“I wanna know about the iguana.”
That’s what we found ourselves saying early one morning while reading a rather curious post on the Ask Portland Reddit page, where u/McGannahanSkjellyfet inquired, “Did Next Adventure used to have a huge iguana that lived in a network of catwalks that ran through the entire store? Or am I losing my mind?”
A little bit of scrolling saw similar recollections:
“Yes they did! I saw it in the late ‘90s when I was a kid. My dad and I went to look for backpacking stuff and I remember being so excited about it. The iguana was also in some of their TV commercials, I’m almost positive,” said u/haylilray.
Still we had our doubts that an actual iguana would be allowed to have free reign over an outdoor gear store like a mild-mannered Godzilla meandering through Tokyo. Was this some sort of lizard-based legend or would it balance on the scales of truth? We decided to investigate.
The droppings were reportedly a bit of an issue.
Photo by Mark McClure
The key to this cold-blooded case starts with Next Adventure’s founders, owners, and life-long friends, Deek Heykamp and Bryan Knudsen. They’re just “two local guys” who opened up the Southeast Grand Avenue shop in 1997 to share their passion for expeditions in nature, from fishing trips to shredding the slopes of Mount Hood.
Turns out the existence of the iguana was not a stretch, although Knudsen’s pet “Iggy” was nearly 6 ft long and “roamed the shop relatively unescorted causing many customers a serious case of the heebie-jeebies.”
“Iggy was very well-behaved around people but reacted violently when he saw his reflection in the mirror, so he wasn’t allowed in the shoe department, with its ground-level mirrors,” explained Tim Braun, executive assistant to Heykamp.
Iggy lived to be almost 20 years old and died in the early 2000s. To this day, Knudsen has a plastic version of the reptile in his office to remind him of his former pet.
