REI's press release announcing the two-ad campaign is here on its website.

GoLite Semi-Annual Warehouse Clearance Sale December 4-6

National Park Fee-Free Weekends

Our Colorado-grown Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, announced in June that the National Park Service would offer free park admission on three weekends this summer!

1 out of 3 National Park Service parks will offer free admission on June 20-21, July 18-19, and August 15-16. Here's the list of parks that are participating.

Fitness People vs. Outdoor People

Back in December, I wrote about a creative agency's white paper, "Actively Different: Fitness vs. Outdoor Messaging". In that short post, I mentioned that the agency's interesting observation was this:

The outdoor-oriented person asks, "What could I do today?" The fitness-oriented person asks, "What should I do today?"

Ever since, I've been thinking about this observation and wondering how one might expand on it. As a backpacking triathlete, a skiing cyclist, a swimmer turned camper, I've often found that my endurance sports training plans interfere with my more directionless wandering about in the woods. Training plans have a framework; each short-term goal is part of a bigger picture. Woodland wandering more often seems like simple fun.

What makes the outdoorsy different from and similar to the athletic?

Outdoorsy :: Athletic
* What could I do today? :: What should I do today?
* Being outside as long as possible :: Being outside for as long as the workout requires
* Eat what tastes good :: Eat carefully
* Build capability for longer hikes, higher climbs :: Build muscle for speed, endurance

Common ground
* Goal orientation: reach the summit
* Enjoy the journey and enjoy the workouts
* Except for the old-fashioned outdoorsmen whose yester-gear is "good 'nuff", gear lust seems to be a common trait. (This explains my garage.)

Boulder Warehouse Sale Season Nearly Over!

With VeloGear and GoLite's warehouse sales already behind us and the REI Anniversary Sale in full swing, it's time to cast a farther glance to find deals.

I've never heard of Neve Designs, so I can't vouch for this sale, but there sure are some great brands on this promo email. If you go, let me know what you think.

Friends Make Molehills Out of Mountains

Here's a scientific study that's near and dear to my heart. The Journal of Experimental Psychology published a study "Social support and the perception of graphical slant" which confirms something all backpackers and hikers have known intuitively: climbing any hill seems easier with old friends.

From the New York Times article "What Are Friends For?":

"Last year, researchers studied 34 students at the University of Virginia, taking them to the base of a steep hill and fitting them with a weighted backpack. They were then asked to estimate the steepness of the hill. Some participants stood next to friends during the exercise, while others were alone. The students who stood with friends gave lower estimates of the steepness of the hill. And the longer the friends had known each other, the less steep the hill appeared."

Perhaps this is why we seem more likely to get ourselves into trouble when friends are around!

The Nation's Backyard Is Now Bigger and Wilder

On March 30, President Obama signed into law a bill that designates 2 million acres of land as wilderness.

Wilderness designation is the highest level of environmental protection the U.S. federal government offers and it is permanent. This bill, which combined over 150 separate bills, took 35 years to become law, and it is the largest amount of land to be designated wilderness since 1994.

The national backyard is now bigger and wilder, but this new wilderness designation has special meaning for Colorado. An eighth of that new acreage is Rocky Mountain National Park (park announcement), which is now 95% wilderness, thanks to the "Omnibus Public Lands Management Act of 2009".

Mark Twain predicted this designation's 35-year delay when he said, "Whiskey is for drinkin', water is for fightin'." The political alignment of Congress and the White House aside, arguments between federal negotiators and Colorado residents about water rights, irrigation ditch maintenance and liability, and wildfire control were part of what prevented these new protections for three decades. Funny that these locals, the very people who should care most about the land, prevented its protection for so long. "All politics is local."

Maintenance and liability for Grand Ditch were among the sore points. Japanese and Mexican workers begin digging the ditch by hand in the 1880s to carry water from west of the Continental Divide east through a mountain pass, to Long Draw Reservoir, into the Cache Le Poudre river, and down to the farms of Fort Collins and north east Colorado. The ditch wasn't completed until 1936. Some friends and I backpacked to the "Ditch Camp" site in northwest RMNP in 2005. The ditch is beneath us:


Where is all this new wilderness?

• California: 700,000 acres in the Sierra and San Gabriel mountains
• Idaho: 517,000 acres in the Canyonlands
• Michigan: 11,700 acres of Lake Superior shoreline
• Colorado: 250,000 acres covering 95% of Rocky Mountain National Park and expanding the Indian Peaks Wilderness
• Wyoming: 1.2 million acres of the "Wyoming Range" moose habitat (I suspect some of this acreage must be part of Colorado's acreage or else the acreage total exceeds 2 million.)
• Other states gaining wilderness: VA, WV, OR, NM, and UT

What does it mean?

All this new wilderness land is officially out of bounds for any activity that might permanently affect the habitat or landscape. This basically means no mining, drilling, logging, or motorized vehicles. Most of Colorado's new wilderness has been managed as wilderness since President Nixon first suggested that RMNP receive protection in the 1970s.

