My Weird Little Outdoor Ecosystem

A satirical gear site, an indie media directory, and a pack weight tracker walk into a bar

Hi all, hope you’re doing well. I’m not at The Running Event, but I’m watching all the coverage from afar and feeling the FOMO, even though my mind is drifting toward skiing this time of year.

I’ll be at the Ski Industry Climate Summit (presented by Atomic and POW Europe) in January, alongside the Prowinter trade show. There’s probably a dozen interesting things to think/write about around that, and if you or a brand you work with will be there, would love to chat. I’ll also be back around Boulder for a week between Christmas and New Years, if anyone is around.

Before we get started, here are a few links for today. I’ve sent enough newsletters to know most people never make it to the ones at the bottom 😂.

Another Puffy Jacket - A cheeky site to share gear, links, and my snarkier takes.

Indie Outdoors - A directory of outdoor media worth your time

PackTrak - A simple tool for tracking your outdoor gear and optimizing pack weight.

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There’s no shortage of outdoor and travel content these days. Gear listicles, travel guides, a new Substack newsletter launches every day. Some of it is good, some of it is great…and some of it is AI-generated. You open ten different gear guides and find the exact same take in slightly different words. Or you get a destination writeup that reads like a reworked press release. With the pure volume of good, the bad, and the “this gives me ChatGPT vibes” all blurring together, it’s hard to stand out.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I want this newsletter to be. Not just how to avoid blending into the noise, but how to make work that actually feels like mine. So far, it’s been focused on one part of me: the part that enjoys writing long, deeply researched articles on a range of topics. Nuanced. Thoughtful. But if I’m being honest, doing that all the time is exhausting. I can’t always be cranking out deep investigations into corporate sustainability reporting or how politics affects the economies of national parks.

And it creates another problem: I don’t like being in a box. Many writers and creators narrow their focus to a single sport or niche, which makes things easier to market and grow. But despite those advantages, I don’t really want to limit myself.

There’s another side of me that loves following trends, posting (informed) hot takes, and just reacting to what’s happening in the industry. My actual day job is in product, design, development, and startups (PermitFlow just raised a $54 million Series B). I like building things that people use. I like curation and connecting people to good work. But all that doesn’t always condense into a tidy one-line description. So, over the last few weeks, I leaned into all those different interests and built (or re-built) a few things that have been on my mind.

Always tinkering

Many years ago, I built a site called Another Puffy Jacket. The name was a joke…yes, here’s another puffy jacket to add to the pile. But it was also my way poking fun at the whole apparatus around gear and gear reviews. It was a satirical gear guide built on witty copy and humor, with equal parts jokes and real gear suggestions.

I recently resurrected it, moving it off Webflow to a custom retro-90s/Tumblr-style site I built from scratch. It’s got a few bells and whistles that make it easy for me to add things, create shareable images, and more. It’s a place for gear news, links, and some of my snarkier takes and intrusive thoughts. No content strategy. No business model. No idea if it’s a good use of my time.

While digging into the size and breadth of the indie outdoor media world recently, I realized exactly how much it has exploded. So I built Indie Outdoors, a directory of outdoor media worth your time. It’s all magazines, newsletters, blogs, and podcasts right now. It’s not comprehensive, just built off of various lists I’ve assembled over the years. Hopefully it helps people find voices and topics that actually interest them rather than PR-sicle content from the big conglomerates. And hopefully it grows with suggestions from folks who weren’t in my initial search (you can submit on the site).

PackTrak came out of wanting a tool for myself and curiosity about how complicated of an app I could actually build these days. It’s for tracking outdoor gear and optimizing pack weight. LighterPack has been around forever but has notable downsides, like being terrible on mobile. There have been multiple attempts to replace it over the years, none particularly successful. There’s nothing revolutionary here besides it being the one I built (and hopefully a bit more design polish). Feedback has been positive, with over 2,000 unique pieces of gear added so far, despite almost no promotion.

These projects are experiments, and they’re all loosely connected. They create a little cross-pollination of attention and new funnels to convert people to the newsletter. They create my own weird little outdoor ecosystem, a cluster of different content shaped by my curiosities, humor, frustrations, and whatever I’m interested in that day/week/month.

Mostly, though, I’m just making things I want to exist and having fun doing it. Hoping maybe someone else finds them useful, or appreciates them, or at least gets a laugh. In a world where everything is starting to sound the same, I’m of the mind that leaning into your own weirdness will work better than trying to optimize yourself into something easily explainable.

I might integrate Another Puffy Jacket into Here & There as more of a separate ‘digest’. I might not. I might add to it regularly or forget about it for months. I still need to migrate hereandthere.club off of Webflow. I might build brand new stuff. Most of it probably won’t work, but that’s the only way to find what does.