This summer is a fantastic time to celebrate your favorite National Park with Pendleton Pale Ale – now available in Crater Lake, Rainier, Grand Canyon and Yosemite park cans!
Our friends at Rogue have outdone themselves with this delicious brew.
So the next time you’re headed out for a picnic on your favorite national Park blanket, take along a crisp pale ale and raise a toast to America’s Treasures!
Cheers!
Each year, Pendleton does a robust custom blanket business for companies, tribes, artists and philanthropic organizations. These are definitely Pendleton blankets, but the entire production run is produced for (and belongs to) the client.
It’s a process to bring blankets to the loom. We have a special department that handles all the steps needed to bring a customer’s ideas to life. We help to translate design ideas into workable patterns that we can actually produce. We give advice on color and finishing, and create special labels that tell the story of the blanket.
This year, we were honored to produce custom blankets for two of our national parks. You read about the colorful new Yellowstone blanket earlier this summer. For Yosemite National Park, we produced a gorgeous blanket in black, cream and grey.
This design echoes the iconic black and white photography of Ansel Adams. This revered photographer’s work didn’t just immortalize nature. His work helped protect it, as well. You can read about his life here: ANSEL ADAMS and see some of his incredible work in this interview with his son.
Just as we did with the Yellowstone blanket, we sent the Yosemite blanket to three of our brand ambassadors. We wanted to see the blanket through their lenses. Their interpretations are beautiful and surprisingly different.
Kate Rolston took the blanket to the mountains:
Taylor Colson Horton & Cameron Powell took the blanket to the back yard:
And Bri Heiligenthal brought the blanket home:
Three different visions of one beautiful blanket. Thanks to our amazing photographers. Follow them on Instagram for more.
And the blanket? Of course you can get your own! Right here: YOSEMITE GIFT SHOP
Last year, we sent out a call on Instagram, asking for photographers to take our blankets home to their parks. We were overwhelmed with responses! After diligent review of well over a thousand Instagram feeds, we chose ten and called it good.
You’ve seen their work all year, but this video takes you on a tour of all ten parks, with a catchy banjo score that has us tapping our feet here at the office. So Happy Birthday to the National Park Service and thank you to our #pendletonparks explorers. You can see them all (and follow them ALL on Instagram) at the end of the movie.
Pendleton for the National Parks
Please enjoy a Pendleton employee park memory: Yosemite memories and photos from Greg, who is one of our northern California account managers.
I have procrastinated on this, because it will be tough to pick a single Yosemite memory. I have been going to the park for 40 years, visiting a couple of times per year. I also go as a vendor. Every time, I see something different, even if it’s just a day trip to the Valley to “work” (if you can call it that).
My first trip was a high school backpacking trip, when we watched a mama bear and her two cubs attempt to steal food that we’d stored up in a small pine tree. One of the cubs was sent up the tree to get the pack, but he wasn’t small enough. The tree snapped! Down came the tree and the cub to the ground. We hiked out the next day, 12 miles in the pouring rain.
Over the years I’ve hiked and climbed some of the park’s largest peaks, fly-fished many of the lakes and streams, backcountry skied into the Ostrander Hut and snow camped throughout the park.
I was there a week after the Valley flood of 1997 when they were still pulling campground picnic tables out of the trees. Signs now mark the high water mark along the Merced River six feet over the road.
I was there just after the huge rockfall at Glacier Point covered Happy Isles with an eerie, almost lunar, pulverized granite dust and debris.
I was there when Mel Gibson, Jodi Foster and James Garner filmed the teepee village scenes in the El Capitan Meadow for the remake of Maverick.
After a lifetime of special memories, it’s too hard to choose one.
Are you ready for your own Yosemite adventures? We’d love to come along with you.
Image: Allie Taylor (@alliemtaylor)
And remember, your purchase of our National Park Collection helps support preservation and restoration of America’s Treasures.
This time in styles that honor America’s National Parks! The new collection for men and women features iconic UGG® boots and slippers paired with the historic National Park Stripe designs of Pendleton’s National Park blankets.
