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Outside of a beer brewed by New Belgium specifically for Patagonia, the Ventura, California-based brand has never truly collaborated on a product until this week. At the ICAST trade show in Florida, Patagonia announced a collaboration with Portland, Oregon’s Danner Boots. The product? A wading boot that, according to the brand, will last you a lifetime.
Both brands have long histories in the outdoor space; Patagonia in everything from climbing to fly fishing and Danner in making rugged hiking boots used by Reese Witherspoon and the US Military alike. When we first heard of the upcoming collaboration, we hypothesized that the product would be a hiking boot. Danner and Patagonia? What else could it be? The Foot Tractor wading boot (which is a name that Patagonia has used on previous wading boots), looks a lot like a hiking boot. But instead of hiking, the boot is optimized for fly fishing and, as its name implies, wading up and down the slippery beds of a river.
The upper shares many aesthetic and material similarities with Danner’s Light II, a blend of beautifully tanned leather and tough 1000-Denier nylon. The boot, like many of Danner’s other boots, uses a stitch-down construction that allows it to be re-soled and reconstructed over years of use.
Perhaps one of the biggest selling points on the boot is that they are constructed in Danner’s factory in Portland, Oregon. But that type of high-quality US production comes with a price. The Foot Tractor will sell for between $499 and $549 depending on whether or not you kit them out with aluminum gripping bars on the sole. That’s not cheap for a pair of wading boots, but when you consider that they can be re-soled for as long as the upper will last, it’s a small price to pay. For comparison, the most expensive wading boots from Redington, Simms and Orvis will run you $150, $230 and $198 respectively.
The Foot Tractor is slated to be available for purchase in February 2019.
