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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Jan 23, 2009 - 03:53pm PT
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This one's for Rusty!
I mean, barely presuming to post here w/o so fine a grade of steel wool, let alone blueing...Sir!
Before any of out times, thank you, but here's an ice piton (50s?)
with a rock pin of the same era for comparison
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 24, 2009 - 10:36pm PT
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Ahh, the era of drive-ins! The movies were gone by the time anyone really worked that one out. Nice one ,Doug.
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Patrick Sawyer
climber
Originally California now Ireland
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Jan 25, 2009 - 07:13am PT
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I had that Forrest ice hammer, and a piolet along with the Chouinard Alpine Hammer. Dana Couloir was the first place I used them back in 1972 if I recall correctly. With Chouinard-Salewa cramps and Galibier Super Guides (great boots).
I had a Jensen pack also EDIT a green one.
Don't know what happened to all that stuff over the years, I know I sold some when hard up for money.
Still have my North Face Ibex sleeping bag from 1969.
EDIT
Still reading through this thread. I had a Simond Chacal. I thought it was cool and used it in Lee Vining.
EDIT
I had a pair of Trappeurs, heavy as a friggin' car, had a little 'gaiter-like' 'sleeve' or whatever you want to call it (cuff?) at the top. Only used them a couple of times.
Doug wrote: It's odd, maybe, that I don't recall Don ever going to the Valley. Grew up in Walnut Creek,.
Hey, I was born and raised in Walnut Creek and Lafayette. Was Jensen from there?
Don lost it on black ice on his bicycle and slid headfirst into a stone wall while a Postdoc in Mathematics in Scotland in the early 70s.
For some reason I always thought he was hit by a car while bicyling in Scotland. Regardless it was a loss. I met him once but I can't recall where, perhaps one day at the PSOM, but he wasn't instructing there when I went, at least I don't think so.
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 25, 2009 - 10:56pm PT
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From the 72 catalog.
Two pounds!!!!
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marty(r)
climber
beneath the valley of ultravegans
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Jan 25, 2009 - 11:08pm PT
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Damn, those are some beautiful tools! I love the new pick/adze of the silver BD Raven, but the cursive engraved name and bamboo/hickory/ash to metal contrast can't be beat. Those ice daggers, however...YIKES!
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Jan 26, 2009 - 01:21am PT
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Always thought that Jensen shot was pretty artful.
2 pounds: hardly anything to it in terms of structure; in a way like monocoque automotive design, nothing in the way of framework, all exoskeleton.
That one looks like it has an arched zipper on the back side of the pack (up top), rather than along the back panel as all I had seen were fitted.
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RDB
Trad climber
Iss WA
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Jan 26, 2009 - 02:09am PT
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The first Jensen's I saw were all green and had a zipper on the front of the pack as pictured above from the catalog. The second version was rust colored and had a zipper next to your back. The Giant Jensens I saw were also rust colored and zip next to your back.
Ray's pack in the picture below has the same zipper placement.
Ray Brooks photo
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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Jan 26, 2009 - 10:46am PT
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Let the zippers fall where they may... The Ultima Thule I recall carrying for years had a flap top.
Here's my take on the "most copied pack ever" or whatever. Designs evolve.
The Jensen Pack that made me sit up and take notice was a day pack he made for guiding on Temple Crag. Light nylon, same basic shape, late 60s. Well under one pound. Don also had an overnite alpine version, size of the Rivendell and Thule.
It was his patterns for that size that I gave to Larry Horton one day in Berkeley to launch Rivendell. He paid Don a royalty and eventually produced Don's Bombshelter tent too. Then became miffed at me for redesigning the pack until it became the Ultima Thule. But designs evolve, the Thule carried better and by then Don had died.
Back up a little. In the spring of 1970 I skied 36 days along the John Muir Trail and the Sierra Crest. Still the best expedition of my life. Carl "P-Nut" McCoy built our wonderful Hexcel ski prototypes for the trip. His girlfriend Claudia and I built two Jensen Packs and a Bombshelter that totaled five pounds. Each pack weighed 17 ounces and carried up to 70 pounds. They were the first really big Jensen Packs; I ballooned-out Don's pattern.
