 My Backyard: Outdoor Lifestyle After receiving an abundance of worthy nominations, we first narrowed the list to 25 people, and then asked Hooked contributors and friends to cast their vote to help narrow the list further. The result: the following Top 5, and subsequent runners-up. These finalists all share the common characteristic of giving back while remaining selfless. All have founded or run companies and organizations that define what every outdoor enthusiast ought to strive to be. They are, without a doubt, deserving of what we feel at Hooked to be Outdoor People of the Year. For starters, he is probably the only corporate head in the entire food industry who would describe his decision in terms of rock climbing. Erickson’s outdoor lifestyle parallels his business life. In fact, it was Erickson’s passion for cycling that led to the advent of the first Clif Bar. Back when he lived in a garage full of skiing, climbing and cycling gear in Berkeley, California, with his dog and no toilet or running water, Erickson would take long bike rides with his friend Jay Thomas. On one ride, Erickson turned to Thomas, gagging on what would be his last bite ever of a then-popular bar. “I could make a better bar than this,” Erickson recalls saying. Within a year of dumping the first round of ingredients into his mom’s mixing bowl, Clif Bar reached $700,000 in annual sales. The company grew at a mad pace, so fast that Erickson would again tap into an outdoor experience to guide him and his company on its way. “It’s sort of natural,” Erickson told Hooked, “that my experience in the outdoors is parallel to how I conduct business.” Erickson’s business model was born during a cycling trip to Europe in 1986. He calls it the “White Road/Red Road” philosophy. Thomas and Erickson met each other in Lucerne, Switzerland, where they began plotting their route over famous mountain passes. The first few days of the trip, they quickly discovered that the map they had used to plan featured only major highways and roads, which were crowded with trucks, buses and cars, and actually off-limits to cyclists, as one motorist bluntly told them. The exhaust and roaring traffic offered less than the bucolic scenery they were hoping for, and they noticed smaller roads that weren’t on the map. They stuck to those smaller roads and found a new map, which marked those major highways in red, smaller but well-traveled roads in yellow and the rural roads that they preferred in white. Erickson would forevermore try to stick to the white roads. In business a decade later, steering Clif Bar onto the white road meant placing emphasis on the journey—or the experience of growing and doing business—and not the bottom line. “For me, riding and climbing have always been about the whole journey,” Erickson writes. “In the same way, I love all the aspects of our business.” For most companies on the red road, the bottom line equates to maximizing shareholder value. On the white road, Erickson and his wife, Kit, thought long and hard about what that bottom line was to them.The word “sustainability” resounded. What came of Erickson’s white-road philosophy was something revolutionary and again hinted at his bond with the natural world: the Clif Bar Ecosystem. “Didn’t we want to sustain our brands so we could support our environmental program?” Erickson asks, acknowledging the connectivity of all the aspects of his business. “Our return on investment boiled down to five aspirations: sustaining our brands, business, people, community and planet.” With this philosophy, Erickson began reinvesting in his community and environment. Doing so meant doing more than just providing free Clif Bars at various events. “I’ve come down off of climbs before,” Erickson says. “But I’ve never had to be rescued. Lead climbing always puts you in that position. It is a calculated risk. For Clif Bar, the risk was losing the company somehow and fear was thrust upon us that we’d be here today, gone tomorrow. But the worst-case scenario in the end didn’t seem that bad or was worth taking the risk. I didn’t want to think for the rest of my life: Could I have finished? If you don’t continue the climb, you won’t ever know success or failure.” Hooked has given $1,000 to Gary Erickson to donate to the charity of his choice. To learn more about Gary Erickson, purchase his book Raising the Bar at your local bookstore.
