The Weekly - May 5, 2020 - 6

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# W E A R E C O M M U N I T Y

Performance
way beyond
the mountain

Vision Quest

A whirlwind effort to deliver goggles to the
frontlines has galvanized the snowsports world.
By Helen Olsson
ON SATURDAY MORNING, MARCH

28, Jon Schaefer, the general manager of Berkshire East ski area
in Massachusetts and a former
Middlebury ski racer, opened
an email from a New York City
emergency room doctor asking for
ski goggles for frontline medical workers. Doctors and nurses
were quickly running out of face

shields. Schaefer sent out an email
blast to his contacts and was soon
inundated with offers. On Sunday,
Schaefer created a tracking
spreadsheet and enlisted Gregg
Blanchard, an exec at Inntopia, to
launch a website that would connect donors with medical centers
in need. "By Monday morning, this
thing blew up," Schaefer says. "It

6 THE WEEKLY / OUTDOOR RETAILER SUMMER 2020

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B O O T H

was like we were inside a balloon,
and things were expanding in every direction." Just 60 hours from
that first email, Goggles for Docs
had shipped 1,600 goggles to the
frontlines in seven states.
With the snowsports industry
and sidelined skiers and riders
stepping up in force, the grassroots nonprofit has delivered
nearly 37,000 goggles to frontline
workers at 1,000 hospitals in all
50 states, including several Native
American reservations. Fueling the effort, Olympic ski racer
Mikaela Shiffrin posted about
Goggles for Docs on her social
media feeds in those first few days.
"My family is a ski-racing family,"
Schaefer says. "I probably have
only one or two degrees of separation from Mikaela."
Schaefer set up a drop-off box
at New York's Catamount, another resort owned by his family.
To date, some 350 drop-off boxes
have been set up at retailers like
Alpin Haus in Clifton Park, New
York, and Joe's Sporting Goods
in St. Paul, Minnesota, as well as
at shuttered ski areas like Howelsen Hill in Steamboat Springs,
Colorado, and Angel Fire in
New Mexico. And Chris Kratts,
host of the PBS Kids series Wild
Kratts, did a PSA on how best to
sanitize and package up goggles
for the frontlines.
Nurses and doctors like goggles
because they offer a protective
seal, shielding them from the
airborne coronavirus. Snowsports
goggles are designed to offer

"ABOUT 10 DAYS IN,
WE CROSSED INTO
THE MOTOCROSS
WORLD. NOW WE'RE
ABOUT TO CROSS
INTO THE HORSE
RACING WORLD."
-Jon Schaefer,
Goggles for Docs

daylong ventilation even when
ripping powder on a stormy day, so
they work just fine in the relatively
mild weather conditions inside
a hospital. Slightly tinted lenses,
evidently, perform under indoor
fluorescent lights, though Burton
swapped out mirrored lenses for
amber ones on the batch of Anon
goggles it donated.
Other brands including Marker,
Smith, Scott, Briko, Dragon, and
Julbo scoured their inventories
and shipped out the protective
eyewear, while thousands of
individuals dug through closets
and drawers to find goggles for the
cause. Other companies like Fox
Racing, makers of motocross goggles, donated a pair for every pair
purchased. "About 10 days in, we

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