*Editor’s note – We have been sitting on this post for a few weeks now, hoping to present it with the new layout of the site, buttttttt that isn’t happening as quickly as we thought, so we are just rolling with it. There are no rules. Here we go…
If you Google the phrase “chase your dreams” the first major post that comes up is one titled “Don’t Quit Your Job to Chase Your Dreams”. To that we say BLAH. Jordan Hufnagel and James Crowe of adventure outfitter West America must have missed that memo as well because they are doing just that.
Bogged down by wait lists and the monotony of motorcycle and bicycle frame building, they intentionally pressed pause on their careers and decided to hit the road on an “epic motorcycle odyssey from Whistler, BC to Patagonia and back” in search of a little thing called “life”. You may have heard of it, it feels a lot like “living”.
When the good people over at Woolrich got wind of an adventure of this caliber, architected by two skilled, American craftsmen (they still exist ladies!) they approached Jordan and James to help create a “Made in USA” capsule collection inspired by the journey. The collection is comprised of a vest, multi-use poncho/ blanket, waxed canvas motorcycle jacket, and hat. We had the opportunity to see the products first hand at Outdoor Retailer this past summer and we were totally blown away. Luckily, we were able to catch up with Jordan before they hit the road and got the inside scoop on how the whole trip came about. As tough as these guys are, they are super polite and passionate about what they do, so you can only imagine how stoked we are to see them finally head out.
Q. Tell me a little bit about yourself…where did you grow up?
JH. I am from Indiana, born and raised in Indianapolis. That is actually where all of my family still lives except for my sister and myself. I moved away from there when I was 20, then I moved to Austin for a few years before settling in Portland. I’ve been in Portland for the last nine years.
I was a pretty typical kid. My folks never really had much money and they had my sister and I pretty young, so any vacations we went on were camping-related because that was just the cheapest thing to do with kids. My mom went to school for geology, the mid-west is pretty chock full of rad rocks and fossils, so we would just go creek-stomping or canoeing and look for fossils and cool rocks.
Q. How about James? How did you guys become friends?
JH. James grew up in BC and he moved away from there to Laramie, Wyoming, where he went to a fabrication tech school with a focus on automobiles. He got hired right out of there. He is just one of those incredible, naturally talented people, so he got picked up by this rad hot rod shop just outside of Portland. In the two years that he was out there, he became one of the lead fabrication guys on all the jobs and he spent a number of years making cars that were in the half a million to two million dollar range.
He and I met out mountain biking one day. A mutual friend of ours invited me to join them for the day to ride some trails outside of Portland, up until then we had only met a couple times. As far as James knew I was just some bike builder that made fixed gears, which at the time I was making lots of. He wasn’t overly excited when he heard some fixed gear riding kid was going to be joining for the day on some gnarly mountain bike trails, he thought he would be spending his only day off waiting for me all day. Well, what he didn’t know was that I spent most of my life traveling across the states riding BMX. Long story short nobody was waiting around and we had an epic day.
To seal the deal I put him to shame at the river after the ride with a couple swan dives off the biggest cliff there. Eventually we went in on a shop together and we have shared that space for the last five years. Both of us are total workaholics, James even more so than I am. We ended up just being there all hours, working late every night, and just hanging out every single day and became best friends.
Q. What sparked the idea to launch West America?
JH. A few years ago, James had to move back to BC to deal with some personal stuff, and right at that same time, I was super burnt out on making bikes and I realized that I had accumulated all these orders that needed to be met. I had about a two-and-half-year wait on a bike, so that meant I basically had two-and-half-years of solid work to complete in front of me that I had already taken deposits on.
We both kind of realized that we weren’t really getting anywhere with what we actually wanted to be doing, and I was kind of stuck in the middle of something that I wasn’t really sure if I was going to be doing forever. I wanted to try and do all these other things, but I didn’t have any time because I had so many orders. Essentially, we both realized that we needed to make a change. So, I stopped taking bike orders and James stopped taking motorcycle orders and we just said we are done. Then we started planning our trip.
Q. Are you really done with building bikes?
JH. I am sending the last bikes to paint before the trip and after that I am pretty much done with it. It is something that has run its course and I have gotten a lot out of it and I am really stoked that I did it, but I am definitely really excited to do different things. I will probably build quite a few bikes in the future, I have this whole idealistic vision of it where I don’t build bikes for money anymore, I just build bikes for people that I love and surprise them with them as gifts. Not have any pressure, just be able to enjoy it.
In the custom frame building world, when you get deep into it, success is measured by your wait list. You have these guys like Richard Sachs that have a six or seven year wait list, so you are taught that is success. No one ever talks about what it feels like to have that wait list, the weight of it. Not publicly at least. If you build 20 frames a year and you have six years of bikes, that is 120 that you have committed to build. There is some insane pressure.
