The Cleanest Line

Conservacion Patagonica Donates 37,500-acre El Rincon to Expand Perito Moreno National Park in Argentina

2013-05-21T16:26:32-07:00

By Rick Ridgeway

This week our friends and colleagues Doug and Kris Tompkins announced a donation by Conservacion Patagonica to the Argentina national park system of Estancia Rincon, a 37,500-acre parcel of wildlands in our namesake, Patagonia-the-place. This former sheep ranch is at the foot of Cerro San Lorenzo – the most Himalayan-like peak in all of Patagonia – and it creates a majestic extension to the existing Perito Moreno National Park.

The story of this new conservation victory begins in the early ‘60s when Doug, a long-time climbing partner of Yvon Chouinard’s, founded The North Face. Doug sold TNF in the late ‘60s to start Esprit, the women’s clothing brand that he in turn sold in the late ‘80s so he could use the funds to create privately endowed parks and protected areas in Chile and Argentina. Those of you who are fans of the 180° South film will recognize this part of the story.

[Above: Cerro San Lorenzo. Photo: Doug Tompkins]

What’s not in the film is how Doug was flying his small Cessna around Chile and Argentina looking for overgrazed sheep ranches to purchase and restore at the same time Yvon was also in Patagonia having an offsite with the senior managers of Patagonia-the-company. This was before I worked at Patagonia as a regular employee, but Yvon, Doug and I were all climbing partners, so we rendezvoused just as Yvon was finishing the meeting with his employees, including Kristine McDivitt, who was then the company’s CEO.

Doug Tompkins, Rick Ridgeway and Yvon Chouinard during the filming of 180° South. Photo: Jeff Johnson

We loaded into the Cessna and flew north, landing in a grassy field at the entrance of the Estancia Rincon. Doug knew the ranch might be for sale, and we all knew it was a special place because it encompassed the approach to the east face of San Lorenzo, the most major unclimbed alpine wall in Patagonia. We tied down the plane and spent three days exploring the valley and a full day sitting under a beech tree staring up at the east face. There was a potential line up it, but it was so intimating that we would spend the next 20 years telling each other that maybe this was the year we should try it, always finding some reason to conclude that maybe the next year would be a better idea.

But Doug didn’t procrastinate on the opportunity to purchase Estancia Rincon, and he closed the deal not too long after we got home. But that wasn’t the only deal he had in mind from that trip. About a week after we got back home, he called and said, “Hey Rick, you know that girl I met when we were down there in Patagonia, Kris, who runs Yvon’s company? She’s your friend, right? Tell me about her.” Later that same day Kris called and said, “Rick, you and Doug are climbing buddies and you know him pretty well, don’t you? Tell me a little more about him.”

Yvon Chouinard, Kris McDivitt Tompkins and Doug Tompkins in the Darwin Range of Tierra del Fuego, Chile. 2001. Photo: Patagonia Archives

They were married soon after, and while Patagonia lost its CEO, Doug gained the love of his life and a partner in his conservation efforts. Kris moved to South America to join Doug, and over the years they have placed into permanent conservation over 2.5 million acres in Chile and Argentina, including the new Patagonia National Park that many of you will recognize from the essays we have published in our catalogs. And now that first piece of land that began it all back in 1991, Estancia Rincon, is also under permanent protection, waiting for a team of young climbers who just might have a little more moxie than the previous generation to pull off that line up the east face.

Rick Ridgeway is the VP of Environmental Affairs at Patagonia and the author of six books. His passion for mountaineering and exploration have taken him around the world, including the summit of K2 where he was part of the first American team to climb the peak in 1978.

Please visit Conservacion Patagonica to learn more about the historic El Rincon donation and how it will expand Perito Moreno National Park. Conservacion Patagonica also has a volunteer program for those who want to help make Patagonia National Park a reality.

Another view of Cerro San Lorenzo in Perito Moreno National Park. Photo: Doug Tompkins

Dirtbag Diaries: Live from 5Point Vol. 5

2013-05-17T17:07:48-07:00

By Fitz & Becca Cahall

We're back for our third annual Live from 5Point event. The sun was shining, but Steve's Guitars was at capacity. Today we present the first two stories from Kevin Pearce and Chris Davenport. In 2009, Kevin was one of the best snowboarders in the world. On a training run, he had a major accident (his story is chronicled in the film The Crash Reel). Today, he talks about finding happiness after suffering a traumatic brain injury.

