May 12, 2020
Doug talks about his many backcountry adventures, product
design, the outdoor industry, and tells a couple of stories
too.
Please give us a rating and
review HERE
Show Notes
This
episode with a very good friend of mine. We've been buddies for
over 30 years. He's been a backcountry mountain guide, rock
climbing guide, ski guide, been in the industry for many, many
years doing all kinds of cool things. He's a great author. Welcome
to the show, Doug Robinson.
How were you introduced to the
backcountry and the outdoors?
I am
an unbelievably lucky kid. At five years old, my parents moved me
from Washington, DC where I was born to California and we went
almost immediately that summer to the backcountry and Tenaya Lake
in Yosemite National Park
and camped out. Back then you
drove across Tenaya Creek and pulled your car up next to the Lake
and we could camp right on the Lakeshore. And we did. And so at
five years old, I'm building rafts and paddling out to the islands
on the Lake, I could not believe the Sierra. The road was one and a
half lanes, 15 miles an hour. It was a dirt road except where it
went over granted slabs. So it was like, two hours from Crane Flat
to Tenaya Lake, which is 40 minutes now.
There
were a few other people who camped by the Lake and you could tell
they came back every year. We all felt like this was the luckiest
thing that could possibly ever happen to us. And as time went on,
we started hiking and then backpacking and you know, little by
little getting into the Sierra backcountry.
When
I was 13, I got rescued off of Pywiack dome, which was across the
Lake from our campsite. I had a pair of lug sole boots and I knew
that made me a mountain climber. So I went up on the side of this
dome and 400 feet up I realized that maybe I wasn't as secure. I
couldn't go ahead and I couldn't back down. Some tourists stopped
on the road and said, are you okay? I shouted NO, but here's where
you find the Rangers and tell them to come and get me. And they
did. They repelled down from the top of the dome and tied me on. So
that was the first time I was ever on a rope in the
backcountry.
Your folks ended up buying one
of those forest service lease backcountry properties by Rock Creek
up here in the Sierra
Another incredibly lucky thing. I ended up in Rock
Creek because of Norman Clyde, who I had the good fortune to meet in the late
sixties. Everybody knows Norman as quite a climber, but, he was
also a backcountry skier. So I asked him okay, where are the good
spots, you know, where should I go? And he goes, Oh, Rock Creek.
That's the best place on the East side of the Sierra for
backcountry skiing.
So I
moved in the next winter. Then the summer after that I found this
one-line ad in the Inyo Register for a cabin for sale. And I mean,
it sent me back $4,500. But I moved in and ended up living there
many winters, cross country and backcountry skiing were just in its
bloom in the seventies. There was a ski touring lodge two miles
away and I could teach there and, and live up the Canyon and ski up
under Bear Creek Spire every day. It was paradise.
Did you stay up there in the
summers or did you go back to work or back to
school?
Well
in the summers I’d go into the Palisades. Cause in the mid-sixties
I lucked into a job guiding there at the
Palisade School of
Mountaineering. Which
was the first climbing school in California.
You'll get tired of me saying this, but I'm one of the
luckiest people alive. Lucked into that job. And then I lucked into
having a place to live in Rock Creek in the winter and, it goes on
and on.
So before we get too far into
this, let's let everybody know you are somewhere in Wyoming, is
that right?
I am
somewhere in Wyoming and we won't pin it down exactly because I am
caretaking a backcountry guest ranch in Wyoming. The closest clue
I'll give you is that when I ski up to the Ridge several hours
away, I can see the Grand Teton off to the Northwest. It's amazing.
We, I say we, my partner Eva Eilenberg is with me here and we
lucked into this caretaking opportunity.
We've
been here over a month and we've got another month to go. I just
came in from, we were doing some work with the batteries that run
off the DC hydro and, and kind of keep place electrified off the
grid. We're way off the grid. I'm talking to you by satellite
phone.
