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guido
Trad climber
Santa Cruz/New Zealand/South Pacific
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Topic Author's Original Post - Jan 9, 2011 - 02:49am PT
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Rainy and windy day in NZ after a week of summer bliss so I shall dive into the Den of Antiquity for some tidbits of the past.
I believe the CMGS was in reality an offshoot of Tompkins and his original North Face Store in North Beach. Between manufacturing and selling gear, socializing next store with Ms Doda at the Condor Club and living in the big city, the boys needed a little guiding to complement the day. Don't remember much about it so perhaps some input would be welcome.
I am remiss in my research, never got beyond Googling Doda.
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PhilG
Trad climber
The Circuit, Tonasket WA
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guido:
That's quite an exceptional group of guides!
I agree it would be interesting to hear from people who were taught climbing by that group of climbers.
Phil
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Peter Haan
Trad climber
San Francisco, CA
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Well, I am not remembering either. However the 308 Columbus address was the first North Face address and Dougie's lair for sure.
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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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'Morning, Guido.
I remember picking up one of those brochures at that first North Face store. I wonder if they actually guided?
The store was a success, right from the first, because they had relevant climbing gear like Chouinard iron and those tan canvas La Fuma packs. The other mountain shop in town was Gerry Mountain Sports, an offshoot from their Boulder headquarters and more into backpacking.
The grand opening of The North Face was an evening in October '66. Doug Tompkins hired an unknown local band called the Grateful Dead, and served Kool Aid, which was hip right then because of the Acid Tests. I spent part of the dreamy evening leaning on Pig Pen's organ watching him play.
On second thought, I recall hitching a ride with Pratt around then from Camp 4 to Tahoe. He was on his way to teach climbing. Had to be this school.
Parts of that drive in Chuck's VW bus stand out in sharp relief. Like driving down the East Walker River canyon and stopping to look at one of those granite crags along the road. It turned out to be rotten rock, but something about being with Chuck, who I admired tremendously, makes that drive vivid over 40 years later.
Is there more to the brochure? A list of climbing courses, anything?
I remember we ended up in South Shore. Maybe Chuck was heading to Lover's Leap. It was already thought of as a place to guide then. Royal had his Rockcraft climbing school across Highway 50 in a cabin for a few years, and guided at the Leap. That was before he moved Rockcraft down to the Southern Yosemite area he called "The Hinterlands," where I guided for him in the early 70s and we put up some of the early routes on Fresno Dome and The Balls with clients.
Chuck went on to guide with Don Jensen and Bob Swift and John Fischer and Smoke Blanchard and me at the Palisade School of Mountaineering in the late 60s and early 70s. Then he moved on to guide in the Tetons every summer for the rest of his life. I always thought it was a strange move for him to leave the sunny Sierra for the stormy Tetons because he so much hated snow and being cold. But I think the livelier social scene there made him happy.
I doubt that those other guys in the brochure ever did much guiding, and I think the school faded away as Doug Tompkins got more into building up The North Face. By 1970 they had a sewing shop in Berkeley near where their outlet store is now, around Fifth and Gilman. I remember Jack Gilbert working there, because he gave me two light sleeping bags for my ski tour the length of the John Muir Trail that spring.
Interesting that the brochure mentions ski touring. An idea ahead of its time, really. It had to wait for the wave of interest in cross country skiing to take off in the early 70s. By the mid-70s Rock Creek Winter Lodge was starting, I was living in a cabin two miles up the canyon, and every spring I was starting to get several weeks of business guiding ski tours -- verging on ski mountaineerng, really -- for a week at a time along the Sierra crest.
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Great thread all!
When did Mountain Travel enter the picture?
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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I don't know how Frank and I managed to miss the opening of North Face except that it must have been on a weekend and we thought Yosemite was more interesting. We had been married not quite a year at that point.
