Kenny Parker lives in a world of awesome. That’s how the co-owner of Water Stone Outdoors talks about living in Fayetteville, West Virginia. “If you like to play outside, it’s a good choice. It’s a good place to hide from the world.”

And if you like to climb, the New River Gorge is one of the best places in the world to do it. According to Parker, it’s an international climbing mecca.

“If you were to poll internationally and ask climbers to list the top 10 places in the world to climb, New would be on that list,” Parker said. “The world-class whitewater, rock climbing, and outdoor play resources are why we’re all here.”

Over 3,000 established sport and trad routes span 60-plus miles of sandstone cliffs between the three major river gorges—the New, the Gauley/Summersville, and the Meadow. That’s not even counting hundreds of established boulder problems. Back in the ’80s, a trio of longtime climbing friends—Parker, Maura Kistler, and her husband, Gene Kistler—started climbing in the area and noticed that a climber’s paradise like the New River Gorge ought to have a gear shop.

The Kistlers made the move to Fayetteville in the early ’90s, and Parker followed suit soon after he graduated college in 1992. It didn’t take long for the three of them to get down to business. In 1994, Parker and the Kistlers co-founded Water Stone Outdoors.

Create More Outdoor People, Save the World

The shop has now been open 362 days a year for more than 20 years, and the climbing-focused retailer is proud of its rock shoe selection and its national reputation as one of the best hardcore destination outdoor shops in the country. But Water Stone is out for something more epic than sweet inventory. They’re fighting to preserve the reason their shop exists: their matchless outdoor playground. And they’re rallying its stewards.

The idea is simple: if people love the outdoors, they’ll be invested in protecting it. It’s why Water Stone’s most important function is to create more outdoor people.

“Because if we don’t, the planet is going to hell,” Maura Kistler said. “I strongly believe we’ve got to get more people outdoors connecting to nature, or how are we going to save the planet? If the outdoor community isn’t fully invested in saving the planet, then who the f*** is?”

While Fayetteville’s cliffs and rapids attract some of the world’s best climbers and rafters, it has plenty of routes and stretches for beginners. Water Stone welcomes newbies with genuine gusto. Mountain bikers and rafters have followed climbers’ suit.

“I believe more than anything that people need help getting started in the outdoors,” Maura Kistler said. “That’s where the shop’s saying ‘quality gear and friendly advice’ comes in. [It’s] becoming more important all the time because that adventurous spirit is a little atrophied in our culture. People need that extra bit of ‘You can do this. Here’s how you can go.'”

Water Stone wants everyone who visits Fayetteville to feel welcome in their our community. The staff is just, well, nice to people.

“That’s a priority in life,” Parker said. “We’re accepting you. Everyone has their oddities and is a weirdo in some way. We just live with it. People really like that about this community. It becomes infectious among the people who live here.”

For instance, for the past 11 summers, Fayetteville has hosted HomoClimbtastic, the world’s largest queer-friendly climbing convention. A documentary called Climbing with Pride captured the 2012 convention, and the film’s trailer features Water Stone. The shop then created their own video in 2013.

“We have a really small community,” Maura Kistler said of Fayetteville’s 2,800 residents. “And how we rounded up 125 people to welcome the gay climbers on the video really says something about our wacky ass scene here.”

Best and First in the Country

But if the Fayetteville scene is wacky, it’s also organized. The founders of Water Stone also started the New River Alliance of Climbers (NRAC), an organization dedicated to preserving and promoting access to climbing areas in the New River Gorge. Currently, the organization’s president and vice president are Gene Kistler and Parker, respectively.

“We have been tirelessly working on it since [the early ’90s],” Parker said.

Gene Kistler nurtures relationships with the National Park Service, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the community. Maura Kislter recruits members and provides motivation for people to move to town. From 2003 to 2013, the NRAC activated the ultimate recruiting (and fundraising) tool—the New River Rendezvous, another event that attracted climbers to its cliffs like bees to a honeypot.

