Feathered Friends Blog
They are finally here: a wide version of our bestselling Flicker Quilt sleeping bag, AND a kids edition!
Take a look at them on our website!
Here is a little history on how the Flicker family of bags came to be.
Two years ago, we launched the Flicker series of down quilt sleeping bags. They quickly became favorites of our staff and adventurers of all types searching for a light bag that could meet a wide variety of needs.
The Flicker was a long time in the making. Our designers are always exploring ways to not only make traditional bags even better but also to create new designs. Their work has resulted in a wide range of bags, from the Penguin and Condor sleep systems to expedition bags for the coldest climates and the innovative and unusual Spoonbill. The quilt-style bag was an area of increased interest for outdoor enthusiasts looking for lightweight but adaptable insulation, so we began experimenting with designs that maximized versatility in a unique and effective way.
Planning for Mount Rainier isn’t just about gear, food, people, and conditions; we also have to think about permits.
Summertime within Mt. Rainier National Park is truly stunning – from lowland forested trails to the massively glaciated alpine – it offers exceptional recreational opportunities. Being so close to Seattle, however, things get a little complicated if you are looking to experience the beauty by exploring the high mountain or staying overnight.
Feathered Friends is a proud partner of Global Exploration and Recovery LLC (GEaR), a team attempting to bring home three Americans who lost their lives in Greenland in a World War Two plane crash.
In the next few weeks, the Global Exploration and Recovery (GEaR) team will be on their way to Greenland. They will be opening the next chapter of an incredible mission to bring home the wreckage of a US Coast Guard plane that crashed in 1942 and became buried inside a glacier. The saga of the multiple downed planes and rescue attempts are documented in the gripping New York Times best seller, Frozen In Time by Mitchell Zuckoff.
GEaR’s part of the story began in 2012, when a team was assembled for the first reconnaissance mission to try to find the missing plane. Their efforts were soon dubbed the Duck Hunt, after the name given to the lost Coast Guard seaplane. Over the last four years new teams have gone back, and this year GEaR is equipped with state of the art technology and a talented team who want to find the rest of the plane and bring home the servicemen.
As we celebrate the 4th of July, we bring you a little reflection on what it means to design and make our gear in the USA.
Seattle has been our home from the beginning. It all started in the basement of our founders’ home, and continues in our factory in the SODO neighborhood of Seattle and our retail space in South Lake Union. While the city has gone through major changes since we started in 1972, our philosophy hasn’t.
To the greatest extent possible, we create each garment, sleeping bag, and comforter at our Seattle facility. Some of our pieces, like the Snowy Owl sleeping bag, take years of training and are completed by only one or two of our specialized sewers. Other items may take less time to sew, but every piece that comes out of our factory receives the highest level of care and attention to detail.
In most cases, each piece is finished with a specific person in mind, their name scrawled across a tag as the item moves from the cutting room to the sewing floor, on to the stuffing station and through inspection.
A trip report by Mark Pugliese on climbing in the Central Alaska Range.
As the plane banked my heart started racing and I thought “This is where the big stuff goes down.” We were flying into the East Fork of the Toke and the mighty West Face of Huntington dominated the window. I was seeing for the first time how truly massive this terrain was. Unfolding below us was an immense alpine playground of endless peaks, lines of ice, and crumbling glaciers. It would be a place to test ourselves and to find what we were both looking for in our climbing; a great adventure.
In late April of this year Nik Mirhashemi and I flew into the Central Alaska Range with plans of climbing some commonly ascended classics as well as hopefully establishing some new routes of our own. With a pattern of warm and unsettled weather we decided to fly into the Tokositna glacier at the base of Mt. Huntington to attempt the Harvard route as a warm up for the trip.