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OK, so I had no intention of attending the breakfast sponsored by the Conservation Alliance, the good-deed-doing arm of the outdoor industry. Had other fish to fry (well, other pancakes to eat). <\/p>\n
But I did to manage to catch the last few minutes of the speech by the Alliance Breakfast’s special guest: Shelton Johnson<\/a>, the black ranger from Ken Burns’ “National Parks<\/a>” series on PBS. I can’t speak for the rest of his remarks, but Johnson was definitely on his game at the end. <\/p>\n I strolled to the open door to the ballroom to hear him talking about seeing an inner-city kid at Yosemite staring in slack-jawed amazement at a waterfall. Next words from the kid’s mouth: “I never knew anything could be so beautiful.” <\/p>\n After telling us how the wilderness can rewire a child’s vocabulary, Johnson moved on to his own childhood. He described the time his mom and dad took him to the Bavarian Alps on a vacation that changed everything in his young brain, how he realized you don’t have to die to get into heaven. You just need a good pair of hiking boots<\/a>. <\/p>\n Greatest moment of the show for me, but I have another Great Moment to recount. Cool thing is it happened perhaps 15 minutes earlier in the same morning. <\/p>\n I broke my fast on Friday with the Boy Scouts of America, who were sponsoring a free pancakes-and-goodies buffet. I arrived just as they were starting so the crowd was pretty thin; I did get to meet the executive director and chat with the publisher of Boys Life, but things got really interesting when Wayne Gregory<\/a>, founder of Gregory Mountain Products, showed up. <\/p>\n Within minutes he was advising the assembled Scouting luminaries on how to generate buzz for their trade show booth and get more people to stop by. <\/p>\n That set my head to thinking, so I raised my hand: <\/p>\n Me: “How about a contest: Are You Smarter than a Boy Scout?” <\/p>\n Wayne Gregory: “That’s a great idea!”<\/p>\n Gregory’s a hero of mine and a legend throughout the industry — within about two minutes of hearing him counsel Scout leaders on publicity matters I realized the guy has chops that extend way, way beyond designing backpacks.<\/p>\n Praise from Gregory made my day, till Shelton Johnson made it again. <\/p>\n Later that day, Johnson scrawled the same quote in a copy of his novel<\/a> that I picked up at the Vasque Footwear booth. And about an hour later, Jennifer Pharr Davis, the Appalachian Trail speed-hiking record holder, signed a copy of “Becoming Odyssa<\/a>,” her account of thru-hiking the AT for the first time in 2005. <\/p>\n After that I chatted with some very cool people starting an environmental school in southern Utah, then got together with even more cool folks at a gathering of Twitter users not far from the Salt Palace. <\/p>\n