EP. 43: Seek Outside - "Built For Life"

Seek Outside designs and manufactures performance-built backcountry products in Western Colorado. The mission of Seek Outside is founded in their passion for the outdoors, wild places and the experiences they provide. The company exists to improve the all season backcountry experience, and to help protect and conserve the wild places we all love. In mid-October, Jesse Deubel had the opportunity to put some Seek Outside gear to the test during a muzzleloader elk hunt in the Gila. After the hunt he sat down with Kevin Timm, the founder and owner of Seek Outside to discuss the origins of the company, the products and the conservation ethic the company is so well known for. As you'll hear, Kevin and the team at Seek Outside have a passion for big adventures in wild places. That is is why Seek Outside proudly supports groups that teach, mentor and protect these special places. They have earned multiple achievements including winning the Larry Fisher Award for their commitment to conservation. Through the years, they have supported many grassroots conservation causes such as A Year in The Wilderness. Seek Outside not only provides all season backcountry performance gear, but also protects the interests of the sportsman and the recreational adventurer. This conversation will educate you about the process of designing, building and testing some of the best backcountry gear on the market. Enjoy the listen! 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, I got listeners.

Speaker 2 (00:01):
Jesse Dubell here, executive director of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation,
Welcome back to another exciting episode of the show. I'm
thrilled today to have a friend of mine, Kevin Tim
on the show. Kevin is the owner of Seek Outside,
and if you're not familiar with the company, I'm so
excited that you're listening because you're going to learn a

(00:22):
lot about super technical, high quality, low weight backpacking gear.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
The New Mexico Wildlife Federation presents the Yahiva Podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
So without further ado, Kevin, why don't you introduce yourself
and tell us a little bit about.

Speaker 4 (00:39):
Who you Laura, Well, I'm Kevin. If I would a
Seek Outside in twenty ten, I have a big passion
for getting people outside, for the back country, for fair chase, hunting,
love being out in the fall. However, when we started,
I saw, or before we started, I saw sort of

(01:00):
a shortcoming in a lot of the gear that was used.
It was really hard to find things that carried the
weight well, that did things, you know, that made it
comfortable for you to stay. So that was really kind
of the starting point. The real genesis I was snowshoeing
in the winter, and I was, It's funny because when

(01:25):
you and I first met, it was my dad had
just died, and one of the things we did was
talk a little bit about our fathers, and you told
me about how close you were with your dad, and
my dad, even though he was older, always said the
one thing he regretted was never going on a moose hunt.

(01:46):
So I thought maybe I would try to get him
on an elk hunt, and by being older and stuff,
all the elk hunting I'd done up to that point
was I would just go it hard for freaking day
and knock out a lot of miles and shitty terrain
and keep kind of doing that, doing that, doing that, Well,

(02:09):
someone who's sixty five or seventy isn't going to do that.
So I started exploring, like maybe there was a cabin
or something we could rent, And as I was snowshoeing,
it was like, maybe in January or February, I thought, Man,
what we really could use is like something like an
Indian TV where you could have a fighter inside. But

(02:30):
that was lighter, and I didn't full disclosure, there have
been some that had existed, but I was unaware of
them at that time. I hadn't I mean, I was
family man, had a job, head kids, all that stuff.
A lot of my time was taken up. So I

(02:50):
came home I told my wife Angela my fantastic idea,
and she basically told me it was the stupidest thing
she ever heard. So after trying to convince her that
it wasn't quite as stupid, we decided to make a
couple of prototypes and source some of our own gear.

(03:12):
The first one we made was absolutely awful, looked horrible,
and she told me, see, it was a stupid idea.
I said, no, no, no, no, no, can'ta. We made
a little mistake. Let's try to get it right and
we're going to build tiny models. Next one we built
was actually pretty good, and then we built one for

(03:34):
the family. We used it because at the time my
kids were in nine and six or eight and five,
something like that, and we used it pretty much throughout
the year for the family, and we thought it was
kind of cool, and so we decided to make a
business out of it and see where it went. At

(03:56):
that time, she did a lot of the legwork on
curing the manufacturing. It turned out that down in Junction
there used to be a Marmot factory, so there was
quite a few people that knew how to sew outdoor
gear there. Early on, we used to joke that we
used old Marmot sewers as informer. The reality was they

(04:16):
were also old as far as chronological as well. But
that was a good starting point and it felt really
like the right thing to do, and it allowed us
to get further in the back country more comfortable as well,
and then the products just sort of grew from there.

(04:36):
You know, people would say, well, you need to make
can you make this? Can you make that? You know,
and started looking at things like packs and having a
lot of our own opinions on that and full the scolosure.
I've always been fairly fairly into making designing things like that.

(04:58):
I mean, I used to play guitar. At one point
I designed my own guitar amps that were well regarded.
I did computer security. I was a security research I
designed different algorithms that ended up getting adopted quite a
bit into how security stuff was done internet wide or

(05:20):
within big products that Cisco offered and stuff like that.
So I've always been kind of that have an idea
and I want to build it, and I almost always
have a fairly consistent approach to it, which is minimal

(05:42):
but very functional, very durable, and working very well.

Speaker 1 (05:48):
And well, that's such a cool story.

Speaker 2 (05:49):
And so your intrigue into the outdoor manufacturing space sounded
like king from tepees, which are you know, my first
exposure personal experience, at least maybe not exposure. My first
personal experience with a heated shelter in other words, a
tent that had a wood stove in it, essentially was

(06:10):
on a moose hunt in twenty sixteen. Prior to that,
I'd always been in more of a traditional dome tent
type of shelter.

Speaker 1 (06:18):
But on this kind of late season Alaskan.

Speaker 2 (06:21):
Moose hunt, one of my buddies brought a shelter that
had a titanium stove, and you talk about an absolute
game changer. In fact, reflecting back on that hunt, and
that was a float hunt on the forty mile Rivers
system in Alaska, and it was brutal and all honesty,
I mean, this is going to sound like an exaggeration,

(06:42):
but had it not been for that heated shelter, I
don't know if we had survive that trip. I mean
that could have been like a search and rescue situation
because the conditions were so intense and without the ability
to dry out that year. And that's what really got
me interested in this new design, this new development, because
they're floorless and surprising, they're surprisingly they're incredibly light, you know,

(07:07):
especially if you've got a couple of people. Because the
way we did it, one guy carried the shelter, one
guy carried the stove, and it was a really sweet setup.
And having spent some time with your products, I just
can't emphasize enough when it comes to the shelters.

Speaker 1 (07:22):
And we'll get into some of the other product und
here a little bit later.

Speaker 2 (07:25):
When it comes to the shelters, especially on late season haunts,
that is an absolute game changer.

Speaker 4 (07:31):
There has not been a person I've met that has
not enjoyed the heated shelter in shitty weather conditions. It
is a vast mood enhancer. A few years ago and
I mean I've I know it. I've did an Arctic
river trip and after a few days on the river,

(07:53):
everyone was like, let's get the stove going, let's dry
out gear. There have been instances where it has been
life saving for people that have had that have say
went overboard, been hypothermic, and they've happened to have one
of our shelters around. We've had instances. We had recently
had a guy mail in. He was on a fog

(08:16):
neck I think, on a hunt, and I think he
had sixty seventy mile an hour sustained winds for thirty
six hours, and then the gusts were higher and he
couldn't He couldn't believe his tent held up to it.
You know, it did have a couple of little damage
spots that are things we can fix for him and
work around, but you know, he couldn't. He thought he

(08:38):
was pretty much dead man walking on that. And I
a few years ago, I had a deer tag and
I went up really high and it ended up snowing
like maybe sixteen or eighteen inches. I got two stories.
Actually both of them happened in the same spot. And

(08:59):
these two guys were camped kind of near me, oh, hunting,
and they were sleeping in like hubb or big Agnes
style tents every night. They ended up in my heated
cimarron and within a week they bought Within a week
after the trip, they turned around and bought their own
hot tent from us. But every night, and I mean
it worked for me. I was getting I was getting

(09:20):
some swigs of whiskey for free out of the deal,
you know, because they're like, hey, we'll share a whiskey,
you share your hot tent. And then there was another time,
me and an employee of ours, Nathan, we took a
really comfortable setup up. We took a courthouse with a
big stove, and of course he took a bottle of scotch.

