Outside Magazine April 2002

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The Big Idea
The Outside Innovators

Rich Johnston & Dan Cauthorn
Wall Crawlers
In 1987, growing antsy—and soft—during Seattle's long, wet winters, two buddies scraped together $14,000 and built America's first indoor climbing gym. Rich Johnston, a 29-year-old paralegal, and Dan Cauthorn, a 30-year-old alpine guide and window washer, rented an abandoned warehouse, glued rocks to the plywood walls, and dubbed their creation The Vertical Club. In short order, indoor rock gyms sprouted across the country, even in topographically challenged locales like New Orleans and Milwaukee. In 1997, Cauthorn became an account manager at W.L. Gore and Associates, but Johnston remains as president of Vertical World (renamed in 1994), which now has 2,000 members.

Ray Jardine
Low-Impact Inventor
Once upon a time, climbers had no Friends. That is, they lacked the spring-loaded camming devices that Ray Jardine concocted in 1973, when he was a 29-year-old aeronautical engineer looking to apply his skills to the outdoors. Friends, sold through the British climbing-gear company Wild Country, became standard-issue rock-climbing protection. They also gave Jardine enough financial security to pursue the "Ray Way," a low-impact philosophy made manifest in superlight camping and trekking gear sold through GoLite, founded in 1998 by entrepreneur and devout Jardinite Demetri Coupounas. In his spare time, Jardine is a paddler known for designing and building graceful Kevlar and carbon-fiber boats. Watch for his new lightweight kayak for ocean travel.

John Collins
Man of Iron
In 1978, marathoner John Collins challenged 14 of his male friends to an unorthodox race in Hawaii that he called "the Ironman." He wanted to settle a dispute about who was more fit—swimmers, cyclists, or runners. Now the granddaddy of endurance races, the Hawaii Ironman attracts 1,500 participants from more than 48 countries, high-profile sponsors like Gatorade and Timex, and 50 million television viewers who tune in every October to gawk at the self-flagellation. But perhaps more important, the Ironman gave triathletes a unique identity, paving the way for the sport's Olympic debut in Sydney in 2000. Collins, now 66, lives on a boat in Panama and remains an active Ironman competitor, though he gave up the clerically strenuous job of race director back in 1980.

McCoy inside Sierra Designs' prototype room

Sally McCoy
Gear Made Just for Women
Hunkered down in Mount Everest's Camp II at 21,500 feet on a harrowing October night in 1987, with winds sinking the temperature to minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit, Sally McCoy had a dream: never to be this cold again. "My sleeping bag was designed for negative 40, but there was so much icy air whooshing into my hood that I was rapidly losing body temperature," recalls McCoy, a veteran mountaineer and businesswoman who is now president of Sierra Designs, the Emeryville, California-based gear maker. "I couldn't help but think how stupid it was that a sleeping bag designed to fit women's smaller-proportioned bodies didn't exist."

McCoy was in a position to do something about it—she was a design executive for The North Face at the time—and she vowed to solve the problem of ill-fitting unisex gear that was the norm back then. When she landed at Sierra Designs in 1994, her first priority was to create and market female-specific sleeping bags—shorter, narrower, and warmer; 18,000 Calamity Jane and Annie Oakley mummy sacks sold that first year. Building on McCoy's success, Sierra Designs broke the industry mold by creating separate R&D teams for its men's and women's apparel lines, microtailoring each garment with gender specifics in mind—down to insulation, hood size, and pocket placement—to minimize hassles, increase efficiency, and promote safety.

McCoy experienced the safety issues firsthand a few years back on Mount Shasta. Wearing a pair of men's pants with baggy ankles, "I caught a crampon in them, and did a slide for life before I managed to self-arrest," she recalls. "I came within half a knuckle of totally losing it, so I swore Sierra Designs would make pants for women without any extra material in them."

The result—Sierra's M8 streamlined black nylon stretch pants with internal gaiters at the ankles—will debut in fall 2002. "You won't catch a crampon in those," McCoy promises, "and they look good, too." —Natasha Singer

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