Columbia Sportswear has offered a number of their employees voluntary buyouts and also put some through a round of layoffs. How many you ask? Well, Columbia won’t disclose the number of employees leaving town, which leaves us to imagine Portland packed with people walking everywhere because they can’t afford bikes. Columbia says their buyouts in [ more... ]
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Spyder’s employing the flexy d30 gel previously used in ribcap ski hats to give their downhill mountain biking suit a new level of protection. The d30 gel  relies on magical molecules that remain flexible under normal conditions and seize into a hard plastic shell when impacted. It’s a remarkable material that feels soft [ more... ]
Tags: Cycling
It looks like some kid begged his out-of-work dad for a bike on his birthday. Erik Bjork is the industrial designer who put together this bike with low-cost materials. I’m not sure how much it weighs, but you can bet those tubes aren’t double-butted. At first it struck me as ugly as hell, but I’ll [ more... ]
Tags: Cycling, Kirkwood
The Filterbrella design concept would have you refill bottles of water by screwing them into the handle of a water-collecting umbrella. It relies on a gravity filter in the umbrella guts to clean the collected rainwater. As much as I hate the wastefulness of bottled water, this thing’s just not going to work. It’d be [ more... ]
Tags: Camping
A study printed in the Journal of American College Health puts forth the notion that drinking heady energy drinks is a predictor of risk-taking behavior among the college crowd. The most interesting part of the study found that people who drank cocktails made with the energy drinks would get about twice as drunk as people [ more... ]
Tags: Food and Drinks, Xtreme!“Hitching rides on trucks! He’s asking for a ride in an ambulance!†A reminder that holding onto the back of trucks should be forgone even at the expense of your boys-pride. “She’s colorblind and can’t see the light./In that case, she shouldn’t ride a bike.â€
It’s a terrible glimpse into the past, and the music does a fine job of adding anxiety.
via Pinch Flat News
Tags: Cycling, Videos
You can custom order a batch of VIP Survivor Lights for your Boy Scout Troop so that everyone can send the same flash signal when they get lost. Go with the normal Morse code for SOS, or spell out some special Scouting camp song that’ll keep the kids company while they hide from strangers in [ more... ]
Tags: Backpacking
I don’t know what it is about raspberry-flavored juice that makes me think of spiders, but it’s in there. I think it’s because I was terrified of tarantulas as a child, and I hated drinking Cran-Raspberry juice, too. Those hairy bastards still freak me out, and I think I’ve even outgrown Cran-Vodkas, so I can’t [ more... ]
Tags: Food and Drinks
I used to work at this gear shop and guys would always come in with Coleman lanterns they needed repaired. About half of them quit working because the guys filled the fuel tanks with citronella oil, and I would just empty it into the can where we dumped old-fuel and then fire the thing up [ more... ]
Tags: Camping, Climbing, Jackets, Kayaking
I used to do something like this, only it was with an empty laundry basket and the stairs that went into the basement. Of course that was before helmets, not that I’m bragging. Brush Boarding is carpet surfing that you do on spinning rollers on a quarter pipe. I can just imagine becoming an expert [ more... ]
Tags: Surf