Our winter stoke Giveaway is going on now; sign up here!

Let’s face it: sometimes a love of the outdoors can force an environmentalist into uncomfortable positions. Road trips to the desert require gas, your kayak is made out of petro-chemicals, and that long dreamed of trip to Patagonia is going to require one CO2-heavy flight. Then winter rolls around, and if you love to ski (as I do), you might start to wonder if all those lifts, groomers and lodges we use are contributing to a global warming trend that means less pow, and more slush.

So what’s a responsible skier to do? Yes, everything we do to enjoy the outdoors has an impact—even ski-touring has a carbon footprint—but that’s not a reason to throw up our hands. Making an educated decision about where you ski, just like what you drive, can have a powerful influence over the impact of your actions.

That’s because there are important choices to be made when it comes down to how to run a ski resort. Resorts are large, meaning the choices they make—good and bad—have a bigger environmental impact than those we each make individually. How they make snow, how they deal with waste, whether they serve on disposable dishware: when you serve thousands of people a day, these choices add up.

That’s why we’ve been so glad to see the steps that some of our favorite ski areas have begun to take to address their energy efficiency, water usage and carbon footprint. As part of our Winter Stoke giveaway (sign up here to win one of two full-value prize packages, including lift tickets, Nau gear and more) we checked in with Mt. Hood Meadows and Stratton Mountain Resort to see what they’re doing to make their operations more sustainable.

Just up the road on Mt. Hood, our friends at Meadows are taking advantage of the abundant wind in Oregon and powering 100% of their operations with Wind Energy Credits. They’re also saving over a quarter million gallons of water each year with newly installed water-efficient appliances. And, true to Oregon’s strong locavore spirit, they’re sourcing local produce and serving it on china, not paper you throw away.

Across the country in Vermont, the folks at Stratton Mountain are also showing how investing in efficient infrastructure can save money and help the environment. They’ve installed 300 new high-efficiency snow guns, which—given how much snow they make each year—could save almost two million kilowatt-hours of electricity. Stratton was also the recipient of the Clif Bar/NSAA Sustainable Slopes Grant this spring, which they’re using to install four Big Belly Solar trash compactors, greatly reducing the the number of waste disposal trips required. They’ve also eliminated disposable dishware, a change they estimate will save roughly 75,000 soda cups, 61,000 spoons, 30,000 forks, 28,000 paper plates, 23,000 knives and 17,750 soup containers.

Of course, the ski areas have as much invested in a healthy planet as skiers do: saving energy is just good business. As skiers, we can help make it make even better business sense by choosing to enjoy those resorts who take seriously their responsibility to be good environmental stewards.

So educate yourself on the efforts your local hill is taking; it’s a step toward positive change, and toward ensuring that there will be snow for future generations.

Like what you’ve heard? Sign up here for our Winter Stoke Giveaway to win lodging for three nights, one dinner, rentals and lift tickets for two at Stratton Mountain Resort in Vermont or two 10-time passes at Mt. Hood Meadows in Oregon. Each winner will also get a Nau winter jacket, pants, down top and insulation layer.

It’s happening. Ski area web-cams in California, Oregon, Utah are showing white. Friends in Tahoe are posting early-season touring pics on Facebook. Long-term weather forecasts are predicting the return of La Niña. Winter is ramping up!

Here at Nau, all this early season excitement is just adding fuel to the fire of our winter stoke. So to give it a positive outlet, we’re giving away everything you need to take advantage of what’s sure to be an epic winter.

For our first-ever Winter Stoke giveaway, we’ve got two great prize packages: East Coasters can win a weekend for two at Stratton Mountain Resort, complete with lodging, lift tickets and rentals; West Coasters can pick up one of two 10-passes to Mt. Hood Meadows. Best of all? We’ll outfit all the winners in complete mountain kit—including jacket, down, pants and insulation—from Nau.

To win, submit your entry at nau.com/ski and stay tuned to our Off The Grid newsletter—we’ll announce the winner November 16th.

[Recipients of Nau's 2009 Grant For Change, Sara Joy Steele and Benjamin Drummond create multimedia stories about people, nature and climate change. They sent us this update on their progress on their next series of stories. -Ed.]

Benj and I are making steady progress on our new series for Facing Climate Change.  I’m logging audio for the salmon story, we just completed another round of fieldwork for our heath story and we recently presented at the North Cascades Youth Leadership conference. We’re also working to line up funding to complete the series. One of the ways that we do that is by helping other people tell important stories. . . and we just finished a new one!

Hozomeen is about a locally abundant and distinctive tool stone found exclusively in the northern Cascade range of Washington and British Columbia. Over the last two decades, archeologist Bob Mierendorf has studied quarries near today’s Ross Lake reservoir that reveal a 10,000 year long record of indigenous involvement with this rugged, high-mountain landscape.

The word Hozomeen means “sharp, like a sharp knife.” Its story cuts across time and place, cultures and borders, archeology and oral histories, connecting us all as human beings. As Bob says, we’re all descended from people who used stone to make their tools. “It’s what put food on the table for thousands of years.”

Watch Hozomeen or visit our blog for more of the back story.

Today at Nau we’re launching a new series of profiles that are part of the on-going project we call Portraits of our Friends.

These latest works are the result of an ongoing collaboration with the bold and beautiful photographer Eden Batki, the never-sleep filmmakers Thomas Oliver and Jordan Strong of Into the Woods fame, the composer Rocky Tilden of the band Wampire, and our principal stylist, the lovely Sarah Van Raden.