2) Marcus Libkind: The Warrior of Wildlands
“I was confronted with the realization that the pressures of commercial development and the use of snowmobiles had, and would, continue to negatively change the landscape on which human-powered winter sports took place,” Libkind recollects. “It was not a pretty thought.” Libkind had moved to Lee Vining, California, to continue research for the fourth volume of his guidebook series, Ski Tours in the Sierra Nevada. What he found was much more than the information he was seeking. Plans to develop the Sherwin Ski Resort at Mammoth Lakes alarmed him, as did the knowledge that developers were also wooing the Forest Service to convert the Inyo Craters area into a resort. This happened at a time when the Forest Service was preparing to write its long-term 15-year management plan. Any open doors for development and motorized usage in the plan would set a precedent, further threatening non-wilderness lands and, subsequently, backcountry recreation. “The organized snowmobile community was lobbying for free range over all non-wilderness lands on Inyo National Forest,” Libkind says. “But nowhere was there a voice for the human-powered backcountry community—a community that is inclined toward self-sufficiency and individualism, often choosing to avoid the regimentation of organized groups in favor of the solitude of winter wildlands.” Over 16 years, Nordic Voice would see many places in the Sierra Nevada and greater Tahoe area closed to development and maintained as backcountry wildlands. Eventually, the committee broke away from the Sierra Club and morphed into Snowlands Network, which has battled for issues like the recent victory over maintaining 70 percent of Tahoe Meadows free from motorized usage. Libkind also helped found the Winter Wildlands Alliance with two other backcountry advocacy groups, creating a more national presence for the fight for backcountry users. “My 12-year old daughter, Sophie. She is quite the backcountry skier. I realize she is never going to have the opportunities I had, but I certainly don’t want them to get worse. If when you go out there and you look at where you are and say, ‘I would regret if the solitude of this place is destroyed.’ Then you need to be involved.” For more information on Marcus Libkind’s organizations, see www.snowlands.org or www.winterwildlands.org. 3) Kim Reynolds: A Woman Adventuring for Women Before Pumori, there was the little girl from Minnesota who gazed up at the Colorado Rockies on family ski trips and wanted to be a ski patroller. There was the 18-year-old high school graduate who saved up her money to go on an Outward Bound course and decided she wanted to work in the outdoors for a living. Then there was the 20-year-old college free spirit, who learned to kayak from her friend and mentor Fritz, who led adventures down the Grand Canyon and other rivers yet to be run. Before Pumori, there was that free spirit’s senior project at Prescott College, which included a 1,200-mile, four-and-a-half-month solo journey across Utah, studying plants, birds and geology that taught her that she was capable of doing anything. Before Pumori, she became a ski patroller, an Outward Bound instructor, Antarctic winter survival instructor, Grand Canyon river guide, ice climbing guide and supervisor for The National Civilian Community Corps. Before Pumori, there were other summits and trips to Alaska, Canada, Mexico, South America, India, Tibet and Nepal. Then there was Pumori. In 1998, Reynolds was on an expedition to summit the west ridge of Mount Pumori (7,161 meters/23,631 feet), located just west of Mount Everest on the Tibet-Nepal border. The expedition failed. But for the first time in her accomplished life of adventure, failure didn’t matter, because it was there that Reynolds had an epiphany. “I had a friend who was running a little safe house for Nepali girls at risk of getting trafficked into the sex trade,” Reynolds recollects. “I was leading treks in Nepal at the time and learned that The Friendship House was in financial trouble. I decided our [Pumori] expedition should be in support of this house. It felt time to give something back to these Nepali people who have given themselves so selflessly to us over the years.” The expedition raised $30,000 for The Friendship House (and more later on) and marked a redefinition of adventure for Reynolds. “My epiphany was that helping others was more important than the disappointment of not summitting the mountain. The looks on the girls faces, the love, the laughter were our greatest rewards.” Her latest project is a nonprofit she started with her husband, Jim Nowak, called The dZi (pronounced “zee”) Foundation, which is dedicated to the education, health, culture and welfare of indigenous mountain communities. The dZi projects include remodeling schools and monasteries, supporting young monks building teacher housing and homes for girls at risk, hosting dental clinics and providing “Since Pumori,” Reynolds says, “it’s been my personal mission to inspire other climbers to look outside of themselves and give back to those in need, because if we don’t help each other, who will?” For more information on Kim Reynolds’ projects, view www.chickswithpicks.net, www.mindovermountains.com, or www.thedzifoundation.com. “I am exhilarated by a good idea,” Kern will admit. His first idea for a nonprofit came to him while hiking