Mar 8 | Simpler Times Video: NRS Spring 2014 Paddling Apparel Showcase Video

by NRS Staff

What happens when you take pro kayakers Erik Boomer and Tyler Bradt, both just back from major expeditions, and turn them and their girlfriends loose in California with a pile of NRS gear, a cherry Volkswagen camper and a dream catcher from a gas station in Nevada? Parking tickets, for one. They also had a lot of fun and put a lot of miles on the latest NRS apparel, as well as the Westfalia. Continue reading →

Mar 2 | Aboard the Wizard’s Eye

by NRS Staff

The Wizard’s Eye—a 44-foot steel-hulled sailboat that carried Captain Tyler Bradt and his crew across the Pacific last year—currently resides in dry dock in Fiji waiting to start the second leg of its around-the-world journey. When we spoke with Tyler last week, he had just returned from a stint running waterfalls for a television shoot in Chile, and now he was keeping a wary eye on a tropical depression that looked like it could hit Fiji as a full-fledged cyclone. If the storm hit, he said, he’d have to go fly out right away to check on the boat; even in dry dock, a powerful storm could wreak havoc. Such is the life of a professional kayaker turned global expedition leader.

yeraWizardHarry Continue reading →

Mar 2 | NRS Spring 2014 Apparel Look Book: Behind the Scenes

by Mark Deming

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NRS catalogs have always been a little bit different. We build them all in-house, and for many years the photos you saw alongside our products were taken on our own vacations. But our product line has grown and our catalog designs have evolved, making it harder to capture all the right products in the all the right ways while also manning boats, cooking meals, running shuttles and trying to enjoy our “time off.” So, by necessity, our photo operation has gotten a little more sophisticated. We have a staff photographer, the indefatigable Jacob Boling, and today’s shoots aren’t vacations, they’re work.

But we still have fun. Continue reading →

Feb 28 | Expedition Q: Journal of a Journey Across Baffin Island

by Erik Boomer

After a year of planning, fundraising and hand-building traditional skin-on-frame kayaks, Expedition Q set out on its historic journey across Baffin Island. The team consisted of two couples. Team NRS kayaker Erik Boomer was joined by his girlfriend Sarah McNair-Landry, an accomplished explorer who grew up in a family of arctic guides. Sarah’s brother Eric, also a veteran arctic explorer, and Eric’s girlfriend Katherine Breen, a physician, rounded out the team. What follows are excerpts from a collaborative journal describing their day-to-day life on the expedition. The crew released many of these dispatches straight to their Facebook page via satellite; these posts are marked with the team’s geographic coordinates.

All photos copyright Erik Boomer unless otherwise noted.

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The team poses with their hand-built kayak frames. From left to right: Eric McNair-Landry, Katherine Breen, Sarah McNair-Landry, Erik Boomer.

1 Jul, 13
After month of building our traditional Inuit style sea kayaks, and two weeks spent crossing the Penny Ice Cap and Auyuittuq Park, we will depart on the next stage or our expedition tomorrow, a two month crossing of southern Baffin Island, using the kayaks we made ourselves. Continue reading →

Feb 22 | Spring 2014 Apparel Sneak Peek

by NRS Staff

February in our part of Idaho means slightly warmer temps accompanied by violent mood swings from rain to snow to hail to sun. Spring still seems a long way off, but almost every day there’s a brief window when the sun emerges and you can imagine tulip shoots discovering daylight and rivers swelling with runoff. Think of this Spring 2014 apparel sneak peek as one of those welcome sun breaks.

NRS Spring 2014 Preview

Continue reading →

Feb 21 | A Whitewater Wedding on the Ocean

by Susan Hollingsworth

NRS ambassadors Susan Hollingsworth and Adam Elliott are two of our favorite people. Better yet, they’re one of our favorite couples. When they tied the knot last fall, they threw a wedding celebration befitting the simple, elegant lifestyle they’ve built around paddling, community and each other—a three-day excursion with friends and family on the remote Oregon Coast.

 

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Adam and I haven’t relied much on material goods in the four years we’ve been together. In fact, we met in a fantastically minimalist environment—an international multi-day rafting trip on the Great Bend of the Yangtzee River in China. Since then we’ve lived in cars, out of duffel bags, and more recently in a one-room studio apartment.

We laughed at the idea of spending tens of thousands of dollars on a one-day wedding. However, in order to honor our community and our place on this planet, we wanted celebrate our marriage with a big group of friends and family in a place where the natural beauty humbles and uplifts the spirit.

And we wanted to have a big party.

So, we decided on an affordable (for us and our guests) wedding excursion at a remote destination on the Oregon Coast, a multi-day adventure not unlike a good river trip. The results were as unexpected as they were magical. Continue reading →

Feb 14 | Returning Upstream: Teaching Kayaking at the Source

by Devon Barker-Hicks

devonkayaktalkTeam NRS paddler Devon Barker-Hicks returns to Stanley, Idaho, the source of many memories and her favorite river, to share her Dare to Kayak program with local students.

 

Sharing my Dare to Kayak program is an amazing, rewarding way to connect with lots of young students in Idaho. This year brought me back to where my school teaching career began—Stanley, Idaho. I began student teaching in Stanley the fall of 1993. Jerry Hughes, of Hughes River Expeditions, graciously offered his warehouse as my accommodations for the semester. The warehouse turned out to be a beautiful cabin overlooking Valley Creek. So I taught and explored paddling opportunities in the headwaters of the Salmon River, a few hundred miles upstream from my home in Riggins.

Continue reading →