“It was a remarkable event that we ran for 10 years,” Maura Kislter said. “We got a lot of respect and we raisedÌę a lot of money. The rendezvous was also one of our single best recruiting tools. It got a lot of people saying, ‘Hey, those people are having fun. What’s going on?'”

They’re having fun while also getting legendary things done—like convincing officials to make deep-water soloing legal for just one day to make history on one of the local lakes in 2016. The 13-minute video just might have you moving to Waterstonia.

“We had the first deep-water soloing contest on natural rock in the country,” Maura Kislter said. “We did it and we crushed it.”

It’s a testament to how far they’ve come, from having no central hub to having Water Stone and its growing community of climbers.

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“Did you happen to catch the presentation by those folks from Louisiana?” asked veteran outdoor retailer Beezer Molten, owner of Half-Moon Outfitters. “What they have going on is a whole new level of commitment to the community, which is something to aspire to.”

Molten wasn’t the only one impressed by the Pack & Paddle’s presentation at the June 2018 Grassroots Outdoor Alliance Connect Show in Knoxville, Tennessee.

John and Becky Williams—who own the Lafayette, Louisiana, shop—wowed a roomful of the country’s top independent outdoor retailers as they shared their shop’s long, family-founded history and big, community-driven heart.

“Our focus is building community and being a welcoming central hub for outdoorsy people in our area,” John Williams said.

“Part of Who I Am”

Pack & Paddle is a second-generation family business that has helped Louisiana folks get outside for nearly half a century. John Williams’ parents opened the Lafayette store in 1974 when he was 12. He and his brother helped build the shop with their own hands, and even tore down two old barns to use the wood for the shop’s interior.

As a teenager, John Williams found Pack & Paddle’s community events to be a bit of a drag. While all his friends got to go home and eat dinner after school, the Williams were out late, and according to John Williams, “dragging a bunch of backpacking gear to the local college every Tuesday night for weeks to teach a Backpacking 101 class.” John Williams said he would wait in the car to haul all the gear back home after each seminar.

But his parents’ perseverance to teach others how to safely adventure outdoors eventually showed John Williams that even if community events aren’t always fun, they’re worthwhile.

His parents built a business from the fabric of who they were and what they loved to do. That passionate authenticity defines the next generation of Pack & Paddle today.

“You have to be doing it because it’s ČâŽÇłÜ—because you want to do it, because it’s part of who you are,” said John Williams. “I think that’s a big deal. Growing up like that, it is part of who I am. That’s part of why we do it and stick with it.”

From Life Support to Life’s Purpose

Back in 2000, John and Becky Williams purchased Pack & Paddle from John Williams’ parents. They had met in 1984 at the store, married a few months later, and went on to run a successful e-commerce hockey business that required most of their attention, so for almost a decade, the trusty ol’ Pack & Paddle ran on autopilot.

“When Becky and I bought the shop out from the family, it was really at a low ebb—it was on life support,” John Williams said.

Seven years later, John and Becky Williams walked the entirety of the Appalachian Trail (AT) together, returning home with a renewed love of the outdoors and of the community that makes the outdoors experience so special. The trail provided fresh life perspective, and the couple decided it was time to give their whole heart and soul to the shop.

“We loved the community we experienced on the trail, and we knew our number one focus when we got home was going to be building community and deep roots,” John Williams said. “This was the opposite of what we did for eight years on the internet. Three days after we got home from the AT, our largest competitor called and offered to buy our online business. This allowed us the time, energy, focus and money to sort of re-invent Pack & Paddle from scratch.”

“It’s Not a Strategy; It’s a Lifestyle”

By the time John and Becky Williams returned from the AT, the community flame of Pack & Paddle had nearly flickered out—no events, no guided outings and the bare minimum in inventory. Luckily, John Williams had learned events are what bring a shop to life in its community, and he had come around to the idea of hosting events because they’re fun, not for a big turnout.

“It’s not a strategy; it’s a lifestyle,” John Williams said. “It’s authentic because if it’s a strategy, it really won’t work. It’s too much effort. There are too many temptations to say, ‘Oh, I did this seminar and three people showed up. This isn’t worth it, I’m not doin’ this anymore.'”