Chris' career as a big mountain skier is impressive – numerous first ski descents of peaks, traveled around the world to ski, a two-time world champion. But I've always been impressed by Chris' creativity in the mission he chooses. Today, he talks about the aesthetics of the lines he chooses and what he loves about mountains, especially those close to home.

Listen to "Live from 5Point Vol. 5"
(mp3 - right-click to download)

Visit dirtbagdiaries.com to download the music from "Live from 5Point Vol. 5", listen to The Shorts and pledge your support for the show. You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes and RSS, or connect with the Dirtbag Diaries community on Facebook and Twitter.

[Graphic by Walker Cahall]

Introducing “$20 Million & Change” and Patagonia Works – A Holding Company for the Environment

2013-05-15T17:12:45-07:00

By Yvon Chouinard

I don’t like to think of myself as a businessman. I’ve made no secret that I hold a fairly skeptical view of the business world. That said, Patagonia, the company my wife and I founded four decades ago, has grown up to be — by global standards — a medium-size business. And that bestows on our family a serious responsibility. The last line of Patagonia’s mission statement is “… use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.” We’ve always taken that seriously.

Three examples: Every year for 30 years, Patagonia has donated one percent of its sales to grassroots environmental organizations. We helped initiate the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, an organization of companies that produces more than a third of the clothing and footwear on the planet. In a very short time, the Coalition has launched an index of social and environmental performance that designers (and eventually consumers) can use to make better decisions when developing products or choosing materials. And last year we became one of California’s first B Corps (benefit corporations), which means that the values that helped make our company successful are now etched into our legal charter.

Now is the time for Patagonia to take the next logical step: to reach out beyond the framework of the apparel and outdoor industries. Today, my family and I are happy to launch $20 Million & Change, an internal fund to help like-minded, responsible start-up companies bring about positive benefit to the environment.

With the launch of this fund, we have reorganized Patagonia and our other businesses within a new holding company called Patagonia Works. While most holding companies are about diversification, Patagonia Works is dedicated to a single cause: using business to help solve the environmental crisis. Rose Marcario, who has been COO and CFO of Patagonia’s apparel company, will now take on a new role as President and CEO of Patagonia Works. Rose has been instrumental in tripling profits for our company. We now want to apply her business acumen and keen sense of social and environmental responsibility to new companies in five critical areas: clothing, yes, but also food, water, energy and waste. Rose has been responsible for the launch of Patagonia Provisions, which will soon expand beyond our Wild Salmon Jerky (wild-caught in natal waters by First Nations tribes) to other foods that, like our jerky, are more thoughtfully sourced. The food business is, as much as the apparel or energy industries, environmentally broken. It takes more from the planet than it gives back. We aim to find ways to get what we want to eat by working with nature rather than against it.

Casey Sheahan will continue to serve as President and CEO of Patagonia, Inc., the clothing company at the heart of Patagonia Works.

Others might see Patagonia Works and $20 Million & Change as revolutionary business ventures; we think both are just next logical steps to doing business more responsibly. Economic growth for the past two centuries has been tied to an ever-spiraling carbon bonfire. Business – and human – success in the next 100 years will have to come from working with nature rather than using it up. That is a necessity, not a luxury as it’s seen now in most business quarters. We invite and encourage all companies to start to work with us in that direction.

To apply for funding or seek information regarding the $20 Million & Change program, please email: info@patagoniaworks.com or call (805) 667-2300.

Best regards,

Yvon Chouinard
Founder of Patagonia Works

Photo by Tim Davis

Help Protect Bristol Bay – Watch Sea-Swallow’d and Take Action Today

2013-05-14T15:10:48-07:00

By Ryan Peterson

As with any creative endeavor, the process of building is fraught with self-doubt. But when I showed a draft of my film, sea-swallow’d to my friend Teplin Cahall 5 months ago, I got a boost. You see, Tep can't talk. He was born that way. Because of this and some associated developmental issues, he sees the world a little differently than do the rest of us.

Take action now!