Let's circle back around to the
Palisade School of Mountaineering How did you start there? You saw
an ad in the paper or how did you get involved with those
guys?
So
I'm 20 years old. I'm in Yosemite. I pack up my backpack and I'm
going to go up to the High Sierra because that's where I started,
right? Tenaya like I told you. And I just love going in the
backcountry, rambling around, backpacking, scrambling up peaks. So
I was getting a little more advanced. I mean technical climbing
because I'd been in Yosemite after all. That was the cutting edge
place in the world for rock climbing in the sixties. And, you know,
we were kind of hot shit and we knew it.
So I
walk up into the Palisades, I’d never been there. My buddy John
Fisher and I had been climbing together since we were 13. He ended
up owning the school later on. So I walk in there and I walk all
the way up to the edge of the glacier. There's a little obvious
backcountry campsite up there. And I dropped my pack and look
around and there's nobody there. Now I had just come from camp 4, I
mean, you could pick up a climbing partner in 30 seconds down there
and I just kind of assumed there would be a scene up there
too.
So I
soloed a couple of easy backcountry peaks and a few days later this
pile of lumber appeared on the slabs below the camp and was coming
up upwards me. It turned out to be a guy named Don Jensen. And he
was getting ready to build a little hut up on the edge of the
glacier, or the Palisade School of Mountaineering. Don turned out
to be the chief guide, so we made a deal. He went climbing with me.
I helped him build his hut.
The
first day we went climbing, we went out and across the glacier up
Starlight Peak down into the notch, up North Pal down the U Notch.
And we were back at camp at 10 in the morning. And he offered me a
job guiding. I go, wow, I'm 20 years old. I'd never thought about
being a mountain guide, but, um, okay, if Don thinks I can do it.
So I have been guiding ever since. That was just another one of
those really lucky things. And you're right, I was ready for it
cause I'd been climbing for years. Right. Dirt bagging before that
was a thing. That was 1965.
Then after Palisade School of
Mountaineering, you got involved with the clean climbing movement
and wrote the manifesto, tell us about that.
Here's how it started.
Royal Robbins kicked
it off. He went climbing in England. He saw, clean climbing there
with pebbles stuffed into cracks and then machine nuts that were
already on a runner. And he got all excited and came back and put
up Nutcracker in Yosemite, which was the most popular route in the
Valley, and is still a classic. He did it as a demonstration, Royal
and Liz, his wife. Then he wrote about it in summit magazine
because we were reading summit every month. None of the backcountry
focused magazines that are out now existed then. It was a basically
a hiker magazine, but there was occasional climbing stuff in it. So
it was the only game in town.
I got
turned on by this and went straight down to the hardware store and
bought brass machine nuts in a whole range of sizes and filed the
threads out of them so they wouldn't cut the runners and strung
them on runners. This was 1965 or 66. So I was guiding in the
Palisades then. So I had my backup Pitons and a hammer, but I took
the nuts long too. Well, it turns out that the backcountry Alpine
granite is just perfect for holding nuts. You can almost throw them
in the crack. So some of the very earliest all clean climbs were
done there and all the other guides got turned onto it too. We're
all in this together and realized that we could do things clean. We
didn't need the hammer or the pins and it was lighter so we left
them in camp.
Then
we started going to Yosemite in the spring and the fall and
starting to try to climb in the backcountry clean also. So I did
the East buttress of Middle Cathedral rock all clean. That was the
first grade four that was done in that committed style. And then
the next year did the Steck, Salathe on Sentinel without carrying
hammers. And you know, we're just very gradually progressing
up.
Meanwhile, I had met
Chouinard, we had gone
ice climbing together in the Palisades, did some first backcountry
ice accents of routes like the V notch. And I started going and
hanging out in Ventura at the tin shed and being a laborer. I
started out there, my first job was being an assistant bong bender
is what they called it, but people don't even know what a bong is
anymore. And we're talking about clean climbing, we're having fun
doing it. Um, and um, and Chouinard and Frost got interested in it
and you know just innovate equipment before breakfast.
