Win a pair of Rudy Project Optics!

In the Siberian city of Tomsk, children play a game called telephone, whispering a sentence around a circle until someone fails to repeat the original wording accurately. The penalty for getting the sentence wrong, is "you must go live in Kamchatka."

If you were that child, along with your Rudy Project sunglasses, what is the one item that you would bring with you to Kamchatka?

To some, Kamchatka is remote and dangerous and to others it is a place that is wild, beautiful, and worth exploring. Either way, you ONLY get to bring one item with you. What's it gonna be?.

Contest rules:

-1. Go to Rudy Project and pick out the sunglasses that you want to win!

-2. Check out our Facebook page and leave a message on our wall telling us the sunglasses you want to win and your answer to this week's question, "What is the one item that you would bring with you to Kamchatka?" by 9 pm PST on Sunday (1.25.09).

-3. Monday morning we will randomly draw three winners from the submissions! Grand Prize: Your choice of Rudy Project optics. 2nd & 3rd Prize: Rudy Project pro-forms and Kamchatka Project t-shirts. Winners will be announced on Monday the 26th by 9 am PST.

100% Organic Cotton T-Shirts

We are excited to announce the release of the official Kamchatka Project T-shirts. There will be two color options which are yellow haze and river blue with a black logo on the front and back.

We would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the creation of these shirts, specifically Ethan Smith for the shirt design and Cassandra and Drew for their timely printing.

National Geographic examines Kamchatka

By David Quammen
Photograph by Michael Melford

Some places on this planet are so wondrous, and so frangible, that maybe we just shouldn't go there.

Maybe we should leave them alone and appreciate them from afar. Send a delegated observer who will absorb much, walk lightly, and report back as Neil Armstrong did from the moon—and let the rest of us stay home. That paradox applies to Kronotsky Zapovednik, a remote nature reserve on the east side of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, along the Pacific coast a thousand miles north of Japan. It's a splendorous landscape, dynamic and rich, tumultuous and delicate, encompassing 2.8 million acres of volcanic mountains and forest and tundra and river bottoms as well as more than 700 brown bears, thickets of Siberian dwarf pine (with edible nuts for the bears) and relict "graceful" fir (Abies sacha­linensis) left in the wake of Pleistocene glaciers, a major rookery of Steller sea lions on the coast, a population of kokanee salmon in Kronotskoye Lake, along with sea-run salmon and steelhead in the rivers, eagles and gyrfalcons and wolverines and many other species—terrain altogether too good to be a mere destination. With so much to offer, so much at stake, so much that can be quickly damaged but (because of the high latitudes, the slow growth of plants, the intri­cacies of its geothermal underpinnings, the specialness of its ecosystems, the delicacy of its topographic repose) not quickly repaired, does Kronotsky need people, even as visitors? I raise this question, acutely aware that it may sound hypocritical, or anyway inconsistent, given that I've recently left my own boot prints in Kronotsky's yielding crust.

To learn more go to: National Geographic