One gauges Tep’s thoughts and feelings on a matter by the glints of ecstasy or tears of rage that accumulate in his eyes, and the alternately soothing or garish noises that his vocal chords are able to emit. His emotions are pure, raw, unfiltered by the complications of the wide world. He’s like an animal - innocent, instinctual, knowing only truth. In this way, if you can decipher his notes and read his analyses, Tep is the best critic a friend could ever have. To date, according to his dad, Fitz, Tep has watched sea-swallow’d several hundred times. I take this as approval.
I should disclose something here. Tep is no kind of savant. It’s just that he’s 18 months old, and like most 18-month-olds his linguistic skills are sharpening by the day. Before long he’ll be like the rest of us, powdered daily by complex ideas and dollars that shape our convictions about how the world should work. Maybe as he ages he’ll be tempted, like some of us, to overlook unequivocal truths and go with flows dictated more by subjective social waves. Or maybe like others of us, he’ll stay transfixed by pure, simple, healthy images of the miracle of life, such as those I was humbled to swim beside during filming. Whatever we are today, we were all like Tep once.

In any event, making something that can make a baby sit stone still and smile for seven minutes straight might be my proudest accomplishment.

I hope you enjoy sea-swallow’d as much as Tep does.

If you do: TAKE ACTION NOW at SaveBristolBay.org. Let the EPA know that you support their Bristol Bay [Alaska] Watershed Assessment Plan, which finds that large-scale, open-pit mining development—such as that proposed by the Pebble Mine—would likely have unprecedented, disastrous consequences for the region’s salmon-based ecosystem and the vibrant industries that depend on it today for economy, culture, and spirit. Your voice will be heard and will help give the Administration the courage it needs to stop the mine before it gets started. This is the BEST shot we’ve got.

The public comment period ends May 31, 2013. Weigh in. It’s really freaking important.

Thanks to so many for so much support on this project, including Patagonia. Unlike the Pebble Mine, Patagonia is, as always, in the right place at the right time.

Ryan Peterson

P.S. Tep encourages all small children to watch sea-swallow’d. Show it to them and watch what happens.

Sockeye salmon returning to their natal spawning beds in Funnel Creek, Bristol Bay, Alaska. Photo: Ben Knight, co-creator of Red Gold, a powerful film that gives a voice to the people of Bristol Bay and their fight against the Pebble Mine.

[With thanks to Travis Rummel, Save Bristol Bay and Trout Unlimited.]

Worn Wear – The Hand-Me-Down

2013-05-13T16:35:43-07:00

By Shari Williamson, Bozeman, Montana

Dear Patagonia,

I don’t actually know the original owner of this little red and purple fleece jacket. I do not know several names scrawled on the tag, but I know some of them… We found this jacket in a large ragged cardboard box of hand-me-downs from a family with three kids. The jacket came to them from a co-worker with two boys.

Next, with our two girls, this jacket saw hundreds of miles of trail, many nights in tents, from back roads to back yards, and every other day in between.

We passed on the jacket a few years ago, and saw it used by two more kids before they handed it down again, in a ragged old cardboard box.

Kids, as is their job, grow fast. And it seems items made for kids these days reflect a similar characteristic – wear fast. But this little fleece jacket is still going strong after 12 kids (maybe more). Thanks Patagonia, for keeping the hand-me-down tradition going strong.

–Shari

This story first appeared on the Patagonia Worn Wear™ blog. We're always looking for good stories (and a photo) about people and their Patagonia gear. Submit yours today. If it gets published, we'll send you a Worn Wear patch.

Piolets d’Or 2013

2013-05-10T11:29:48-07:00

By Hayden Kennedy

“Some declared it the climb of the century. But did anyone repeat GIV to confirm our illusion of it? Besides, does it make sense to declare a poem the poem of the century? Can you choose a woman of the century?” – Voytek Kurtyka writing about the Shining Wall on Gasherbrum IV

There are no winners or losers in climbing. How can there be? Isn’t the point of climbing to escape these themes of ego and competition? To surrender ourselves to the experience at hand whether that entails failure or success; to push beyond the surface of our own expectations and those others have of us into a deeper well of motivation, curiosity and mystery? In my life, some of the greatest moments have come from failure. And what does success truly mean? Reaching the summit is an obvious and logical yardstick, yet too much focus on that singular measure can blind us to more profound possibilities like surrendering ourselves to the experience at hand, regardless of whether it entails failure or success. As the prolific Mugs Stump once said, “We were stuck on a portaledge on the Eye Tooth for eight days… We don’t need the summit. Just being here, in the present, that’s enough.”

