Chouinard founded both Black Diamond (called Chouinard equipment at the time) and Patagonia. He sold the hardware business to the employees when he didn’t want to deal with the liability anymore, and they renamed it Black Diamond. He kept Patagonia which was a safer business and grew faster. Patagonia popularized polyester fleece and long underwear among climbers and skiers.
Tom Frost was a Stanford-trained engineer who worked with Chouinard to innovate on ice axes, crampons, pitons, and yes the Hexentric.
Royal Robbins was another big name in early Yosemite climbing and he started the eponymous outdoor clothing company.
The Lowe brothers were well-known climbers in 60s and 70s and invented the internal-frame backpack and the modern padded outdoor camera bags, with their companies Lowe Alpine and Lowepro.
Ray Jardine was an aerospace engineer who invented the spring loaded cam so he could protect the first 5.13 climb in Yosemite. He later invented a lot of the ultralight backpacking gear and techniques that are popular now (tennis shoes, tarps, quilts, etc) which he detailed in a guidebook to the Pacific Crest Trail.
Not all these folks were in on the smuggler plane of course but yeah there was a ton of invention and innovation that came out of early climbing.
This is an excellent reply - thanks for sharing it!
I think my favourite Yvon Chouinard/Tom Frost story is from the dawn of the Hexentrics path of innovation. They came to realize that pitons, which was their cash cow, was damaging rock. So they innovated against themselves and changed climbing!
That's the hacker of my dreams - they're so driven by moving their passion forward that they'll innovate against themselves. :)
Given your interest, there’s a Tom Frost documentary [1] in progress (I saw an early cut as part of an SFFILM event). There’s a lot of great material, but the film wasn’t ready (late 2019?) and I assume the pandemic paused their release plans.
To add one, Doug Philips started Metolious Climbing hacking together the first active protection gear in his garage and selling them in the parking lot at Smith Rock. Bootstraped the company by occasionally building houses, and used metal working machines off-hours at friends shops.
this sort of innovation was rife in California in the mid to late 70s (Lucasfilm, Genentech, the Dead). It's one of the things that set up the bay are of today.
Tom Frost was a Stanford-trained engineer who worked with Chouinard to innovate on ice axes, crampons, pitons, and yes the Hexentric.
Royal Robbins was another big name in early Yosemite climbing and he started the eponymous outdoor clothing company.
The Lowe brothers were well-known climbers in 60s and 70s and invented the internal-frame backpack and the modern padded outdoor camera bags, with their companies Lowe Alpine and Lowepro.
Ray Jardine was an aerospace engineer who invented the spring loaded cam so he could protect the first 5.13 climb in Yosemite. He later invented a lot of the ultralight backpacking gear and techniques that are popular now (tennis shoes, tarps, quilts, etc) which he detailed in a guidebook to the Pacific Crest Trail.
Not all these folks were in on the smuggler plane of course but yeah there was a ton of invention and innovation that came out of early climbing.