GravityFed Network

Have you seen Department of Goods yet? ..it’s powered by Backcountry.com and it replaces BackcountryOutlet.com. Note if you go to Backcountry Outlet now, it redirects you to DOG. It’s pretty much the clearing house for any outdoor gear or ski gear deals you can imagine…and NOTHING is full sticker. Gotta love their slogan: Full Price Is Dead

You get the same free shipping on orders over $50, that you get at Backcountry. And you get the same killer service. We have included the ALL SALE PRODUCTS here for DOG, so browse and shop away!

Time to start digging out the gems from the gfed archives. And yes, there are a lot of them. One of these days we’ll get to featuring them one-by-one again For now, enjoy the
Farmer Dave Profile…
“Dave Van Dame is an Alta skier and a local legend because of his skiing technique. I first saw his unmistakable tracks in the backcountry in the winter of 1992 and thought, “What the hell made those?” It looked as if a snowmobile made about 40 turns side by side. It was not until we got closer that it became apparent the tracks were made by a skier. The snakey grooves were cut side by side and about a foot apart and took up an entire snowfield. I think I was with Matt West at the time and he said, “Oh, that’s the work of the snow farmer, he’s out here in the backcountry a lot…”
Read entire story in two parts…

One of these days we’ll get around to re-purposing and posting all the legendary, authentic ski bum content that lives deep in the GravityFed archives (right now there is just a small fraction of the content/articles we have there). But until then, we’ll just keep you up to date on all the development news from the GravityFed Network of sites.

For instance, last post I talked about the gear on sale blog @ GravityDex…which BTW the way is out of the gate and running. With the site authority and legacy “The Dex” holds, it didn’t take long for Pingomatic and WordPress to do their collective magic. We’re trending phat with nearly 10,000 uniques for the web’s oldest outdoor directory in the first 8 days of September…and nearly a third of those visitors are coming from the brand new blog.

Next on the update band wagon is Kids Gear Outlet. That site has been chugging a long getting more and more authority over the past couple of years. But this week we axed Upside Over (they went out of business), but added Little Ruler (kids skate clothing) and Play Outdoors (kids adventure gear). Those two retailers join Backcountry, Patagonia and REI. This is a quality resource for active families looking to outfit their wee ones with kid specific outdoor products. Enjoy!

The oldest outdoor links directory on the web just go better. Last year we added a gear outlet featuring the top outdoor stores on the web, and the list of retailers keeps growing. And now we’ve added a WordPress blog that will highlight all the deals and promotions from these retailers, as they roll out. If you’re not into paying top sticker for your gear and apparel, then you should subscribe to this blog for up-to-the-minute gear coupons and more!

Check it out…I bet you’ll see some similarities to this blog

We are in the process of rolling out another targeted outdoor gear site, this time specific to camping stuff, and more specifically sleeping bags. It’s just about ready for prime time, and some serious traffic. It’s yet another (and most recent) version of the continuously evolving format we’ve got for our product content network (see the GravityFed sidebar category on this blog).

SleepingBagOutlet.com (SBO) features products from both Backcounrty.com and TopSleepingBags.com, as well as editorials, product reviews and compelling deals/promotions from an array of outdoor stores. This seems to be the most popular blog category we see across multiple sites. I wonder why. Hint: Retail is for suckers on the web. There is always outdoor gear on sale or daily deals to be had.

At any rate, check out all the closeout sleeping bags at outlet prices from the top outdoor industry brands. Let us know what you think!!

We were fortunate to be introduced to a new company this winter, Swany Performance Gloves! We have seen Swany Ski Gloves around Alta for a while now, but never had the opportunity to try them out until now. The GravityFed crew was sent both the APOLO (NFX-5) from the Flexor line, and the Swany X-change II Ski Glove from their Sports Utility Crossover Collection.

Both get an A for warmth, and overall comfort. But the APOLO gets an A+! We were especially impressed with the molded knuckles with the APOLO. And over the course of the winter I had the opportunity to talk them up a TON on the lift. A lot of people noticed the burly knuckles and rugged leather. Easy conversation piece, and there were nothing but good things to say all around about these ski gloves.

Check out GM’s review on both gloves as well, on Ski Bum Poet. Thanks to Swany for sending over these two pair of gloves. We certainly reccommend both for any Altafarian (or any skier for that matter)!

Buy Swany Performance Gloves at Backcountry.com.

One of the largest and longest running ski communities online just launched a new and improved web site. Here is the official news release:

February 10th, 2009 – Bozeman, Montana – EpicSki.com, the largest, most active skiing community online, has partnered with San Francisco company Huddler.com in a complete re-launch of the web’s home for dedicated skiers.

What’s new?

• Look and feel: From a revamped logo to complete layout redesign of the site, EpicSki now has a fresh appearance to usher their community into the future and attract a broader audience, while providing a consistent experience and new features designed for the current loyal user base.
• Upgraded Forums: The new forums feature a modern interface and easy access to other relevant content from across the site to improve accessibility for users on site for the first time.
• Integrated Wiki: Deep, skiing-related content that previously spanned hundreds of conversational posts can be consolidated into informational articles that existing and new users collaborate on to ensure each piece stays up-to-date.
• Product Reviews: EpicSki already boasts one of the largest communities of knowledgeable skiers online. Now the members have a structured means to share what they think of the gear they use and the resorts where they ski.

Visit EpicSki.com for more info…

Once upon a time (March, 2000) one ski bum asked another ski bum how a few HTML tags worked. Two weeks later GravityDex (Outdoor Sports Directory) was functional and on the web. It’s always been a human-maintained outdoor links database, with custom descriptions and outdoor-relevant categories. It’s continued to grow through the years steadily (at time of this post, the links database included 13,348 links in 1,073 categories).

>> If you have an outdoor related site, Add Your Link <<

In the last few years, “The Dex” expanded to also include a comprehensive gear & apparel clearing house; including outdoor gear deals of all kinds, and product catalogs from the top outdoor retailers on the web (new stores added regularly). One of the coolest things about this site, is that it allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds for daily gear deals. By now you should know that there are tons of promotions out there, or coupons….so it pays to know where to find them all when you’re gearing up.

Check it out! Search GravityDex Links or Gear Database:

Family photo. Fish Solo, Soni and Ethan Kai. Congrats you guys. We’re all thrilled!

Would you find a search engine specific to outdoor gear useful? I’ll bet you would, since like us, you’re probably a gear junkie. And you’re probably not into paying retail, like us. On this site I just did a search for North Face Denali (probably the single most popular fleece jacket in history, and definitely The North Face’s top selling product), and the site returned 285 results from about 20 online stores. At that point I sorted the price column and was able to get a look at the best deals on this product. All this took about 8 seconds.

So check out our friends at OutdoorGearEngine.com. According to their homepage (as of the date of this post), the database consists of 495,132 products from 70 outdoor stores. Damn skippy. That’s pretty sick. This site is also chalk full of RSS subscriptions for outdoor gear deals, and they also maintain a blog that features industry news, gear sales/coupons from participating stores and just random coolness. Have a look and gear up for the pow!