So
pretty soon they're making the aluminum nuts that are really good
and I'm contributing to the design. So in the end, and this is a
hats off to Chouinard too, cause he'd started making Pitons in 1958
in that chicken coop in his parents' backyard in Burbank, he's a
teenager and selling out of the trunk of his car. And that business
was built on pitons and hammers and all the unclean stuff to go
climbing.
So
these piton makers, they're making a living, they're being able to
hire us. Thank you very much. But we're understanding that these
pitons are so good at being removable, which we thought was clean
and they're chipping away at the rock and destroying the cracks and
then they're getting ugly looking. And so this clean climbing is
the solution to that. And they bet the farm on clean climbing and
it ended up eliminating the piton business.
Pretty scary though because they're making all their
money off pitons and they're doing all right. But we think this is
the right thing to do. So anyway, I ended up writing a piece for
the catalog. It was the first real catalog of the company. It was
called the Great Pacific Ironworks at the time. So in the
72 catalog is my
manifesto called the whole natural art of protection and it really
changed things.
Val Franco is doing some pretty
amazing archival work that is keeping all those times alive, talk
about that.
You
walk into that archive and this is only a couple years old but it's
phenomenal. I mean there's examples of every piton on that
Chouinard Equipment ever made and she has the newer equipment that is now
called
Black Diamond Equipment, but it's just this like the lineage is right straight
through. And all of the clean hardware and some fascinating
prototypes that I remember making with a file and a bench vise down
there.
And
they are doing taping sessions too. I got to sit in on some
sessions with Tom Frost before he died where he was talking about his part in
all that. He'd been an aircraft designer, aeronautical engineer,
and quit all that. He's a Stanford trained engineer, smart guy. The
mechanical drawings that he made for the nuts that we were
designing are phenomenal. They're just beautiful. And those are in
the archive too. And so are the interviews with Tom where he talks
about his role. Um, it's very cool. Val Franco is the head of that
and she was a sewer at ironworks when I was there. We knew each
other when we were in our twenties and she's still there and
putting this thing together and she's so excited.
What was your first backcountry
ski experience?
I
started downhill skiing when I was seven years old at Goldridge and
Sugar Bowl. And I had these Hickory skis, little segmented metal
edges screwed onto them. But the bindings were interesting cause
they had a cable on the heel and there were two hold-downs on the
sides. And I hope you can visualize this cause, you snap the cable
underneath one to hold your heel down onto the ski, right? That's
the rear one. The forward one snapped from the rear. It’s a walking
mode and these are my downhill skis. But this is 1952 and skiing
hasn't advanced that far, so it's still like walking on skis is
important. It's a backcountry sport that happens to have some ski
lifts and hasn't evolved into plastic boots and all
that.
Um,
so in a sense having that gear was my heritage and I realized that
you could walk on it and that meant that I could go uphill on my
skis. Jeez, no big deal. They were built for it. So in a sense, it
started right there and by the early sixties, I was going into the
backcountry skiing Pyramid Peak. I got to move to Bishop in 1969
fresh out of college. I'm already a guide and lucky again, I had a
client for the entire winter. We rented a cabin up Bishop Creek and
I taught him how to backcountry ski and winter climbing in the
Palisades. We ended up the next spring, spring of 1970, skiing
the
John Muir Trail, which
we thought was a first. But it turns out that we were scooped in
1928-29 by
Orland Bartholomew.
And that's another whole story.
Well,
nothing like skiing the whole length of the range to give you some
ideas of places to go and things to just do. in 1975, David Beck
and some friends pioneered the Sierra High Route in the
backcountry, which goes from roughly Independence across to Sequoia
National Park for six days. Or I like to take eight or nine days to
do it cause, once you're out there, well why rush back to the
city?