These were the thoughts going through my head when Kyle Dempster and I were lucky enough to get invited to the 21st Piolets d’Or ceremony in Chamonix. The annual event – held over four days with plenty of red wine and good French food – typically chooses a “best” alpine climb of the year and rewards that team with a golden ice axe. Kyle and I were nominated for our new route up the south face of Ogre I in Pakistan’s Karakoram Range.

[Above: Hayden descends Ogre I after making the third ascent of the mountain with Kyle Dempster. Karakorum Range, Pakistan. Photo: Kyle Dempster]

We were among some of the strongest and most legendary alpinists in the world. At lunch one day, Stephen Venables told us how he broke his legs in India when his anchor ripped out of the wall, sending him hundreds of feet down the mountain. One table over, the renowned Kurt Diemberger, responsible for the first ascents of both Broad Peak (1957) and Dhaulagiri (1960), was telling his stories. Over espresso, the infamous Brit Mick Fowler told me wild tales of his first years exploring the Himalayas. To be surrounded by so many amazing climbers was truly an honor.

The five other nominated climbs were all outstanding and unique, ranging from a three-week ridge traverse on an 8000-meter peak to navigating new ground on unexplored peaks. I felt my sense of the possibilities in the mountains open up. Yet during the event there was also a lot of hype about “who” was going to “win.” It’s a big deal for some people. Me? I was so blown away by the company I could have cared less about the award.

To my surprise, the Piolets d’Or jury made a great statement towards alpinism by celebrating all of this year’s climbs instead of awarding a “prize” to a single climb. This is a fantastic step in the right direction and I thank them for their choice. The fact that we all shared a similar passion for wild climbing adventures was enough. I was so inspired by the stories I heard at the event that all I could think about was getting back into the mountains.

The ultimate alpine climb would be a spectacular line up a virgin face, no one nearby, with a good partner – and there wouldn’t ever be a word uttered about it. Stripping away all desires except the pure experience of the climb, escaping all expectations and our own egos, these are the real achievements. We should all dream of this… maybe one day it will become a reality.

“Potentialities increase
Pleasure eats senses
Power seems unlimited
Suddenly I discover
The only escape from madness
Is the old path through
Blood, sweat and tears.”
       – Voytek Kurtyka

Master of Stone: Layton Herman Kor

2013-05-08T15:33:20-07:00

June 11, 1938–April 21, 2013

By Cameron M. Burns

One of the greatest American climbers of the late 1950s and ’60s, Layton Herman Kor, died April 21 after a long battle with kidney problems and cancer.

The son of a Dutch mason (Jacob Kor) who came to the U.S. in 1897 from the Oldambt area of Groningen, the Netherlands, and a second-generation German-American (Leona Schutjer) from Iowa, Kor spent his early life in Canby, Minnesota and was particularly fond of swimming and fishing, especially during Minnesota’s hot summers. He loved the outdoors.

Editor's note: We're grateful to author Cam Burns for sharing this tribute with us. Layton Kor was beloved by many in the extended Patagonia climbing family. Says Yvon Chouinard of Layton, “He and I were Mutt and Jeff climbers, my 5'4" to his 6' plus. I’d get freaked out belaying as he would quickly run out a long lead; I didn’t know if I was going to be able to hold him. I never had to find out, even though we climbed all over Yosemite and Chamonix. Back in camp he was just one of the guys.”

[Above: photo courtesy of Glen Denny]

In 1955, The Kors (Layton, brother Waylin—7 years his senior—and their parents), who’d never lived anywhere other than the Plains regions of the Upper Midwest (with the exception of a short stint in California in the 1940s to address young Layton’s “rheumatic fever”) moved to Manitou Springs, Colorado, where the young Kor saw a film that would change his life (High Conquest based on James Ramsey Ullman’s book of the same name—Kor mistakenly called it Man Against the Matterhorn in his book Beyond the Vertical). The next day, Kor borrowed his father’s geology pick and found some rocks behind the trailer park and started chopping steps in the rock.

“I don’t remember,” he told me in 2008. “I think I just did it here and there probably, just something to balance in. It wasn’t very high.”

