CONTENTS
LETTER
06
PUBLISHER / CREATIVE DIRECTOR Chris Brown SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER Gustav Schmiege
ESSAYS CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Obi Kaufmann, Jay Carroll & Ben Masters
Obi Kaufmann
08
Jay Carroll
22
Ben Masters
28
CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Derek Street, Jay Carroll & Ben Masters
CAMPFIRE TALES
32
STYLING Brad D Hatton GRAPHICS/ILLUSTRATION Cabel Owen Everitt & Ryan Rhodes / LAND
Š 2014 Refueled Magazine. All Rights Reserved. Any commercial or promotional distribution, publishing or exploitation of contents, is strictly prohibited unless you have received the express prior written permission from our authorized personnel or the otherwise applicable rights holder.
REFUELEDMAGAZINE.COM
This one was going to be different, but then again, they always are. I’ve gotten used to it. I am Juniper Ridge’s chief storyteller, that means that I’ve been hiking with Hall Newbegin, the founder of our small company, for about ten years and can talk on and on about the very unique way we put the mountains into a bottle. I am one of Juniper Ridge’s wilderness perfumers; I am equal parts drunken poet, amateur naturalist, trail painter, and avid freak of all things wild of the American West. That being said, I’ve not hiked the Cascades of the Pacific Northwest very much, so when Hall announced that our next Field Lab seasonal fragrance was going to be called Timberline Trail, I was out of my head. I know California, I know the fragrance grammar of glaciers sitting high above the forest at 10,000 feet. I’m less familiar with the solitary, englaciated, ice giants that begin showing high-mountain trees several thousand feet below where I am used to finding them. Hall, our intrepid leader, speaks to why we are headed there: “I grew up in Oregon and spent my summers hiking and backpacking around the lakes and peaks of the Cascades—Mt. Hood, Mt. Jefferson, The Three Sisters…just saying those names brings a little of their magic into the room for me. That’s what our perfume is all about. That's my inspiration. When I was a kid it's just what we did in the summer, and then as an adult I started digging in deeper- learning the names of all the little wildflowers, harvesting wild foods, spending quiet weeks out on the trail. Everything I do in my life now is an expression of that deep, helpless kind of love for the quiet stillness of the outdoors.” Field Lab is Juniper Ridge’s seasonal wilderness perfume, and it defines the outer, experimental edge of what we do. Produced in extremely small batches, these mountain poems reflect the rugged, aromatic landscapes they come from. It seemed simple enough, we had done it a hundred times before, but never here and never this way. Our quarry now was capturing the aromatic essence of Mount Hood, Oregon’s tallest peak. Our first day up over the low-lying glaciers was wrought with horizontal sleet and buffeting winds in excess of 80 mph. The weather certainly got in the way of what we thought was our straightforward plan to do what we do best: hike all day, harvesting small samples of particularly good-smelling flowers along the way. Then, beside the evening campfire, we’d use ancient techniques of perfume-making to capture it all in a beautiful little bottle of fragrance. But nothing ever goes as planned with Juniper Ridge. It truly never has. Juniper Ridge, since its inception in the late nineties, has been about doing everything differently. Hall came to fragrance through his love of hiking. “I’m a backpacker,” says Hall, “and I’d never buy a perfume or cologne from adepartment store, but I knew how transformative it was to
crush Black Sage leaves or Mountain Fir needles under my nose. Our connection to these smells is braided into our DNA—it's paleolithic.” Our atypical approach has always delivered products that reflect the wild place they come from. "Being a small, independent outfit allows us creative freedom," says Hall. "Instead of creating scents synthetically, we make our fragrances with real stuff from real places, using techniques like distillation, infusion, and enfluerage that date back to the Phoenicians." Our fragrance extraction techniques only yield a small amount of usable aromatics on this harvest and therefore, this run will be launched as a limited-edition. The nature of the botanicals we used in this formula hold onto tightly to their oils. To keep it simple: we only use the real stuff. We’re the world’s only wild fragrance company—you can’t buy our materials or fragrance ingredients anywhere because nobody does what we do and no one works with the plants we work with. The only way to get our materials is to hop in the van, throw the fragrance still in back and head up into the mountains. After our first exhausting, frozen day of surviving Oregon’s perilous peak, the dozen people who made up the harvesting party on this Field Lab trip dropped down into Elk Meadows for a night of drying out by the campfire. We only take a small number of trail scouts (as we call our extended family) on the trips. We only ask for an adventurous spirit and an easy-going attitude, and come ready for a bit of party—we’re a tight-knit group that tends to get moderately rowdy around the evening campfire. What we did not expect or adequately plan for was horizontal sleet. The bitter old mountain seemed to have it out for us. There were a few trail scouts on the trip who had never been backpacking before and were horrified to find out how dynamic late-summer weather can be. Not so strangely though, the weather on the trail cleared up as soon as the day was done. The dark clouds had moved on as if the mountain just wanted to give us a good initiation before opening up the wildflower fields. I read a poem to the group at the start of each sun-kissed day there following. The meandering days were then filled with treepitch harvesting, wildflower fragrance extraction, campfire distillations of essential oils under a merciful peak that seemed to be showing off how beautiful and gentle it can be. “You never feel more alive than you do in the outdoors,” says Hall. “People think of fragrance as being a shallow experience that just happens in our nose. It’s so much richer than that! Smell is the oldest of our senses. It bypasses reason and goes straight to the ancient parts of our brains…right to our emotions. Real fragrance stirs up profound, complex things in us that we can’t even begin to understand."