Now a decade later, even a casual weekday how-to workshop—such as Backpacking 101—fills the store. One of the most effective tactics Pack & Paddle employed to increase event turnouts was handing out good old-fashioned flyers the good old-fashioned way.

“Flyers were huge,” said John Williams. “In the beginning, it was really a ground war. We found staff inviting customers and handing them a flyer [related to an activity in which they’d expressed interest] was a big driver of turnout.”

Digital strategies—such as building the shop’s email list to 15,000 recipients andÌęFacebook advertising—have also helped Pack & Paddle get-togethers grow from three-person turnouts to pushing 100.

Pack & Paddle accommodated its growing event turnouts by converting a third of the shop’s floor space it into a kayak room, which transforms into a venue that holds more than 70 people. But even this new venue hardly can contain the crowd that comes out for special events.

“A marquee event like my talk on the Camino—we had maybe 70 people?” Becky Williams said.

“Closer to 100 people came to your Camino talk,” John Williams insisted. “People were out in the other room. It was crazy.”

Molten was right: Pack & Paddle is on a whole new level when it comes to community commitment. And without that commitment, the shop might not have made it through another generation with the challenges of four big-box competitors, another specialty store, plus online retail and DTC tactics.

As long as Pack & Paddle keeps it about the people, there’s no doubt the Lafayette community will keep Pack & Paddle as their first stop en route to outdoor adventure.

“It’s more fun to work in a business that’s dedicated to giving people their start in the outdoors,” John Williams said. “Helping them maintain their love of these activities and doing more than just selling outdoor stuff.”

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Jim Smith, a lifelong climber and all-around outdoorsman, spent nearly two decades searching for just the right independent outdoor shop to purchase in order to turn his passion into a trade. “I’d been looking at shops, for, like, ever,” he said.

“Since I’ve known you,” confirmed his wife, Elaine Smith.

In looking at 20 shops all over the West, various stores piqued their interest, but the deals fell through for one reason or another. One day in 2015, the Smiths walked into a northern Colorado shop that wasn’t even for sale. But they knew they’d found the spot.

“We started scoping some shops in Colorado, and honestly, Mountain Chalet spoke to us quite loudly,” Jim Smith said. “So we reached out to the owner and asked him if he’d be interested in selling, and he says, ‘Maybe, I think I might.’”

In Good Hands

By March 2015, Jim and Elaine Smith became the new owners of the oldest independent specialty outdoor store in Colorado: Mountain Chalet, founded in May 1968.

The couple has done their research to confirm Mountain Chalet as Colorado’s longest-running independent specialty outdoor retailer, behindÌęThe Alpineer in Gunnison, Ski Haus in Steamboat, and Kristi Mountain Sports in Alamosa, which all opened in 1969 and remain open today.

“Collectively [between online research and conversations with reps], we all felt really good about labeling ourselves as the ‘oldest,'” Jim Smith said. “There were some shops that opened before us, but they are no longer open.”

The couple bought the store from longtime owner Dan Foster, who bought the Chalet from its founder Kent Kane in the early ‘80s after working at the shop as an employee. And half a century after its inception, the founding family still has ties to the shop.

“Kent’s wife still comes into the shop on a regular basis to check in with us,” Jim Smith said. “She brings us super cool old articles and artifacts from the shop. She’s an amazing woman, and it’s fun to have her come in and tell us stories.”

Kane, and later, Foster, represented a vital and trusted resource in the Colorado Springs outdoor community during their tenures as Mountain Chalet owners. Foster wanted to ensure whoever succeeded him also would take on that mantle of leadership, expertise, and passion without selling out.

“Dan [Foster] recognized that the center of the outdoor universe in Colorado Springs is Mountain Chalet,” said Jim Smith. “So it was important to him to make sure we were going to keep it small and independent specialty retail, and that we didn’t have some ulterior motive to do something else … He was looking for a good steward of the shop who would continue to represent the community in a way that fit Mountain Chalet as he built it up.”

