MMC makes Polartec competition finals

The College placed as a finalist in the Polartec “Made Possible” contest, a competition among college outdoor clubs to win a $10,000 grant for a project of their choice.

Polartec is a fabric company based in Lawrence, Mass., that subcontracts with and supplies textiles to outdoor gear companies such as Patagonia, Mountain Hardware, North Face and Marmot.

“They contacted a whole bunch of people who were the heads of outing clubs to see if people were interested,” said Andrew Freeman ’13, a member of the Middlebury Mountain Club (MMC) who spearheaded this project.

But Freeman got involved in a different way. This past summer, he worked for a rockclimbing magazine and became acquainted with a representative from Backbone Media, the company that developed the grant, which Freeman described as “a promotional tool in some ways.”

“I came up with an idea that I’d like to use the money to create, publish and distribute a document that’s a guide to all the outdoor resources and stuff around Middlebury,” said Freeman.  “Basically the premise is there’s ton of cool stuff to do around here including a lot of really good climbing, kayaking, hiking, etc., but when you get here to this school it can be kind of hard to have all the know-how.”

“If you’re not a person that has a ton of initiative in that respect, it can be kind of hard to get into that world,” he continued. “If you show up on campus and you want to go for a hike, its kind of hard to know who to ask. I thought it would be really great to have a document that you get on your first day with your orientation packet that says ‘here’s the stuff to do, here are the people to get in touch with and here’s how you go about it.”
In addition to topographical and other types of maps and written guides to a variety of outdoor activities, the guide also would have included information on environmental ethics.

“Andrew brought his idea to our board for approval, and we decided to support his project because we feel that providing information about outdoor opportunities in the Vermont landscape fit well with the mission of the Mountain Club,” said Pier LaFarge ’10.5, treasurer of the MMC.

After asking the MMC to propose this project in its name, Freeman created a video that serves as both the application and the promotion for the project. He shot and edited the video himself over the course of a couple weeks.

“The beginning starts out with a bunch of voiceovers about how to get to all these places and the point is that it all sounds very convoluted and very difficult to find,” said Freeman.  “The second half of the video is explaining what we want to do with the money.”

A total of 19 schools submitted applications, out of whom four finalists were chosen: Middlebury, Appalachian State University, University of Massachusetts-Amherst and University of Idaho. All four videos were posted on the Polartec Facebook page under the tab “Made Possible” where people could vote once a day to decide the winner.  The voting ended at midnight on Nov. 30 and Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C. was announced as the winner yesterday with 10,900 out of 23,000 votes. Appalachian State will use the grant as seed money for an outdoor activities scholarship program.

The other finalists proposed a variety of projects. The University of Massachusetts wanted to provide adaptive outdoor equipment to allow people with physical handicaps to participate in outdoor activities, and the University of Idaho sought funding for an ongoing service project to remove trash from an abandoned ranch in a wilderness area.

Though the MMC did not win, Freeman appreciated the outpouring of support his proposal received.
“People have been a big help in getting the word out and trying to get people to vote for it,” said Freeman. “The mountain club infrastructure here is great and there are hundreds of people on the mountain club e-mail list.”