(09:45):
And there was this guy I know, he used to
be an instructor for cold weather survival instructor right, so
he likes to go out with a little flat tarp,
build a fire, keep his tarp about eighteen inches off
the ground, and he likes to sneak into some park
at four in the morning and freeze his ass off whatever.

(10:08):
But he was up there with his wife and daughter,
and he ended up camping across the park from us,
even though he wanted to camp somewhere else. There just
wasn't any other really good flat spots in that area.
And Nathan and I felt like we were cheating because
we had the courthouse, which had two poles. We put

(10:31):
a prussic on each pole, clothes liner between them so
we could hang her clothes. We had a lot of
wood prepped. We had fairly comfortable paths and sleeping bags.
And I took up ova ease, which is like a
dried egg thing with a little cheese and a little
already cooked bacon and some flower tortillas, and I made

(10:55):
a bunch of breakfast tacos and wrapped them in aluminum foil.
It really was not It really was hardly any more
weighty than like oatmeal for breakfast. Yeah, I think it
came out like four ounces more. The thing is, you
just got to add a little water when you get
up there to rehydrate the eggs and cook them. And
so we had a lot of breakfast tacos, and we
could throw one on the stove in the morning and

(11:16):
heat it up and then put it in our thing
and go out for our hunt. And Nathan and I
were living like kings up there. Man. We were coming
out of the tent with our shirts off because we
were hot. We needed to catch some cold air. We'd
been drinking a little bit of scotch. And this dude,

(11:37):
his wife and daughter were all huddled underneath this little
tarp about eighteen inches off the ground with a fire,
and we were Nathan and I were just like, man,
kind of feel bad for the ladies over there. You know,
they don't really deserve this, you know that, you know
they got to be looking over here, like, man, these

(11:57):
dudes are cheating. This isn't you know. Anyway, we got
our animals, packed them out, We're going back in. We
saw those people leaving. Yeah, boy, that was so funny.
We're like, I was your hunter or whatever because they
were hiking out and she's like, never again am I
doing this?

Speaker 1 (12:17):
Never?

Speaker 4 (12:18):
Never? And he's like, oh, we just need to get
you some new boots, that's what we need. And it's like, no,
you need you need to get your wife some sort
of setup like what we had. We felt like we
were showing off across the park, you know, like we're
almost cheating.

Speaker 2 (12:35):
Yeah, well, you know that that courthouse that you're talking
about is a pretty spectacular design.

Speaker 1 (12:41):
You and I recently were drift in Nhila.

Speaker 2 (12:43):
Unfortunately, circumstances didn't allow for you to stay for the
entire trip, but I was there with other mutual friends
of ours and for the entire duration of that l hunt.
We were using the courthouse as kind of like our
cook tent and our hangout spot and just start and
you know, this is the HeLa in October. A lot

(13:04):
of times it's eighty degrees and beautiful. But over the
course of this hunt, we saw every kind of weather
condition you can imagine, hail and sleep and crazy wind
and snow and rain and eighty five degree days. I mean,
we saw the whole spectrum in that short amount of time.
But throughout all of it, that courthouse was absolutely bulletproof,

(13:25):
super spacious, and just an awesome place for us to
hang out and be out of the element.

Speaker 1 (13:30):
So kudos to you on that design.

Speaker 4 (13:32):
I am glad it worked for you, but we have
a lot better courthouses than that. The Like I said,
I didn't know what happened to my courthouse. I think
I must have loaned it to somebody and I got
it back, or loaned it to someone at the shop
or something. But the courthouse I ended up down there,
and I didn't pay enough attention to it. The courthouse

(13:53):
I had down there was one that we had let
winter a full winter outside because we wanted to see
how it performed. So and I live at a fairly
seventy five hundred feet, so we get a lot of
snow here. And it was a prototype that had wintered
all the way from November to like April when I

(14:14):
could finally start to get the steaks out. So it
had a little bit of damage, a couple rips and
tears in it, and it wasn't quite as good as
the production one. It was one of those things that
you know, when you put it through that much weather,
you start to see a thing or two that can

(14:36):
be approved upon. So I'm glad that one worked for you.
I'm a little embarrassed. That's the cordouse I brought.

Speaker 2 (14:43):
Well, if you hadn't, I didn't know that backstory, and
had you not told me that, you know right now,
I would have never known that it wasn't just a
brand new product right off the shelves of the showroom.
Because it performed flawlessly. I mean, we had no issues
with it. What's incredible is how how much those shelters

(15:03):
have the ability to retain.

Speaker 1 (15:05):
We never actually set up the stove, but we had.

Speaker 2 (15:08):
You know, a little propane two burner cooker in there
that we were making breakfast and cooking coffee in the
mornings and those kinds of things. That little propane stove,
I mean, we'd have to open the zipper up on
that thing to vent it so that we could be
in there comfortably, because even when the temperature outside was
practically unbearable, the temperate temperature inside was super warm, and

(15:29):
it was it was awesome.

Speaker 4 (15:31):
That's like Nathan and I going outside in fifteen degree
weather with our shirts off, you know, and three three
drinks of Scotch and us already and the little ladies
across the park freezing into the little tarp. You know,
Nathan and I are eating like kings and there. Yeah,
they do pretty well. At You can get pretty darn

(15:54):
warm in those especially in the courthouse, and I especially
like one of my favorite things about the courthouse is
that two pole design really allows you to try out
gear well because you can run a little cordage between
each pole, which gives it structure, and then it's just
a clothes hanger there. It really is, you know, hang

(16:15):
whatever up there and you're good and run the stove.

Speaker 1 (16:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:20):
Well, the other thing that's really really convenient is that
you can stand up in these shelters, whether it's the
courthouse or one of your teepees, when you're waking up
at three point thirty in the morning, four o'clock in
the morning, and you didn't go to bed until eleven
o'clock at night because you got back well after dark.
You're hiking hours with a headlamp in the evening after
the day's hunt, you're exhausted, and when you wake up

(16:43):
in the morning, the ability to stand up to get
dressed is it's a luxury that we take for granted
most other times.

Speaker 1 (16:50):
But when you're on a backcountry hunt.

Speaker 2 (16:53):
You know, historically, prior to using shelters like yours, I'm
in a small dome tent, you know, one of these
kind of baby type shelters, and you know, trying to
get yourself dressed and ready to go out into the
elements and those conditions is very, very challenging as opposed
to being able to stand up in a teepe or

(17:13):
a shelter more like the courthouse.

Speaker 4 (17:15):
There's a few big differences there. Right, So let's draw
this picture. You come back an hour after dark because
you hunted till dark, right, and so you get back
about an hour after dark, it's below freezing. You probably
sweated some, so you're probably popping like Colorado, New Mexico,

(17:38):
very similar. You have a lot of sun a lot
of times, so chances are you might have this odd
chill to you because you've been in kind of this
warm sun and then all of a sudden it's twenty
degrees and you've sweated a bit, and you're getting in
this little tent and cooking yourself a little meal, and

(18:00):
the only thing that'll keep you warm is you're sleeping bag.
And if you put analogae and full of hot water
or something down there, but you're already kind of chilled,
feeling kind of nasty. Got a little bit of food,
there's no But if I've had nights where without a stove,
in that scenario, I mean, you're literally sitting in your
tent with your teeth chattering all that long. You're not

(18:22):
sleeping your life, you know, barely barely making it work.
You know, next morning you get up, you've had two
good hours of sleep. First as you come back, you
turn on the stove. You dry out some gear, but
that heat also kind of dries you out as well.
And it's like I have a wood stove in my

(18:42):
house and you just go up over there and it
warms you up, like to your core, and then you
go to bed and it's just not bad. And if
you get a little cold, you throw a little more
wood on the stove and keep going. And like that
time with Nathan and I in the court house, you know,
we would in the morning, we'd build a quick little

(19:05):
fire and we'd throw those the little tortilla you know,
the breakfast tacos that were wrapped in the aluminum foil.
Throw them on the stove, get them warmed up a
little bit, throw them in one of our pockets, go
out on the hunt now, and we were set up
for the day. It was it wasn't like we were

(19:25):
It wasn't like we were suffering the way we were
supposed to. It was like, you know, we weren't doing
a proper amount of suffering. We were thriving in the situation.

