Rachel Gross opens Shopping All the Way to the Woods with an evocative anecdote about her preparations for a yearlong backpacking adventure on a post-college fellowship. Ensconced in an urban environment, she had learned from audio guidebooks and her family’s Ansel Adams calendar “that the mountains were where to go to feel real” (p. ix). She imagined that her pre-trip purchases at the outdoor retailer would provide her, a novice, with an expertise that she did not possess. “I reassured myself confidently that picking the right gear in that metropolitan store would be the key to my success in the great outdoors” (p. x). Of course, Gross admits, her choices were wrong.

Gross argues that the outdoor industry’s success is based not only on supplying useful wares, but “on selling authenticity to consumers. Shopping for the woods was about being—or becoming—the right kind of person” (p. 2). Tracing the industry’s evolution from a handful of retailers in the late nineteenth century to the corporate behemoths that dominate at the turn of the twenty-first century, this book merges business history, cultural history, environmental history, and history of technology. It probes the complex consumerism behind a nature-based lifestyle that seemingly rejects capitalism, all with a subtle analysis of the ideas of class, race, and gender embedded in its imagery.

Chapter one locates the origins of outdoor recreation and the businesses it spawned in the late nineteenth century. “The American wilderness served as an exclusive getaway for the wealthy, particularly white men” (p. 6). A photograph of Theodore Roosevelt in buckskin captures the argument. Middle or upper-class white men found a gateway to a preindustrial past where they claimed, through their clothing, the masculinity and expertise of the Indigenous man while rejecting his supposed “savagery.” Guidebooks warned against using too many gadgets that distanced outdoorsmen from their encounters with nature, but, in turn, paved the way for outdoor retailers by detailing clothing that eased the tenderfoot into his journey.

As the interest in outdoor recreation expanded in the early twentieth century, outfitters emerged to sell gear to eager consumers. Through catalogues and other advertisements, as Chapter 2 outlines, mail-order companies such as Abercombie & Fitch used words and images to lure customers. “Writers who described the outdoor store’s products played a vital role in reconciling the otherwise paradoxical union of commercial culture with an outdoor culture cherished precisely as an escape from the world of commerce” (p. 41). Women participated in camping and other activities, but advertisers emphasized the man, garbed in the appropriate gear, as the beacon of national identity embedded in frontier imagery. “Authenticity marketed by outdoor companies was, still and all, a male quest” (p. 54).

By the 1920s and 1930s, outdoor retailers broke through certain class barriers by identifying a new market for their goods with laborers whose jobs kept them in the outdoors. The third chapter also explores advances in gear such as the Trapper Nelson pack and the Buck Skein jacket. “By the mid-twentieth century, consumption was a national ethic, replacing the nineteenth-century ‘ideal of a republic of producers’” (p. 68). Certain leisure activities remained the province of elites, but the industry’s consumer base expanded. With a nod toward nostalgia, authenticity was bestowed through purchases, even if the goods were “mass produced and fungible” (p. 69).

In the middle section of the book, Gross explores the dramatic impact of World War II. In the 1930s, the expert examined new clothing in the field and reported his findings. In the 1940s, new technologies emerged quickly as the military scientifically tested clothing and equipment, eager to get them into production and to soldiers. Adopting wartime methods, for example, industry found new uses for nylon in the postwar era. After the war, veterans sold their military gear in army-navy surplus stores around the country to grab a share of the recreational market. As the USA secured its global leadership, the outdoor industry added international influences, such as lederhosen, that also allowed it to cement earlier racial imagery. “For Americans these items connotated European sophistication, a kind of quintessential whiteness that the linked the Rocky Mountains to the Alps” (p. 123).

The final three chapters contemplate the mammoth growth of the industry in the twentieth century’s final three decades. As Chapter 7 outlines, the backpacking movement of the 1970s launched new enterprises from local family businesses to chain retailers such as Bass Pro Shops. “All grappled once again with how to reconcile the culture of consumption with nature as an anti-commercial escape from it” (p. 141). The increase in participants often left “wilderness” in polluted disarray. Recognizing that their improvements made gear more comfortable and contributed to the growing numbers, many stores offered classes in outdoor ethics. By the end of the 1980s, Gore-Tex and other synthetic materials reshaped definitions of genuine nature experiences. Finally, a new “authenticity” challenge emerged as outdoor wear became daily wear in a less formal America. “By the 1990s, the consensus in the outdoor industry was that the casual outdoorsman—white, suburban, a lover of tree decals as much as if not more than trees—was here to stay” (p. 219). The large corporations that had bought out smaller operations and consolidated their market share reinvented their heritage as they embraced greater profitability.

Gross might have added a touch more nuance to her analysis by placing the outdoor industry within the larger context of America’s emergence as a consumer’s republic. Nonetheless, deeply researched, with materials from more than 20 archives, thoroughly embedded in historical literature, and written with verve, Shopping All the Way to the Woods is a model of a focused historical study.