He quickly gave that up—realizing that chopping steps in the ice in the movie he’d seen was a totally different deal altogether—and began reading about climbing in whatever books he could get his hands on as the Kors moved briefly to Altus, Oklahoma then Wichita Falls, Texas (the “land of the flat,” as Layton called it. Ironically, the library there—in Wichita Falls—had a lot of books about climbing).

“As time went on I kept accumulating knowledge about what the sport was about, the fact that you use a rope and tied in and stuff like that,” he told me in 2008. “[It was] all rudimentary knowledge about the sport, but little by little I learned more.”

In the spring of 1956, the Kor family returned to Colorado—this time Boulder. Game on.

Kor, with no formal climbing training—and as many observers have suggested, because of that lack of formal training—essentially invented climbing for himself. And, fortunately, Kor was in an area with a lot of great crags that were almost wholly undeveloped in terms of their climbing potential: Eldorado Canyon, Boulder Canyon, Lumpy Ridge, and Rocky Mountain National Park, to name the nearest to Kor’s home.

“He just saw things and had that confidence,” noted Dave Dornan, an early climbing partner of Kor’s. “We were taught to be cautious and to test stuff, and three points of contact, and all that old-fashioned stuff, and he never had any rules to follow, so he just did what came naturally.”

As the years followed, Kor would go on to make first ascents of Eldorado’s best-loved and most classic climbs, including the Naked Edge, Ruper, Rosy Crucifixion, the Yellow Spur, and many others (he is credited with first ascents of 55 routes in Eldorado alone, most of them considered classic climbs today). By 1959, with his and Ray Northcutt’s ascent of the Diagonal on the lower section of Longs Peak, Kor was a household name in the Colorado climbing community—although that household was more like a one-roomed cabin at the time. Then, he really got to work.

Layton just outside of Eldorado Canyon. Photo: Cam Burns

In the decade from 1957 through ’67, Kor developed a routine in which he would roam between his local crags in the Boulder area as well as venture to other climbing areas, which in his case included Yosemite, Devils Tower, Garden of the Gods, the Shawangunks, and various Canadian and Alaskan areas, establishing new routes, and, as was important during this period, setting new time records for nearly every route he climbed, most notably those in Yosemite, which were the Holy Grail of American climbing, simply because they were the most challenging rock climbs on the planet in the early 1960s.

“He was a dynamo, a one of a kind,” Royal Robbins, Yosemite’s most respected pioneer of the 1960s, told me in 2008. “The emotion was one of wonder and admiration and ‘who’s this guy who comes from out of state and goes on the hardest Yosemite climbs and does them in record time?’ It’d never been done before.”

Like his father and brother, Kor became a mason and worked just enough to cover his expenses and spent the bulk of his free time climbing (he lived with his parents in their trailer until he was nearly 30). “My parent’s supported my climbing,” Layton told me in a 2011 interview. “Definitely. Without a doubt. For a decade there, all I did was climb.”

In 1966, he was so highly regarded in climbing circles he was invited to be part of an international team that included John Harlin II, Dougal Haston, and (by default) Chris Bonington—who was hired by a UK newspaper to cover the event—to establish a new direct route on the Eiger’s north face. The climb dragged out for more than a month, with the team of climbers routinely jugging 7-mil dynamic ropes fixed on the face—not something most climbers would rely on. “Every time the rope jumped or gave an inch or so my heart dropped through my boots,” Bonington told me via email in 2012.

Ultimately, one of the dynamic ropes broke, John Harlin fell, and it was suddenly the end of an era—the Kor era. Standard histories of the end of Kor’s climbing career suggest that after the Harlin accident he found God and quit climbing. He did the former, but not the latter and kept on climbing a lot, here and there, in a much lower-key fashion. As Lloyd Volgamore, a contractor who hired Kor during his early Jehovah’s Witnesses years in Golden, Colorado, told me, he was climbing a lot in Clear Creek Canyon even though he’d supposedly given up climbing. A single formation in that canyon—near the Kor home in the 1970s—reportedly boasts five Kor routes.

After living for periods in Golden and Glenwood Springs, Colorado, the Philippines, Guam, and California, Layton moved to Kingman, Arizona, where he passed his final days, climbing occasionally and cursing the dreaded dialysis treatment he was on.