I was
guiding that every spring or maybe even twice every spring. And by
the mid-eighties, there was a time when I skied across the range,
guiding it for a week and then rested a day or two. And I had
another backcountry ski tour to guide starting on the Eastside. So
I skied back in 22 hours. This is like a six or eight-day trip but
you know, I'm really fit and by then and I have set my own track
across the top of these high basins. But what a day, you know, to
be out there all by myself.
I'm sure all this time in the
backcountry gave you plenty of time to think about
gear.
The
Ultima Thule Pack evolved out of a pack that Don Jensen had
designed. He was brilliant. He gave us the plans for them and for
our Muir Trail backcountry ski trip we built packs that weighed 17
ounces and carried 70 pounds. I built those packs and a tent that
Don Jensen designed for that trip. And then while I was working in
Ventura I knew that I could improve on the Jensen pack. So Tom
Frost and I ended up crawling around on pattern paper on the floor
and laughing to ourselves. It was so much fun to work with him as a
designer and we came up with a truly better version of that pack
that carried better. And so that was wonderful and decades later I
designed another carrying system for a pack for Montbell when you and I were working there.
That
was the Wishbone system. I mentioned that the Ultima Thule dragged
on your shoulders just like the Jensen backcountry pack did. We
hadn't figured that out. And so it was figuring that out over the
years with essentially some internal stays in the pack that rose
above the shoulder straps, like lift straps, which everybody's got
now. But there was a time when that was a big deal. It was a new
way and the new hybrid materials that I came up with without going
way into it.
When did you write your first
book?
Writing for magazines like Outside, which I helped
start, another whole story. I wrote some cover stories and was
having such a good time. That was the first really professional
magazine that I'd ever been around. I ended up moving to San
Francisco to hang out with them and I was making enough of a pest
to myself that they gave me a desk and a phone and ended up staying
the winter.
Then
I wrote cover stories and I was writing for backpacker and already
mentioned Powder. So that was half of my career and guiding was the
other half. By the nineties, I had all these magazine articles that
I had written that I liked and other people liked so I pulled them
together into a book. So my first book was really just an anthology
of my own writing. Things I liked the best going back to the
sixties. And it was a big success actually. It was recently named
by climbing magazine as one of the 33 must-reads climbing
literature of all time.
You were thinking about the
listeners of the podcast, what do you want to say to
them?
I was
thinking about the people who might be listening to this podcast.
And I'm imagining that some of them are shop people working on the
floor, some are designers, some are marketers, you know, we're all
in the same industry, this outdoor industry, which is so great.
It’s given us such great friendships and good times.
I was
thinking about the customer that walks into that shop and you're
the guy on the floor saying “hi what can I do for you”? And that what you can do for them is not just talk
about the qualities of the packs that you're selling, that they
want to buy, but also the experience. You've been out in the
backcountry more than they have. You have the experience they
admire that and they would love to soak it up and hear some of your
stories. And if you're a customer just walking into your local
mountain shop, yeah you wanna walk back out with a parka and a pack
and a sleeping bag, but you also want to rub shoulders with the
experience itself. And so don't you guys out there sell yourself
short on, on that. You got a lot to give people besides the tech
specs.
Do you have any other
suggestions or advice for someone wanting to get into the outdoor
business or grow their career if they are already in the
biz?
Follow your bliss. I mean, that's how basically all of
us got in here. And I have one other sort of oddball piece of
advice too. Don't think that you can get that degree from Oregon
and be a product designer without the outdoor experience with it,
cause you gotta be out there in the rain with the water somehow
finding its way to drip in around the hood of your parka, you know,
and you have to have that experience before you can know how to
design around it, how to fix it.
If you could have a huge banner
at the entrance to the OR show these days, what would it
say?
My
banner would say “take
care of the planet because if you don't, nothing in this show is
going to mean anything.”
Y
ou
can follow up with Doug at his website Moving Over Stone