Ringing in the Big 5-0 with an Invitation to “Get Out There”

No doubt Foster appreciates the community-centered outdoor celebration Jim and Elaine Smith cooked up to celebrate the shop’s milestone: the Mountain Chalet 50th Anniversary Contest.

“We’ve celebrated all year long in lots of different ways,” Elaine Smith said. “One of the most fun things we’re doing is a year-long contest with six sports categories: trad climbing, sport climbing, ice climbing, backpacking, trail running, and backcountry skiing.”

To participate, more than 300 community members completed specific routes for each sport category. The number of specific routes participants had to complete—in order to earn an entry to the grand prize drawing—varied by category.

“People worked on these all year long,” Elaine Smith said. “They could do more routes and get additional entries, too.”

In October, Mountain Chalet combined all the Mountain Chalet 50 Anniversary Contest entries to draw a name in each sport category. Later this year, the six winners will receive a full outdoor kit tailored to each sport category so “they’ll be fully decked out”—from tri-cams, tents, and tech t-shirts to skis, skins, and sunglasses.

“We really wanted to just encourage people to get out there,” Elaine Smith said. “We heard a lot from folks who said, ‘I’d be sitting on the couch, but now I know I need to go out and get some routes done!’ And they’re experiencing a lot of new routes since they can’t do the same route twice. So they’re experiencing more of Colorado, and that’s great too.”

The contest created a sense of community—out on the trails and routes, in the store, and online.

“We gave every participant at Mountain Chalet 50th anniversary flag…and we created a Facebook group. [Each participant] had to take a photograph at the trailhead or the summit with their Mountain Chalet 50th anniversary flag when they completed the route,” Jim Smith said. “It did get everybody kind of excited and made for a mild form of competition. Everyone could have a good time with it.”

Events like the Anniversary Contest continue to ensure Mountain Chalet remains at the center of the outdoor universe in Colorado Springs. “It’s what I call community outreach,” Elaine Smith said. “Bringing folks into the shop to talk with folks at all different kinds of events.”

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It was a shared appreciation for simple living that led friends to peg Chris Gerston and now-wife Erica Gerston as ideal blind date material.“The common thread was that we both did a lot of living out of our cars,” Chris Gerston said with a laugh.

From the start, both Gerstons knew living the good life really only required the essentials, like beer and gear.

In the spirit of simplicity, the couple opened Backcountry EssentialsÌęabout 12 years ago as a technical gear shop with a cozy floor plan and expansive atmosphere, complete with a built-in three-door beer cooler to keep bevvies cold.

Technical Prowess

The shop carries the must-haves for playing in the Pacific Northwest through all its seasons—climbing, hiking, camping. They booted kayaks about a decade ago to make room for the beer cooler. But Backcountry Essentials really comes alive after the first snow falls and the skis line up to dominate the store’s limited floor space.

“Winter is more our strong suit,” Chris Gerston said. “We’re gonna end up talking about winter one way or another.”

Formerly, Chris Gerston was a mental health counselor who worked in wilderness therapy, and Erica Gerston worked as a long-time bookkeeper for multiple local businesses. In combining their passions and expertise to open an outdoor retail space together, two aspects of their new store were nonnegotiable: technical expertise and genuine friendliness. The union of these qualities actually helps get people outside, and then—relative to their experience level—get after it once out there.

“We’re really a technical gear shop, and that’s how we wanted to be,” Chris Gerston said. “We wanted to be a store that sold gear first, and sold clothing second. Our forte has always been our technical services. The name we’ve built for ourselves here in town is really based off the bootfitting and ski techery. This was a service our town really needed.”

When a town’s local ski hill is 11,000-foot-high Mount Baker, it needs a technical ski shop. It’s safe to say the mountain has a reputation for legendary powder days: in 1999, Mount Baker Ski Area set the world record for recorded snowfall in a single season (1,140 inches). And at 641 inches a year, Mount Baker Ski Area racks the (unofficially) highest average snowfall of any ski resort in the world. If the snow is that good in bounds, imagine the backcountry.

