In January, the Outdoor Foundation, the
nonprofit arm of the Outdoor Industry As-
sociation, shared some gloomy statistics.
According to its annual survey, fewer than
20 percent of Americans were recreating
outside at least once a week, working out to
an estimated billion fewer outdoor activi-
ties a year compared with a decade earlier.
Just under half of the population, the orga-
nization estimated, was not participating in
outdoor recreation at all.
“Outdoor participation,” the survey also
found, still skewed slightly male and more
than slightly white. Over all, a “historical
downward trend” indicated that “Ameri-
cans will likely continue spending less time
outdoors” partly because of “work and fam-
ily demands as well as technology and cost
of entry.”
As many of these Americans would soon
find out, preferring not to go outside is quite
a different thing from being told to stay in-
side. As official and de facto lockdowns
dragged on, and something like a consensus
about the relative safety of outdoor activity
emerged, an indoor country found itself
suddenly, and rather urgently, drawn out.
One way to tell the story of the pandemic
is through its shortages. Early and ongoing
shortages of personal protective equipment
underscored the threat of the virus and how
woefully unprepared the United States was
to confront it. Subsequent stockpiling — of
toilet paper, canned food, weapons — re-
vealed the strange and complicated ways
Americans process disasters. Facing wide-
spread business closures and stay-at-home
orders, customers looking to buy home fit-
ness equipment, grooming supplies or vid-
eo game consoles ran up against shortages
and back orders.
Already, summer is oozing by, and the un-
certainty of autumn is creeping closer. Out-
door pools and trampolines were an early
warning sign. Bait and tackle spiked in
April. Now, it’s a mad rush for outdoor gear.
All of it.
“For us, it’s been a bit of a mirror of the
human condition,” said Paul Calandrella, a
merchandising manager at REI. First, he
said, people came for survival gear: freeze-
dried food, water filtration and backup
power supplies. “They surprised us out of
the gate.”
There was also a bike rush, which caused
shortages that began in March and have ex-
tended, for some brands, into next year.
Next to run low were kayaks and stand-up
paddle boards. Soon, running shoes were
picked over. Sales at outdoor retailers were
up almost across the board, with a few ex-
ceptions in specialized categories (indoor
climbing gear, for example). Next up:
camping gear. In the space of a few months,
outdoor retailers went from solving a mar-
keting problem to wrestling with supply
chain problems.
“We’re probably in the early days of feel-
ing some constraints on tents, sleeping
bags and camping furniture,” Mr. Calan-
drella said. “One place that really caught us
off guard was backpacking food.”
Freeze-dried food and camp fuel suppli-
ers, already cleaned out by prepper-minded
customers months before, were confronted
with “extraordinary levels of demand” from
actual backpackers looking to escape into
the wilderness. “It was whiplash.”
Mountain House, a popular freeze-dried
food brand, has a warning on its website:
“Due to increased demand, many of our
products are out of stock.” An upscale com-
petitor, Good To-Go, founded by the deco-
rated chef Jennifer Scism and her husband,
David Koorits, has paused sales through its
website while it tries to catch up with orders
from retailers. The company has increased
its staff by more than 10 percent; after an
early spring surge followed by a brief lull,
August orders are five times as large as
they were last year.
Some sought-after items suggest that
people may also be camping in their own
backyards. Hammocks, after a few mysteri-
ously slow years, are back in high demand.
Powered coolers are hard to keep in stock.
Good To-Go has noted particular demand
for some of its less eclectic foods, such as
chili and pasta. “Food that would also be kid
friendly,” Mr. Koorits said.
Moosejaw, the outdoor retailer acquired
by Walmart in 2017, has been looking for
new suppliers for tents and camp furniture,
two categories where sales more than dou-
bled this year; new birders have depleted
the stock of popular binocular models.
Customer moods have changed accord-
ingly.
“Generally speaking, with these more
considered purchases, people do their
homework, and they’ll come to us having al-
ready picked out a product,” said Eoin Com-
erford, Moosejaw’s chief executive. “With
some of these supply chain constraints,
people are coming to us and saying, ‘Do you
have a bike?’ ”
Helen Johnson-Leipold is the chairman
and chief executive of Johnson Outdoors,
which owns the camping gear brand Eure-
ka, a backpacking stove company Jetboil
and the boat brands Old Town and Ocean
Kayak, among others. “Back in March, we
didn’t have a picture of how it would turnout,” she said. “We had more cancellations
than we had new orders.” At the same time,
in response to the spread of Covid-19, John-
son Outdoors was keeping many office and
factory workers at home.
By the end of April, however, interest had
resumed. “Usually, with significant orders
we have a little bit of lead time,” Mrs. John-
son-Leipold said. Not this time. Demand for
boats — tandem kayaks stood out as a sur-
prising example — was “through the roof,”
with orders soon outpacing production.
People were fishing more, or taking it up for
the first time. Later, especially as public
lands began to reopen, demand for campinggear followed; Mrs. Johnson-Leipold sus-
pects that, if current trends continue, Eure-
ka and Jetboil could soon be dealing with
back orders, too.
