Fear and Clothing - TedX
Fear and Clothing - a TedX talk by Loki Gear Co-Founder Seth Anderson
November 6, 2024
Seth talks about he and his big brother Dirk Anderson overcoming fear on high mountains. Together they helped create patented solutions and Loki Gear, a Colorado outdoor clothing company.
tedxspeaker #tedxgj #lokigear #artbysethanderson #grandjunctioncolorado #tedtalk #outdoorclothing
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00:04
I was asked to come talk to you about all things awesome. But I'm not gonna do that.
00:12
I'm gonna talk to you about fear and the fear that my big brother Dirk Anderson and I faced while climbing mountains in Colorado and beyond.
00:24
In 1990, I was 16 years old and my brother, nine years older, decided that we were going to go climb a 14,000 foot mountain above Ouray, Colorado, called Sneffels. I thought that sounds like a nose problem.
00:42
But I learned later that many climbers like me discovered that it's one of the prettiest mountains in Colorado and perhaps the lower United States.
00:52
We went up to Mount Sneffels and camped out and we woke up in the morning and there was frost everywhere and it was way colder than we thought. And we put every shred of clothing we had on and we started hiking through the trees and got up above the basin, into the basin, and the sun came out and we warmed up and we stopped. And we put our clothing, our outer layers in our backpacks.
01:10
We kept climbing up the mountain and we got warm again and we put our middle layers in the in our backpacks. And we get got up and rock climbed up a little bit to the pokey summit just in time to be in shorts and a t-shirt and a blast of blizzard comes from the north side of Sneffels and we ran and ducked and got behind rocks and got our clothing out of our backpacks and the wind was trying to take our clothes away from us. We finally got our clothes on and we hid there. It was too dangerous to go down.
01:47
And the storm eventually passed and we looked around and the snow was glistening everywhere and my brother turned to me and said, Seth, that was scary, but it was awesome.
02:00
And he said, only 500 people in 1990 had climbed all the 14,000 foot mountains in Colorado. And he said, what do you do what do you say? We shake on this and we climb them all together and we did and we agreed. And we started climbing down the mountain and my brother said,
02:16
I have an idea. We kept climbing mountains and we started doing more in the winter and and January of 1997, we went to climb Mount Princeton above Buena Vista and we skied up and we set up a camp below treeline and we started getting up above the alpine up to the ridge.
02:31
It started getting dark and windy and cold to seven below and my brother stopped to get water and he dropped his glove. I ran to go get his glove and I caught it before it went over a cornice ridge and I brought it back to my brother and he stood there pale-faced with fire in his eyes and he said, Seth, that was not awesome.
02:51
So many people have lost their lives or their hands climbing mountains when they drop a glove. I've got an idea. We kept climbing more mountains, not just in Colorado. And a lot of times we'd have to backpack in, carry heavy backpacks, set up camp. And it was always a conundrum as to whether we take our heavy backpack to the top of the mountains or we take a separate little light backpack and we're trying to carry as little as possible.
03:10
Those experiences gave us ideas. In 2005, my brother and I went in May and June and spent a month to go climb the highest point in North America, Denali.
03:42
We got to spend 12 days in an igloo. We skied every day. A storm blasted the summit and no one could climb. We finally got a weather window and we climbed up up the top of Mount Denali and we were facing 40 degree temperatures during the night and up to 80 degrees during the day when the glacier would reflect the sun back.
04:06
The day we summited was 20 below. We got down from the summit, we skied back down to the base. The park rangers at Denali came to us and a group of us and said, guys, a lot of people summited yesterday, but eight people dropped their gloves and they're gonna lose parts of their hands.
04:26
My brother looked at me and said, we have ideas. In 2010, myself and a friend decided we were going to climb a mountain very close to here, the Grand Mesa. And it was St. Patrick's Day of 2010 and we climbed up right above Palisade and got right to the edge and we skied down what's called the Thunderbird.
04:40
It looks like a cross kind of on the northwest corner of the Mesa. We skied down and we got into some powder and it was awesome. Some of the best turns of my life. And going back to the runout shoot, this narrow little skinny shoot, I jumped off a little cliff cornice and I landed and an avalanche broke out, took me down over three cliffs down about 500 feet.
05:15
But instead of burying me, the bottom of the shoot does a little turn and it spit me out over the snow into a tree that I caught by my shoulder and fell down and I looked over the edge to bare boulders 70 feet below a cliff below me and I looked to my belly button and there was the heel of one ski boot and I looked above me and there's the heel of another.
05:40
I had broken both my legs and the avalanche had taken my backpack, my skis, everything from me. I laid there shivering with nothing but my outer shell and a base layer because I was active. I didn't need anything at the time.
05:57
I got rescued. Thank you to modern medicine and helicopters and search and rescue. I'm still here.
06:04
But I sat there and I had an idea. All those ideas, my brother and I started to work on the day we summited Mount Sneffels. We went home and we start sewed up five neck eater hats.
06:20
And but we worked on those and we showed them to friends and I sewed most of them for that seven years and we tried to invent new things and but seven years later we finally figured out to achieve Dirk's idea. We figured out how to make a hat that can open and vent, can make a headband, but if a storm or colder temperatures come upon you or us,
06:49
you can make this into its own face mask. So we kept we applied and got a patent for that and started selling those to friends and family and around the world eventually.
07:02
And then my brother and I kept experimenting and we figured when we were on the side of that mountain, we dropped a glove, why not if we want our body to be this warm, be able to not just cover our wrists, but be able to cover ourselves to our fingertips so that we don't have to remember not able to drop and we can always have our hands ready to be warm if we need them to.
07:17
And some can have options, but you've always got a way to be covered if you need or not. And those extreme temperature changes made us come up with ideas that we can change insulation for our bodies or what's important is 50% of your body heat can escape the top of your head and your neck. So we came up with a way to cover your face up or down or just your neck that is again built into your clothing and all of the layers that we have come up with.
07:58
And we also came up with an idea when we wanted to go to a summit and we didn't want to carry an extra backpack, what we really needed is clothing that can be, well, sometimes warm or protective, but we figured let's make big pockets so we can carry extra stuff. But if the weather changes, uh, and we need that more warmth, we want to be able to carry our jacket and other things with us to a summit or sometimes even just daily.
08:13
We can put all of our layers and have what we need with us on our backs and other stuff. So from facing fear on high mountains and in dangerous situations, we've tried to figure out of the box ways and solutions to face our fears with change.
08:52
Now, my brother and I did eventually in 2019 in August on my birthday of 2019, we did summit all the fourteeners together. It was one of the proudest moments of my life.
09:05
A week later, thank you. We always joked that in all those scrapes and even South American mountains and Mexico, we got into situations we joke with each other, well, we can't die here because we have vowed to climb the fourteeners together. Well,
09:25
so we finished the fourteeners and exactly a week later, my brother went on a motorcycle and was going too fast and went off a cliff and fell 80 feet and he passed away. Five years ago now.
09:38
But we weren't ready as a family and a community to face that fear, but we had to and we have. And we continue to try to look outside of the box and make change and keep doing what we're doing and try new things and we are ever grateful and in need of community and our family and friends locally and we have worked with and continue to
10:06
a world community that helps us make this stuff become a reality and has helped us think outside of the box, face our fears to make change and make things awesome, not just for ourselves, but for other people and each other. And our hope is that we are going to face fears and we're gonna have to come up with out of the box solutions to make things awesome for everyone. Thank you.