Drum roll, please:
 

I’d never been to Outdoor Retailer before, so I arrived in Salt Lake City last week bearing no fond memories or emotional scars from previous shows. Not so my seasoned colleagues. For some, this was their 18th or 20th time working the floor, so over dinner, or during slow moments in the booth, they invariably reminisced about shows past. And when they did, I reached for my Flip Camera.

In the following clips, Larry Seidl recalls how, at his first show, he worried he'd be forced to "sleep with a guy I'd never met before"; Mark Downey recounts how he landed his current job while angling to trade a pair of shoes for books; and Max Phelps describes the tornado that caused a stampede on the show floor and actually killed a worker. Plus, first-time attendee John Groton offers his impressions of O.R.

Hans Florine leads some life. He's a successful author, he's married to a former supermodel, and--perhaps most enviably--he lives in the Bay Area. Oh, he's also a legendary climber who set the world's record this summer for scrambling up El Capitan in Yosemite National Park faster than anyone before--3,000 feet, straight up, in just over 2 1/2 hours. Hans stopped by the booth at OR and told me about his historic ascent, as well as his recent, aptly titled book, Speed Climbing!: How to Climb Faster and Better:

Writer, photographer, and outdoor adventurer Stewart Green is the author of, count 'em, 18 books--most for GPP and FalconGuides. Since March, he has run About.com's climbing site. I got a chance to sit down with Stewart at OR to discuss his blog, the K2 tragedy, and his latest book for Falcon, Rocky Mountain National Park Pocket Guide, complete with nifty PopOut maps.

Falcon author Eric Horst met fans and signed copies of Conditioning for Climbers:

Take a virtual of the GPP booth at the Summer Outdoor Retailer show in Salt Lake City, and hear what Max Phelps, our director of marketing and sales development for outdoor books, has to say about this year's conference and the FalconGuides brand: