The brand new Cascade Crest Mountaineering Boot is the brainchild of Danner and Oregon State Park Rangers like Melissa “Mo” Czinger, a 43-year-old ranger who has labored for the parks for 15 years.
Czinger relies out of the West Columbia River Gorge—about 30 miles from Portland and the Danner company headquarters. In spring 2021, Danner staff approached Czinger and her colleagues about collaborating on a brand new boot design.
“They wished a boots-on-the-ground perspective as to what our dream boot could be, in addition to one thing that will match our uniform necessities,” she stated. Park rangers should put on neutral-toned boots with leather-based uppers, Czinger stated, to guard their toes throughout park upkeep work.
And Oregon requires numerous park upkeep.
There are greater than 200 state park properties in Oregon, a few of that are among the many hottest in the USA. Every year, greater than 50 million individuals go to the 113,000-acre system, reserving a whopping 3-million tenting nights, in response to the Oregon Parks and Recreation Division.
The state is understood for being moist—annual precipitation can complete 200 inches on the western slopes of the Cascade Vary. Oregon’s local weather and geography are various and unpredictable, and the identical is true for its parks.
At Valley of the Rogue State Park, for instance, temperatures are heat and the park sees little snowfall. Pilot Butte State Scenic Viewpoint is a distinct story. Located in Bend, the park in some years could be pummeled by winter storms that deposit anyplace from a light-weight dusting to greater than a foot of snow over the course of a day.
Consolation with swiftly altering climate and situations is a prerequisite for Oregon State Park Rangers.
This demanding atmosphere is strictly why Danner, which was based almost a century in the past to make boots for loggers and outdoorspeople, turned to native public land managers when it got here time to design its newest climbing boot.
Czinger and different park rangers in her unit met with Danner product designers on a collection of digital calls to offer enter. For Czinger, who spends as much as seven hours on her toes and might put in 20,000 steps in the course of the summer season visitation season, the boots wanted to be comfy, supportive, light-weight, and importantly, waterproof. “We’re generally actually strolling by a stream,” she stated.
The completed product delivers on these fronts and extra.
The very first thing you discover whenever you slide into the Cascade Crest boots is their sturdy full-grain leather-based, which has been subjected to six rigorous high quality checks. Subsequent, you observe the boots’ cushioned footbeds, produced from recycled rubber, with a final that provides loads of room to your forefeet to splay.
The Cascade Crest Mountaineering Boots function a water-resistant, breathable GORE-TEX® liner to maintain toes dry in moist or muddy situations, in addition to Vibram® textured outsoles to expertly grip trails and ice and snow—one other consideration park rangers advocated for.
Within the Gorge, “we have now areas the place it may be sandy and dry—like down at Rooster Rock the place there’s an enormous sandy seaside and sand island…or it may be that actually moist, damp atmosphere the place it’s raining on a regular basis,” Czinger stated. “We additionally get numerous ice and snow right here within the Gorge.”
Certainly, the boots are made for navigating every kind of environments, simply as Oregon State Park Rangers do. “In case you’re going to be right here working—or exploring—you want boots that span the hole,” Czinger added.
The Cascade Crest boots are handmade within the U.S. on the model’s Portland, Oregon manufacturing facility, they usually function the model’s signature fashionable match and heritage really feel.
And whereas they’re characteristically constructed to final, Danner acknowledges that even the highest-quality supplies put on out after years of repeated use. That’s why the Cascade Crest are eligible for Recrafting.
The service works like this: Prospects use a web-based evaluation to see if their boots are eligible for recrafting; if the boots are eligible, Danner then rebuilds or re-soles the pair by hand.
Recrafting lets out of doors fans lengthen the lifetime of their boots and helps maintain supplies out of landfills. It’s a win-win. Go to the Danner web site to be taught extra.
The Cascade Crest—named for the mountain vary that cleaves the western third of Oregon state—can be found in a full vary of males’s and girls’s sizes, and are coated by the model’s money-back assure.
In case you aren’t blissful along with your buy otherwise you discover your boots are faulty in any manner, Danner gives a 365-day guarantee throughout its total footwear line!
