Then and now …

The origin of Wicked Outdoorsy dates back to the early 2000s, when Verizon Razrs roamed the earth and Zoom was still just a PBS show.

The idea first formed as a way to “bring to life” what daily existence looked like for a startup PR firm that had just relocated to a sleepy ski town with no stoplights and no Starbucks. The irony, of course, was that I’d never lived in Vermont before 2004, didn’t know the difference between Fayston and Ferrisburgh, and had barely a clue where all the dirt roads actually went. So the writing quickly became much more exploratory as I learned my way around, more personal thanks to an untimely cancer diagnosis, and occasionally/hopefully interesting to the couple thousand people a month who would stop in and read a piece or two.

Looking back, I was also clearly a little freaked out about how national clients would perceive my choice of location, and was eager to find a tool that might help me keep up with the Joneses of Western-based PR agencies. It may be hard to fathom from our current seats in this 24/7 Tiktok bonanza, but back in the early 2000s people actually thought blogging was cool and kind of edgy. You’d go to a barbecue or a bike race and it seemed that everybody either had a blog or was thinking about starting one. And honestly? It was pretty satisfying to see the work of all these never-ever writers deciding that now was the time they were finally going to put pen to paper and send some well thought out pieces into the Blogopshere. It was hard work, though, and while early enthusiast bloggers certainly became more appreciative of professional journalism, they also fell quickly in love with the easier and more immediately gratifying world of “microblogging” … an early term to describe the well-known 2004 startup.

These days, I’m still living in central Vermont and still working as a PR and communications consultant, but I know a little more about where all the roads go. My hope with this new chapter of Wicked Outdoorsy is simply to write something worth reading from time to time, to continue to learn more about this beautiful and mysterious place that I call home, and to hopefully encourage more creators out there to just write what they want instead of only writing what they have to.

Thanks for swinging by.

— Drew Simmons is the president and founder of Pale Morning Media, a public relations and strategic communications agency specializing in the outdoor world. He is also an advocate for the outdoor recreation economy, serving as the chair of the Vermont Outdoor Business Alliance and on the steering committee of the Vermont Outdoor Recreation Economic Collaborative.