Layton Kor, friends recall, was a rough and ready youngster on the crags—setting a climbing standard for difficulty across Colorado and much of the nation—but in later life a splendid and virtuous friend, father, and husband.

Every climber who’s ever lived has ultimately come to respect Kor’s climbs. He set standards for difficulty and daring in every area he ventured—the Front Range, the Colorado Plateau, Yosemite, and other areas. Authors Stewart Green and Eric Bjornstad estimated in 2012 that a popular Kor route near Moab, the Kor-Ingalls route on Castleton Tower, has had more than 40,000 ascents.

Kor even had an influence on equipment design, too. As Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard said in a 2012 interview, a 1966 ascent of Les Cortes near Chamonix with Kor led him to rethink ice gear.

“It was a big breakthrough because both of us realized it was a stupid way to climb with these flexible crampons and flexible boots, ice axes that wouldn’t stick in, ice daggers that were worthless,” Chouinard said. “It was a revelation for the two of us for sure.” (Chouinard also credited Kor with being one of the few guys he ever hired at Chouinard Equipment in the early 1960s—where a number of climbers worked just to get their hands on decent pitons—who could forge.)

Chris Jones’s often maligned but generally accurate 1976 book, Climbing in North America, has a chapter titled “Layton, ‘The Great ’Un.’” He was the only climber in a book spanning more than a century’s worth of American climbing history to be honored in such a way—not even The Fred, whom we all know and love, was honored like that.

In 2008, a pensive Kor summed it up quite well for me during a marathon interview. “We all carry a little bit of madness,” he said. “You have to be mad to climb. It’s a pretty bizarre sport—a way out there sort of thing. It’s amazing it’s gotten so popular.”

Layton “the great one” Kor is survived and missed by his children—Arlan, Julia, and Jaime Kor—and his widow, Karen, and by his first wife Joy Kor (née Herron). And by thousands of climbers around the globe.

Photo: Glen Denny

Contributions to Layton’s family can be made at a website set up by Chris Archer and Steph Davis: http://www.youcaring.com/memorial-fundraiser/support-for-layton-kor/55319 or, by contacting the writer directly at camburns@rof.net.

Cam Burns is currently working on a biography of Layton Kor.

[With thanks to Glen Denny and the Warner Literary Group.]

Working Towards Responsible Supply Chains: Our Factory Monitoring Efforts

2013-05-07T10:54:12-07:00

All of us at Patagonia have been shaken by the recent tragic events in Bangladesh. We offer our deepest condolences to all of the victims and their families. We are monitoring the press, the actions of governments around the world in response and the courageous efforts by the charities on the ground. Our stakeholders may ask what Patagonia is doing to monitor its supply chain and help prevent in our partner factories another occurrence of this kind of tragedy.

Two decades ago we began seriously examining social and environmental issues in our supply chain. The more we learned, the more worried we became. So back in the mid-1990s Patagonia helped create the Fair Labor Association (FLA), a multi-stakeholder initiative whose sole purpose is to promote fair, safe and healthy conditions in factories worldwide. The FLA has been auditing our factories since the early 2000s and our own Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program since 2008. Regular supplier auditing, training and education by committed brands has, in part, eradicated child labor and some forms of forced labor as well as led to minor improvements in health and safety.

We fully recognize that some factories over the past 10 years have stepped up to the plate to do everything responsible brands do in their CSR efforts, including CSR reporting. Unfortunately, these exemplary factories are few and far between. We are constantly searching the globe to find them. When we do, we put them through our rigorous screening process before we place the first order. You can find sketches of many of these factories on Patagonia’s Footprint Chronicles.

[Above: Shane Prukop, president of Trupart Manufacturing in Ventura, California, shows Patagonia’s Social and Environmental Responsibility team the River Crampon he makes for our company. Photo: Jim Little]

We know that auditing alone doesn’t resolve persistent human rights and environmental issues in the supply chain. In the past three years we’ve added several new steps to our monitoring program, including root cause analysis, more frequent supplier trainings, responsible purchasing practices, and increased multi-brand and NGO collaborations to name a few. As of 2011, we are now assessing our top 40 raw materials suppliers for social responsibility. In 2013, we will add a version of the FLA’s new assessment tool that dives deep into human resource functions to ensure that human rights are respected every day. We’ve added seven new positions in the past three years to our CSR team, including highly experienced field managers in Asia. To keep our FLA accreditation, we are required to track and sustainably correct all problems we find so that they do not crop up again in the next audit. It’s a lot of extra work, but well worth every minute we put into it so workers are protected. This includes workers in Bangladesh, where we place production with a factory in Chittagong owned and operated by the Korean-based Youngone Co., Ltd., a long-term, highly regarded supplier of ours that has a highly competent, sophisticated and proactive CSR staff.