Last season’s theme was design; now we have the provocateurs.

I’ll be the first to admit that the theme can get a little heavy if taken too seriously (especially when it’s French, and in italics), but the sentiment’s real. We’ve selected 12 people, in 10 portraits, who are Read More »

Quick: What are your five favorite pieces of Nau? Uncrate asked Nau’s lead designer Peter Kallen to answer that question, and are giving away the garb to one lucky reader:

• Men’s Shroud of Purrin Jacket in Caviar
• Men’s Regular Straight Denim in Dark Indigo
• Men’s Free Range Plaid Shirt in Wave Plaid
• Nau Billfold
• Nau Flip Scarf in Fossil

Like Peter’s choices? Enter for your chance to win at uncrate.com. Got a different top 5? Hit us up in the comments…

We’re excited to announce that this Friday, October 15th, Nau will once again open the doors to a pop-up shop in New York City. Following on the success of last year’s pop-up—designed by Jean-Pierre Veillet and with appearances by 2009 G4C winners Benjamin Drummond and Sara Joy Steele, Har Mar Superstar, Zee Avi and Will Dailey, among others—we’re coming back for another holiday season.

This year, you’ll find us at 25 Howard St in Soho, sharing space with our friends at Dunderdon. Based in Gothenburg, Sweden—and with an an office in hometown of Portland, Oregon—Dunderdon shares with Nau a focus on understated design, performance outerwear and modern fashion. We’re look forward to being in New York with them.

In the meantime, we’re planning a full calendar of events, parties and performances, so if you’ll be in New York this holiday season be sure to stop in—for the latest developments, check back here in the coming weeks for event listings. In the meantime, we hope to see you at 25 Howard Street—at the intersection of Howard and Crosby, between Broadway and Lafayette—starting this Friday.

Jeremy Barnicle, the VP of Marketing and Communications at Mercy Corps, one of Nau’s Partners For Change, sent us a dispatch from Nairobi with highlights from his trip to Zimbabwe. Here’s what he has to say:

“In the first photo, I am at a water treatment plant that serves the city of Mutare, which happens to be a sister city of Portland. Portland, the EU, and Mercy Corps came together to get the water treatment plant back online after years of disrepair. The guy in the blue is the plant superintendent and the other guy is the MC staffer who oversees it. The roughly 200K people of Mutare used to get untreated water and only three days a week. We worked with them to fix it and now they have clean water pretty much all the time. Interesting thing is that it’s the one place I’ve ever been in Africa that FELT like Portland: rain, mountains, fog, and evergreens. It was awesome.

The second photo shows what I do when I’m in the field: talk to people, get their stories, capture images. In this case, I’m visiting a beauty salon where some vulnerable women (the woman in the white is deaf) are getting vocational training so they can be self-sufficient. The woman, named Vimbai, will earn almost 10 times as much a month doing hair as she was as a seamstress, which was about all anyone would hire her to do before.”

Similar to this dispatch, the Mercy Corps blog has contributors from field staff all over the world.

Thank you Jeremy- and safe travels.

[In July, we named TruckFarm, and its founders Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney, the recipients of our 2010 Grant For Change. Recently they've been on the road, swinging through Portland for our upcoming Portraits photo series (see Eugénie's blog post from last week for more) and seeking out a West Coast Truck Farm cousin. Readers of The Thought Kitchen with an old truck and an interest in getting involved with this great crew should get in touch with us—we'll put you in contact with Ian and Curt. Once you have the truck, setting up the farm costs a mere $300.) - Ed.]

Truck farmer Ian Cheney traveled to Denver, CO with cinematographer Taylor Gentry to visit Truck Farm’s first sibling: Denver Urban Truck Farm. The owners of this beautiful ‘66 Ford, Ashleigh and Ryan, provided a quick tour of the bed (which featured tomatoes, parsley, hot peppers, and a va- riety of herbs), and then a joyride through downtown complete with a visit to a suburban farmer’s market. Ian noted that the Denver Truck Farm was much more organized than his Brooklyn farm, which at the onset of fall was beginning to get jungly.

Editing continued on the documentary film, with songwriting and animation galore. Although only at a rough cut stage, the film is being sent off to festivals in the hopes of landing a strong premiere early in 2011. We are exploring ways of heating the greenhouse in case the old Dodge needs to make a winter appearance at a film festival somewhere…

Cooler weather on the Brooklyn streets allowed Ian to plan another round of lettuces, kale, and swiss chard, in addition to this year’s experiment: saffron! Saffron crocus bulbs will allegedly bloom in October, yielding, if all works out, our tiniest crop yet…stay tuned!

In the wake of the Dow’s 1,000 point plunge and recent hundred point aftershocks, it’s worth reflecting once again on the legacy of the financial crisis and what—if anything—we’ve learned. Our Partners For Change at Ecotrust believe that the lesson of the financial crisis is the same one we must learn if we are to deal effectively with the environmental crisis: live within our means. Check it:

Last Call! Only 24 hours left until the submission deadline for GOOD Magazine’s Everyday Solution to an Extraordinary Problem design project, sponsored by Nau. There’s still time to post your idea as a comment to GOOD’s contest page, tweet @GOOD, or e-mail projects[at]goodinc[dot]com with a pressing global problem and your creative, DIY solution. If yours is the best, you’ll win a $500 Nau gift certificate. So think quick, and don’t forget to post your ideas here, too, in the comments section below.