The packs skied superbly. The basic genius of Don's design was to get a soft pack to cling better to your back the tighter you packed it, instead of turning into a sausage that rolled its weight against your turn to slam-dance you onto the snow. Again.
And skiing even more than alpine climbing is the ultimate test of how a pack design will follow the motion of your back.
The hidden problem with the design, that only became obvious once I expanded it, was that its softness wouldn't support lift straps for the shoulder straps. Many cycles of evolving it into the Ultima Thule with Tom Frost's help and encouragement, made the bottom compartment wrap far more tightly around your hips and took more weight off your shoulders. But with big loads, not enough.
A fundamental limit of the design had been reached. And exceeded, I could tell every time I lowered a 60# load off of shoulders beginning to cramp. Don Jensen had tacitly pointed that out, I realized, by carrying all his really big loads in an external frame pack. Later, internal frames would bridge the difference, getting the load closer to your back than his Kelty, but also supporting those shoulder-stabilizer straps that would give relief to the tops of shoulder muscles.
See? The zippers and the rest of the stuff that holds the load mean nothing compared to how it is made to ride on your back. How you support it is the trick.
I later designed, on paper, a small frame element that would allow the Thule to grow shoulder-stabilizer straps. But by then packs with two internal stays were the state of the art, and I never built it. The internal frames would carry a big load all right, but they went careening off in their own wrong direction until you could heft a seven- or even eight-pound wonder. Even with a monster load, there's something just wrong about 10% or more of the load you're humping up the trail going into merely the sack to put it in.
Back to the Jensen, I read on the Internet that Rivendell produced a thousand of them over a decade. And hundreds of Bombshelters. (Sweet tent, btw, but tiny. On our ski trip I modified ski poles to hold it up and we only carried the ridgepole. Patterns on request, tho the state of that art has moved on from A-frames.) Someone in Washington is now reviving the original Jensen Pack design yet again. Sticking to tradition is honorable in its way -- it's the conservative path -- but don't get stuck; if Jensen were alive I'm sure he would have carried an Ultima Thule instead, because it made his own idea work better. And then like the rest of us he would have moved on to an internal frame. It's like the Einstein t-shirt I saw last night: "Life is like a bicycle. You have to keep moving forward or you'll fall over."
I hounded Wayne Gregory for years about weight, and even cooked the first carbon-fiber stays in my oven for his packs. He built me a custom lightweight for climbing Ama Dablam with Frost in 1979, but didn't sell anything light until after I had designed MontBell's Wishbone suspension packs 15 years later.
Now there are some more diverse ideas cropping up. Some really innovative, and some de-volutions that lock up your back. I'm sitting on an idea that I think could be the Next Big Thing, if any companies out there are interested.
Long live the genius of Don Jensen. I've written a bit more about him, but I'm waiting to find the photo to go with it and then I'll start another thread.
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RDB
Trad climber
Iss WA
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Jan 26, 2009 - 01:01pm PT
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Anyone remember the Millet 370s?
For the guys I started climbing with it was "the" climbing/skiing pack in the late 60s, early 70s.
You could get gear for a 3 or 4 days and a sleeping bag into one. Not that it carried all that well with a 1/2" tape waist band.
Same load of kit in a Jensen did actually carry pretty well. We all thought that was the brilliance of Jensen's design. Being difficult to pack was just something you learned to live with.
Guys I climbed with used the Giant Jensen, the GPIW Thule and the Yak pak to lesser and lessor degrees of satisfaction for even bigger loads. The first pack that would actually carry a bigger load to our satisfaction was the Lowe Expedition.
Easy mixed on Deltaform
Two Jensen's on a early winter ascent of Ptarmigan Ridge, Rainier.
And yet another Jensen on the NW Face of Half Dome.
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Jan 26, 2009 - 01:45pm PT
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Sweet!!!