Enter Backcountry Essentials: a place where backcountry shredders can find the specialized and advanced gear they need. The Gertsons built their community reputation off a refined, technical—and yes, ±đČőČő±đČÔłÙŸ±Čč±ô—backcountry ski selection backed up by the deep know-how to outfit and prepare powder hounds to head out of bounds when ready.

“We get a lot of skiers in town, and Mount Baker has a great open gate policy,” said Chris Gerston. “So as long as you’ve got your transceiver, probe, etcetera, you can start cutting lines and going out of bounds. There’s tons of skiing to do here.”

But before the shop, many skiers likely were cutting those lines in ill-fitting boots.

“There wasn’t really a good bootfitter here, and the guy we have now has been bootfitting for 30 plus years. He’sÌęreally good,” Chris Gerston said. “When I hired him, I’d been bootfitting for eight or nine years. I thought I was kinda, you know, gettin’ my groove on. And he showed me that, truthfully, I’m so average.”

Now Backcountry Essentials is grooming a long and fine legacy of bootfitters.

Kindness Over Gnarliness

But with intense and intricate gear expertise can come the risk of snobbery—a sort of technical elitism that might intimidate beginners or even intermediates (anyone not pro)—from even walking through the door, let alone setting out for the slopes.

“People oftentimes walk into a gear shop like this, and they’re somewhat intimidated, like, ‘Who are these guys? Are they gonna have a chip on their shoulder?’” said Chris Gerston.

For Backcountry Essentials’ staff, good hearts come before epic accolades.

“One of the things we really drill into our staff is that I don’t hire them because of how hard they climb or how fast they ski or how high they jump. I really just need them to be nice people,” Chris Gerston said. “And it’s one of those things that’s really easy to say, and yet most gear shops can seem to have a little bit of an attitude. We just try to not.”

Besides, what better way for a small specialty retailer to encourage folks to come into their store than by being nice? Kindness: the essential building block of community.

“We want to be seen as nice people—as a resource,” Chris Gerston said. “And, not knowing what else to do with marketing, here’s what we can do: we’re approachable. We’re here for you. We definitely spin ourselves off being a community hub. [We have] events at a local place for the community to come see a slideshow and have a beer.”

Expansion: Gear for the Groomers, Too

Five years ago, the biggest ski shop in Bellingham closed. Another smaller local ski and bike shop sold, and only kept the biking side. That’s when Backcountry Essentials saw its chance to expand from selling solely backcountry ski gear to offering the whole shebang. They quickly transformed from peripheral, technical ski stop to the main ski game in town.

Convincing brands to get on board with the expansion (and allow them to pick up the slack from the stores that closed) came easy due to Backcountry’s specialized roots and stellar repute.

“Those two stores had their liquidation of ski gear. As soon as we heard, we got on the phone and started calling companies we wanted,” Chris Gerston said. “They were looking for a new store, and so all the brands were pretty much open to us. And because we had that sort of technical background, it was very easy for everyone to be like, ‘Oh, it’s just natural. We’re going to trust them because they already do avalanche stuff.’”

Although Backcountry Essentials has diversified its inventory to better serve beginner as well as super technical users, Chris Gerston still prefers skiing the backcountry over the groomers.

“I enjoy skiing in bounds without a doubt,” Chris said. “But I kind of need my exercise so I like backcountry touring. It seems like a more well-rounded experience. I love it.”

Having fun and staying alive comprise the bare essentials for successful outdoor adventure. Chris Gerston gets it: “When I was in grad school, I had classmates who were miserable and freaking out about something, say, a paper that was due. And I was like, ‘Did someone die? No? No one fell down a crevasse? No? Okay, everyone’s alive. Then we’re good.’”

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“16 years, 4 months, 17 days,” general manager and buyer Ron Lewis of Rusted Moon Outfitters said when asked on July 17 how long the Indianapolis store has been open.

He and his team have been serving customers since March 1, 2002.

It’s no coincidence that Lewis is on top of the store’s tenure down to the day—Rusted Moon manages to stay on top of everything, from every angle. But on their toes is where they stay to see what’s coming or where Midwestern outdoor enthusiasts are going—which might be the other side of the world, requiring tippy toes.

