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Ablue-and-white "For Sale" sign marks the Osprey Packs factory, a low metal building that sits beside a sand-and-gravel operation on the outskirts of this Four Corners city.
Osprey Packs is a success story built on the popularity of outdoor recreation: The company makes some of the finest backpacks in the world. But it doesn't make them here anymore.
Back in 1990, Osprey founders Mike Pfotenhauer and his wife, Diane Wren, moved their small, home-grown firm from Santa Cruz, Calif., to southwestern Colorado. They came because they loved the place, and because they had heard there were good, affordable workers on the nearby Navajo Reservation.
Some Navajo employees commuted two hours each way to their jobs in what grew to become a 30,000-square-foot factory. The jobs paid $7 to $12 per hour -- better, Pfotenhauer says, than most other jobs in the area. By 2001, 92 people were working here, 78 of them manufacturing packs.
Then, in May 2002, Osprey became the final large U.S. backpack maker to shift its manufacturing overseas, joining the diaspora of companies such as Arc'Teryx, Gregory, Lowe, Mountainsmith, REI, Eastern Mountain Sports and Dana Designs.
Today, only 14 people work in the huge building, most of them in sales, marketing and administration. In August, Mike Pfotenhauer, who remains the company's principal designer, moved with his family to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in order to be close to the factory that now produces all of Osprey's 42 different backpack models.
"When the American consumer begins to understand all the hidden costs that underlay cheap goods, maybe they will find it truly more economical to buy their goods locally made -- but this is the sort of change that would require generations of time," Pfotenhauer said by e-mail from Vietnam.
Osprey's story is a cautionary tale about how even in the much-touted recreation economy of the New West, distant economic forces exert profound influences on the region.
Conventional wisdom holds that low-paying service jobs are replacing high-paying resource extraction jobs around the West. The traditional place-based jobs that were built around the West's timber, livestock and minerals have spiraled downward in recent decades. At the same time, sports that did not exist a generation ago, such as mountain biking and snowboarding,...