Speaker 2 (19:36):
Yeah, you know, I wanted to ask you, Kevin, because
this is a little bit off topic, but how did
you come up with a name in the courthouse?

Speaker 1 (19:43):
Because I thought that was super clever.

Speaker 2 (19:45):
But as I was using the product, I was just
thinking to myself, I wonder how this thing got its name.

Speaker 4 (19:52):
So a lot of our things are named for things
around here that have a common theme. Obviously the teepees weren't.
But in there's a valley in the west Fork of
the Cimarron's hint, hint, that's the name of one of
our products in the West Fork of the Cimarrods. And

(20:12):
that valley has a mountain by the name of Courthouse.
It also has a mountain by the name of Redcliffe,
and they kind of follow there. What so, if you
take like the name Cimarron, we have the mountain range
Cimarrons around here, right, But Cimarron is it's designed to
be a portable shelter. And if you look up the

(20:35):
original meaning of Cimarron, it's it's more like someone that's
on the move a lot camping. Just look up the
origins of the word cimarron and what it comes from.
If you look at Redcliff, you'll kind of see the
very simp Red Cliff is very steep on its front

(20:55):
and back, and then it's out more wide on it's
and right, which matches very closely to the profile of
the Red Cliff, and then the mountain mountain Courthouse has
very walled sides and then goes up which matches very
closely to like the profile of the courthouse. And so

(21:19):
you can look at a few things like if you
look at our zipperless shelters, Silex, that's a mountain that's
way deep in the Womenouch, Guardian is a mountain next
to it. They have slightly similar profiles to the mountains.
Sunlight is a mountain in the in the Womenouch that

(21:44):
you pretty much have to jump almost from one peak
to another peak. It's a two pole tent to get
to the official summit with a lot of air underneath you.
So there's there's generally kind of a theme around these
that we sort of follow. If you take a look

(22:04):
at our packs, the packs that are on our breakaway
platform have some sort of predatory bird name paragrin, and
I can go through the names that we've used even
over the years, but Peregrin, goshawk, saker, things like that.

(22:28):
And then if you go to our although all of
the packs on the big frame are very hunting capable,
most people think of the breakaway load shelf as more
hunting and they think of the integrated as less hunting.
But a lot of us actually use the integrated as
our hunting packs because the fabrics are waterproof and you

(22:48):
can just wipe them or wash them out pretty easy.
But if you go to our integrateds, that's usually some
sort of mountain feature or something close like or like
one of our one of our packs on the integrated
is called the HeLa birthplace of wilderness, right. It's also

(23:10):
a place that I spend quite a bit of time at,
as I'm sure you kind of know by now. It's
easy for me to get there in the winter, and
it's not got a lot of people, which are kind
of my things. I don't really like the super busy spots,

(23:32):
and there's some things I do there that not a
lot of people other people do that that go into
something that your dog and my dog are very passionate about,
uh and raised dog is very passionate about. So. But divide,

(23:55):
you know, that's a fairly common mountain topography, you know.
We Uniweep Canyon is not that far from junction, and
it's got an interesting feature our frame, the way it
moves both ways. The Uniweep is basically unweep divide river

(24:15):
flows both ways out of it. Keene I Well, I
mean that's a fairly popular outdoor recreation spot in Alaska.
So our naming usually takes on some sort of theme
and follows it. So Porthouse, Cimarron, Redcliff, those all kind

(24:38):
of follow the similar theme.

Speaker 1 (24:40):
Man. That's cool.

Speaker 2 (24:41):
I really like the naming conventions that you just walked
us through and how these names came to be.

Speaker 1 (24:47):
That's that's exciting.

Speaker 2 (24:49):
You mentioned also the fabric or the material, and I
want to pretty soon here, I'd like to pivot into
some of the pack technology because that's something I'm fascinated with.
I've had the opportunity reach and to really experiment with
and play around carry one of your one of your
packs that you're working on in. The material that that
pack is constructed with is really advanced. I mean, something

(25:12):
that's very very impressive to me. And the same thing
goes for the tent material. It's it's so lightweight. But
as you just mentioned, you set up a courthouse in
late fall, essentially in November, and then let that thing
exist in the elements for an entire season, all the
way until April. And it's still functional, intact, and I

(25:36):
mean performed based on my experience with it, as well
as it would have the day someone took it off
of the took it out of the box when they
ordered it. I mean, it was really amazing. And I
don't know the exact weight of that. I'm sure you
probably do. But for something that's so lightweight to be
so durable, are you willing or able to talk a
little bit about the materials, technology, the textiles.

Speaker 4 (26:00):
We're pretty open. We're pretty open about what we use.
We use Cordua branded fabric with a silicone coating, a
lightweight Cordua. A lot of other brands market that they

(26:20):
have super sil Polly. Well, you know, we did a
lot of research into sil polly and we offer a
couple products in it. But I think we did about
a four or five month research with building some of
our shelters out of sil polly versus our nylon that
we use. And almost every shelter we built out of

(26:44):
silk polly failed and we weren't to be clear, I mean,
some people will be like, well, maybe you were just
trying to make them fail. For no, we were trying
to see how good we could make them. I mean
we went through, we did we did other stuff with
we did other stuff with stitching. We tried different threads

(27:04):
to see if we could get better performance on that,
but all of them failed at some point, with the
exception of our with our stuff, with what we normally
used now, so poly does have a little bit of
a usability benefit, but it's a fairly minor usability benefit.

(27:25):
But some people might prefer it. On the usability. I
can say, I'm not going to do any flying trip
in Alaska with a big silk poly tent. I will
not trust it myself. It's great, it's good stuff if
you're not going to be really in the severe stuff.
But for flying trips, nah, take what we are standard fabric.

(27:47):
There's other people that say they have ultra storm blah blah.
You know we've bought all of those tents. We buy
and do research of other people's tents. There's a lot
you can get away with intent design. There really is.
You don't have to be perfect in a lot of instances.

(28:09):
But I can see flaws in other people's tents because
those are things we've tested out, and I mean a
lot of the stuff we test. We will stick stuff
up and be like, let's let the weather beat it
and beat it and beat it and beat it. Now,
in all fairness, I mentioned earlier, about earlier about the

(28:32):
customer on a fog nec I think it was, you know,
they had a couple of little issues, but they weren't
big issues. Their tent survived. There were things that are
fairly easy to fix, and for that environment, there's a
couple little things we could do just to touch better.
But the problem is that it would probably be very

(28:54):
specific to someone who is planning to camp in six
sustained winds of sixty plus in exposed areas with gusts
into the eighties regularly. Because there's a couple of things
that there's a couple of little things, but they just

(29:15):
don't translate well to a product that works as well
for people all over. Right, They're little things, and I
mean we know the tweaks we can advise people like
do this, do this, do this if if that's what
you're going to be in all the time. They're pretty minor.

(29:36):
But you know, we test the heck out of stuff.
We set stuff up for months at a time. We'll
take stuff to the worst weather we can find and
go through it. And we've done that with our packs too.
I mean, before we ever released a pack, we had
someone who did thirty plus miles with one hundred and

(29:57):
fifteen pounds on the same pack over the course of
like three days.

Speaker 1 (30:03):
Wow. Yeah, that's super impressive.

Speaker 2 (30:06):
And you just mentioned that you'll kind of help somebody
to make modifications if necessary for their specific use, And
that reminds me of something I've been really impressed with
regarding the Seek Outside brand.

Speaker 1 (30:18):
And that is your level of involvement with the company.
I mean, the founder and owner of the company.

Speaker 2 (30:24):
I follow seek Outside page on Facebook and I see
where customers go on there and ask a question or
make a comment, and I see you personally engaging in conversations,
making suggestions, helping to resolve any questions that your customers have.
And that's a level of customer service it's pretty hard
to find these days.

Speaker 4 (30:45):
You know. The thing comes down to, more often than
not that I don't really consider getting people outside work.
I consider that more of like a passion, right, I
consider them having the best experience. It's because nothing ruins
someone's desire for the outdoors like having an absolutely shitty experience.

(31:06):
Like I've hiked out of places I've backpacked in, and
I've seen other people going in and I'm like, and
I know what the weather is going to be. I'm like, oh,
that person's probably gonna have a fucking shitty we can
say words, right, Okay, that person's going to have a
really shitty experience. And that might and they look like
they just got all new kit that they went to

(31:27):
ARII and ari I said here, we're gonna make you
into an outdoor adventurer. And they're probably going to do
this one trip, go home and put it off for
sale because the weather is turning the crap, and you know,
and likewise, I mean, I've seen people like it's funny,
I mean backpacking up because I used to be really

(31:49):
into doing peak bagging in the summer, and I still
love just high fucking remote places. I like the really
shitty terrain. I don't know why, even though I'm freaking
old now, I still come down the mountain sometimes and
turn around like, damn, that was an assed up route
I took. You know, why the hell? You know, remind

(32:11):
not to take that gully anymore. You know. I like
to get people out. I like them to have a
try to have the best experience that they can, and
so I try to just have a really super honest
dialogue with them, treat them respectfully. Hopefully they treat us
back respectfully and just go because that's what it's about.

(32:37):
I mean, it's about having a positive experience out there. Now,
let's not fool ourselves. It's not gonna be seventy five
with hummingbirds flying by and butterflies and all that stuff
all the time. I mean, you're gonna have some snow,
you're gonna have some wind, you're gonna have some some
trials and tribulations, right, But uh, that's all part of

(33:01):
the experience, right, And you can't you can't get that
morning in the elk woods, you know, September twentieth, color
on the trees, elk bugling. You can't get that sitting

(33:22):
in the comf comfort of your own home.

Speaker 1 (33:25):
Yeah, that's that's the truth, you know.

Speaker 2 (33:28):
And one thing talking about getting people outdoors and having
incredible experiences and being comfortable, I mean, as you mentioned,
you know, there's always some level of uncomfortability. And as
avid outdoors people backcountry adventures, we have to teach ourselves
to be become comfortable being uncomfortable.

Speaker 1 (33:48):
That's part of our what we have to do.

Speaker 2 (33:50):
But especially when you're carrying heavy weight on your back
and been sleep deprived, you're working super long days, you're
in rough terrain, you're in inclement weather, and now you've
got to pack an animal out or you know, get
yourself in your camp out from a really remote backcountry
hell hole for lack of a better term, Having a

(34:10):
comforable backpack.

Speaker 1 (34:11):
Really really matters.

Speaker 2 (34:13):
And on this hunt that we were recently on, you know,
I brought my Kafaru Reckoning, and I mentioned that because
listeners to this show are well aware of the kind
of pack I generally carry, you because I talk about
it regularly, I often say that there's three pieces of gear.

Speaker 1 (34:30):
To me, at least my personal opinion.

Speaker 2 (34:32):
This isn't necessarily a rule for everybody, but for me personally,
I call it to three b's. First and foremost are
my boots, Like I've got to have boots that really
really work for me, that I know and trust and
have experience with.

Speaker 1 (34:47):
And I've got to have full.

Speaker 2 (34:48):
Confidence in my boots before I do a crazy backcountry excursion.

Speaker 1 (34:52):
The second piece of gear is my backpack. I mean,
I have to rely on my backpack. I can't afford
for it to fail.

Speaker 2 (35:00):
And then the third thing for my binocular so boots
back back in binoculars is how I start my gear
list for every single trip and then get into the
rest of the stuff from there. But on this last
hunt that I was on, I took my Kafaroo pack
and then you brought this seek Out side pack and
he said, hey, you should try carrying this thing. And

(35:21):
I picked it up, and it was really remarkable how
light it was. First of all, because you know, the
Kafaru pack is fairly heavy, and I've never been bothered
by the weight because I've always equated that weight to
being durable, like it's big, it's heavy, it's strong, and
that means it's not going to fail. That's just been
my perception. But you had me this pack and say

(35:42):
why don't you carry this thing and see what you think?

Speaker 1 (35:45):
And I'm looking at and I'm examining it.

Speaker 2 (35:47):
I'm examining it, and I'm so surprised at how light
weight it was.

Speaker 1 (35:52):
And I say, yeah, I'll give this thing a try.
I'll carry this around.

Speaker 2 (35:55):
And I carried that pack for I guess seven day,
six seven days, something like that, and it was blowing
my mind how capable it was, how comfortable it carried
a load. Unfortunately, on that particular trip. I didn't have
the opportunity to pack out any ilk, but I did
a pretty good job of loading it full of weight

(36:18):
without having an elk kind quarter in there anyway, and
I was really impressed with how comfortable that pack could
carry a load considering how lightweight the pack was.

Speaker 4 (36:31):
Well, thank you. It should be mentioned that that pack
is a non released pack, yet I think I think
we're going to get you one that's maybe released, so
you can have a little bit of a comparison, and
I want you to put some miles on the non
released I want to go back through a little bit.

(36:51):
You made mention of you can't have your pack fail. Well,
last year we had a prototype of that pack that
you wore, the first prototype, and I had told the
designer to do it a certain way and the designer didn't.
And Joel and I each had one of those packs

(37:14):
on a caribou hunt and they both broke. So they
were basically the suspension part of them broke, not the stays,
but the stay channels. And that was kind of kind
of sucked for Joel and I, you know, especially carrying
out my caribou have it racked like nothing because our

(37:39):
system a lot of it is based on tension, and
this is kind of true of all of our packs,
and a lot of packs based on tension, and hardware
works best at certain angles, but when you lose tension,
your hardware starts to fail a lot of times as

(38:00):
well because those angles get messed up. But I came
back home, came back and made it clear this is
the way I want the pack done, not this way,
and we haven't had any issues with their ability since.
In fact, I took i've from the one you used.

(38:22):
I got it's been improved a little bit from there,
and I got another little improvement I'm going to put
in it. But I also want to send you a
couple things because I value your opinion. Like you and
Joel have a very different opinion on the type of
belt closure you prefer, So I would like to give
you both to run. Because one we will say has

(38:44):
better usability, Joel feels one has a better fit, but
it's the one with the less good usability, with lesser usability.
And I would say I probably agree with Joel's assessment,
but I want to let you come to your own
because you may have a totally different assessment, right, but
you considered. You made the comment of you considered weight

(39:09):
durability to some level, right, Yeah, I don't think that
is true. Our packs over time have been incredibly durable
as long as they've been production packs. I've had a
couple of failures, but it's been in prototype concepts and
that's on me, and I would rather take the failure

(39:30):
than a customer take the failure. I have a shitty
pack out with ninety five pounds, well, so be it. Right.
I also sleep in our tents unseam sealed a lot
of times too, because I'm like, I want to find
out where the little flaws, where the little gotchas are right.

(39:50):
But I think I think the thought that weight equals
durability there is probably a sliver of truth in there,
But the reality is it's more about It's more about
nuance and execution than it is about weight. What weight

(40:15):
allows you to do is avoid having to pay attention
to the nuance and execution. Right, you can just be like,
I'm building it with bomber stuff, and if everything's bomber,
then it should be bomber hopefully. Right. You can get
just as good, maybe even better durability with nuance in it.

(40:37):
And I guess the way I would say it, And
I mean, I'm not super versed in this, but there
are some martial arts people that can kick a lot
of people's ass and they don't look that big and strong.

Speaker 1 (40:52):
Yeah, that's that's well said. You know.

Speaker 2 (40:54):
I used to watch the EFC back when it first
came out, before they had weight classes, you know, and
you see Gracie finding Chemo and there's a two hundred
pound difference and hois Gracie comes out with the victory.
And that's really the way I feel about your pack
after having used it. So I went into the experiment
with some skepticism, like, oh boy, I'm glad this isn't
my ILK count because don't be wanting to test a

(41:15):
brand new product on my ELK tag. But I was
out there with the other guys that had tags and
I was just tagging along and helping. But by the
end of the trip, I was absolutely sold on the pack.
And what's remarkable about that is that the Kafaru that
I've carried for years, I have it completely dialed. In
other words, it's so fine tuned with how I've got

(41:37):
it adjusted, how I've got it set up.

Speaker 1 (41:38):
Because I've spent years getting it fine tuned.

Speaker 2 (41:41):
In this pack I've only carried for a week, it
carries more comfortably than the pack that there's in years
of experience with. And so it was it was really
exciting for me to be able to be exposed to
a brand new product that say, he was an incredible
amount of weight, especially when you know I'm not carrying.

Speaker 1 (42:03):
A hundred pound load.

Speaker 2 (42:04):
If I'm carrying a hundred pound load and a pack
is five pounds different, and weighing kind of doesn't matter
nearly as much. But when you're carrying your daypack hype load, well,
an extra five pounds makes quite the difference.

Speaker 4 (42:17):
See, that's and that's part of our mindset, right. And
I don't know what the exact weight of the Kafaro was,
but my guess is the pack you used was probably
about forty percent the weight empty. And part of our
mindset is that when you're in a back country hunt,
it's about energy, and there's some things you need or

(42:41):
that are going to help you be successful much more.
One of them is a good night's sleep. Right, If
you're not sleeping, you're not recovering well. And if you're
not recovering well, you're just getting beat down. One is
to be able to dry gear and avoid getting hype
athermic or severely uncomfortable for long periods of time, because

(43:05):
once again that's going to kind of beat you down.
Get into your sleep, get into everything else right. Likewise,
if you have say twelve pounds of gear, and you
put it in a ten pound pack on your day hunt,
you're slepping around twenty two, twenty five pounds or whatever.

(43:27):
You know, slepting around seventeen pounds saves energy. You know,
the part where you're carrying anywhere between say sixty and
one hundred and twenty pounds. That's probably the smallest portion
of the trip. Now, it doesn't mean that we try
to be lesser on that at all. I was just

(43:50):
walking around with eighty pounds in that pack, the same
exect design, a couple of little improvements from the one
you used. I got one other little touch and provement
in there, But I mean it did well at eighty pounds.
Usually usually somewhere between sixty and eighty that's where the
rubber hits the road with packs, you know, that's where
you start to see the ones that carry well. Keep

(44:15):
carrying well and the ones that don't fall by the wayside,
and you know it carries well. I have full confidence
that that can. You know, I know quite a bit
of the engineering underneath it. Obviously I've designed it. I
have full confidence in that pack well over one hundred

(44:37):
and some pounds. I don't really like to carry one
hundred and twenty pounds, but I've known customers that have
carried one hundred and sixty several times. Not that I
want to carry one hundred and sixty, but there's sometimes
like we had some people that you know, had out

(44:57):
down on a fog now and had a grizzly issue,
and they decided to move their elk in their camp pronto.
You know, one hundred and sixty pound loads were the
quickest way to do it. Nathan, who helped design the
original packs, used to work for us. He carried a

(45:20):
full white tail out of a ravine one time that
his dad shot estimated to be around one hundred and
sixty pounds. So it happens sometimes you get into a
spot where that's what's necessary. But I mean, if I
had my rathers, I'd much rather do sixty to eighty
pound loads all day. But that's just what it is.

Speaker 1 (45:44):
Yeah, No, I agree with you one hundred percent.

Speaker 2 (45:46):
I've definitely carried out some loads over one hundred pounds
over the years packing animals, mostly recently packed a moose
out of the back country in Montana.

Speaker 1 (45:55):
That's those are some heavy loads behind quarters and things
like that. But having a pack that won't fail is
one thing.

Speaker 2 (46:04):
But having a pack that can carry a load like
that as comfortably as possible. Now, when you're carrying one
hundred parts pounds, comfort becomes relative, but being able to
do it with as much comfort as possible is the
difference between getting your animal out and preserving all of
the meat that you've worked so hard to obtain and
not especially in a state like New Mexico, where in

(46:25):
early archery season in particular, we could have some serious
temperatures and you've got to be really aware of how
soon you can get that animal off the mountain and
taken care of.

Speaker 4 (46:35):
Yeah, I almost I don't want to say I laugh
at people, but I feel a little sad for people
that get super aggressive during early archery season and end up,
you know, I guess getting what would you call it,
some sort of they forget about where they are, and
they get a little bit too much into that. They

(46:58):
got a little bit of big bull itis, and they're
eight miles back and it's eighty degrees and then it's like, oh,
you got yourself in a shitty spot. You know you're
going to lose meat, you know, especially if you've got
four thousand vertical feet per trip, which sometimes that's what
you get. And I mean, to be clear, we design

(47:20):
our stuff basically around the kind of terrain around here
and mix that in with kind of terrain and the
remoteness and isolation that you get like in Alaska. We
try to kind of split that fairly well. And if
we go back to the packs a little bit, we

(47:45):
don't just focus on it has to carry one hundred
pounds or it has to be durable. I mean, we
focus on you should be able to draw a bow
with the pack on. You know, there's no reason you
shouldn't be backpacking into somewhere and if you see an
animal in the right shot, you should be able to.

(48:05):
So we want a certain amount of it. Compliance with
your body, but not mimicking your body. So we have
we do things probably a little bit different. I mean,
when you get into the designing stuff in the outdoor industry,
you start to see that so much shit.

Speaker 1 (48:28):
Is a derivative.

Speaker 4 (48:30):
Of other people's designs, like this looks like a mystery
ranch and of this had an illegitimate baby. Yeah yeah,
and this is the product, right, you know they got
in the back seat and had too many drinks and
out pops this brand. And that's true. I mean it is.

(48:58):
I mean you call up someone and say you want
to make clothing, and a lot of times the cut
and sew will say, well, send us a shirt you
really like and tell us what little mods you want.
And I mean literally, you could grab your Patagonia and
be like, I want this pocket to be bigger and
I want and if you've got the money, they'll make

(49:19):
you one hundred units. And if you say we want
to size it just a touch bigger because we think
we have slightly bigger people, you're going that's in fact,
we prototype most of a clothing brand, and honestly, I
thought the designing the clothing was almost the easiest. Like

(49:40):
I had to teach myself how to design tents and
on our backpack design our original backpack. We had no
intention of copying anyone else. It was that we were
going to test product and write down the things that
worked and take our impression of what we wanted to do.

(50:03):
So like we started offering, we originally started with X
pack in the hunting world. Everyone told us we were
dumb and didn't understand people for using this waterproof fabric
because it was too loud. And then what three or
four years ago, almost everyone else is using something with

(50:24):
some form of X pack in it because it also
washes up from blood really well. And you know, rain
covers conceptually they seem to work, but they really don't work.
I mean, go out in a big wind with your
rain cover on. Yeah, bye bye rain cover. You know

(50:47):
you are raining. You're like, oh, it's just going to
rain for a couple of minutes, and so you don't
put the rain cover on because you don't want the
extra noise, and it's all this stuff raine for a
half hour. Next thing, you know, all of a sudden,
your puffy jacket's kind of wet. So there's a lot
of advantages. Like I did a caribou hunt on the

(51:08):
North Slope. I actually flipped in my raft and my
raft took a ride about one hundred yards down river.
There was maybe less than a teaspoon of water in
my backpack when I got it out. Had I been
in some other backpack that wasn't waterproof, I might have

(51:31):
been kind of fucked, you know, I might have had
wet sleeping bag. What this? What this in the Arctic,
you know, with it just raining and being nasty the
whole time. So we use Ultra now because fabrics have
gotten better. And the guy who was kind of he's
unfortunately he's passed. But the guy who was influential at

(51:54):
x PAC then became influential at Challenge and made some
of the at some improvements over what was there. Pale
was his name, but I don't know what he passed from,
but I got notification about a year ago.

Speaker 1 (52:10):
That he passed.

Speaker 4 (52:12):
But he was very passionate in the backpack fabrics and
that the sale class had a very good performance. And
they do, they do. I mean, it's really nice to
be able to wipe the blood out of your pack
when you're done. It is. It's nice to not worry

(52:34):
about you know. We did a hunt, caribou hunt and
was it twenty one and it rained pretty much the
whole time, and a couple of us had seen sealed
our packs to be anal A couple of us hadn't.
It wasn't an issue for anyone, and we're out for days.