Locals Serving Globetrotting Locals

Say it’s 93 degrees in Indianapolis and a customer is cruising the long underwear selection before heading out on a trip to South America.

“We joke about locals serving locals, but really, we’re locals serving locals who are traveling globally, which is a hard thing in a small store,” said Lewis. “We have to ask ourselves: Do we still have the 101 for the other hemisphere? Am I fully selected in alpine snow skis? Absolutely not. I don’t want to go broke. I want to eat. But can we handle that person doing something a little bit further away than what we can see? Yeah, of course.”

Whether you’re ripping down to Patagonia to shred some pow or deep in that daily hometown dog-walking scene, Rusted Moon’s got you on their mind.

“We need to make sure we’re offering that same level of ideas and experience and focus to all the different avenues of what we do,” Lewis said. “Are we taking this idea into backpacking, into travel? Are we taking this idea down to a day-use person who doesn’t want to sleep in a tent and drive six hours? The local, ‘I go for a walk around the neighborhood every day’? Are we reaching each type and part of each customer base?”

And Rusted Moon lets customers set expectations (because they might just wildly exceed those that would’ve been set for them).

“We all have to do our own thing,” Lewis said. “Just because we’re looking at an older customer [doesn’t mean] they just do old person things; they probably backpacked before Gore-Tex existed. They’ve forgotten more than maybe you will ever know. They might have backpacked and hitchhiked across our country twice 50 years ago.”

“Customer Contact Makes You Better, Period”

While Rusted Moon is nothing if not open-minded in its vision and thorough in its execution, all these fruits bloom from simple roots.

“The core tenets are always the same: fantastic selection, fantastic service,” Lewis said.

The founders of Rusted Moon—owners Henry Miller (his wife Sharon also is very involved in the store), apparel and footwear buyer Tonya Furuhashi, and Lewis—met working at Midwestern chain Galyon’s Trading Company back in the day. They’ve relished how a small independent shop versus a chain naturally fosters superior customer service because everyone at the shop actually serves customers.

“Everybody has the freedom to have more input at more levels and to gain proximity to the customer again,” Lewis said. “That’s what hurts a lot of stores. Folks are in buying and management and every other level than sales, and aren’t having intimate customer contact. Customer contact makes you better, period.”

If it’s clichĂ© to say this is the kind of store you can walk into for the second time, and they remember your name, well, let’s recall that in today’s marketplace that’s not so common after all.

“It feels clichĂ© to me ‘cause I live it every day, so I assume this is how it is,” Lewis said. “We do have a more intimate relationship with our customers. We do recognize a lot of them. We do know where they go, and we have experiences they’re going to have in our rearview mirror.”

We all know our best in to the outdoor life—both epic and serene—comes from folks who are livin’—and lovin’—it themselves.

“I love that I rode to work with my dog today, and he’s laying on the floor beside me right now,” Lewis said. “I love that I’m wearing a Rusted Moon T-shirt, not tucked in, and a pair of flip flops, and that’s okay. I love that if a customer comes in today and is on the fence about a kayak they may or may not want, I can say, ‘Hey, I’m going to go bounce out with this guy and paddle for half an hour, ’cause I can. It’s good for us, the customer, and my emotional well-being as a human.”

“Man, You Go There?”

Goals: bring people together over the outdoors at Rusted Moon, and then again, in the outdoors over Rusted Moon.

“I have this dream someone is going to be out hiking in the Midwest and run into someone else and say, ‘Hey, didn’t I run into you at Rusted Moon?’ Or look down at skis and see the sticker for Rusted Moon and say, ‘Holy crap, You’re from Indianapolis? Man, you go there?’ That’s my dream,” Lewis said.

Rusted Moon is perpetually checking and double-checking all the little boxes that build big dreams. And if they can’t check a box for you right away, they’ll find a way.

“We do what we need to, when we need to, for anyone we need to do it for,” Lewis said. “We don’t have a corporate flow chart that says this, then this. It’s like stop. What do they need, can we accommodate, how can we make it happen? Can we? Oh we can! Wow, we can pick up the phone, and we can work it out.”

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