By Ethan Brightbill
Photos by Levi Sim

As a collection of over 10,000 catalogues and magazines plus documents, sketches, correspondence, and other artifacts of outdoor product history dating as far back as the start of the 20th century, Utah State University’s Outdoor Recreation Archive (ORA) is, in a sense, a monument to everything in the industry that has fallen out of fashion. There are records of brands that failed to find their niche in the marketplace and equipment that hasn’t been cutting edge in decades. In some cases, the documents in the archive were literally gathering dust in someone’s attic before being donated.

But if the ORA is a graveyard, it’s also a place of rebirth. Since its creation in 2018, a growing stream of fashion designers, product developers, and other creatives have come to USU to visit the collection in search of inspiration and knowledge of the past. And as word-of-mouth spreads, the archive is increasingly going out to the rest of the world, with exhibit locations ranging from Tokyo to Munich in 2025 alone.

At the heart of the archive’s success are two people: Clint Pumphrey, manuscript curator for USU Special Collections and Archives, and Chase Anderson, industry relations manager for the university’s outdoor product design and development program. Under them, what started as the dream of USU Professor Sean Michael (and not technically part of either Anderson’s or Pumphrey’s job descriptions) boomed into something greater than anyone could have imagined.

From Instagram to Fashion Week

The reason for the ORA’s surge in popularity, agree Pumphrey and Anderson, is the archive’s Instagram (@outdoorrecarchive). Through a mosaic of ’90s footwear, permed and mustachioed men with tents, and even pages from a Japanese manga about a university mountain club, the account offers a window into decades of thought about how we experience the outdoors. And more people than ever are choosing to look through it.

“We have well over 40,000 followers and it’s the third biggest USU Instagram account,” Anderson says. “The audience is really broad. Our top five cities are Tokyo, London, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles, and the people finding this material are not just outdoor enthusiasts, but designers in and out of the industry.”

Since the time of the interview, the Outdoor Recreation Archive account surpassed the Utah State Aggies (@usufootball) in number of followers to become the second-largest USU Instagram, behind only the university’s main account (@usuaggielife). The interest also isn’t just digital. Since April, Pumphrey and Anderson have taken Polaroids of each visitor to the archive. The board where they hang them now needs to be replaced due to lack of space.

One of the people who connected to the ORA through Instagram was Geoff McFetridge, a Canadian artist and graphic designer. He decided to stop by the archive during a road trip with Ramdane Touhani, a French-Moroccan artist and entrepreneur behind various fashion and beauty brands. The meeting led to a collaboration between the ORA and Touhani’s magazine, Useless Fighters, on an exhibit exploring the history and cultural impact of outdoor product company The North Face. The event took place in March at Touhani’s Paris boutique, with the archive contributing images from throughout the company’s history, including photos from designer sketchbooks and even the first catalog put out by the company in 1966.

“The name of the exhibit was Genesis,” Pumphrey explains. “Really, there was an interesting kind of genesis to the whole project in that one thing led to another, and then all of a sudden, we were doing a panel discussion in Paris during Fashion week.”

“Right?” Anderson agrees. “When you’re at customs and they ask you why you’re there, you don’t usually get to answer, ‘Fashion Week.’ It’s been fun for us, and because these are all university projects, it’s also been great to see people discover Utah State. We’re helping Utah State to become internationally renowned for outdoor product design and development in general and as a leader in archiving this topic in particular.”

One of the reasons the archive has taken off in the way it has, Pumphrey says, is that it’s the only collection of its kind in the world.

“While there’s a lot of imagery on the internet, it can be a bit of an echo chamber since so much of what exists was never put online,” he says. “We get a lot of people who want to incorporate vintage designs into their work and come here to explore things that people haven’t laid eyes on in decades — even 60 or more years.”

And of course, there are the USU students who benefit.

“Just yesterday, we had a class of students in our Fundamentals of Design course come in here,” Anderson says. “It’s helpful for them to see examples of what they learn in class, so we curated a selection of materials for them to examine for good principles of design throughout history. In another class, students who are learning to design and visualize their ideas on paper come here to study sketchbooks from iconic designers in the outdoor industry.”

The Book Deal

Thanks to one of the groups who discovered the ORA through Instagram, there’s also another way to browse the archive. The Outdoor Archive: The Ultimate Collection of Adventure & Sporting Graphics, Illustrations and Gear debuted in the United States on May 13 and internationally June 19 and brings the ORA in 384 pages to bookshelves and coffee tables everywhere.

“The project came out of the pandemic when everyone was home and looking for projects to work on,” Pumphrey says. “A publisher in the United Kingdom, Thames and Hudson, had seen that account and contacted me about creating a book around the archive. We had some initial conversations about what that might look like, what kinds of materials would be in it, how it would be organized, and it only made sense to bring in Chase as well since he’s my partner in making this archive a reality.”

The book includes over 600 images and includes product photography, illustrations, processed imagery, landscapes, and more. It also includes personal reflections from more than 20 designers, athletes, academics, creative directors, and other figures in the outdoor product industry. Names include outdoor photographer Chris Burkard, who wrote the book’s foreword; Conrad Anker, an internationally recognized alpinist who located George Mallory’s body on Mount Everest after his 1924 disappearance; USU’s own Julie Lamarra, associate professor of practice in outdoor product design and development; Kimou Meyer, a creative director at Nike; Avery Trufelman, a podcaster behind the show Articles of Interest; and Thibo Dennis, a footwear designer who’s worked for Dior and Louis Vuitton.