The Footprint Chronicles features an interactive map of Patagonia's suppliers around the world. Source: Patagonia.com

In 2010 we helped organize the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC) of brands, NGOs, trade associations, universities and government bodies. The goal was to develop a key performance indicator tool to help brands and suppliers design, develop, make and retire products with social and environmental responsibility at the top of their minds. Version 1 of this tool, now called the Higg Index 1.0, was launched last year and may be researched on the SAC website. The Higg 1.0 includes product, brand and supplier modules that enable companies to make smart, environmentally focused choices among fabrics, processes and finishes. The social/labor module of the Higg index, to be launched later this year, will focus on worker protection. The ultimate goal is to make the Higg consumer facing, so a customer waving a cell phone over the bar code on a hang tag can read the social and environmental equivalent of the nutritional label found on food packaging.

Because SAC members produce more than a third of the clothing and shoes made on the planet, the Higg Index could make a positive impact on a truly industrial scale, and result in major improvements in the lives of factory workers.

Patagonia’s Social and Environmental Responsibility team conducts an audit at Trupart Manufacturing. See more at The Footprint Chronicles. Photo: Jim Little

Patagonia deals with the same pressures faced by any business, but we are diligently working to ensure that we use all of the best available tools, resources and services to monitor and improve conditions in the factories that make our products. All of us at Patagonia urgently feel the need to achieve full visibility of worker and environmental protections at every stage of the production process and to constantly improve, scale and evolve our supply-chain monitoring program. We feel this is not just our responsibility as an apparel company, but a moral obligation. We will continue to update our Footprint Chronicles and Corporate Responsibility pages and encourage all of you to visit often.

Update (5/21/13): We've received a number of emails and phone calls asking whether or not Patagonia will sign on to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (PDF). We do business now in Bangladesh with one sewing factory, owned by Youngone, a well-regarded, long-term supply-chain partner that is committed to worker health and safety and provides benefits to the employees well beyond what the law requires. In addition, the quality of the standards and practices of this factory exceed those called for in the proposed accord. To sign on would not strengthen our existing practices. In addition, we are concerned that some of the terms of the accord, including its annual membership cost, are not yet plain and thoroughly expressed. We do share the principles expressed in the accord and support a good-faith, multiparty effort to immediately improve conditions in garment factories in Bangladesh. We are now seeking clarification of the accord's costs and terms and investigating whether we can participate, and do so productively. We will keep you posted and thoroughly explain the decision we come to.

DamNation – The Grand Dame of Dam Busting

2013-04-25T10:46:49-07:00

By Katie Klingsporn

Folk-singer, desert goddess, rabble-rouser and all-out spitfire Katie Lee has been raging against Glen Canyon Dam and its reservoir, Lake Powell, for more than 50 years.

And she’s not slowing down.

Lee, who is featured in DamNation, a documentary film produced by Patagonia and Stoecker Ecological in conjunction with Felt Soul Media, has penned protest songs and authored books about Glen Canyon, the dam and the Southwest over the years. Just now wrapping up her latest project, “Dandy Crossing,” she tells the story of the handful of people who once lived at Hite, a river crossing that was drowned by Lake Powell, and what happened to them after they were forced from their homes.

Lee, who is in her 90s, also serves on the advisory board of the Glen Canyon Institute, an environmental group that advocates the draining of Lake Powell and the restoration of the Colorado River. She still performs and speaks for educational and non-profit organizations, as well.

[Above: The one and only Katie Lee, outside her home in Jerome, Arizona after her interview for DamNation this fall. Photo: Ben Knight]

“I haven’t quit, I’m still moaning and groaning about it,” she said recently from her home in Jerome, Arizona. “What else am I going to do? I know who I am, I know what I’m supposed to do and I do it. And until I drop, that’s what I’ll do.”