with his younger brother on the Appalachian Trail in the mid-1960s. He began wondering where the trails were in Florida, where he had recently moved. “There were none,” says Kern. “I was incredulous. So I said, ‘Let’s build a trail!’” But as Kern started exploring and thinking about all the things that needed to be done to make it happen, politically and practically, he realized he needed help. “The idea of the FTA followed on the heels of the idea of the trail. So after a few years, the FTA got up and running, and they started building the first trails in Florida.” Next came a phone call from Bill Kemsley, founding publisher and then editor of Backpacker magazine. It was the late 70s, and congress ordered oversight hearings to evaluate the implementation of the National Trails System Act (1968). “Bill saw that we needed an organization to think about trails, because at the time there were none,” remembers Kern. “He talked to Paul Pritchard, president of the Appalachian Trail Conference, and me because I had just created the FTA and written an article for him about it. The three of us nurtured this into an organization called the American Hiking Society.” “I have the ability to start stuff,” Kern says proudly, “but I don’t have the ability to run stuff.” While Kern’s nonprofit pursuits were successful, his business life was not so fortunate. He tried developing an energy-efficient community after reading how Davis, California, was the most energy efficient city in the country. It failed. He tried to start the first private wilderness park. It failed too. Then there was the machete manufacturing business and his adventure travel company, which both failed. An adventurer by nature, Kern loved wildlife “This is very different from founding organizations,” Kern says. “Really it was a pursuit of the love of nature. At the time, wildlife photography was limited in who you could sell to, so it was a tough sell.” “I saw this deal in the paper for Continental Airlines where you could fly to a western city in the country and bring a kid for $1. I thought I’d bring my son backpacking, and I told him he ought to bring a friend.” The friend canceled and after trying to get other friends to fill the spot, Kern finally invited an inner-city kid from Miami through Teen Age Shelter Care. “We had a blast, and it all came together on that trip. The next year we took six kids and six adults.” Eventually, Kern met Skip Yowell, co-founder of JanSport, and asked for support. JanSport stepped forward with $100,000. That made BCM. For more information on the Florida Trail Association, see www.florida-trail.org; for the American Hiking Society, go to www.americanhiking.org; for Big City Mountaineers, see www.bigcitymountaineers.org . 5) T.J. Penkoff: Matchmaker, Rampager Some 500 teenagers have T.J. Penkoff and Phoenix’s River Rampage program to thank for their summer vacation. But this is not just any ordinary summer vacation, and these aren’t ordinary teens. “Half of our teens have disabilities and half are at-risk teens,” says Penkoff, River Rampage’s program director. “Connecting the two is an unlikely match, making the program unique and pretty amazing.” The City of Phoenix-sponsored program requires that each of the teenagers agrees to 40 hours of community service, has a good attitude and is ready and willing to participate. For the disabled teens—who suffer from a range of handicaps, including cerebral palsy, deafness and blindness—it is a chance of a lifetime to pursue a wilderness adventure, such as rafting Cataract Canyon, the San Juan River Wilderness, or the Grand Canyon. For their counterparts—often with histories of gang membership, substance abuse, homelessness and poverty—it’s a chance to let their guard down in a different sort of wilderness than the urban one, where uncertainty derives from weather, ability and teamwork, not guns, rival gangs and dropping out of school. “Out in the middle of nowhere, a lot of at-risk kids get off the bus and a light goes off,” says Penkoff. “It’s like they say, ‘Alright, let’s get it on!’ and they want us to try to make them have fun, make them relax. It is a challenge to convince them they don’t need attitude out here.” But it isn’t usually staff members who have the greatest effect on the at-risk youth, admits Penkoff. “I wish I could take credit, but I think it is more their disabled peers who have the greatest effect on them. You see at-risk attitudes change because they are not [usually] around kids with disabilities. It affects them—they realize they are able. One gang kid told me around the campfire that he felt so free out here that he didn’t have to watch his back, that he could just be.” Disabled kids feel it too. One participant named Mandy, who has cerebral palsy and is in a wheelchair, testifies to its effectiveness: “People’s differences or backgrounds don’t “We have a reunion every year,” Penkoff says, when asked about River Rampage’s success. “We see kids who went to the same high school but never hung out. They were obviously in completely different crowds. At the reunion, we saw all of them hanging out with one another, laughing, having a great time. River Rampage creates some of the most unlikely friendships you could imagine.” To learn more about the River Rampage program, go to: www.phoenix.gov/PRL/adrecsvc.html#river; or call 602-262-4543.
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