LETTER 06

ESSAYS

Obi Kaufmann 08

Jay Carroll 22

Ben Masters 28

CAMPFIRE TALES 32

PUBLISHER / CREATIVE DIRECTOR Chris BrownSENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER Gustav Schmiege

CONTRIBUTING EDITORSObi Kaufmann, Jay Carroll & Ben Masters

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERSDerek Street, Jay Carroll & Ben Masters

STYLING Brad D Hatton

GRAPHICS/ILLUSTRATION Cabel Owen Everitt & Ryan Rhodes / LAND

© 2014 Refueled Magazine. All Rights Reserved. Any commercial or promotional distribution, publishing or exploitation of con-tents, is strictly prohibited unless you have received the express prior written permission from our authorized personnel or theotherwise applicable rights holder.

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CONTENTS

This one was going to be different, but then again, they alwaysare. I’ve gotten used to it. I am Juniper Ridge’s chief storyteller,that means that I’ve been hiking with Hall Newbegin, the founderof our small company, for about ten years and can talk on andon about the very unique way we put the mountains into a bottle.I am one of Juniper Ridge’s wilderness perfumers; I am equalparts drunken poet, amateur naturalist, trail painter, and avidfreak of all things wild of the American West. That being said,I’ve not hiked the Cascades of the Pacific Northwest very much,so when Hall announced that our next Field Lab seasonalfragrance was going to be called Timberline Trail, I was out ofmy head. I know California, I know the fragrance grammar ofglaciers sitting high above the forest at 10,000 feet. I’m lessfamiliar with the solitary, englaciated, ice giants that beginshowing high-mountain trees several thousand feet below whereI am used to finding them.

Hall, our intrepid leader, speaks to why we are headed there:“I grew up in Oregon and spent my summers hiking and back-packing around the lakes and peaks of the Cascades—Mt. Hood,Mt. Jefferson, The Three Sisters…just saying those names bringsa little of their magic into the room for me. That’s what ourperfume is all about. That's my inspiration. When I was a kid it'sjust what we did in the summer, and then as an adult I starteddigging in deeper- learning the names of all the little wildflowers,harvesting wild foods, spending quiet weeks out on the trail.Everything I do in my life now is an expression of that deep,helpless kind of love for the quiet stillness of the outdoors.” FieldLab is Juniper Ridge’s seasonal wilderness perfume, and itdefines the outer, experimental edge of what we do. Producedin extremely small batches, these mountain poems reflect therugged, aromatic landscapes they come from.

It seemed simple enough, we had done it a hundred times before,but never here and never this way. Our quarry now wascapturing the aromatic essence of Mount Hood, Oregon’s tallestpeak. Our first day up over the low-lying glaciers was wroughtwith horizontal sleet and buffeting winds in excess of 80 mph.The weather certainly got in the way of what we thought was ourstraightforward plan to do what we do best: hike all day,harvesting small samples of particularly good-smelling flowersalong the way. Then, beside the evening campfire, we’d useancient techniques of perfume-making to capture it all in abeautiful little bottle of fragrance. But nothing ever goes asplanned with Juniper Ridge.

It truly never has. Juniper Ridge, since its inception in the latenineties, has been about doing everything differently. Hallcame to fragrance through his love of hiking. “I’m a back-packer,” says Hall, “and I’d never buy a perfume or colognefrom adepartment store, but I knew how transformative it was to

crush Black Sage leaves or Mountain Fir needles under my nose.Our connection to these smells is braided into our DNA—it'spaleolithic.” Our atypical approach has always deliveredproducts that reflect the wild place they come from. "Being asmall, independent outfit allows us creative freedom," says Hall."Instead of creating scents synthetically, we make our fragranceswith real stuff from real places, using techniques like distillation,infusion, and enfluerage that date back to the Phoenicians." Ourfragrance extraction techniques only yield a small amount ofusable aromatics on this harvest and therefore, this run will belaunched as a limited-edition. The nature of the botanicals weused in this formula hold onto tightly to their oils.

To keep it simple: we only use the real stuff. We’re the world’sonly wild fragrance company—you can’t buy our materials orfragrance ingredients anywhere because nobody does what wedo and no one works with the plants we work with. The only wayto get our materials is to hop in the van, throw the fragrance stillin back and head up into the mountains. After our first exhausting,frozen day of surviving Oregon’s perilous peak, the dozenpeople who made up the harvesting party on this Field Lab tripdropped down into Elk Meadows for a night of drying out by thecampfire. We only take a small number of trail scouts (as we callour extended family) on the trips. We only ask for an adventurousspirit and an easy-going attitude, and come ready for a bit ofparty—we’re a tight-knit group that tends to get moderatelyrowdy around the evening campfire. What we did not expect oradequately plan for was horizontal sleet. The bitter old mountainseemed to have it out for us.

