Published February 1, 2001 12:00AM
Go figure. Having borne for a thousand years the same relationship to fashion that the tater has to gastronomy, the lowly clog is now the hottest ticket in jockware. Merrell Performance Footwear has sold more than a million slip-ons since launching its line in May 2000, and most every other outdoor footwear firm, from Vasque to Salomon, offers clogs this season for your every need. But one company is poking fun at the backless fad. Last fall, technical-boot purveyor Montrail unveiled the world’s first mountaineering clog. The VerClog, according to marketing director Boo Turner, is a Montrail Verglas technical alpine boot surgically altered by a cobbler. “It has a classic wood lasting board, so it’s completely rigid for technical ascents and crampon techniques, such as frontpointing,” she says. For reasons of public safety it’s probably a good thing that (1) the VerClog is actually a spoof, (2) there’s only one pair, and (3) it isn’t for sale. On the other hand, it’s a pity: If the current footwear mania reaches its inevitable conclusion and clog dancing sweeps the après-ski scene, the VerClog would kick some serious butt.
SURFERS HAVE LONG PRAYED to Mother Nature for heavenly waves. Some have even burned boards on sacrificial beach bonfires. But this winter, one SoCal environmental group is placing its hopes in the power of human ingenuity.
Back in September, members of the Surfrider Foundation lowered 120 fourteen-ton sandbags off a barge anchored at Dockweiler State Beach near LAX. Their goal: the nation’s first artificial reef designed to jack up surfable waves. Nobody knows how well the fake break will work, but the big test is expected in January and February. If the planet does what it’s done for the last few eons, powerful northern Pacific storms will crank out stacks of swells that will speed across the ocean and eventually spill over the seven-foot-deep reef as though it were a natural sandbar, hopefully creating perfect A-frame peaks on top. “I don’t have a crystal ball,” says Pratte’s Reef designer David Skelly, a coastal engineer and owner of Skelly Engineering. “But I know it’s going to produce a surfable wave.”
Whether the waves show up or not, a government ruling that helped finance the reef has already made environmental history. In the mid-1980s, the California Coastal Commission, a state regulatory agency, allowed Chevron to build an oil-pipeline jetty off the town of El Segundo, but told the company it would have to make amends if the project diminished local waves. In 1994, the commission decided it had, and the oil company paid Surfrider $300,000. Pratte’s Reef is the result. “This means that waves deserve the same protection as redwood trees,” says Surfrider executive director Christopher Evans.
The group has opted to study Pratte’s cultural and environmental impacts before pursuing any additional reef projects. Skelly, however, sees a day when fake breaks dot the globe. Two others, installed last year at Narrowneck on Australia’s Gold Coast and in 1999 at Cables Station on Australia’s West Coast, are performing with mixed results. But Skelly, an avid surfer, is still stoked. “This takes surfing into the 21st century,” he says. “It allows us to consider making surf spots that mimic classic breaks like Pipeline and Malibu. It opens a whole new field of opportunity for the sport.”
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THOSE NUTTY RUSSIANS. Who else would try to jump-start a half-frozen body with a hypo full of EDTA—a white crystalline acid commonly used to treat lead poisoning and known around most households as good old-fashioned sodium ethylenediaminetetraacetate? Kyrill Ivanov, a researcher at St. Petersburg’s Pavlov Institute of Physiology, claims he has discovered a method of resuscitating hypothermic subjects without rewarming their bodies. By injecting his patients—thus far, very pissed-off rabbits and rats, chilled in ice water—with EDTA, Ivanov managed to flush the excess calcium that builds up in cold-weakened cells and restart the shivering reflex. But Ken Zafren, a member of the board of the Wilderness Medical Society, is skeptical about EDTA’s efficacy with humans. “Whenever you move important electrolytes around the body, it could have unintended consequences,” he says. Still, if Ivanov’s hoped-for human trials pan out, a syringe of EDTA may one day join that space blanket in your winter survival kit. Or nyet.
