Odds are that you’ve bought something from Backcountry.com. The online retailer that started in a spare bedroom in a Park City, Utah, townhouse is ubiquitous in the world of outdoor gear. So, too, is its daily blog, the Goat–odds are that you’ve been entertained, informed, maybe even LOLed, perhaps on occasion ROFLed, after reading one of the parade of misadventures chronicled up to four times per diem under the byline Rocky Thompson.

Despite Backcountry.com’s expertise with internet-based algorithms, Thompson is not a cyborg, bot, or computer-generated journalist. He’s a real human with a real job, and after four years of reading his amazing volume of posts, one gets real curious wondering what he’s all about–and what he’s learned after writing thousands of bite-sized stories on all manner of outdoor news. It took some time, but The Adventure Life finally talked him into an interview with promises of providing a steady stream of story tips. Here’s what he had to say:

How did the Goat come about?
I’m not sure. I left Backcountry.com after two years of writing for the site and moved to Minnesota. That month they posted a ‘Pro Blogger’ job, and I applied. They hired me a few weeks later, and I’ve been at it ever since. The Goat was meant to be purely about gear, but I’ve slowly morphed it into more of a News-of-the-Weird blog about the outdoors and the outdoor industry. I also covers oil disasters, hiker attacks and other less entertaining news, but I try to take an angle that makes reading it an enjoyable departure from the cubicle life.

What kind of mandate were you given?
When the Goat kicked off, I was instructed to absolutely destroy any outdoor company that produced stupid or inferior products. I angered a few product managers and several buyers, but I was specifically told by top brass at Backcountry that if I wasn’t getting angry e-mails, then I wasn’t doing my job. I would also write the rare positive review for elegant new gear with smart design that filled an actual need users had in the outdoors.

This went on for some time. The problem is that the outdoor industry is actually pretty good at what they do, and at 10 posts per day, you begin to run out of things to eviscerate. And while you can always find something to make fun of, at some point the gear you find gets so bizarre that backcountry people don’t even really care about it. If this were a blog about energy production in the U.S., it’d be easy to stay constantly angry, but the outdoor industry has a lot to be proud of. You can still find the occasional greenwashing crime in the industry or a blatant ripoff of another brand’s idea that deserves a skewering, or but for the most part The Goat has moved away from gear and towards backcountry-style news.

Also, it was impossible to actually test 10 pieces of gear per day and write reviews, so the posts lacked a certain amount of user experience. It was more like: “Hey, check this out. Can you believe that anyone would make anything so rad/stupid?” Then I’d sprinkle it with links and jokes, and do that through nine more posts. A few years ago we changed to five posts per day (now four) and focused on news, gear, and the outdoor industry – basically anything that might be of interest to Backcountry.com people.

Any ground rules, like “don’t piss off The North Face” or “definitely piss off The North Face”?
No companies were off limits. A couple times I’ve upset really big companies (Gore and The North Face come to mind), and they ended up sending me free gear to test. You’d probably guess that I get loads of free gear, but it rarely happens. The only time companies dispatch their PR brigade to send me free gear is when I write something really brutal about them, and they honestly think that I’m wrong. In those cases, they send me the thing I wrote about to ‘make you eat your words.’ This I do happily in a follow-up post if it turns out I was wrong.

How long have you been writing it?
Since the summer of 2006.

And that adds up to how many posts?
It’s around 5,575.

Do you have a favorite post? Strangest?
I convinced Backcountry.com to send me to the ISPO outdoors tradeshow in Germany several years ago. In retrospect, my scheduling was a huge mistake. I spent a week in Las Vegas for the SIA ski and snowboard tradeshow, then went to Salt Lake for a week of skiing and the Outdoor Retailer tradeshow, and then I went straight to Munich. I was living in Minnesota at the time and on the road for that entire month. Living out of a suitcase while trying to find time to write 10 blog posts a day was killing me. By the time I arrived in Munich, I was so fried that I honestly thought there was an earthquake while I was walking the trade show floor. It turned out that I was just super tired and hungover. I lucked out by running into my buddy Dave who’d been sent as a buyer for Backcountry. I stayed with him for a few days, and after a week at ISPO, I convinced him to come to Prague with me for a week. Free wifi isn’t as easy to find in Europe as it is in the U.S., and by now I’d given up on 10 posts per day. Instead, I thought I’d just write one decent post per day. So after getting run out of the Ninthward booth, I wrote this one.

I haven’t read this post in years, but the circumstances surrounding it still make me smile.

What’s the most popular of all your posts?
“Top 5 Reasons Snowboarders Are Cooler Than Skiers” still gets comments even though it was written in February of 2007. I ski, and though these references are ‘so 2007,’ most of them are still true in spirit.

Besides this one, any recent post about guns, naked people (specifically women), or unbridled stupidity have received a lot of traffic.

I’ve heard you have a full-time job on top of the Goat. True? How much time do you spend on the Goat a day?
I do have a full-time job. I’m a copywriter for an expedition company; it’s the same kind of work I did with Backcountry.com prior taking over The Goat. I work on The Goat about an hour-and-a-half to two hours per day. Some people go home and play World of Warcraft after work. I go home and write The Goat. I enjoy it very much, but I don’t know that this pace is sustainable. The Goat might be looking for contributing writers soon, though to be fair, I’ve been saying that for a couple years. I also write a daily e-mail for SteepandCheap called The Daily Dose. The name of the e-mail’s not very inventive, but we have a few hundred thousand subscribers. I also post the content from The Daily Dose e-mails on my own blog, Liquid Astronaut. I also used to write a blog for Varsity Bike Shop and occasionally contribute to GetOutdoors, but I’ve dropped both of those since I had no free time.

Do you see Google Alerts and RSS feeds in your sleep? How do you reset after ingesting all that information?
At first I was writing 10 posts per day and spending hours on RSS feeds. Now I’m lucky to have a handful of readers who send links my way when they see something interesting that I haven’t covered. I write four posts per day now, and I usually get one or two of those ideas from readers. I’ve developed a pretty good system of Google News searches that I’ve put into my RSS feed, so I can usually find some interesting news that no one else has covered. I also borrow heavily from a lot of the other outdoor bloggers, and toss a link back to them at the end of my post.

Stupidity seems to be a common thread. What have you learned about human nature over all those posts?
Agreed. But I honestly have to say I never really noticed until now. I suppose it’s a bit more obvious that I like writing about stupidity when you’re not me. You get more of a global view. Now I’m kind of wondering what this says about me. My only real requirement for choosing something to put on The Goat is that it interests me and that I think it might interest some Goat readers. Does this mean that I take joy in reading and writing about stupid mistakes? I guess it does. I can accept this, but now I worry that I like reading about it because it somehow makes me feel superior. My insecurities aside, I guess that I’ve always thought stupid mistakes and funny stories had more value than real news. At my college newspaper, I wrote a lengthy story on the president’s golf cart getting stolen and driven into a ditch. Later that week, I went to rent movies from Blockbuster while a riot was taking place after a hockey championship. I probably should have covered the riot story, but I guess I was never cutout for hard news.

Is that a dog or a bear you’re holding in your profile picture? Are you hugging, wrestling, or something NSFW?
That’s my sister’s Malamute, Charlie. He had a thyroid problem.

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