For much of the outdoor recrea-
tion industry, this is generally
good news: lots of people buying
lots of things, potentially finding
hobbies or forming habits that
will last for years. “The partici-
pation rate will grow,” Mrs.
Johnson-Leipold said.
Outdoor recreation is, of
course, seasonal, and nobody is
quite sure what’s going to happen
when winter comes. REI, for example,
is reconsidering what its stores will look like
come fall, when customers would normally
expect to see store displays filled with gear
for ski and snowboard outings that, this
year, could be risky or impossible.
Shortages also have consequences. A lot
of outdoor gear is produced overseas, or-
dered a year ahead and sold seasonally,
meaning some sold-out items won’t re-
appear until 2021. As with bikes, however,
many of the first products to sell out are
more affordable and practical options — a
stark reminder that some of the industry’s
underlying problems are the same as they
were in January.
“The dampening effect is real,” said Kenji
Haroutunian, a consultant and diversity
and inclusion advocate for the outdoor in-
dustry. Outside is free, as plenty of enthusi-
asts will insist, but outdoor gear can be ex-
pensive, even in the best of times. As
Covid-19 continues to spread, many for-
merly social activities have been reduced to
individual or family pursuits, leaving
would-be participants without access to the
people and communities that could other-
wise welcome them. “Indoor climbing, for
example, is more diverse than outdoor,” Mr.
Haroutunian said, but gyms are closed,
“and that’s cutting off a chain of new climb-
ers.”
Mr. Haroutunian is cautiously optimistic.
Close-to-home recreation is on the rise
around diverse urban centers. Lots of out-
doors companies are hiring, and he’s heard
that larger general interest retailers are
ramping up investments in recreational
gear, some of it more affordable than what
you might find at REI. It’s an opportunity to
be seized or blown. “When times are good,
people forget that you have to invest in
maintaining the future,” he said.The Outdoors Beckons, but the Gear Is on Back Order
By JOHN HERRMANFull of anxiety and pent-up
energy, consumers confound
the recreation industry.
NATURE IS
FREE, BUT AN
ENTHUSIAST’S
EQUIPMENT IS
CERTAINLY
NOT.ELIZABETH D. HERMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESJEREMY AND CLAIRE WEISS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESCamping gear, top, is in high
demand but is hard to find this
summer, even for those whose
destination is the backyard.
Likewise, inflatable pools,
above, have become newly
coveted during the pandemic.D2 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 2020
What if the answer to “where to live now” is
actually “lots of places” and “kind of no-
where”?
Kibbo is a new entry in the booming busi-
ness of American life in vans. It rents vans
to its members and also creates communi-
ties for them to engage with.
It plans to start with five wilderness loca-
tions in which its vans can park. Its first, ex-
pected to open in September, include Ojai
and Big Sur in California; Zion in Utah; and
the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, home of
Burning Man. These locations — you could
call them campsites? Or... trailer parks?
— have a central hub, or clubhouse, de-
signed to feel like co-living space. There will
be Wi-Fi, bathrooms, a kitchen with shared
food.
The other upside? Members lease these
mobile homes, with all-access membership
and Mercedes-Benz Sprinter four-wheel
drive cargo van rentals starting at about
$1,500 per month.
Marian Goodell, the chief executive of
Burning Man, owns her San Francisco
apartment but has been living in a bor-
rowed Kibbo van for the past several weeks,
test-driving the lifestyle.
“Before Covid, this was an interesting
idea,” Ms. Goodell said. (She was parked
just outside of Grand Rapids, Mich.) “But
now, this crisis is going to create more mi-
cro-communities.”
Next year, the company plans to add five
urban locations in San Francisco, Los Ange-
les and Silicon Valley. Members may come,
go and return as they wish.
Much of the United States is mobile al-
ready, though in very different ways. The
country has a long-established network of
R.V. parks where people can vacation or live
semipermanently. And the Sturgis annual
motorcycle rally will rev on this year start-
ing Friday, despite local opposition; last
year it brought nearly half a million motor-
cycle enthusiasts to Sturgis, a town of 7,000
in South Dakota.
Then there are the many darker aspects
of our current life on wheels: Many cities
are in the midst of a growing homelessness
crises, with tens of thousands of people in
America living in vans or cars out of desper-
ation. (In Los Angeles alone, 16,500 home-
less people were living in cars in 2019.)
This year, the City Council in Berkeley,
Calif., grappling with people sleeping in
vans overnight in commercial districts,
voted to try a program of permits for
overnight use of city lots.
This stands in opposition to the Insta-
gram-friendly influencer version of #van-
life — vintage Volkswagen buses with cute
curtains, California sunsets, wide-brim
hats, where what’s going on after the pic-
tures are taken is a bit unclear.
“It’s really difficult to be in a van, in a
city,” said Colin O’Donnell, the founder of
Kibbo. We were actually speaking in one of
his vans, parked on a San Francisco street
in a perpendicular spot. He sat in the pas-
senger seat, swiveled backward. There
were cork floors and a small kitchenette be-
tween us, with a little fridge, a little stove.
