The worlds largest collection of outdoor gear designs is at a Utah university

SALT LAKE CITY — What started at Utah State University as a collection of about 250 outdoor brands’ catalogues as a way for students to be educated in outdoor design history has now grown to a design archive representing over 1,000 brands from all over the world.

Clint Pomphrey is the curator for the Outdoor Recreation Archive, the world’s largest public collection of outdoor catalogues, magazines, design sketches and Pomphrey says the archive has now started collecting audio-visual as well, adding ski and climbing movies. 

After the collection started in 2017, co-archivist Chase Anderson said he decided to start an Instagram account two years later, showing off some of what they had. From there it took off, drawing attention from around the world. The pair found themselves being offered pieces from private collections and becoming the stewards for the sketchbooks of key designers in several big-name outdoor brands including Patagonia, JanSport and the North Face.

The account is now the most followed Utah State University page, just behind the university’s main page and gaining more followers than any of the schools’ sports teams.

Pomphrey says this is an archivist’s dream.

“There’s so many archivists who are doing really important work. And sometimes we have to work really hard to get people to pay attention to what we’re working on,” says Pomphrey. “This is a collection that we built where we were the first to collect in this area. And there was a demand for viewing and using the materials. So for an archivist? That’s, I mean,  that’s incredible. That’s ideal. That’s exactly the position that you want to be in.”

Pomphrey says every piece in the collection feels like a win, but recalls the moment they got the personal sketchbooks from a key designer at JanSport, Skip Yowell, who passed away in 2015.

“Skip Yowell was one of the early employees at JanSport, and he kind of built the brand into what a lot of people know it today as a famous backpack brand. And so we had been working with Skip’s wife,” Pomphrey said, adding that after working with her for a while, she finally decided to donate his work.

Pomphrey and Anderson took a van to a one-horse town in Kansas and went to see all the materials that had been stored in the basement.

“We got to spend the day just going through Skip’s papers and the materials he kept from Jansport. And then we drove them all back here in the university van,” Pomphrey said. “We’ve organized them, rehoused them in archival boxes and folders and helped to preserve them for the long term. And I think it’s those kind of experiences that kind of remind you why we’re doing this, and to capture the history of an industry legend like that is just really fulfilling.”

Anderson says the collection has been an invaluable resource in helping educate students.

“We have some early designers from The North Face from the ’70s and the students get to look at their sketchbooks and it’s a great teaching moment,” Anderson said, adding they are able to use the collection for several projects.  

“We’ll assign students a project – for example, we’ll have them design a new category of products for a company like the North Face,” he said. “And before they can start designing, they have to do research and they have to understand the brand, the aesthetics, the look and feel, the product line of The North Face.”

He says this can also give them an edge over other hiring candidates.

“If they have a better understanding of the industry and and of products and where this whole industry came from, we think they’re going to be more compelling candidates and more valuable employees to brands,” Anderson said. 

Anderson says what makes the collection unique is it’s not just the largest collection of outdoor designs — it’s also public.

“We’re here to provide access to the people. And so we have open reading hours where people can come into the collection. People also e-mail us from all over the world asking for scans or research requests. And so we host visitors and guests pretty frequently in the collection and some traveling as far as Tokyo to come just to look at materials from our collection.”

The collection doesn’t just sit in the library either, Pomphrey says they show it off around the world, often displayed with other designers or brands.

 “We’ve partnered with a Japanese brand called Beans to do an event called Expedition Club, which we’ve done in many cities around the world where we display our catalogs alongside a collection of vintage down parkas and mountain parkas.” 

In October the collection will be heading to Taiwan for one of these Expedition Club exhibits. The archive will also be in Portland, Oregon.

“One thing that I’m working on right now is an exhibit about the history of wool in outdoor clothing. That exhibit will be on display during the Functional Fabric Fair trade show in Portland,” Pomphery says this is a partnership with Wollmark. “And we’re just going to have some of our materials there on display. And then we’re going to be borrowing some actual historical pieces, like a vintage wool swimsuit, which a lot of people don’t think of wool being used in that context.”

Anderson says one thing the archive is looking for more of: Utah brands.

“We have collections from the big national brands in the country. We have started collecting materials from European brands. We have Japanese outdoor magazines in the collection. But interestingly enough, we are lacking in our Utah archives,” he said. “So we’re always looking to grow our collections around Utah brands and the history of Utah companies.”