Trail Notes

Iconic California: The 2020 Big Sur Field Lab

Continuing In Hall’s Footsteps

Remembering Hall Newbegin

Introducing Sierra Forest

O2 Artisans Aggregate: Our Sustainable Business Community

Western Wilderness Defense: Our 2020 Recipients

Christmas Fir: An Upcycling Story

Crisp Air and Clean Blue Sky – Timberline Trail Field Lab 2019

The Scent Of The Season – Christmas Fir 2019

Bring Your Home to Life with Our New Room Sprays

Mojave + The Mountains – Sand to Snow Field Lab 2019

Wilderness in a Bottle – Our New Line of Personal Fragrances

Back To Wallowa: Hurricane Creek Field Lab 2019

Tassajara Creek Retreat + Field Lab 2019

Hike + Trailwork with Wildtender in Big Sur

Return To Topanga

Coast Range Gin Sour Cocktail Recipe

New Botanical Teas

Winter Redwood Field Lab 2019

Skin Love Inspired by the Outdoors

The honey and the bee

Each year we donate 10% of our profits to organizations working on behalf of Western Wilderness Defense.

A Christmas (Fir) Story

Hurricane Creek: Exploring the Wallowa Mountains, dreaming up scents

High Sierra Crossing

Rich Table + Juniper Ridge

Diffusing Essential Oils

Topanga Canyon, Summer Solstice 2018

Public Land Store: A new shop intent on engaging your senses.

The Bar Soap Story

Tahquitz Canyon – Father’s Day Field Lab

Sand to Snow: Desert & Denim exclusive Field Lab

Earth Teachings

Barebones in the backcountry

The Jennings Hotel: Historic hotel & artists residency.

Jalama Dye – An exclusive bedding collaboration with Gold Dust Collective and Juniper Ridge

The secret wildflower gardens of Topanga Canyon

In the end, it’s a bottle of that one day, on that one trail, in that place.

There are so many little ecological niches in the Mojave, we could make a different perfume for every canyon.

Every year around March, we hop in the van and hit the road to follow the wildflower bloom.

High Desert Bloom Everyday Oil

STAFF PICKS: TOP 10 DESERT READS

What a year! It seems safe to say 2016 was a doozy for everyone.

Hall & The Founders of Echo Park Craft Fair

“I’ve spent my whole life exploring the outdoors. It takes a few rides around the sun to realize how ephemeral the experience of a place is.”

Two years ago, twenty-three pioneering brands gathered in California’s high desert to celebrate those who create, specifically the artist and craftsman.

Desert. Coast. Mountains. These are the wild places we go every year, chasing the yearly rhythm of the plants.

When the first winter storms of the season come in from the Gulf of Alaska, they roll ashore into the coastal mountains of Redwood country and unload massive amounts of rain.

Our incense is 100% natural. That means there are no synthetic ingredients in our products.

“Our Topanga Canyon seasonal Field Lab collection is the essence of that dream, rooted deep in that place…”

Flowerchild fantasy Southern California still exists…

99.9% of the plant material we harvest is evergreen trimmings, perennial shrub trimmings and annual herbs; stuff that can be easily trimmed without having any impact on the plant or larger ecosystem surrounding it.

Check out the Desert & Denim 2016 video & an interview with Hall about the birth of D&D!

JR Founder’s favorite meal to make on the trail.

Were so excited to be back down at the Agenda Show in Long Beach!

JR Founder Hall Newbegin shares with you his recent trip through the Sierra Nevada Foothills.

Weekend at Camp Navarro + New Field Lab!

Juniper Ridge owner Hall Newbegin is taking over the blog this week to share our Sustainable Harvesting practices with you!

Check out our second annual Desert & Denim Trade Show – 2016.

We teamed up with Meg Mussari of APPRVL to create these hand dyed gift packs! Meg has become a fast friend of Juniper Ridge after participating in our Desert & Denim trade show.

Backcountry is our new everyday line—simple, aromatic formulations for about half the price of our Juniper Ridge products. A fresh, simple, affordable hit of the outdoors.

We caught up with Rob of Jungmaven while we were on our Wildflower Tour through LA. He gave us his own tour of his favorite local spots in Echo Park and shared with us a little more about his sustainable brand.

Every year we pack up the Wildflower Van, hit the road and follow the bloom as it moves throughout the West. From the deserts in early spring to the high peaks of the Cascades in August, we’ll go anywhere for a good bloom.

When planning our road trip up Highway 1 for the Wildflower Tour we knew we had to make a stop in Santa Barbara to visit our friend Steven Soria of Make Smith Leather Company.

We caught up with Kristen Pumphrey of Pommes Frites Candle Co. to hear about how she started such a successful and down right rad business. Read about her inspiration & experience below! If you haven’t already, definitely try out some of their beautiful smelling candles!

The heat of the afternoon about to pass and the coolness of evening beginning to descend. We gather together, pack up our stuff and drive a couple hours south to the trailhead.