(52:55):
It was raining pretty much the whole time. That's nice.

Speaker 5 (53:02):
Yeah, it's super convenient because what I've done with other
packs I've carried that are not waterproof is I'm putting
all my stuff in dry bag and now you're just
increasing the weight because.

Speaker 2 (53:12):
You have all this additional stuff that you're carrying to
keep your gear dry, and it makes it less convenient
to have to go and get stuff out and then
you're taking it out of the backpack and then out
of the dry bag, and it's just not ideal. But
this pack that I carried of yours, again, we tw
every weather condition you can imagine, and that thing, as
far as protection of the contents, was absolutely flawless.

Speaker 1 (53:38):
And that's a big deal. In a lot of cases,
that's a really big deal.

Speaker 2 (53:41):
So we talked about the shelters and their ability to
dry out gear, but man, there's also a ton of
benefit to not having to dry out gear because it
stays dry in the pack. Now you're only drying out
what you're wearing instead of what you were wearing and
what you were carrying.

Speaker 4 (53:56):
Yeah, we just fundamentally. You know, some brands really focus
on what they think they can market, and sometimes I
think that's a fairly failed concept because what you think
you can market well, if you go ask people what
they want, they're almost always going to point to something

(54:21):
that they know, right, I want that pack, I want
an Arctarics, I want an Arctarics, or I want to whatever.
We don't take that we take trying to build what
we believe will perform well in the field. But you
clearly can see it a lot of times when you
look at different brands that sometimes things are built to

(54:45):
look good on the store shelf. We don't give a
shit how it performs in the field. Once you've bought it,
it's your problem. And you probably could say that the
brands that do that, they probably could make a fairly
good case for it, because there's a lot of people

(55:05):
that don't use their gear that hard. They'll use it
once or twice, put it in the closet, you know,
maybe use it a little bit the next year. They
just don't use it that hard. The same with tents.
A lot of people look at the weather forecast and
they don't go out unless the weather is so fair
that you really don't even need a tent. You just
sleep under the tree. So it's not necessarily wrong for

(55:31):
other brands to think that way, but the way we
try to think is no, we want this stuff to
work well in the field for the purposes at hand,
and we kind of can't. The reality is, if I
was to say what Seek has done the most of
I would say that we ruggedized ultralight concepts, because back

(55:55):
when we started, it was like, oh, you could buy
a lightweight pack, but people said, it's only going to
it can only carry twenty twenty five pounds, and it's
going to last you a big hike and that's it.
And we said, well, with nuance and gaining a couple
ounces and doing things a little bit better nuance wise,

(56:19):
we can make this pack last ten years carry one
hundred pounds. It's kind of funny that when we came out,
probably the pack that was the pinnacle of the ultra
light or the lightweight stuff at the time was probably
like the Ula Catalyst or something. It was a three

(56:40):
pound pack maybe rated for thirty five pounds. Most people
said it did twenty five pounds. You know, maybe it
was four thousand cubic inches. The pack I let you
borrow weighed almost exactly the same, was more like seven
thousand cubic inches and had several weight gaining features in it.

(57:04):
There's three big zippers in that pack. That pack I
know for a fact, carries eighty quite well because I
was doing that this morning, rugged enough to go well
over one hundred. And the durability, I mean, it's gotten
non weight saving features in it, like the bottom is

(57:27):
doubled up. It isn't a focus. It wasn't a focus
to make it a fragile light pack that performed well.
The focus was to make a really good pack that
was light, that had really good usability and was intuitive
for people to use as well. And that pack, I

(57:47):
believe is got fairly fairly intuitive and fairly easy to
use as well.

Speaker 1 (57:55):
And it's got some fantastic features. You know, a roll
top closure on the top I think is exceptional.

Speaker 2 (58:01):
I mean, it's a lot of the features, the way
the pockets are designed and oriented, super functional, and I.

Speaker 1 (58:07):
Loved everything about it.

Speaker 2 (58:09):
And you're not, you know, you hit the nail on
the head with the difference between gear for people who
need gear.

Speaker 1 (58:16):
That literally your life depends on.

Speaker 2 (58:19):
Compared to you know, someone who's going out on Fourth
of July weekend to camp at the local state park
or something. It's two different kind of experiences, you know,
I not well. A few years ago I did a trip,
a solo float trip for caribou across the entire Yukon
Charlie Rivers National Preserve. So I got dropped off by

(58:41):
a floatplane on one end of the preserve and then
spent nearly a month traveling all the way to the
village of Circle in this alpaca wrapt forager, you know,
going down the Charlie River until eventually I finally hit
the Yukon River and then paddling down the Yukon for
eighty miles until you get to this you know, individenous village.

(59:01):
But that was a solo trip, and I'll never forget
when the pilot from Toke Air Service dropped me off
on the tundra and quickly.

Speaker 1 (59:09):
You know how they do it. They got somewhere else
to be another hunter to pick up.

Speaker 2 (59:12):
So you know, there's no hanging out and hugs and
high five and you know, spending time together. The pilot
parks throws your gear out of the plane as fast
as he can get it out, and then the pilot's gone.

Speaker 1 (59:26):
And I remember standing on the tundra with just this
little pile of.

Speaker 2 (59:28):
Gear, you know, piled up on the tundra, and I'm
watching the plane leave until eventually the plane's out of sight,
and then even after the plane's out of side, I
can kind of hear the engine in the distance for
just a little while, you know, and then that disappears.
And now I'm standing there looking at this little pile
of gear, knowing I'm all by myself, and I've got

(59:49):
to get hundreds of miles from where I'm currently at
by myself, and hopefully get a caribou in the process.

Speaker 1 (59:56):
And all I'm thinking about in my mind is, boy,
I hope holds up.

Speaker 2 (01:00:01):
You know, I really hope I don't have any major
failures on this deal, because this is all I've got
and I'm already going to the closest village that exists.
So it's not like I just I have no way
to bail out other than you know, hitting the SOS
button on the in reach, I guess.

Speaker 1 (01:00:16):
But it's those kind of experiences when you can truly
appreciate the.

Speaker 2 (01:00:22):
Quality, craftsmanship, and dependability of a product like the ones
you're manufacturing.

Speaker 4 (01:00:27):
It's let me step back a little bit there. It's
a really wild feeling when that plane takes off, isn't it. Yeah.
You just kind of look around and you're like, well,
this is kind of kick ass.

Speaker 1 (01:00:45):
I hope I.

Speaker 4 (01:00:45):
Don't screw up. You know. Yeah, it's kind of a
it's kind of a wild feeling when that plane takes off.
You're like, well, this is it? You know.

Speaker 1 (01:01:00):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:01:00):
One, and and you're so dependent on that gear that
you brought. I mean, yeah, I'm thinking two things. One,
I hope I didn't forget something super important. I'm thinking that.
And then I'm thinking, I hope what I.

Speaker 1 (01:01:11):
Did bring is going to hold up. Yeah, I hope
I don't have failures.

Speaker 2 (01:01:16):
Because you know, I love companies that really promote their
warranty and lifetime warranty and all.

Speaker 1 (01:01:22):
These kinds of things. That's great.

Speaker 2 (01:01:23):
I mean, it sounds good, and I appreciate them standing
behind their products.

Speaker 1 (01:01:27):
So I don't mean anything negative by that.

Speaker 2 (01:01:29):
But in a situation like I'm describing, the warranty is
not going to help me.

Speaker 4 (01:01:33):
The warranty is fricking worthless if the shit goes bad
two days into a three week trip. Exactly, you know
it is. And there's and some people offer big long
are very good with their warranties because even though they
know that their product maybe breaks down a lot, but

(01:01:55):
they've built that into their pricing. And that's great that
they have, really and behind it on their warranty. Doesn't
do your shit for good when you're.

Speaker 2 (01:02:04):
Out there and it breaks, Yeah, exactly, that's well said, Kevin.

Speaker 1 (01:02:09):
And I'm just I'm thrilled, man.

Speaker 2 (01:02:11):
I'm really thrilled to be introduced to this new product
line and looking forward to experimenting with it and trying
it out.