SAX MILLET: Alto or tenor?
Hey DR,
That was a cool break out of design history.
Wouldn't you say all that came to it's final apogee in the Dana Terraplane?
I'm gonna put some top shoulder pulls on my Jensen when I rebuild it; gotta have 'em.
That is an issue: hell on the levator scapula.
They do work on frameless rucksacks, as long as the load/size overall ratio isn't too aggressive. (well under the 60+ lb mark, like 30-35lb maybe)
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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Jan 26, 2009 - 02:39pm PT
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Dana Packs seemed to be on the top of many folks lists. I never carried one, partly because they were so heavy and partly because I was designing and selling my own MontBell Wishbone packs against them. Mine weighed half and carried as well (less cush, more lively -- kinda like Tar's analogy of a monocoque race car) up to about 50 pounds. Then the big freighters like Terraplane worked better.
But if weight is one of your criteria I could never call it an apogee. Talking to the pack sales guys in shops, however, it was pretty obvious that Dana did the best marketing job in the industry. He went face to face with them, right at their own pack walls, clear across the country. They became true believers.
As a designer who was an active user and building a pack to move, part of my rap against Danas was to offer to compare waistlines with any designer in the industry.
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marty(r)
climber
beneath the valley of ultravegans
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Jan 26, 2009 - 03:17pm PT
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Tar,
Where's Ray(dog) Olsen? We need some free radicals in this thread.
DR--is the WishBone going to get a 21st century resurrection? What's new with MOS? Inquiring minds (with luggage fetishes) want to know.
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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Jan 26, 2009 - 04:03pm PT
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Luggage fetish? Maybe I don't want to know...
Boy I'd like it if someone revived the Wishbone. My packs are wearing out after only a few thousand miles. The patent should expire any day now. MontBell took its pack suspension off in a different direction soon after MontBell America, which I worked for, went out of business (mid-90s). It's still called Wishbone, but not the same.
MontBell Japan is bringing their products into Boulder, and distributing them to shops around the country. Which is great, because some of that gear is unbeatable.
My pack ideas are headed in a different direction. New frame, some of the same materials, super light, flexible. But I'm not actually building any protos, as I have a full-blown "portable hut" tent project in final development. I'm excited to finish that and see what happens.
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Jan 26, 2009 - 05:24pm PT
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Ray is MIA at the moment...
But his ears might start burnin' in a couple few ...
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F10
Trad climber
e350
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Jan 26, 2009 - 05:40pm PT
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Where's Ray(dog) Olsen?
Or do you mean,
Ray(FROG) Olsen ?
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Jan 26, 2009 - 06:18pm PT
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One and the same.
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Jan 26, 2009 - 06:32pm PT
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This thread needs a little humor…
Largo on Ice, (sorta):
Photo by Accomazzo
Bloody Mtn couloir maybe…
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Jan 26, 2009 - 07:52pm PT
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I saw a woman crossing the street just a few months ago, with a MINT blue one on her back. Just a couple models under the one Dane posted.
If I had more than two nickels to rub together I might've tried to run her down and make an offer...
Shoulda' just flat out purse snatched it.
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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Jan 26, 2009 - 08:12pm PT
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Largo on Ice.
Classic!
And unlikely.
Reminds me of...
OK, so there we are slapping a mockup of issue #3 or so of the fledgling Outside Magazine onto the conference table, right in front of the Big Cheese himself, Jann Wenner, the guy who started Rolling Stone and then started Outside in '77. Kinda funny, since he was completely clueless about the outdoors. Sure had a good sense of timing, tho...
It's the ice climbing issue. My piece on the FA of Ice Nine with Dale Bard is in it. And a Chouinard excerpt from Climbing Ice which is just about to hit the streets. The main cover headline reads "Chouinard on Ice."
So the mockup lands in front of Wenner. We all lean forward expectantly. He rocks back, looks up and says,
"What? Is he dead?"
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Jan 26, 2009 - 08:15pm PT
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Ha!
He might be if he stays on it too long...
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