Hey everybody and welcome to this Christmas edition of Gear 30 on the Blister Podcast Network.

I'm Jonathan Ellsworth and you can check out everything we're doing and reviewing over at

blisterreview.com.

And, you know, we wanted to give you a little something extra this holiday season, and so tomorrow we will be posting over on our Bikes and Big Ideas podcast channel,

a conversation with Sage Caterbriga-Alosa about riding bikes and skiing,

and you are going to get to hear how Sage sees and thinks about the similarities of riding and skiing.

It is a fantastic conversation, so subscribe to our Bikes and Big Ideas podcast and check out that conversation tomorrow.

And what we have for you today, right now in fact, is another edition of Shop Talk, where we talk with one of our Blister recommended shops to get their perspective on a mix of topics that range from broadly

applicable to all of us everywhere, regardless of where we live, to topics that help us

better understand what's going on in the specific local community that each shop serves.

And our guest today is Chris Gersten,

who is the founder of Backcountry Essentials in Bellingham, Washington.

And if you somehow don't already know about Bellingham,

well, first, that's really hard for me to even imagine at this point.

But I'm just going to go ahead and let Chris himself tell you a bit

more about Bellingham and the Bellingham community, as well as some of the gear that he thinks

works really well for, say, skiing at Mount Baker, and also some of the gear that he really likes

for going volcano skiing,

which is a thing you do if you happen to live in the Pacific Northwest.

And today's episode of Gear 30 is presented by Survivor

and their Survivor Endurance phone case for the iPhone 12.

Luke Kappa and I have both been using the Survivor Endurance

...