Geoffrey Holstad: Inner-view

Geoffrey Holstad is an artist, creative director, plein air graphic designer and citizen meteorologist. He is currently daylighting as an apparel graphic designer at Patagonia in Ventura, California. By moonlight, he is the co-founder and director of Cabin-Time, a roaming creative residency to remote places.

What do you have for breakfast?
Huevos rancheros from Farmer and the Cook (Ojai, California) and 100 cups of gas station coffee, consumed outdoors.

What are you doing at Patagonia?
I am the in-house apparel graphic designer at Patagonia. I design new tee/hat graphics, help curate the other amazing artists that we work with, and assist with print production work. I cannot imagine a more inspiring, authentic, eclectic, rewarding place to work. I am very proud to work with such an amazing group of friends who care so much about radically responsible business, and for our planet.

I am also a board member on Patagonia’s new Environmental Media Grants Council, responsible for funding radical, grassroots filmmakers and creatives devoted to protecting the environment.

Conquerors of the useless!

How did you end up working for Patagonia?
Leading up to the offer from Patagonia, I did freelance illustration, hand-lettering, design, and creative consulting for a little over five years, much of which was for the outdoor industry. I worked with a lot of clients like Poler, Stussy, Dakine, Merrell, etc. which gave me a little bit of momentum in the outdoor/skate/surf apparel worlds. I also wrote for the super fun blog Cold Splinters, through which I met a lot of great people which helped that snowball along.

As I became more and more devoted to Cabin-Time, a personal project that accrues no money (by design), and less so to paying commercial work, it became increasingly apparent that I would need some steady income to pay student loans, and keep the lights on.

I left Michigan for Southern California in the winter of 2013, for a full-time design gig at Patagonia.

Why are you doing the Cabin-Time residency thing?
Cabin-Time is a roaming creative residency to remote places. I started Cabin-Time in December of 2011 with designer Ryan Greaves and photographer Colin McCarthy, and we (now a crew of six working creatives) have since hosted five residencies and over 40 artists from around the world.

Cabin-Time has been the most rewarding and important project of my life, and keeps getting better. I spend much of my 5-to-9 working with my best friends to make this project work.

We are embarking on our sixth residency at the end of this summer, this time, to an off-grid homestead in Northern Idaho.

That Thalia catalog you did a while back is the funnest freaking catalog I’ve ever seen. Did they give you total creative freedom or what?
Corey at Thalia got in touch with me to design a tee for the shop in 2012, and then followed up with that catalog project leading up to the 2012-13 holiday season. I did indeed have freedom to do pretty much what I wanted with the cover, and hand-lettered and illustrated some assets for the inside. I also did a little interview with Corey for print in the catalog as well.

Thalia’s great!

Aside from C street and the surf in general, what are some unexpected joys to living in Ventura?
I actually live 16 miles up the mountain in the tiny town of Ojai with my girlfriend and fellow Patagonia designer Sarah Darnell.

Foraged blood oranges, condors, black sage, hot springs, bouldering, Pine Mountain, sunshine, great vegetarian food, swimming holes, baby coyotes, Beatrice Wood, and crystals. 

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Instagram: @geoffreyholstad
geoffreyholstad.com
cabin-time.com
patagonia.com

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Horn Tootin' Time!

The world is upside down when a long-standing media giant magazine like ours gets blogged about by young hip upstarts like Without Walls and The Athletic.

If you don't want to read their whole stories, you can just enjoy these pulled quotes from them.

"Watch out girl so you don't get cactus butt!" - The Athletic

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Also, The Athletic made some awesome socks with us. Each pair you buy comes with the summer issue of Stay Wild!

Ground Score

Foraging in the Mud and Dirt Outside Seattle

By Kiliii Fish

Seduction has a scent.
It wafts, languorous and alluring,
until the breeze blows it my way, and I am smitten.
It’s the fiery scent of desert, mixed with salty rivulets
running off a mermaid emerging from the sea.
The smell is also oilier than that, and it’s sizzling dangerously from a wok filled with manila clams several inches from the lens of my camera.

“I think we might have added a few too many Thai bird chilies," notes Langdon Cook, my new favorite chef and wild food forager of the Pacific Northwest. He tastes some and adds, “It’s the perfect amount of heat for someone who actually loves spice.”

He’s right. My body is a bit overwhelmed with the intense flavor and contrast to the cold torrential rain on the mud flats we just walked triumphantly through with clams and oysters in hand. I’ve never tasted anything so good in my life, especially flavored with hunger sauce after the long afternoon. Forget girlfriends and kids and other things that are supposedly worth the effort. I’m in it for the wild edibles.

Langdon Cook is the anti-celebrity celebrity. While wild edible foods are nothing new (ask our ancestors), Langdon is the humble spearhead of an authentic adventure-into-gourmet-cuisine movement in the United States. His book, Fat of the Land, is an adventure diary of someone who loves fresh real food so much he even learned to freedive and spearfish to pursue lingcod for the table!

Cook doesn’t eschew the gourmet favorites though. His new book, The Mushroom Hunters: On the Trail of an Underground America, is his story of venturing “into the woods with the iconoclasts and outlaws who seek the world’s most coveted ingredient … and one of nature’s last truly wild foods: the uncultivated, uncontrollable mushroom.”

The perfect moment for stinging nettles has passed. My feet remember this because I unfortunately chose to go picking with Langdon in my sandals when the little guys were just a foot tall and easy to miss when walking about in the forest understory. But what I remember much more than the momentary stinging sensation is the creamy and earthy taste of nettle pesto. Langdon’s recipe for this magic can be found, along with lots of others, on his blog, fat-of-the-land.blogspot.com.

Sometimes you can thwart the inevitability of the seasons by going up in elevation, such as with fern fiddleheads. We chased them up from the riverlands into the evergreens. In the west, our prize is the Lady Fern, a classic light green fern. In the east, it’s the gigantic Ostrich Fern. We passed a multitude of ferns that looked about right, but for discerning tastebuds, you’ll want the fiddleheads that haven’t unfurled and remain covered in a bit of brown fuzz.  

Langdon was a real stickler for the quality and choice of oysters in the raw. Since we marched out there in muck boots during a good tide, we took our time to look for picturesque oysters that resembled little fists rather than long scoops or ones that grew in odd shapes. Thanks to the help of Bainbridge Island Parks and Recreation, we had our pick of the prime oysters near Dosewallips State Park. The little ones were delicious when shucked and eaten raw mixed with a mignonette of champagne vinegar. We barbecued the bigger ones and added butter or bacon when they opened.

For manila clams, you need only your hands or a three-pronged garden tool. Remember to check local regulations for harvest openings and closures.

See more of Kiliii Fish's work HERE>>>