The Mojave is a deeply psychedelic place

We met up with our neighbor and fellow Desert & Denim pack member,
Brian of Endorfin Foods, to see how the hell he makes his chocolates so insanely good.

Trail Vibes Vol 10: Winter Redwood Fog

Hall, or more specifically Hall and the Field Lab Van, knows the Panoramic Highway, which winds around the peak of Mount Tamalpais, better than any man and his trusty steed should know each other.

Trail Vibes Vol. 9: BYRD – Look Slick

We were so excited to have Squarespace sponsor our labor of love, Desert & Denim, this year. Squarespace is such an amazing and useful platform for artists & entrepreneurs that it only made sense for us to team up with them when throwing our one-of-a-kind makers trade show!

While working on throwing our second Desert & Denim we knew it was a perfect opportunity to force people to party to the psychedelic sounds of some of our favorite new music.

“When Juniper Ridge first started making Winter Redwood, it was all about the essential oil. California Bay Laurel, Douglas Fir and Coastal Redwood essential oils were combined into a bright perfume-base that was gorgeous and green and full of light and life”

2016 brings us the sequel to the inaugural Desert and Denim event we curated last year.

“My perception rockets out the top of my head, out of the tower and looks down on where I would be, unable to see my tiny dot in the holy mass of these mountains. ”

“For the foreseeable future, we will remain focused on protecting the special wild landscapes – mountains, rivers, deserts, forest, and coastlines – that are so important for habitat and outdoor recreation. “

“We are each our own obstacle unless we speak up and do something to save wilderness. It is easy fear the wild. It is easy to say we need to keep wilderness at arm’s length. That is embedded in our culture.”

” A big challenge in Oregon is changing the narrative. We have a strong self-perception that we are the greenest state in the country. In some ways, we are doing a great job. We pioneered, and recently expanded, bottle and can recycling. We protected our beaches for the public way back in the 1970s. But, on issues related to forests and watersheds, we have fallen way behind. “

“Our strategy has always been to roll up our sleeves and teach by example. Persistence (to the brink of obnoxiousness) is the name of the game in terms of getting the Forest Service to work with us.”

We knew we wanted to send our new Light Forest Candle out into the world in style, in a vessel that, in every way, extended the story of what we stand for: commitment to craft, expertise, and just the right amount of nerve to allow for some really beautiful things to happen.

When you get a bottle from Juniper Ridge, you know it’s full of the real deal. This year, we wanted to extend that authenticity beyond the bottle.

Don’t you hate it when companies say they’re donating a “portion” of their profits to charity,
but never tell you how much they’re giving or where it’s going?

“God I love this mountain. Coming here always gives me a serious case of the warm fuzzies. I grew up in Portland and I’ve been coming to Mount Hood since I was a little boy.”

Long before the volcanos of the Cascades took their ragged, skyward shapes, a mass of ice nearly a half-mile thick blanketed Oregon from Mount Hood, south to Mount Mcloughlin.

At the end of the the most recent ice age, the Palmer, Newton Clark, Eliot and other glaciers of Mount Hood were about a mile thick at 6000 ft elevation, almost exactly where the Timberline Lodge is today.

We set out over Gnarl Ridge, on Mount Hood’s eastern face, with a forecast of 30% showers.

The forests of the Siskiyou and Klamath mountains are incredibly complex, not only in topography and trail-layout, but in ecological makeup.

He spends most of his time heaving drums of myriad botanical mush across the warehouse against the backdrop of hundreds of vials and beakers.

To me this trail, this story, is nothing less than the most beautiful and important trail in the world.

You can never carry enough water. You’re going to need more than a gallon a day and each gallon weighs eight pounds. Three nights: thirty-two pounds of water. At least.

Conifers go by lots of names: evergreens, Pinophyta, pines— even Christmas trees. Whatever name you use, it isn’t hard to fall in love with them.

Picking the most beautiful anything in the west is a challenge, but we have noticed that year after year, there are a few wildflowers that catch our eye most.

Hitting the trail isn’t the only way to get a new perspective. Sometimes the most inspiring thing is staying in to watch a film that reminds you how beautiful and rare the world really is.

Tom fumes silently in the front seat of the Field Lab van, who’s now-silent hull rests lifeless at the crest of an immense glacial valley.

Celine Thibault, who you may remember as the smurf-handed, good witch of Desert and Denim, standing over her cauldron of boiling plant dye, is the mastermind behind the hand-dye process of Juniper Ridge’s first hemp, wild-dyed tee-shirt.

Juniper Ridge teamed up with longtime friend, Rob Jungmann, owner and founder of Jungmaven to produce a tee-shirt dyed with desert plants.

Our next Trail Vibes comes from our good friends in New York, Babes Abroad.

Trail Topanga Canyon and the Santa Monica Mountains in the 60’s

Cartographer and friend of Juniper Ridge, Bryan Conant has been the primary advocate and organizer of a trail project called The Condor Trail since 2008.

We spend all of our time poking around the hidden corners of the west coast and have stumbled across so many of these gems over the years, we want to start sharing them with you.