Other resources:

• Local supporters of the bill include Sen. Mark Udall, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Sen. Michael Bennett, Rep. Betsy Markey, former Sen. Wayne Allard, and former Rep. David Skaggs.
• Summary of the Act, as passed and signed into law, including which members of Congress voted for and against the act
• Summary of the full text of the Act
• Wilderness.net: facts and figures about U.S. wilderness

John Muir Was Awesome

After chuckling through Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, shivering through Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, meandering through Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, and thirsting for more of Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, I've decided to build a library of great outdoor books. 

Most recently placed into the stacks is The Wild Muir: Twenty-two of John Muir's Greatest Adventures, selected and introduced by Lee Stetson, illustrated by Fiona King, published by the Yosemite Association, ISBN: 0-939666-75-8. 

Lee Stetson is an actor who has dedicated his career to the study and reenactment of Muir's life. I imagine he has a bushy beard, and I imagine he's a strange fellow, in no small part due to the fact that he's likely spent many of his evenings in front of Yosemite campfires acting like a crazy Scot who talks to wildflowers. (To an Alaskan wildflower: "Ah! My blue-eyed darlin', little did I think to see you here. How did you stray away from Shasta?")

John Muir's insanity is what made him so effective. Muir was a fearless man, a man so honed into competence by his life experience that there was no situation in which he found himself powerless. Muir did not hesitate to commit insane acts because, for him, they were perfectly rational. A young man who wished to climb a mountain with Muir was told, "These foolish adventures are well enough for Mr. Muir, but you have a work to do, you have a family...and you have no right to risk your life on treacherous peaks and precipices.". Muir would argue, like Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire, that the risk-taking lifestyle of the naturalist is far saner than that of "civilized society". 

Muir's tolerance of danger stemmed from his sense of capability, which he forged through years of challenges and misadventures beginning in childhood. Muir grew up in Scotland in an austere farming family. For excitement, the young Muir and his friends would turn to what they called "good scootchers"; games of brinksmanship that would make Johnny Knoxville grin. Muir writes of one scootcher that involved trying to nearly--but not quite--fall off the roof of a two-story farmhouse. When Muir's family moved from Scotland to Wisconsin as homesteaders, Muir's father asked the 19-year old to dig a 90-foot deep well with a shovel, pickax, hammer, and chisel. Muir spent an entire summer moving earth and chiseling through bedrock until he was nearly suffocated by carbon dioxide gas that filled the bottom of the well. Muir later taught himself to swim by rowing into the middle of a lake and jumping in. Danger was the young Muir's calling.

So when he decides to climb the sheer rock face behind Yosemite Falls, we're unsurprised that, upon reaching a pitch "dangerously smooth and steep", Muir "concludes not to venture further, but does nonetheless". When Muir becomes stranded in a blizzard atop Mt. Shasta (without a jacket), he lays flat on some geothermal vents, sometimes holding his breath to avoid billowing clouds of acidic vapors, until the skin on his back scalds and blisters and a set of barometric instruments freezes to his face. We're awed, but not surprised, when Muir hikes off the mountain alive, though badly frostbitten. 

The Wild Muir presents 22 riveting adventures in beautiful succession, building to the climax in which it offers two versions of Muir's cliffside rescue of a young pastor in Alaska; one from Muir himself and one from the pastor. The pastor slides down a gravelly slope and barely catches himself to prevent a 1,000 drop off a cliff and onto a glacier. He dislocates both arms. Muir recounts the rescue plainly, pulling the man off the cliff, the difficulty of re-setting the man's arms in their sockets, a long trek back to camp. The pastor's account is not so plain and it is from him we learn that Muir hoisted the man off the cliff by clenching his collar in his teeth. 

Unlike many of today's outdoor heroes, Muir reserved his glorious description for his surroundings instead of for himself. Muir is often credited as the father of Yosemite and the American National Park System, but Muir is underappreciated. Muir's towering ability and selfless love of nature was the spearhead that killed the old European view of nature as enemy, igniting a passion in the American West for nature as playground, as source of renewal.

A parting image of Muir the botanist from the young pastor: "With all his boyish enthusiasm, Muir was a most painstaking student; and any unsolved question lay upon his mind like a personal grievance until it was settled to his full understanding. One plant after another, with its sand-covered roots, went into his pockets, his handkerchief and the "full" of his shirt until he was bulbing and sprouting all over, and could carry no more... Then he began to requisition my receptacles. I stood it while he stuffed my pockets, but rebelled when he tried to poke the prickly, scratchy things inside my shirt. I had not yet attained that sublime indifference to physical comfort, that Nirvana of passivity, that Muir had found."

GoLite Semi-Annual Warehouse Sale Price List - Fall 2008

Here's the price list for GoLite's warehouse sale. Click to see it bigger.

The prices aren't as good as prior years. I think GoLite has ratcheted up the prices to about 55% of the retail price.

Some of the prices on this list don't agree with the prices charged at the register. I got a jacket that was $5 more than expected and some running shorts that were $5 less than expected.

