This past Thursday, Patagonia Burlington hosted Patagonia Action Work's Snow Activism Tour with two film screenings and a discussion about fighting the climate crisis in your own backyard. Patagonia ambassador Nick Russell hosted the event and asked the audience "What Would you do Without Winter?".

This issue was top of mind as Vermont was coming off a weekend of 55 degrees and heavy rain, a huge loss of snow pack in the mountains. January thaws typically happen every year, but this was extreme.

Ironically, the following Thursday on the day of the Snow Activism event, Vermont got a few inches of heavy snow and then a significant drop in temperatures the next day. Then a snow storm hit over the weekend and the mountains gained another 6-10". Vermont dodged a bullet and we quickly got our winter back! Vermonters and tourists here for the holiday weekend rejoiced - but the elephant in the room remained.

My resume of trips for the past few years include:

• 2012: Biking, backpacking, and working on a farm in Ecuador for 3 months.
• 2013: Solo backpacking for 3 months through France, Italy, and England.
• 2014: Hiking across England on the 200-mile Coast to Coast trail.
• 2016: Hiking 130 miles on the Long Trail averaging ~20 miles/day
• 2018 Hiking 108 miles on the Long Trail averaging ~20 miles/day

Based off this, what would you expect me to be doing this year?

This year I went the coast of Maine and stayed on an island that was half a mile long. I can hike half a mile in 15 minutes, and instead spent 672 times as long within that half mile distance. I spent my mornings drinking coffee, eating meals, reading, playing cards, exploring rocky tidepools, collecting mussels to cook for dinner, and walking around the island’s perimeter. I spent my afternoons and evenings doing the same, but ending sans coffee instead having a beer by a fire. This trip, though drastically different than my laundry list of prior trips, was just as rewarding and rejuvenating.

It’s October in Vermont and despite the few, random days of higher temps we all know the inevitable truth: winter is coming. Maybe the changing of seasons causes you unmitigated joy for all the winter activities you love. Or maybe you feel the existential dread of 4pm sunsets and accidentally sliding to the bottom of Main street after hitting that hidden patch of black ice, prompting you to create a new sport called the ‘Involuntary Luge’. No matter your reaction to winter, we can all agree on at least one thing - wow, it’s COLD outside! So, how do we warm up?

Besides just staying tucked in bed all winter, the best way to stay warm outside is to invest in an insulated jacket or midlayer. When choosing the correct piece for you, one of the first questions you should ask is whether you want natural down or synthetic insulation. The best option is dependent on the type of environment and activities you plan to use your product for.

The scarcity of jewels ensures their worth,
so now we search the earth in earnest for
the items left unloved awhile ago
when great abundance led us to ignore
resources now more precious than before.

I was born and raised in Burlington. When I was a kid, the Intervale was a scary wasteland that people used as a junk yard. When the beltline went in around 1971, you could drive through it and still see parts of old cars around, some even hanging from the cliffs to the west of the wetlands. It was kind of creepy cool to see from a car, but not a place that made you want to get out and walk around.

As a human race, we have a plastic addiction rooted in consumerism and fossil fuel extraction. Collectively, we continue to remove vast amounts of carbon from the Earth to create products that are over-consumed and eventually, the resource-intensive products get thrown out as waste.

It’s likely you’ve seen photos of trash filling our oceans, strangling wildlife, and piling up on shores. What was once considered pristine areas of our planet are now filling up with our trash from all over the world. We are all connected by and responsible for this global plastic problem. Depressing, right?

Fortunately, Patagonia is paving the way for a more environmentally-conscious clothing industry with a variety of solutions to combat waste.

The Long Trail spans from the Massachusetts/Vermont border 273 miles north to the Canadian border along the Green Mountains.

Having backpacked only once before moving to Vermont and subsequently falling in love with the sport/lifestyle within my first week of living here, it was only right to cap off my college career with a thru-hike of Vermont’s Long Trail (LT).

People often ask me how I ended up here in Vermont, having grown up outside of Chicago. When the college search began, my mom asked me what I wanted my chosen home to look and feel like. I loved this question and knew that what I wanted most was to be surrounded by mountains. I wanted to be in a landscape that inspired me. When choosing between going east or west, my sister being in Boston drew me to the Green Mountains.

This April, Patagonia was excited to once again award the Intervale Center with another $20,000 grant for their Riparian Restoration & Land Stewardship Project to continue their work in raising awareness within our community about the importance of riparian buffers for the health of our waterways and to continue to grow the conservation nursery itself.

When I first arrived in Burlington four years ago, the Intervale was something that I couldn’t fully wrap my brain around. The concept that there could be a large piece of land in the middle of a city that provides local food to its residents, while also caring for the land, hosting community events, and providing a shared space for small farms to seemed completely foreign to me. Over my years here, I have seen evidence of the Intervale everywhere.

A couple years ago, my roommate andRead More

I’d like to start by saying I hate running. I’ve never been particularly good at it, my asthmatic lungs and I are a prime example of Darwinism, had modern technology medicine not been created. I do, however, love the Vermont City Marathon and the Patagonia Burlington 5 person relay team I’ve gotten to be a part of for the past three years.

In 2017, the first year I was asked to be on the relay team I said yes and instantly regretted it. I was hopelessly under prepared to run the whopping 3.4 miles of the first leg. I had about a month or so to train, and race day came and I would have said I was in no way ready to go. I ran my leg at a nice little pace averaging 10 minute miles, something that is unimpressive to some but the fact that I kept running for the entirety of the leg was good enough for me.

In 1991, Patagonia famously conducted an audit of all of the materials in their product line, finding cotton to their surprise to be the most environmentally impactful. This discovery spurred a revolution; no industry existed at the time for organic cotton, but Patagonia was determined to eradicate harmful pesticides from its cotton production process.

With the cooperation of a big box store -- who, after some coercion, agreed to invest in making 1% of their styles with organic cotton -- Patagonia was able to grow organic cotton production enough to erase all non-organic new cotton material from its products.

Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, the majority of my outdoor time was spent at the lakefront or in the forest preserve near my grandparent’s house. During the summer, we spent weekends camping in Wisconsin and Michigan or road tripping out west. By the time I was deciding where to head for college, I had a thirst to explore more mountainous terrain.

When I committed to the University of Vermont, I was ecstatic to take part in a Wilderness Trek trip. This program, sponsored by the University, offers incoming students a chance to spend six days in the backcountry with future classmates and two upper class leaders. Although I had only backpacked once before, I was excited to explore the Green Mountains right off the bat.