Outdoor Retailer - Summer 2016 - 68

Feature .03
all the time. We were starting to feel more comfortable with the business, which was growing.
So we needed more staff and more staff housing and we decided to start looking for our own
place to live." They bought a house 14 miles
away, in Owltown, Georgia. "Real estate here
is a lot better than Charleston. My mother-inlaw is a real estate agent there and she can't believe prices up here."
Neither can thru-hikers from the city, accustomed to bigger gear mark-ups. From 2015 to
2016, according to Georganna, Mountain
Crossing's sales are up about 27 percent. "It's
fun now," she said, "because we've got our own
numbers to compare to. But from when we
took over, I think we're up almost 40 percent."
A steady increase in thru-hikers each year
helps the bottom line. Robert Redford's movie
version of A Walk in the Woods has probably
caused a nice bump, too. But the efforts and
innovations of the Seamons have also been
critical. Long grasping the unique draw of the
in-house shakedown, they've added a "virtual
shakedown" for harder-to-reach customers,
which costs $100, but acts as a rebate for gear

68 OUTDOOR RETAILER

/ Summer 2016

purchased at their store, that can take place on
Google hangout or via a Skype session; a weekly
newsletter (covering topics like leaving no trace
and hiker feeds); a tiny satellite shop 36 miles
down the trail, at a Budget Inn in Hiawassee,
Georgia (for hikers who didn't heed their advice at Neel Gap and want a second chance to
buy, say, trekking poles). They've accumulated
7,000 followers on Facebook-one way that being young helps a business-which is about six
and a half thousand more people than reside
in nearby Blairsville. How? By creating a more
active page and encouraging people to visit it.
Georganna cheerfully shared this with me
while sitting at a picnic bench overlooking
the verdant valley below the shop, just a rock's
throw from the Appalachian Trail she and I had
both walked years before. That's right: I had my
own Mountain Crossings' experience, back in
2003, before the Seamons arrived. I went in for
a quick Snickers bar resupply and, feeling the
wind at my back and the bottomless energy of
a 20-year-old, I kept on trucking.
Every so often, as we spoke, a thru-hiker
would pass us by on his or her way north. I told

Georganna it was tempting to drop everything
and do the Trail-at least some of it-again. "I
don't think we'll ever do the whole A.T. ever
again," she confessed. "There's so much to see,
all these other trails." She and Logan hiked
the Colorado Trail the year after the A.T. and
now have their eye on doing the Camino de
Santiago, in Spain. "But thru-hiking, in general, totally restored my faith in humanity. People
are so nice to you. Humanity is, overall, good."
Indeed. The Seamons have tried to return
the favor with their local community, knowing that Mountain Crossings is important to
the history of the area. "For a long time," she
said, "I think there was no interaction with the
outside world 14 miles away. So we've become
Blairsville chamber members and reconnected with the community down there. When we
print stuff, we use Busy Bee Printing in town.
When we make signs, we use the sign company
in town. Or we promote a restaurant we like
there. It makes you feel more at home to have
the community support you. We plan to extend
that 14-year lease of ours when the time comes.
We love it here." O.R.

http://www.coldpruf.com http://www.coldpruf.com

Outdoor Retailer - Summer 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Outdoor Retailer - Summer 2016