By Skittles
Our Outdoor Retailer shows generally consist of a good mix of both business and pleasure. Like I might have mentioned before, we love coming back to SLC twice a year to see all our friends both at, and not at, the show who we call our SLC Family.
Several times during the show, David and I turned to each other and commented on how the JTree booth had seemingly become the show “hangout” for our friends at the show. And seeing a crowd around a booth, other folks would come in to check out what the “hub bub” was all about. This is a shout out to all our friends who hung at our booth - thanks for stopping by and come hang with us again this summer!
As usual, we worked super hard selling JTree product at the show so that we could afford to eat at our favorite sushi place EVER, Takashi, in downtown SLC. It has, hands down, the best sushi I have EVER eaten. Bentley and his wife Jessica, our friends from TrailFoods, Chris and Pat, Vegas climber friend John, Clint aka C-Dog from Layton, UT, friend Mike from his days in MI, David and I put down $$$ worth of sushi rolls and multiple bottles of sake. 
After three orders of the Black Magic Woman roll (our favorite) the server suggested trying the Seared Sable Fish and it was amazing. The night quickly moved on to a local bar where some poser in our group decided to start off with Jagger Bombs. (Ugh, we all know what happens to Skittles after starting with these!) Which were quickly followed by a round of Rusty Nails compliments of Chris. Chris being the proud West Virginian that he is, felt obligated to introduce us to some old time, backwoods, hillbilly whisky concoction, the Rusty Nail (fitting name for a drink that bad!). On all three attempts to try a Rusty Nail, they all tasted the same: strong and bad. There might have been some dancing involved with random bar goers at that place, though not exactly sure as things started to get fuzzy….
As our OR tradition goes, on the last day of the show, Jessica and I get our shop on when all the booths try to get rid of the samples they have to pack up by selling them at cost! We hit up the sales at IceBreaker and KAVU and both got some cute stuff. Jess even got a sweet pair of new mountain biking shades at Native! To continue with our OR tradition, we hit the slopes the next couple of days, taking advantage of our OR passes getting 50% off lift tickets at all the local SLC resorts - SAAAWWEEEEET! We spent two days after the show boarding thru knee deep powder at Snowbasin and Powder Mountain and commiserating on how miserable our lives really are! Can’t wait to shred some nar pow here again next year!
By Skittles 
It’s amazing how many people would stop to tell us what a beautiful dog we have. (I have to agree he is pretty cute!) Although Torr was super disappointed by how few other dogs there were to play with at the show, the highlight for him was a visit on Day 3 by his “brother” Porter. For being cute and well-behaved, Torrent received his second Dog of the Day award at the show! Good job Torr!
After picking up B from the airport and making a few important stops (dumping holding tanks…love that smell….and hitting up the liquor store for some booth essentials…whiskey and sweet tea vodka) we headed directly to the Salt Palace for booth set up. Sign-in and badge pick up: check. Unloading the RV: check. Finding our booth #32076: what the…. Long story short, what we failed to learn until we walked out on to the showroom floor was that our booth space was directly in front of the main door that leads to the loading dock. So unless we wanted to have our booth run down by forklifts moving crates and boxes into the showroom, we were not going to be able to set up until that door was permanently shut. Now the question was: when exactly would that be? Apparently that was going to be at 8pm the night before the show. Lucky for us we pack light and move efficiently! At 9:30pm our booth was finally set up. Now it was off to get some sleep!