13
17
18
If that’s what you mean by camping then I’m not sure. What is the meaning of all this life if it’s little more than working in a box, writing snippy emails, hating your boss and avoiding your significant other? I’m not sure what the point of that is either. I get a kick out of people who don’t camp — it’s funny to think that camping is merely an abstraction of how we all used to actually just live — some of us still live like that under bridges and even in the luxurious zip codes of Central Park. As a species of this planet, I wonder what the hell we’re doing. How is it that we’re so quick to reject where we came from and find a way to be so unhappy in the midst of so many conveniences? As life gets better, life gets worse. Why have we forgotten to actually physically look for the answers to the burning questions before we give up and log in to Facebook? Listen, I’m not accusing anyone here. I know what it’s like to move from one airconditioned box to the next. I’m just asking us to remember there’s more to it, should we want or need it sometimes. Take a few steps back and rough it. Jump into some freezing cold water, walk to the next town over, or live with nature for a week. Lately, I’ve come to think point of it all is not actually the point, at all. That notion is a rouse — another of the Universe’s unflinching ironies. Most of us start life with an oblivious consciousness, cursed by ceaseless questioning and a preference for sharp corners, repeatable patterns, quantifiable data and hard, flat ground. As soon as you chip away at the long list of questions and the answers start to outweigh the questions, the curtain falls and the cycle begins again. What was the point? Is there a point? Shit, it all went by so fast! When I recall incredible spans of endless boredom as a kid and reflect on the slow pain that life can deliver as an adult, I wonder how could it possibly seem so fast in retrospect? I often recall the first time I saw a satellite, slowly rolling around our planet at night. Sleeping on the ground in New Mexico bear country, I and my barely teenage friends, watched a small blip of light ride through the sky, its path obscured by the twinkling of stars, but moving straight and true as an arrow. If it wasn’t actually magic, it was as close as it gets. I wonder how many times that satellite has made it around Earth since then, or if it’s even still there. Maybe some hard quantitative data can better communicate the time that has elapsed. How many blips may have coasted across the sky in these last twenty years? I suspect my perception of time will continue to change as I now find myself
on the precipice of a new great adventure. My wife and I are due to have a son in just under a month. How will meeting this world again through his eyes change the way I see it? What will ripple through the universe as he imposes his will upon it? Will he ever realize that we’re no more than all that dust in the stars of the New Mexico sky, as they turn over and over, condensing and expanding the perception of time for some unwitting watcher? Will we make it around the sun enough times to show him how it all works and share with him the overwhelming beauty and grace of the natural world? Is it possible to explain the void and that despite it’s emptiness we still have to try as hard as we can? Is it possible to give a gift that big to another person? All creatures live on similar wheels in this wonderfully austere void — each with their own nuances and turning at their own speed. The redwood tree predates our existence and presumably has a leg up on comprehending the rhythms of the universe. Each seedling has the potential to live much longer than a human — for hundreds of years! It is one of the largest organisms we know and is in fact so large that it sustains and powers the lives of many organisms in its vicinity. It too begins, helpless, and most likely unaware of its potential — ringless, but a spinning wheel nonetheless. Through the centuries it will solidify its place in the void and turn for what seems, to us, an eternity. In all that time, does it ever have a thought? Does it feel the same existential panic as we humans? Perhaps it says everything there is to be said through a stoic and silent harmony with the lives around it. Is it a consciousness evolved into non-consciousness — a happier and less concerned view of the void? Perhaps it is too big to ask where its place is — it simply is. Where, when, why, how — those are concerns for smaller life forms with other burdens. Perspective is everything. Perspective is perhaps the only thing. It is the key to the machinery of all the things that spin, large and small, enlightening and banal. Finding perspective can be elusive. Occasionally it is foist upon us, and we remain compelled to seek it intentionally and often. We are simple creatures and there is no easier way to find perspective than to literally put yourself in the middle of it — to become powerless in the face of a mountain or helpless in the middle of a sea. To die and come back, to fall down and and to rise, this is the rhythm to which the universe spins. It’s how I learned and how my father learned before me. It is what all this camping is about. It’s what all this life is about.
33
36
37
43
50
51
55
60
62
63
67
74
78
79
83
87
89
92
93
96
97
104
106
109
112
113
116
117
SPECIAL THANKS Kelvin, Brenda & Ashlie Adams, Kelly DeWitt, Caleb Owen Everitt, Brad D Hatton, Lauren Kirby, Brittany Keen, Connie Mobley, Kyle Muller, Ryan Rhodes & Tamara Becerra Valdez IMOGENE+WILLIE / imogeneandwillie.com SHINOLA / shinola.com DEUS / https://us.deuscustoms.com SLOW & LOW / drinkslowandlow.com FILSON / filson.com ARCHIVAL / archivalclothing.com KKDW / kkdw.co MOLLUSK / mollusksurfshop.com NORMAN RUSSELL / normanrussell.com LAND / workbyland.com JUNIPER RIDGE / juniperridge.com ESBY / esbyapparel.com
YARD / yardfibers.com FOLKLORICA / workbyfolklorica.com