Get your mellow on and take it nice and slow, baby. Here’s a playlist to accompany the release of our Love On the Trail Massage Oil.

How is Wilderness Perfume different than conventional perfume? Why did we (as humans) begin to interact with plants and wear their extracts? Was it for purely aesthetic reasons?

On Feb 6th, 2015, seven backpackers ascended this heretofore unnamed ridge deep in the granite mountains of the Mojave National Preserve.

If there is one thing you know about Juniper Ridge, it is probably that we make fragrances out of plants we get from the mountains.

Next up on the Juniper Ridge playlist circuit is Trail Vibes Vol. 2: Moon Relay, Moody 60s Surf. Founder, Hall Newbegin, threw these doobie wave jams together to cruise down the coast of California.

The team here at Juniper Ridge has been wearing denim while hiking and backpacking for years. It is why we came up with Desert Denim Wash.

2015 was a dry year everywhere else in the West, but here in the central coastal mountains of California, the rainfall totals were about normal and the plants, well, let’s just say they’re really happy.

The Mojave Desert is a symbol of some kind of “Middle of Nowhere-ness” to the romantics that are smart/dumb/excited/suicidal enough to visit each year.

Our next Trail Vibes playlist comes from our very own Art Director, Jordan Vouga. We tease this kid all the time telling him he was born in the wrong generation.

We wait for it year after year, and when it comes, we are never disappointed.

Perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean with the feel of a small village of hippie shacks and some hazy long forgotten 70’s back-to-the-lander dreamscape, Slide Ranch just exudes the kind of magic that drives us crazy at Juniper Ridge!

Our next installment of curated tunes is brought to you by Obi, our Chief Storyteller and a lifelong metalhead.

The Redwoods- Coastal Redwood, Sierra Redwood, and Dawn Redwood- were present on earth at the same time as the dinosaurs and individuals may live for over two thousand years.

Wilderness Perfume is a concept and an ingredient. Everything Juniper Ridge makes is a Wilderness Perfume from our Trail Soap to our Campfire Incense; we call it all Wilderness Perfume.

We have been working on, and producing, limited runs of the Field Lab Wilderness Perfume called Winter Redwood every February for the past four years.

Winter Redwood is a feeling, complex by nature, from the rich loamy soil dappled in bay, oak, chaparral and fir, windswept by stream, ocean and fire.

For a few days, we were living our own unreal dream caught somewhere between lucid euphoria and articulate oddity.

Long hours on the road in the Field Lab van lead to longer discussions of what music is, how it moves and inspires us, and how metabolically necessary it is to everyone of us Wilderness Perfumers.

Mojave Desert after an early spring rain, resiny creosote desert winds with wildflowers in the air.

Travel with us to this bizarre and transcendental part of the desert with the Tahquitz Canyon Desert Spray.

It was a long day of driving. We said goodbye to Seattle and made our way toward Portland.

When you’re a kid, you think summer lasts forever. When I smell the Oak flowers, that’s the feeling I get. It’s intoxicating.

The mountains are calling, and the Sierra summer has just begun.

We love Seattle. Today began with a revitalizing hike through Cougar Mountain with some friends.

We met at the warehouse this morning at 6:00am, primed and geared for the Cascadia Rising expedition of the Pacific Northwest.

November 29-December 5th, the guys of Juniper Ridge are hitting the road and heading to the Pacific Northwest with the indomitable Field Lab Van to visit some friends and celebrate the release of our newest Field Lab Fragrance: Timberline Trail.

Reflections from the most harrowing day on the trail.

Three days of harvesting on Mount Tam for our 2015 Winter Redwood Field Lab fragrance.

Nothing summons the holiday spirit like holiday spirits.

This trip took us over the ridge from Big Sur on California’s central coast, deep in the Santa Lucia Mountains.

The seasonal perfume is a love song to this misty wilderness, located about an hour north of San Francisco.

Here are a couple of our favorite spots to escape the long winter nights.

Deserts get a bad rep. Portrayed as barren, unforgiving wastelands devoid of life and water, the Deserts of the American West are always terrifying, monstrous badlands, just waiting to claim their next victims.

We hiked Oregon’s Timberline Trail in Mt. Hood National Forest this past fall in order to create a small batch of beard oil and incense.

R&D Field Lab is our new favorite way of exploring the depths of wilderness perfume.

This year, Juniper Ridge has selected fourteen western wilderness defense organizations to focus our donation efforts on.

Public Lands From 1870 onwards, American westward development began to change its focus from private development, to management by the federal government of the remaining public lands.

The wildcrafted stuff inside will transport you from a crowded city street to your favorite mountain trail in seconds.

One of the benefits of wandering around in the woods a lot is that you stumble on some pretty amazing, off-the-beaten-path campgrounds.

Check out the inside scoop on how our new packaging was created.

High Sierra Summer Wildflowers

The harvest happens on a huge desert ranch run by a good friend.

Trailers, Guns, and the Storm of the Season