It was nearly 60 years ago when Lee first floated into the red-rock labyrinth of Glen Canyon, but her memory of that place hasn’t faded a bit. She recalls a desert Eden of soaring Wingate walls, ancient ruins, maidenhair fern, canyon wrens and little arches everywhere.

“It took me by the throat and it’s had me ever since,” Lee said. “There’s no way to describe it, it was just absolutely heaven. I mean, it was another world.”

Lee, then a petite starlet and luminous folk-singer, who entertained raft trips with songs, fell headlong for Glen Canyon. Over the next couple years, she rafted and floated the Colorado and San Juan rivers dozens of times, exploring and naming the mazelike system of side-canyons, swimming in the canyon’s pools, running the rapids and becoming one of the most enduring characters of Colorado River lore.

It was nearly 60 years ago when Katie Lee first explored the red rock labyrinth of Glen Canyon. Now 93, her memory of that place, which was drowned by the construction of Glen Canyon Dam, hasn’t faded a bit. Photo courtesy of the Katie Lee Collection

She and her friends mostly ignored early rumblings that a dam was coming, she said, because it seemed too implausible, too stupid to happen. And despite their fervent, forceful protests later on, construction commenced in 1956. The 710-foot-high concrete arch dam was completed in 1963, 15 miles upstream of Lee’s Ferry. In what has become a well-told narrative, the dam, which was built to create hydroelectricity, store water and provide flow regulation, then inundated one of the most breathtaking canyon systems in the country, leaving Lee both deeply broken-hearted and spitting mad.

In the six decades since, Lee has emerged as one of the most colorful, vocal and sharp-tongued advocates for preservation of wild places in the Southwest. She is outrageous, mischievous, feisty, graceful, fearless and determined. Not afraid to call a shithead a shithead, sing an incendiary protest song or ride her bicycle naked through town, she calls Lake Powell “Rez Foul,” and has openly insulted U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) officials. And she’s not shy about her dreams for the future of Glen Canyon Dam.

“I would like the dam to blow up completely all in one fell swoop, clean out the grand canyon, get rid of all that crap that’s in there now and be a river again,” said Lee.

The dam has drastically changed the Colorado River watershed by decreasing sediment loads, threatening native fish, taming a wild river and drowning a world of grottoes, spires, canyons and cliffs under the second largest manmade reservoir in the United States. Lake Powell, which sits beneath breathtaking red-rock walls, has a storage capacity of 27 million acre-feet and stretches 186 miles when it is full.

The Glen Canyon Institute, which was founded in 1996, has for years worked to restore Glen Canyon. Its scientific studies of the dam’s impacts helped win a lawsuit forcing the Bureau of Reclamation to re-evaluate how dam operations affect endangered species.

But right now, there are no plans to decommission the dam and drain the reservoir. And that’s good news to many people. The hugely popular recreation area draws roughly 3 million boaters, water-skiers, campers and fishermen to its shores each year, according to the USBR.

To Lee, the dam is an ugly reminder of one of America’s biggest mistakes. And though it may not happen in her lifetime, she is confident that if people don’t get rid of it, Mother Nature will, with time.

With recent large-scale dam-removal projects unfolding in places like the Northwest, Lee says the awareness is starting to grow about the harm that can be caused by dams. But her advice for people goes beyond dams: Protect what you love, or you may lose it.

“You better get off your butts and get out and protect what you love, because if you don’t make a noise, people won’t know what’s there, and if you make too much noise you’ll ruin it too,” she said. “I was so lucky to see [Glen Canyon], just so fortunate. That’s a gift that I will never be able to repay.”

Katie Klingsporn is a writer and editor for the Telluride Daily Planet in southwestern Colorado. Look for more of her posts highlighting issues featured in DamNation a documentary film being produced byPatagonia and Stoecker Ecological in conjunction with the Colorado-based filmmaking team Felt Soul Media.

2013 5Point Film Festival Trailer

2013-04-24T12:16:46-07:00

Let's do this! From April 25 - 28, 2013 the 5Point Film Festival will take over your senses, transport you to another place and leave you inspired for adventure. Join us. Visit 5pointfilm.org for more information and tickets.

[Video: 2013 5Point Film Festival Trailer from 5Point Film Festival.]