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DAVE: I'm Dave Page and I'm a cobbler
and I've been a cobbler for 40 years.
We do the warranty and repair work for literally
every hiking boot company in the country.
We can burn though 125-150 pair of soles a week.
That's a lot of soles.
I graduated from high school in Wisconsin
then I started hitchhiking.
I came out here across the country, then headed South.
I think I got about as far as Phoenix, Arizona
or some place and I thought, "Geez, Seattle was the
nicest of every place I've been,"
so I came back here...
never really left.
We're 45 minutes from grade four climbs.
Probably the largest city in the world this close
to a mountain range.
If you go climbing, you skiing, you go sailing...
if you get outdoors, or biking, you know,
that sort of thing, this, this town is your base.
Most outdoor people understand that if you
got a favorite pair of boots and the soles are worn out
or torn up or something...
if you put new bottoms on them,
you can use them for years.
STAN: I like the fact that it's very grass roots.
We're taking something that is essentially going to be
thrown away...
and bringing it back to life and making it useful again.
DAVE: A lot of these decisions are emotional
not financial, "those are my favorite shoes,"
"those are my favorite boots,"
"I hiked in Nepal in those boots,
I want to get them re-soled."
ASHLEY: I definitely think all shoes tell a story.
People who mail in their boots and have literally
scripts of pages and pages and pages
about where their boots have come from
and every single place their boots have been
and how much they mean to them.
I think it's pretty interesting because people, people,
you know, they, they love their shoes.
ROB: We get customers calling us who have had their hiking
boots for 20 plus years.
Dave will bring up a pair of boots and say,
"These boots are older than you are.
Like, these were made in 1974."
It's, um, that kind of care and attention of quality
of the product that Dave is really, um, focused on.
DAVE: Well, we had a guy about two or three weeks ago,
that picked up a pair of boots that we'd re-soled
and it was the third time we re-soled them
and the first time we think we did it in 1971 or 72.
This guys got to be 80... this is, this is 'good genes'...
and when he turned around and started walking out the door
he says, "I'll see you again in a few years."