As for Mountain Travel, I believe it was started just before we went to Europe in 1969. They were going strong by the spring of 1973, when on the basis of a photo in their catalog and the description of Rolwaling Valley as "the most isolated and traditional Sherpa Valley in Nepal, just opened to tourism for the first time in 20 years", I decided that was the place I was going to do the fieldwork for my doctorate.
A year after seeing that Mountain Travel catalog, I had already spent three months there doing my research and the rest is history. Mountain Travel changed the whole course of my life! They were also, through Al Reed, their director in Kathmandu, the people I turned to when I got the letter from Chris Jones telling me that Frank had been killed. He telexed Leo LeBon in Berkeley who telexed friends in Chamonix to confirm and find out what happened.
Interesting too, how I haven't thought much about all these interconnections until we started putting all this history together on ST. Too busy living life, rushing from one adventure to the other, to even notice them at the time.
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Unknown local band?!?
Jan- Very cool connection to MT!
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guido
Trad climber
Santa Cruz/New Zealand/South Pacific
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 9, 2011 - 11:04pm PT
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I am always amazed at all the interconnections.
That is the total brochure I scanned several summers ago and I also have the feeling the CMGS never really got into swing. Tompkins knew how to throw a good opening. The revived Esprit shindig in SF was along the same lines, everyone but our small group from Santa Cruz was dressed to the nines and the Kool Aid was a little more sophisticated. Haanster didn't you work with Harper and TM on the rebuild after the fire?
Unknown band! Gotta love that. I was on a boat in Polynesia many years ago helping a friend with his solo guest on a private charter. Guy told me he had a band. I ask him the name of the group and he reluctantly tells me Police. Naive guido, absent from the mainstream sailing for for years, asks him," what kind of music do you play?" Bluegrass, folk etc. Stuart Copeland looks at me and says. " you and I could become friends." He had just finished a mega million dollar tour.
Juri lived in Jackson Hole and was a good friend of Herbert. Met him only briefly but remember TM always speaking highly of him.
Any trip with Pratt in his old VW would have been an excursion down memory lane.
The first office for Mountain Travel was in my old doctors office on Solano ave in Albany. Don't recall when they actually started but I do remember Steck making the big leap from The Ski Hut to Mountain Travel. Steck was an institution at the Hut and many of us believed he would never leave. Large cast of characters worked for Steck during those years, including: Roper, Pratt, Foott, Marks, Swanson and a host of other lost souls. He was very accommodating in hiring us back when we ran off for a season of climbing. My last three years of high school I got out of school at noon to work at the Hut. Good excuse to go climbing.
Across the street from MT was the Solano Club which was a favorite watering hole for seaman dating back to world war two. My dad always knew where to find his merchant marine buddies when he had to. Didn't require too many years to become popular with the Mountain Travel crowd.
North Face, Mountain Travel, The Ski Hut and Sierra Design were intermingled with many of the same personalities and lots of interaction between the key players and grunts. I would certainly put The Ski Hut at the center on the west coast for the genesis of numerous companies in the formative era of the 60s in the outdoor retail and manufacturing industry.
Jan-those early Mountain Travel brochures were indeed dream machines.
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Mungeclimber
Trad climber
sorry, just posting out loud.
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Is this now the name of the guide service Cos runs?
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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Guido, I like what you're saying about the intertwined trajectories of all those Berkeley businesses that flowed out of the Ski Hut. In a way that highlights the startup of The North Face as an anomaly, since Tompkins came out of the east coast and cranked it up outside of the Ski Hut circle. Soon enough, though, it got drawn into the Berkeley orbit.
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Jan 10, 2011 - 12:14am PT
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Fair to say the dawn of the trekking industry?
Superb tales Joe!
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guido
Trad climber
Santa Cruz/New Zealand/South Pacific
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 10, 2011 - 12:59am PT
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Doug
I remember being at the old Sierra Designs on Tewksbury in Pt Richmond and Susie Tompkins would drop by with some projects for George and Bob's assistance in design and sewing of North Face paraphernalia. Remember, both Marks and Swanson came from the Hut.