Speaker 1 (01:02:17):
And I've already had all.

Speaker 2 (01:02:18):
Kinds of great successes with it and really opened my
mind to some new possibilities. So thank you for introducing
me to it and letting me borrow that pack that
was so much fun to carry.

Speaker 1 (01:02:29):
I mean a lot of people laugh.

Speaker 2 (01:02:30):
When I say how much fun it is to carry
a heavy pack across the mountains, but I really do
enjoy that.

Speaker 1 (01:02:35):
And appreciate that.

Speaker 2 (01:02:36):
But the other thing about seek Outside that I'd like
to talk about, just for a few minutes, is the
conservation ethic, you know, because.

Speaker 1 (01:02:43):
Clearly you and your staff people that.

Speaker 2 (01:02:48):
Are affiliated with your organization are very interested in public
lands and public land advocacy and protecting our ability to
access places to hunt and fish all of these things.
So just curious if you'd like to talk a little
bit about, you know, seek outside philosophy when it comes
to the conservation and habitat sewardship issues.

Speaker 4 (01:03:11):
Well, there's passion, and then there's and then there's business. Right,
people probably don't like it if you say, well, conservation
is good for business, and the reality is it isn't always,
but some brands have made conservation good for business. In

(01:03:32):
my mind, conservation is a little bit good for business
because we build things that are made are when when
we devise a product, we're not thinking how great it's
going to look at the koa. We're thinking about how
it's going to be out in the mountains. Well, the

(01:03:52):
real world usage scenario of it. We realize someone may
actually be stopping at the koa with it once in
a while, or a campground or a for service campground.
That's fine, but that's not where the primary design is.
Just like a jeep is not really designed for running
around doing shopping chores in the city all the time.

(01:04:16):
You know, it's just not it's not what that product
was devised for. So there's a selfish intent a little
bit to us, because without all these great public lands
and all this great access, we don't have much of
a business. You know, what are we going to do
get into making our vs for KOA. I mean, that

(01:04:40):
wasn't really on my planning thing, so we don't. The
other part of it is, and we alluded to this
much earlier. I'm very passionate about getting people outside. Now
this is going to be kind of sound, kind of funny.
Before Seek Outside, my official title was computer security researchure

(01:05:00):
for Cisco Systems. I worked in the research group. But
I've always thought America had too much of an attachment
to this. I'm very glad about the technology that allows
you and me to do a podcast, even though we're
five hours apart. This is good, but I think far

(01:05:24):
too many people make these things be just their reality.

Speaker 1 (01:05:32):
Yeah, just certain for the listeners.

Speaker 2 (01:05:35):
When Kevin's talking about these things, he's he's holding up
his cell phone, so this is But I agree with
you one hundred percent.

Speaker 1 (01:05:41):
You know, the technology, the screens, the devices.

Speaker 4 (01:05:44):
Right, the real world is out there. The real world
is out there, you know. I mean when you go
to these devices again, which I'm waving, I mean, you
got controls, you got people trying to influence you. You know,
what's real? What's real? Is that out buggling or that

(01:06:06):
mean or hell? Even the other day, I woke up
before sunrise and I hopped in my shitty little hot tub.
I got on my porch and drank coffee, and I
saw something that behind my property that looked like antlers
in the grass, and then I saw them start move.
Buck got up, started rubbing on a tree and started
chasing Does that's real world stuff? You know? It could

(01:06:32):
be people, it could be animals, it could be that's
real world. This stuff isn't always real world, and I
think that we lose focus of it way too much.
So I think part of my passion for getting people
outside is partially probably a reaction to the fact that

(01:06:54):
I spent ten or fifteen years getting people great access
or through these sorts of problems that really weren't reality.

Speaker 2 (01:07:07):
In my opinion, Yeah, wow, that's that's that's a that's
a pretty inspiring story. And I can totally relate because
my previous life was as a real estate developer and homebuilder.

Speaker 1 (01:07:21):
Turned full time conservationists.

Speaker 2 (01:07:23):
You know, I spend enough time bulldozing wildlife habitat to
make housing developments. Then I said, boy this, I've got
to I've got to do something different here and change
the way I spend my time. And now I spend
my time working to protect these wild places. So it's
kind of interesting, but it really sounds similar, at least
in values to what you're describing.

Speaker 4 (01:07:44):
I think it is. And I think the one thing
that people don't realize is once these wild places are gone,
they're gone for good. You know. It's not like we
can just be like, oh yeah, well, I mean maybe
they're not gone for good. Maybe some sort of nuclear war,
all the people from Earth disappear, They rebuild in another

(01:08:06):
million years, so maybe, but they're effectively gone for good
within our lifespan, possibly our children's lifespan, possibly their children's lifespan.
Now we do need housing and things like that, but
you know, the wild places just and I mean for me,

(01:08:28):
they're where I go to solve my problems, to think
through things, to get my peace, you know, to work
through whatever's top of mind. They're very important.

Speaker 1 (01:08:43):
They're very important to.

Speaker 4 (01:08:46):
Show your mug. They're very important to this gal too.

Speaker 1 (01:08:51):
Man that that's so cool. What a beautiful dog.

Speaker 2 (01:08:54):
I can't wait for you to come down here and
bring that dog so we could spend some time chasing
bird together. Season started. We're recording this November fifteenth. Today's
the first day of quail season in New Mexico. Oh,
it is season officially open. I can't wait to spend
time with you out here, Kevin.

Speaker 4 (01:09:10):
Would.

Speaker 2 (01:09:10):
I both share a love and a passion for the HeLa,
for wilderness in general, and for that whole region of
the state.

Speaker 1 (01:09:17):
And this time of year is a great.

Speaker 2 (01:09:19):
Time to be down there, and I'm looking forward to
spending more time in the field with you.

Speaker 4 (01:09:23):
I got a funny story real quick, and I take
it we're getting close to wrapping up. I had a
HeLa hat on the caribou hunt I did last year
up by the Arctic Circle, and a big wind came
and blew it off my head into the brush. I
could never recover it. So somewhere sometime, who knows, maybe

(01:09:48):
five years from now, maybe three hundred years from now,
someone is going to find a hat almost at the
Arctic Circle that says Helo Wilderness on it, almost at
the Mexico border.

Speaker 2 (01:10:03):
You know, I feel like I feel like that's a
personal challenge and I should get to the Alaska and
start looking for that hate that hat.

Speaker 4 (01:10:11):
I can tell you where the I can. I can
show you the little creek we were in Yukon Charlie
where we lost it. So oh wow, yeah, so that's
where we were camped in Yukon Charlie. Although I killed
my caribou just out of Yukon Charlie over over a ridge.
But yeah, we had a We had a great little creek.
We caught grailing and uh some color phase dollies. We

(01:10:35):
also killed some ptarmigan. Yeah, we had a great time.

Speaker 2 (01:10:39):
Well, those Alaska trips are just phenomenal, you know, and
they're especially phenomenal if you've got the right gear, because
a trip like that but the wrong gear can be
a disaster.

Speaker 1 (01:10:49):
I mean, it could be a tragedy quite frankly.

Speaker 4 (01:10:51):
Oh yeah, you know if you have if both times
I've done those trips, I came very close to having
to sit in there a few days and just wait
to ride out the storms. You know, it was like
I got out both times the day before everything turned

(01:11:16):
the crap, and sometimes you're not fortunate enough to get
out on those days. In fact, we thought on this
last trip that we weren't we we had tagged out
Joel Ryan Owen. We're like, you know, this is pretty
nice back here. Let's spend another day or two, have
kind of a man good time. And then about midnight

(01:11:38):
starts raining, raining some more, and we're like, oh boy.
And we knew some weather was coming in, so they
were supposed to get bad, and we're like, oh boy,
hopefully we didn't screw ourselves on this one. But luckily
there was a little bit of clearing and they got
in and grabbed us.

Speaker 1 (01:11:56):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:11:56):
You know the the interesting thing and I don't I
didn't do this on purpose, but every Alaska trip I've done,
every flying trip, my extra strategies.

Speaker 1 (01:12:04):
Did not require an airplane to pick me up.