The limited-edition UGG® X Pendleton® Collection will be available at all UGG®concept stores in North America and Asia, online at UGG.com, pendleton-usa.com and at select wholesale partners beginning August 15.
You probably recognize the stripe patterns from our Yellowstone and Yosemite blankets, shown here in photos by two of our #pendle10park explorers; Corey Jenkins (@ourfreeways) and Allie Taylor (@alliemtaylor).
The boots, like our blankets, are part of our initiative to honor and support the National Park Service in its mission to preserve America’s treasures, our National Parks.
See our selection here: Pendleton x UGG Australia. We would love it if you bought from our site, but we have already sold through some styles and colors. So please head to UGG Australia to find anything you don’t see in our selection. And please don’t wait. The collection is honestly flying out the door. And we are not supposed to play favorites, but this style is our favorite.
That’s how you walk the dog, people.
Yosemite Valley, carved by glaciers and the Merced River, came to public attention in the 1860s, through the journalistic efforts of a Scottish immigrant named John Muir. He wrote countless articles describing the wonders of Yosemite, raising awareness that helped contribute to the eventual preservation of the area for generations to come.
Yosemite is not America’s first National Park. The Yosemite wilderness and Mariposa redwood grove were designated as protected wilderness areas in 1864, with legislation signed by President Abraham Lincoln. But Yellowstone National Park was created a full eighteen years before Yosemite.
The original wilderness did not include Yosemite Valley and its world-famous landmarks—El Capitan, Half Dome and Yosemite Falls. The park as we know it was expanded after Teddy Roosevelt asked John Muir to guide him on a camping expedition to Yosemite in 1903.
Their night in the Mariposa Grove inspired one of Teddy’s most memorable quotes, in which he compared his night in the grove to “lying in a great solemn cathedral, far vaster and more beautiful than any built by the hands of man.” Muir lobbied the president to expand the park to include lands already in California’s possession, and in 1906, President Roosevelt signed a law that brought the Yosemite Valley under federal jurisdiction.
…we’re dismayed to write this, but domesticated sheep were once the primary threat to Yosemite. One threat? Shepherds who set meadow-fires to promote the growth of more edible grasses for their far-ranging flocks. The sheep caused trouble, too, destroying sub-alpine meadows and passing diseases to the native bighorn sheep. This prompted naturalist John Muir to call them “hoofed locusts.”
The original Yosemite Park Rangers were Buffalo Soldiers. According to the Yosemite National park website:
Buffalo Soldiers, like their white counterparts in U.S. Army regiments, were among the first park rangers, in general, and backcountry rangers, in particular, patrolling parts of the West…Approximately 500 Buffalo Soldiers served in Yosemite National Park and nearby Sequoia National Park with duties from evicting poachers and timber thieves to extinguishing forest fires. Their noteworthy accomplishments were made despite the added burden of racism.
You can read the entire (fascinating) history, listen to a podcast and watch a video of a modern-day re-enactor who works in Yosemite here: Yosemite’s Buffalo Soldiers .
Another item of interest? The Buffalo Soldiers inspired the traditional Park Ranger hat. Many were Spanish-American War veterans who had shielded themselves from tropical rains of Cuba and the Philippines by pinching their high-crowned, broad-brimmed hats into symmetrical quadrants. This distinctive peak was known as the “Montana Peak” on the home front, and eventually became part of the National Park Service ranger uniform.
Over 4 million visitors arrive each year to experience the 747,956 acres of wilderness, on 840 miles of hiking trails.
The mountains at Yosemite national park are still growing at a rate of 1 foot per thousand years.
Yosemite Falls is one of the tallest falls in the world, 2425 feet in height. That means in 1000 years, it will be 2426 feet tall, but of course we won’t be around to see that.
There are three Sequoia groves in Yosemite. Sequoias are the largest living things on the planet, with some reaching 300 feet in height, living for 3,000 years.
At 4000 feet high, El Capitan is the largest block of granite in the known world.
Are you ready for your own adventures? We’d love to come along. And remember, your purchase of our National Park Collection helps support preservation and restoration of America’s Treasures.
Yosemite Blanket photos: Allie Taylor @alliemtaylor