Kevin's sweet new tent

"Just bought the Marmot Aelos 2P tent for a lightweight backcountry camping option. Great deal at $121 (REI.com has it for $370). Here are some scenic pics from the PacNW as a postcard thank you. You can expand the panoramic shot, which doesn't do justice to all the mountains on the horizon. I took the one in the forest, my buddy Travis took the panoramic when we did a hike together in June. The MT St Helen's shot is from USGS." --Kevin

more promo coupon tall tales

"Dave, I'm looking for a good bear-fighting knife. I hear Leatherman has a model out that placed first at the 2008 Grizzly Face-Off Challenge. I'd love to get my paws on that coupon." --JK

my sweet new backpacking stuff

The Outdoor Retailer show hands out pro deal coupons with show badges. This year's deals are pretty screamin', ranging from 40% off retail (Gregory Packs) to 75% off retail (Marmot). The product selection is somewhat limited and the offers expire between Sep 1-30. Here's what I've picked up.

Gregory Baltoro 70: forty-three hundred cubic inches of goodness at five and a half pounds.

Leatherman c301: 3 ounces and 2.8 inches of fiery mountain lion defense! Considering I've never taken my Swiss Army knife backpacking, I probably won't take this one either. But if I did--just 3 ounces!


Marmot Lightweight Crew: Polartec Power Dry for Erin!


Total cost = $182 plus shipping

Outdoor Retailer 2008: promo code contest!

• "In preparation for our trip to Australia and New Zealand, I’d LOVE to take advantage of the Helly Hansen and Marmot coupons! Do I win? Do I? Do I?" --Mat
• "I'm all about the Gregory, tout suite. Oh yeah, this would be used to climb Mt. Rainier. How much more outdoorsy can you get?!?!?!?!?" --Chris
• "Kevin says we are interested. He thinks he can make me outdoorsy and stuff. BTW do these fancy tents have toilets? I have tried to explain that bears are big and eat people and I'm not a very fast runner. He thinks I'm being overly dramatic." --Nicole
• "Yes please, me me. Would it count as outdoorsy/adventurous if I was writing this email naked in the woods? Too bad, it's not the case, I'm on my couch watching the Olympics." --Cris

Outdoor Retailer 2008: Sunday night schwag tally

Four days. It takes four days for me to become thoroughly tired of eating restaurant food.

Today's schwag haul is likely to be the most valuable booty-load of OR:

• Osprey Talon 5.5 backpack - $20
• 16 oz. stainless steel bottle with carabiner
• National Parks Conservatio Association "fanny" pack
• sweet EK USA lanyard
• carton of Sharkies
• sample pack of Sportwash

I've also amassed a 10 inch stack of magazines, including some outdoor industry mags I've never heard of before.

I'm now getting concerned about luggage space.

Outdoor Retailer 2008: Saturday night schwag tally

Jen: Falcon Pocket Guide to OR, DeFeet "police" cycling socks, eVent keychain, USA Triathlon cycling socks, Camerons Smoker Bag for oven/grill/campfire

Dave: Falcon Pocket Guide to OR, DeFeet "police" cycling socks, eVent keychain, USA Triathlon cycling socks, Camerons Smoker Bag for oven/grill/campfire, Spira t-shirt, Primus foldable fork and spoon

Outdoor Retailer 2008: booth review (priciest, best attended, most inviting)

I do believe that Life is Good wins the award for spending the most on promotion at OR. Check out this exhibit:


Life is Good also sponsored the industry party and produced a "goodminton" tournament.

The booth with the highest body per square foot ratio, though, was Smith Optics:


I found this booth to be the most inviting, and yet the worst-branded. I think it was Merrell (a Columbia brand), but I'm not sure...

Outdoor Retailer 2008: Friday night schwag tally

Dave: tasmanian merino wool hiking socks, smartwool arm warmers, collapsible cup
Jen: tasmanian merino wool hiking socks, smartwool arm warmers, collapsible cup

Outdoor Retailer 2008: Industry Party (plus a goodminton tournament!)

We exhibitors in the ESA closed our first OR show day disappointed and, in some cases, with some anger. A petition circulated urging Nielsen Business Media to add more signage to encourage floor traffic from the main show. The squeaky exhibitor gets the worm, and we were told that Nielsen would make hourly P.A. announcements on the show floor to spur buyers to the ESA, add signage from the main show to the ESA including sandwich boards every 30 feet from exit to entrance.

The evening ended on a high and hopeful note, though. The OR Industry Party was just outside the ESA, which should show buyers how to get to our show floor tomorrow. Free beer from Wasatch Brewery flowed like wine:


And there were a heckuva lot of people:


The Life is Good t-shirt company sponsored a "Goodminton" tournament, with 64 teams competing!

Outdoor Retailer 2008: schwag tally (friday noon)

Current schwag tally:

Jen: 2 pairs smartwool socks, 2 notebooks, notepad, 1 Flair Hair (blonde)
Dave: 1 pair smartwool socks, 1 notebook, 1 notepad, 1 headache, 1 Flair Hair (brunette)