“It’s tailored toward a design audience,” Pumphrey explains. “The publisher wants this book to be something that’s on the shelf of every designer who works in the outdoor space.”

Anderson and Pumphrey are working hard to make that happen. The duo’s schedule for the remainder of 2025 includes a launch event at the bookstore Chess Club in Portland, Oregon, followed by a visit to Performance Days in Munich at the end of October. They’ll then return to Portland for the Functional Fabric Fair in November, among other events.

But arguably the most impressive item on their itinerary this year was a May stop in the biggest city in the world — Tokyo.

Tokyo Talk Show

“We’ve been working with this large Japanese fashion label and retailer, Beams,” Anderson says. “Their chief buyer, Shigeru Kaneko, is obsessed with outdoor clothing and gear, particularly vintage down garments. We reached out to him around 2021 after we saw him posting about vintage clothing, and we connected over shared interests. He visited us in October to find advertisements and product listings that go with his collection of vintage down garments — he has over 100 pieces from different companies — for a book Beams was producing about him and his collection.”

The book, Outdoor Expedition Book 99, is the ninth volume in a series about different Beams tastemakers. It details 99 ideas that inspired Kaneko’s sense of fashion, and it includes a section on the Outdoor Recreation Archive, which the book describes as “the world’s finest outdoor resource room.”

“That was our first point of collaboration,” Anderson notes. “It turned into them inviting us to Tokyo for a three-day exhibition where he put his collection on display along with catalogs we brought for the public to see.”

“The opening party for the event that was packed,” Pumphrey adds. “We did a panel discussion that they called a talk show where Shigeru acted as the moderator, and it was all translated for the Japanese audience. Beams brought copies of our book for us to sell, and we sold out.

“It was neat to meet people who are passionate about the same things as us even though they’re half a world way. One moment that stands out to me most was seeing people who had bought our book carrying it out. Neither of us ever thought that this project would have such an impact, and it was humbling to see people abroad so excited about it.”

Product With Appeal

Between magazine features on the ORA and panels like the one in Tokyo, Anderson and Pumphrey have become comfortable with interviews. One of the most common questions they get is about their favorite items in the archive.

“I feel like we should come up with different favorite items,” Pumphrey admits only a few days after The Salt Lake Tribune and Utah Public Radio both published articles in which they answered that very question. “They keep getting featured.”

“Well, that’s the fun thing about the archive,” Anderson says. “I have favorite items every time we do an interview, but between interviews, new collections come in, so I have new favorite items all the time. We got a donation of materials from Nancy Grimes, who was the co-founder of a company called Banana Equipment in the mid-1970s in Colorado. It was a small business that grew quickly and made great products, but they’re not around today. Nancy and her co-founder sold the company in 1980, and the brand eventually phased down. I hadn’t heard of them before the donation.”

“What Nancy donated was her scrapbook, an incredible record of the company’s entire history with photographs, documents, and invoices as well as their very first catalogue,” he continues. “She said only 5,000 were ever printed, and all the artwork and product descriptions were done by hand rather than type.

“That catalogue speaks to the importance of what we’re doing. A lot of the big brands have documented at least some of their history, but for a lot of these smaller brands, if we don’t try to preserve their history, I don’t know if anyone else will. That’s why this collection is special to me. ‘Banana Equipment: Product with appeal.’ That was their slogan.”

Pumphrey ultimately goes with Moss Tent Works.

“First, it’s our biggest collection, and probably one of the only ones that’s a truly complete picture of a company. It includes everything Moss Tents produced when they were in business, including correspondence, legal records, patent records, sketches, photographs, slides, VHS, tapes — everything,” he says.

“The other reason is just the visual beauty of things in the collection. Bill Moss was an illustrator for Ford Times before he co-founded the company with his wife, and he created some wonderful sketches of car camping in the 1950s. He designed things like rooftop tents that slide out from a vehicle and drawers for the back of a station wagon where you can put a stove. He said there are no straight lines in nature, and his tents reflect that through these beautiful, flowing curves. It’s such an appealing collection.”

“That’s the second time we’ve said appealing,” Anderson notes.

“Maybe it all goes back to the banana,” Pumphrey grins in response.

A Person Behind Every Item

As the archive continues to grow, so too do the relationships behind it. Pumphrey and Anderson have developed a broad network of collaborators and supporters and have built meaningful connections with them along the way.

“Those relationships are meaningful,” Anderson says. “There are real people behind everything in the collection, and their stories deserve to be preserved and learned from.”

Along with Anderson and Pumphrey’s work, the success of the Outdoor Recreation Archive is due to a broader community. Faculty regularly support and promote the archive, and library staff help with research, digitization, and organization of the materials.

“We’re also surrounded by people who understand the vision of the archive and help to make it a reality,” Pumphrey says.

However, despite all the work they’ve put in, the duo says there’s still so much more to do and that they feel like they’re racing against the clock to do it. They have a whiteboard with the names of more than 50 people or brands they’ve made contact with, and they’re constantly learning about new brands or work from individuals that should be preserved.

“Chase and I are the perfect people for this project,” Pumphrey says. “We both have a passion for the outdoors and history.”

“We both have a vision for something big, and we’re taking the steps to build that,” Anderson echoes. “It takes extra time outside of our regular work and hours, but when you’re passionate about something, you’re more than willing to spend the extra time.”