It’s difficult even for people who have
other housing. At one point in our chat, a
Volkswagen pulled into the spot next to us
and then, spying us, the driver did a double
take and quickly backed out. Mr. O’Donnell
is aiming for the laptop warrior set, not re-
tirees.
“There’s a snowbird demographic that’s
not really the demographic we’re looking
at,” he said. Kibbo members “are working.
They’re creating. They’re people interested
in participating in the city at large.”
Mr. O’Donnell is already a member of a
co-living community; he has about a dozen
roommates in a converted Victorian house,
which partly inspired the idea. Along with
Monday night group dinners, book clubs
and agreements on quiet hours, there are
also semipublic events like open-mic nights
and political talks.
Kibbo sounded appealing for a certain
type of childless extrovert. I asked Mr.
O’Donnell if he thought his new business
had a borderline dystopian quality. Cities
are now so expensive that even people with
decent jobs live in vehicles, traveling the
wilderness? “Dystopian and utopian are
close kins,” he said. The freedom to choose
is the difference, he added.
He was also a founder of LinkNYC, a com-
pany that converted pay phones to Wi-Fi
hot spots in New York City. (The company
was championed by city government; was
criticized for overserving the richest partsof the city, and for people using its web
browsers in public, which were then turned
off; and was often regarded as a menace to
privacy for its cameras and potential data
tracking, though the company said it did not
track users.)
“It got me thinking, what if we could
change more than just pixels?” Mr. O’Don-
nell said. “I started thinking about dynamic
cities.” Life on wheels is his solution to the
high cost of city living. Though real estate
costs are now undergoing their own trans-
formation, the housing crisis continues.
(Average rent for a San Francisco one- bed-
room: $3,280.).
He’s pitching Kibbo as a cheaper, more
flexible alternative to paying rent and an
easy way for cities to add housing. If people
just lived in vehicles — or “mobile bed-
rooms,” as he called them — you could build
a “house” as easily as parking a car.
The pandemic, he said, has made negoti-ating with commercial landowners much
easier. For beleaguered resorts and ghost
town corporate campuses, he’s pitching a
Kibbo site as a new kind of reliable tenant.
The pandemic is also bringing new peo-
ple to populate those vans. Mr. O’Donnell
said interest was coming from all sorts of
people who were suddenly working from
home. “People are spending so much
money on this product that’s outdated and
undesirable,” he said. “It’s starting to look
more like a prison like you’re stuck in, espe-
cially after four months of quarantine.”
Ysiad Ferreiras, 36, is eager to sign up.
Mr. Ferreiras is originally from the Bronx
but has been living in a San Francisco apart-
ment for the past three years, working at a
political technology company. “It would al-
low me to try out different cities, if I’m con-
sidering a move,” he said. “It would make it
easier for me to present as someone cur-
rently living in a place.”
Kyrié Carpenter, a 34-year-old anti-age-
ism activist and coach, who also lives in San
Francisco, plans to join. She already has a
Sprinter van she calls Le Rêve (“the
dream,” in French). During the pandemic,
she and her partner have been on the road,
working remotely and living mostly out of
the van.
“Stealth camping” in cities has always re-
quired some strategizing, she said. “We
look like a plumber,” she said, since her van
doesn’t have side windows, which helps, but
finding a safe, flat parking spot isn’t always
easy. They’ve learned through trial and er-
ror that parking on a hill makes for a rough
night’s sleep.
Ms. Carpenter, who also rents an apart-
ment in San Francisco with roommates,
said she liked the idea of not being attached
to any one place or ever needing to own
property. “I grew up in Florida, and my
mom’s a Realtor. We had a front seat to the
housing market crash,” she said.
Kibbo, she added, could help make the
sense of freedom that comes with van life a
more permanent thing. (Members with
their own vans will pay about $1,000 a
month to have access to clubhouses.)
Mr. O’Donnell said the pandemic acceler-
ated his timeline for the business, with pre-
orders underway and the first communities
opening by Sept. 1 (there is already a wait
list). Kibbo, named after a camping, craft-
ing and world peace movement in 1920s
England, is far from a proven concept.
But Ms. Goodell, from Burning Man, said
she was excited about Kibbo’s concept. In
her point of view — and she should know
something about gatherings — the pan-
demic has increased the desire for people to
connect safely in smaller groups within
their cities or on the road.
She plans to send feedback to Mr. O’Don-
nell about living out of the Kibbo van when
she gets home. The biggest challenge so
far? The lack of a bathroom. She has been
using a marine toilet and a portable solar-
powered two-gallon pouch often used in
camping. For her, that’s fine. “The experi-
ence reminds me very much of Burning
Man,” she said.Rethinking How to Live a Little in a Mobile World
IMAGES VIA KIBBOTop, a promotional photo of a
Mercedes-Benz Sprinter from
the van rental company Kibbo.
Above, a rendering of a parking
lot transformed into a Kibbo
community with a clubhouse.By CANDACE JACKSON‘It’s really difficult to be in a van, in a city,’ says Colin O’Donnell, the founder of Kibbo.
An article last Thursday about the soprano
Renée Fleming referred incorrectly to the vocal
range of Susan Graham. She is a mezzo-so-
prano, not a soprano.CORRECTION