Tompkins was a master at delegating and finagling and both Chouinard and Robbins in the latter days of the rag trade benefited from his trials and tribulations at Esprit. Of course this was when everyone discovered that the real money was in clothes and forget the hardware. Really synonymous with the computer industry in many ways. Hardware margins disappeared with volume and software was the holy grail.
I have all the catalogs from the Ski Hut from the late 50s to mid 60s and next time I'm back in Santa Cruz, I will scan them. George Rudolph with his wholesale company, Donner Mountain Corporation, was years ahead of everybody with his introduction of Vibram soled shoes, european climbing gear and beautiful German girls from Sporthaus Shuster that would work at the Hut for a year exchange program. They couldn't play baseball for sh#t but man could they drink.
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Jan 10, 2011 - 01:14am PT
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I have a single Ski Hut catalog somewhere.
That Sierra Designs catalog that was shot in Bodie stands out in my earliest soft goods memory.
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guido
Trad climber
Santa Cruz/New Zealand/South Pacific
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 10, 2011 - 01:40am PT
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Bodie is a very cool place-I remember being there before it was a state park and you could wander everywhere and anywhere. Amazing that people did not steal the place blind, but thankful it is now protected. I believe the first hydro generating plant in the US was Bodie. If you ever go back, check out the giant circuit breakers in the electrical shack. I bet DR would know what creek the hydro was set up on? Long long run no matter.
Last time in Bodie, the Aussies were working a gold field that borders the state park on the east side. "There's gold in them there hills."
Ever see the movie High Plains Drifter by Eastwood? We ended up with a large amount of wood from the movie set. Nice beams and all, the only problem being that it was painted red. Hennek was living on Mono Lake at the time..............................................
Oh how these threads can diverge.
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Jan 10, 2011 - 01:44am PT
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We are the spiders of destiny...
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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Jan 10, 2011 - 12:58pm PT
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Hennek's cabin was cool, even with some of the boards red around the edges. You'd wake in the loft which had an eye-level window out over the last willows and onto the lake, and roll over to see coffee steaming and "baby cakes" sizzling on the wood range.
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Chris Jones
Social climber
Glen Ellen, CA
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Jan 10, 2011 - 08:49pm PT
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Love the snappy Tyrolean hat that Doug Tompkins is sporting - he looks like a candidate for the Eiger circa 1930. About the time the North Face opened, I lived a couple of blocks away - I was a refugee from the Haight Ashbury. Lito Tejada-Flores worked for Doug, or at at least he hung out there quite a bit. He had a tiny studio a short way from the well-remembered pole-mounted glass enclosure on Broadway in which a scantily clad young woman was hired to dance and generally entice passers-by into the associated establishment. In my recollection the North Face at that time was more of a ski shop than a climbing shop - I went to the Ski Hut to buy gear. As others have mentioned, there were very few climbers then in San Francisco - they were in Berkeley.
In regard to Mountain Travel, which was certainly one of the first Adventure Travel businesses, they had a small office in Montclair on, I believe, Mountain Ave., before opening the facility on Solano Ave.
Doug - I recall a great few days ski touring with you on the Eastside just after I was laid off my job on Christams Eve 1970. Primitive gear!
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guido
Trad climber
Santa Cruz/New Zealand/South Pacific
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 10, 2011 - 09:17pm PT
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I'm glad Chris brought this tread back on track. Getting back to Doda and the famous piano.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Jan 10, 2011 - 09:32pm PT
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What was the piano used for? Please enlighten those of us who weren't born in time to experience it.
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WBraun
climber
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Jan 10, 2011 - 09:45pm PT
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Carol Doda LOL
In 1964 I was there in North Broadway freshman in high school.
The barker outside the place gave me the "look" as in ....
Get lost kid.
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