Q. Who approached who about the Woolrich x West America trip? How did those initial conversations start?
JH. The trip was born out of the idea of change. Gehron Burkholder from Woolrich (he handles all the social media and collaborations) reached out and was just really supportive of what we were doing. James and I worked really hard to make sure that this trip is our trip, so we were not really looking for any sort of sponsorship. But we had the meeting, and they were super nice and really stoked on what we were doing and they wanted to send us some product. We are pretty minimal guys, we aren’t shoppers, and we don’t just buy stuff for the sake of it, but what was really interesting to us was Woolrich’s commitment to manufacturing in the U.S., which we are really passionate about, so that got us thinking about ways to work with them and help grow that movement. We wanted to make sure that this was more of a partnership as opposed to a sponsorship, so we decided that it might be a better idea to actually make something with them, instead of just wearing something they made.
Everyone wins this way, it looks right, it sounds right, and it is real. It’s not just us looking for free products and its not Woolrich trying to tack their name onto a trip–it is all of us having a shared vision and shared goal. We ended up going out to Woolrich and hanging out with them, and really getting to know each other. We spent a lot of time with Karuna Scheinfeld, who is the VP of Design for Woolrich. She is just amazing, a total badass and someone I have really come to love. So after hitting it off with the team, we just decided to go for it and it snowballed into designing an entire line instead just one piece. They were really passionate and so were we, so we were just able to make it happen even though it has only been eight months.
Q. Let’s talk about the capsule collection…
JH. There is a lot to be said for having the Woolrich design office in NYC and having a factory right down the street from that. It really helped speed everything along. All of these products are new, they are not existing products that we re-branded.
Q. Do you have any favorite pieces?
JH. It is really tough. Karuna and I worked really closely on the upper-body pieces, we were always designing them as something that worked together, as a system. I definitely am a vest guy, I wear them non-stop during the fall and transitioning into winter, so that will probably be the piece I wear the most. The jacket is another favorite–it has all these really rad details that really bring it all together.
I had been searching through internet archives of Woolrich and things they had done and I kept finding this printed wool camo and I was literally like “holy crap, this is so rad”. It was all pretty old, I kept emailing pictures to Gehron, like, “We need to to find this. Where is this stuff?” We just went digging in the archives (they have rolls of fabric in the warehouse) and we happened to find eighteen yards of that exact camo just sitting in stack in the corner… and we claimed all of it.
Q. Lets talk about the trip, give me some logistics.
JH. We are planning to ride down the Sierras, making a few stops along the way. We will probably ditch the bikes for a while in Patagonia and go hiking a lot and do some boat trips and kayaking. Paddle around the island. Do some climbing and glacier hopping. We will be camping the whole time as well.
Q. Tell me about the bikes you will be riding? James built both of them right?
JH. He did. They are matching bikes, they are both mid-’90s Honda XR600s, which were the king of the Baja 1000 in the ’90s. Simple, desert race bikes. Big displacement for a dirtbike and just a good all-around bike. They don’t have batteries–they are just kick-start only. There is not a lot that can go wrong with them and they are pretty easy to work on because they were designed as race bikes. James built a new rear frame on the bike so that they could carry our weight and bags. He made new seats for them as well, and had them upholstered by our friend at New Church Moto. He made new tanks for them, so they could carry a 6.5 to 7-gallon capacity of fuel so we have huge range on the bikes. So with that, and the jerry can that is built into the frame, we have over a 450-mile range on the bikes. The air intake is set up really high in the motor through the middle of the tank, so we can go through deep water as well. They are definitely not dirtbikes anymore; they are adventure bikes that we can go off-road with, but also be comfortable cruising down long stretches.
Q. Are you planning on bringing anything special on the road with you?
JH. We are planning to keep it super simple. We will have the Woolrich x West America capsule collection, some baselayers and extra insulation. We will have Topo Designs pants and shorts, which we are really versatile and we are also taking a Poler tent. I also have few “special” things that I will be bringing for good luck. I have a coin from a state fair from 1951 that my grandpa got when he was a kid and he gave it to me a few years ago, and it has been in my pocket ever since. My mom also, unknowingly, also gave me a pocket coin to carry with me and a really sweet card to remind me of her while we are on the road. And I also have a compass that my girlfriend made for me that will be with me all the time.
You can follow their ramble on Woolrich’s Instagram feed (@woolrichinc) or on West America (@wearewestamerica). Good luck and god speed, gentlemen. We will be cheering you on from the sidelines.
xx Jeanine
