Yeh, I’m old. Let’s get that out there right away. I remember when there were only seven television channels to choose from and if you wanted to learn about what was happening in the world, you read a newspaper, listened to the radio, or watched the evening news. Life was pretty damn good.
And if you needed hiking shoes, you went to a store and picked out a pair from two or three makers. It wasn’t hard because they all looked like this. All you needed to decide was high top or not. After making your big purchase, you took them home to spray waterproofing gunk on em and oil them up like a good baseball glove.
I don’t want a return to the days of breaking in old leather hiking boots and inevitable blisters but when did there become so many choices? Short, tall, GoreTex, mesh, leather, hard toe, not-as-hard toe, and shoes for carrying less than or greater than 30 pounds on your back. As Bev told the shoe sales guy at REI, if I’m carrying more than 30 pounds in a backpack, we’ve got a problem.
So off to REI we went. If anyone’s wondering, REI stands for Recreational Equipment Incorporated. It says so right on the awning over the front door. Who knew? I always wanted REI to stand for something cool like Radical Everything Imaginable, so some boring corporate name was a bit bubble bursting. The lawyers must have been in charge on the day they named the company. Happily, the name is the only boring thing about REI. Three steps inside the store and you want to turn to a sales person and yell “I’ll take one of everything, please”. If I ever win the lottery that I rarely play, I’m going to hire a personal shopper for me and Bev, and then accompany that highly compensated person to REI, where we’ll sit and have cool stuff brought to us while we dream of amazing adventures.
In the meantime, though, we settled for being assisted by Jesse and Toby in the shoe department. They were sort of like our personal shoppers, except that we had to share them with about 35 other people. They even helped another customer who was overheard saying that she was planning to hit the Mt. Whitney Permit Lottery this summer. Bev said something that sounded like “not if she breaks her leg trying on shoes”, but I couldn’t be sure. Jesse and Toby kept the hiking boots coming… Merrill, Vasque, Oboz, Keen… men’s, women’s, one size up, one size down… a parade of hiking boots!
And the winners were the Oboz Yellowstone II. One in men’s, another in women’s. So comfortable and snug like a sock. Now we just need to break them in and put them through their paces on the trails.
And we have the great sock experiment. Synthetic or “smart wool”. Thin cushion or medium cushion. So many decisions…
When I was a kid in Boy Scouts, I loved tromping around in the woods and finding interesting stuff in nature. One of the coolest things to find was a good walking stick. If it was the right weight and height, you could swing that stick, poke stuff with it, beat it against trees, and when you got bored with it, test your javelin skills. Using it for walking was pretty low on the list of applications for a good stick. That’s what your legs were for.