There were a few trail scouts on the trip who had never beenbackpacking before and were horrified to find out how dynamiclate-summer weather can be. Not so strangely though, theweather on the trail cleared up as soon as the day was done.The dark clouds had moved on as if the mountain just wanted togive us a good initiation before opening up the wildflower fields.I read a poem to the group at the start of each sun-kissed daythere following. The meandering days were then filled with tree-pitch harvesting, wildflower fragrance extraction, campfiredistillations of essential oils under a merciful peak that seemedto be showing off how beautiful and gentle it can be.

“You never feel more alive than you do in the outdoors,” saysHall. “People think of fragrance as being a shallow experiencethat just happens in our nose. It’s so much richer than that! Smellis the oldest of our senses. It bypasses reason and goes straightto the ancient parts of our brains…right to our emotions. Realfragrance stirs up profound, complex things in us that we can’teven begin to understand."

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If that’s what you mean by camping then I’m not sure. What isthe meaning of all this life if it’s little more than working in a box,writing snippy emails, hating your boss and avoiding yoursignificant other? I’m not sure what the point of that is either. Iget a kick out of people who don’t camp — it’s funny to think thatcamping is merely an abstraction of how we all used to actuallyjust live — some of us still live like that under bridges and even inthe luxurious zip codes of Central Park. As a species of thisplanet, I wonder what the hell we’re doing. How is it that we’reso quick to reject where we came from and find a way to be sounhappy in the midst of so many conveniences? As life getsbetter, life gets worse. Why have we forgotten to actuallyphysically look for the answers to the burning questions beforewe give up and log in to Facebook? Listen, I’m not accusinganyone here. I know what it’s like to move from one air-conditioned box to the next. I’m just asking us to rememberthere’s more to it, should we want or need it sometimes. Take afew steps back and rough it. Jump into some freezing cold water,walk to the next town over, or live with nature for a week.

Lately, I’ve come to think point of it all is not actually the point,at all. That notion is a rouse — another of the Universe’sunflinching ironies. Most of us start life with an obliviousconsciousness, cursed by ceaseless questioning and a preferencefor sharp corners, repeatable patterns, quantifiable data andhard, flat ground. As soon as you chip away at the long list ofquestions and the answers start to outweigh the questions, thecurtain falls and the cycle begins again. What was the point? Isthere a point? Shit, it all went by so fast! When I recall incrediblespans of endless boredom as a kid and reflect on the slow painthat life can deliver as an adult, I wonder how could it possiblyseem so fast in retrospect?

I often recall the first time I saw a satellite, slowly rolling aroundour planet at night. Sleeping on the ground in New Mexico bearcountry, I and my barely teenage friends, watched a small blipof light ride through the sky, its path obscured by the twinklingof stars, but moving straight and true as an arrow. If it wasn’tactually magic, it was as close as it gets. I wonder how manytimes that satellite has made it around Earth since then, or if it’seven still there. Maybe some hard quantitative data can bettercommunicate the time that has elapsed. How many blips mayhave coasted across the sky in these last twenty years? I suspectmy perception of time will continue to change as I now find myself

on the precipice of a new great adventure. My wife and I aredue to have a son in just under a month. How will meeting thisworld again through his eyes change the way I see it? What willripple through the universe as he imposes his will upon it? Willhe ever realize that we’re no more than all that dust in the starsof the New Mexico sky, as they turn over and over, condensingand expanding the perception of time for some unwittingwatcher? Will we make it around the sun enough times to showhim how it all works and share with him the overwhelming beautyand grace of the natural world? Is it possible to explain the voidand that despite it’s emptiness we still have to try as hard as wecan? Is it possible to give a gift that big to another person?

All creatures live on similar wheels in this wonderfully austerevoid — each with their own nuances and turning at their ownspeed. The redwood tree predates our existence and presumablyhas a leg up on comprehending the rhythms of the universe. Eachseedling has the potential to live much longer than a human —for hundreds of years! It is one of the largest organisms weknow and is in fact so large that it sustains and powers the livesof many organisms in its vicinity. It too begins, helpless, and mostlikely unaware of its potential — ringless, but a spinning wheelnonetheless. Through the centuries it will solidify its place in thevoid and turn for what seems, to us, an eternity. In all that time,does it ever have a thought? Does it feel the same existentialpanic as we humans? Perhaps it says everything there is to besaid through a stoic and silent harmony with the lives around it.Is it a consciousness evolved into non-consciousness — a happierand less concerned view of the void? Perhaps it is too big to askwhere its place is — it simply is. Where, when, why, how — thoseare concerns for smaller life forms with other burdens.

Perspective is everything. Perspective is perhaps the only thing.It is the key to the machinery of all the things that spin, large andsmall, enlightening and banal. Finding perspective can beelusive. Occasionally it is foist upon us, and we remain compelledto seek it intentionally and often. We are simple creatures andthere is no easier way to find perspective than to literally putyourself in the middle of it — to become powerless in the face ofa mountain or helpless in the middle of a sea. To die and comeback, to fall down and and to rise, this is the rhythm to which theuniverse spins. It’s how I learned and how my father learnedbefore me. It is what all this camping is about. It’s what all thislife is about.

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