Speaker 2 (01:12:08):
One time, we parked a U haul truck and where
a bridge across the river, you know, miles and miles
downstream from where we got dropped off, and then just
had the key hidden and so we float down until
we get to that bridge and then pull out and
jump into the U haul truck and drive back. The
last one I did, where I made it to the
village of Circle. I actually had to hitchhike back to

(01:12:29):
Fairbanks from there because I didn't have a ride back.
It was during COVID, it was That's a whole long story,
but anyway, it's crazy stuff. But having the kind of
gear that seek Outside manufacturers allows these experiences to really
be possible and to be safe, or relatively speaking safe,

(01:12:50):
of course. And I love the name of the company,
especially after talking to you in this conversation Kevin and
your passion for the outdoors and getting outside and experiencing
nature and getting away from the cell phone, getting away
from the screens, and knowing that the company is called
seek out Side just seems so completely fitting.

Speaker 1 (01:13:10):
Well, thank you, and man, I really, as.

Speaker 2 (01:13:14):
I said, I look forward to spending more time in
the field with you, Kevin. This has been a great
conversation and I'm so excited to be using your products
and learning more about them and just doing experiments and
having a lot of fun outdoors with super high quality gear.
So before we wrap up, I just want to give
you an opportunity to cover anything you think we haven't
already touched on, and maybe let our listeners know where

(01:13:37):
they can find you, where they can learn more about
seek outside, how they can get their hands on some
of these innovative products.

Speaker 4 (01:13:44):
Well, let me first say, I'll definitely reach out to you,
and I feel that I'm coming back through New Mexico
and spend some time bird Hunk, maybe we can get together.
Our website is seek outside dot com, just spelt the
way it is Silence, seek Outside, Seek. We have a
Facebook page, we have Instagram, we have a YouTube page.

(01:14:07):
You can learn a lot about it on that. But
I really podcasts like this you can learn a lot
from a lot behind what's going on behind the scene.
But I would really say, yeah, go to our website
seek outside dot com and start there. We do a
few things. We've done quite a few things differently. Our

(01:14:33):
focus from very early on was to make very quality gear,
and as quality, we thought that there was a component
of how long it lasted and how well it performed. Right,
that was part of that. And then wait, I would
consider us overall generally high performance designs, but quality has

(01:14:58):
always been a big part part of what, why and
how we want to do things. I would also say
that we try to have a very excellent customer service.
We do a four day work week most of the time.

(01:15:18):
The reason we do four days is because we want
to attract people that want to go outside so they
get a three day weekend. You know, it's hard a
lot of times when you do a five day work
week to get a proper weekend trip in. You know,
it's like so that four day. We have a generous
loaner pile for our staff and our staff Ryan those

(01:15:43):
guys do an excellent job teaching each other how to
use different products, and we encourage our staff to go out,
use the product, go, you know, and just more than anything,
to treat the customer respectfully, to treat them honestly, to
give them their honest thing. Because the way we've drawn

(01:16:06):
this company, we're in a little bit I don't want
to say we're in a harder space, but there's a
slightly bit harder space. Especially the hunting community is more
divided than the recreational community. We will have customers that
have never slept in a tent other than a wall

(01:16:29):
tent before or an RV. We'll have some customers that
are incredibly hardcore that mostly sleep under a tarp. The
wrec community, I don't think is as diverse. You know,
a two man hub, a tent, three man, They're all
pretty similar in their expectations. People don't go to RII

(01:16:53):
expecting a pack that will carry one hundred pounds either.
For us, we have to meet those expectations. Even though
we have a pack line. We have a couple of
packs that aren't designed to carry one hundred pounds like
our flight. But our flight still carries fifty sixty pounds
quite well, and it's sub three pounds. It's two pounds

(01:17:16):
eleven ounces, I think is what it is. So we
have a harder time like setting the right expectations. I
think partially because the hunting crowd is a little more diverse.
We also get a lot of We get a lot
of the more high intense, high intensity wreck customers as well,

(01:17:38):
the ones that will pack raft in the Arctic on
a regular basis, ones that will do big, long trails
but want to be able to do it a little
more comfortable we're at their own pace. Or we've had
people that have David Amy Freeman spent a year in
the Boundary waters in one of our tents. We've had
people that have bike packed for two three years around

(01:18:03):
America using our tent, even in places where the weather
is cold and the winter and stuff. So the expectations
I think are just a little bit different with us,
and we have to really be as open, honest and
give the customer the best advice we can give them.
So I view our customer service staff, I'm very proud

(01:18:27):
of how they've communicated. I'm proud of I hear how
excellent job they do from a lot of people, and
I think that that's very important to us to help
give the customer the best experience they can have.

Speaker 1 (01:18:43):
Yeah, very well, said Kevin. I've been thoroughly impressed, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:18:46):
You know, I've been spending time on the phone with
Ryan over the course of the last few days, and
I would encourage our listeners, you know, if they're interested
in taking the next step and getting the advanced gear
that's going to allow them to enjoy outdoor experiences and
have more confidence to go deeper and stay for extended
periods of time and all those things, to reach out

(01:19:09):
to your team if they have questions, because when you
go on the website for people that are not familiar
with this type of shelter or this type of backpack,
they might not be fully educated on the different type
of components and options that are available. For example, when
you're looking at a TP shelter, there's an option for
a liner, which essentially creates a double wall shelter for

(01:19:32):
condensation purposes. Things like that, But some customers that might
be listening to this podcast aren't going to fully understand
what the benefit of this particular feature is. Or when
you're looking at the packs and they're additional modular options.

Speaker 1 (01:19:47):
Available like lids.

Speaker 2 (01:19:48):
You know, someone who hasn't dealt with an advanced pack
like the type you make might not even be familiar
with the term lid.

Speaker 1 (01:19:55):
But your team is so helpful and so willing.

Speaker 2 (01:19:59):
To to guide customers through the purchasing process that I'm
hopeful that as these customers go on to the website
and look at the products, if they have questions, don't
be intimidated.

Speaker 1 (01:20:10):
Instead, just reach out and ask the questions.

Speaker 4 (01:20:13):
Yeah, I mean, like Ryan that you've been with. Ryan's fantastic.
If he didn't have parents, I'd adopt him, says a lot,
because I don't really want a lot of kids. But
Ryan's fantastic, you know, our terminology can be a little different.
But at the other end of the scope, just so
people know, we make shelters that have a full double

(01:20:37):
wall option on them. We have single wall, fully integrated
shelters that are great for just summertime backpacking. But like
I said earlier about I'm the guinea Pig, I took
one of them in our lightest fabric on a caribou
hunt last year, and it's one of those things that

(01:21:03):
we can meet just about all needs. For instance, I
know there was a review of our Sunlight, which is
a fully integrated trucking pole zipperless shelter which we have
a patent on the zipperless closure, and in the review
they said, I think forget what magazine it was, but
in the review they said something like it was the
only trucking pole shelter they trusted above tree line, and

(01:21:26):
it was the only one that was actually a comfortable
two person shelter, where the other ones were like two
person spooning shelter. I've had a guy from Hilliberg come
up and tell us how much he loves our Guardian
and how cool he thinks our zipperless feature is, you know,
and I mean the Guardian can be set up as

(01:21:47):
a full on four season ten. You can get a
solid walled enter in it. It's a large, two person
you can run a stove with it. It's still a backpacking shelter.
It weighs hardly. That weighs like two ounces more than
an MSR HOBA. So I mean there's we can and
we can meet you all the way up to a

(01:22:09):
sixteen person tpe that is practically big enough to park
your car in.

Speaker 2 (01:22:14):
That's a full suite of products. I haven't experienced all
of them, but I can say with full confidence that
the ones I have experience have been incredibly impressive. And
looking forward to to spending some more time out in
the wilds with your stuff, Kevin, So thank you so
much for joining the show. I really appreciate all your
support and you know, your friendship and looking forward to

(01:22:36):
spending some more time in the field.

Speaker 4 (01:22:38):
That's great, No worries, let's let's get together later.

Speaker 3 (01:22:43):
Thanks for listening to the Yahiva podcast produced by Drift
with Outdoors.