Please Note: All Material on this page, and in all my "History of Gear" webpages, is copyrighted, and no usage of my material is permitted unless explicit permission is granted by me, Bruce B. Johnson, owner of OregonPhotos.com. Sources used to develop this material include a personal interview with Frostline founder Dale Johnson and also an interview with the Frostline owners who took over in about 1983.. I welcome readers contacting me (oldgear@oregonphotos.com) with information, pictures or stories about Frostline Gear, or any other of the classic outdoor companies.
Date: 1966, Boulder, Colorado.. Dale Johnson (no relation to this writer) became possessed with the cheerful vision that common folk could produce high-quality outdoor gear on their own home sewing machines. Mr. Johnson's involvement with Frostline ended in 1978, after over ten years of booming growth and success. The company he began continued, and for over 30 years this (mostly) mail order business nurtured many of us (often poor) outdoor types. Dale, now 75 (2007), continues to live in Colorado, and continues his active life of backpacking and backcountry skiing with his wife. He even still has full sewing facilities at his home, and whips himself up a new tent now and then. (source: personal interviews with Dale).
If your main question is, "Can I still order Frostline Kits," please skip to Page Bottom for the latest on this mysterious subject!
If your main interest is in finding MODERN companies which can supply you with the fabrics and down that you need for outdoor sewing projects, click here to visit my page about that important subject! If you've got a piece of gear that needs quality repairing, please click here to visit the page that I've compiled about that important subject! (under development)
The name brings back a flood of memories for me: A flame of a fierce independence; a joy in a creativity that won't allow itself to be "bound by a box." Fun with other sewing nut friends caught up in a gear-making Revolution. And a special pride in owning and showing off great, personalized gear despite being a college kid and young adult on a very small budget.
That was the Frostline
draw: To make your OWN gear, to customize it as much as one had
the imagination and perserverance to try. To add your name, to
add those perfect pockets you always dreamed of onto that daypack
that is lacking; in fact, to add all manner of hardware/software
anytime, anywhere, to anything you can sew or glue it to!
Then there was that insane pleasure of taking a plump tube of
down and slyly boosting the warmth of your existing climbing parka,
and the cry of dismay from the surprised spouse who arrived home
and discovered the living room atmosphere alive with tiny white
down clusters! (the Frostline down-filling technique took some
time to develop expertise in using!). Click here for a story about the ultimate joy of building one's own gear!
My
personal kit-building successes included: a "Bighorn"
down sleeping bag, a shell parka or two, a down vest or two, a
dog pack, a fine 3-man tent, I think called the "Ridgeline,"
a bright orange teardrop daypack, a pair of red gaitors, two pair
of insulated winter pants, and probably a few more creations that
I have forgotten...... Most of these exited my sewing room with
several alterations and additions to customize them to ME, my
spouse, or my DOG. In the most radical cases, I would even buy
a garment kit and then completely replace the inner or outer material
with stuff of exotic colors, a more pleasant "hand,"
or even add a hood to a kit that lacked one, using the design
from a previous kit I had sewn! Some of these kit creations I
still have and use today, such as the classic daypack shown to
the left, now truly a piece of vintage gear to be cherished! (Image
copyright Bruce B. Johnson 2005)
NOTIONS: Frostline also offered a wonderfully extensive collection of raw materials and "notions;" eg. every kind/color of nylon you could dream of, zippers, tubes of down, buckles, zippers, drawstring clamps, snaps and grommets--- you name it and you could buy it and get to work revamping those inadequate non-Frostline products.
Several of us
amateur designers went beyond cosmetic alterations and explored
new concepts of warmth, strength and design. I, for instance,
still have and use a pair of baffled down pants which incorporate
a vapor barrier and a sitting zone composed of less-compressible
polarguard.... Did I form a company of my own and sell ten thousand
of them and patent the idea? No, but what fun I had, and others
actually did go on to enter careers designing gear within the
growing outdoor products industry of the 70's and 80's; as an
example, Wayne Gregory worked for a Frostline store in
the Seattle area for awhile before he launched Gregory Mountain
Products in 1977 (webpage being developed).
Frostline spawned a generation or two of GEAR CREATORS, and
this is one of the Company's big contributions to the Gear Revolution......
Frostline also spawned a huge collection of assorted imitators.
Some of these kit companies (eg. Altra, Camp 7's Calico Kits,
and Holubar's Carikits) were neighbors right in the Boulder/Denver
area, while others sprung up all over the U.S, most during Frostline's
prime years (1970-1980)....... the list is long, and is found below.... An interesting
sidelight is the fact that one of the very earliest kit companies
did not produce clothing at all-- it was a branch of Andy Drollinger's
A16 pack company which produced a "Do it yourself, External
Pack Frame Kit" in the early 1960s, mostly sold to BSA troops
(Boy Scouts of America).
The outdoor equipment kit industry thrived for over a decade, reaching its high point in the later 1970s.. One source states that between the two big kitmakers (Frostline and Holubar/Carikits) sales approached 50 million dollars annually (this is a figure that I question)..... Frostline boomed with sales doubling every year for some ten years. For Frostline, their kit catalogs were extremely successful, and eventually there were also 18 Frostline retail stores. Mr. Johnson ran Frostline until 1978. At that point, the company was still a great success. Dale stated proudly, "I sold it at the perfect time." He sold to a big corporation--- the "Gillette" of razor blade fame. But the growth bubble was soon to pop.
Under Gilette management, Frostline did not do well. In addition, several insidious factors had developed in the American economy that were a real challenge to Gilette. By 1982, Gilette tried to sell Frostline, but there were no buyers, and so Gilette liquidated Frostline in 1983 (source: Dale Johnson interviews). Dale reports that a customer in Grand Junction, CO learned of the liquidation, bought the remaining assets of Frostline, and tried to start over (the buyers were Eddie and Shirley Clements, who filed new business papers with the State of Colorado February 1984). But, according to Dale, the "new" Frostline suffered a long period of hard times and declining fortunes. ..For one thing, the extensive Frostline production facilities had long since been eliminated, and the manufacture of any new kits was very problematic from a number of standpoints...... The last "Frostline" catalog in my possession is dated Fall/Winter 1995, and lists the company's location as Grand Junction, in Western Colorado, hundreds of miles west of its original location.
Why would such a booming market for kits collapse? I myself had stopped buying kits during the 80s; but I always assumed Frostline was going strong, and was nurturing along another generation of enthusiastic kit builders. Unfortunately, I was wrong; ever since the late 1970s, the kit market had been going downhill. According to Dale Johnson and a top Holubar/Carikits person, the main reasons were that economic hard times in the 1980s were forcing more and more American women (the main market for the kits was always women, not the occasional nut case men like myself) to take up "real" jobs, therefore with less time and energy for kit-building. Secondly, cheap outdoor goods from abroad (chiefly the Orient) began to pre-empt a big segment of the Frostline-Holubar kit market, mostly, I would guess, that segment who were buying the kits to save money (as opposed to those of us who bought the kits more to innovate, create and modify gear for hard-core mountain and expedition use). In any case, both Frostline Kits and Holubar kits went bust somewhere in the early 1980s timeframe.... Along with them, most of the numerous smaller kit companies also bit the dust, examples include: Altra Kits, Makits, Country Ways (at least their Frostline-like products), Cascade Kits, Calico Kits by Camp7, Sundown Kits, EMS Kits, REI Kits, Symmetry Kits of Vermont, Timberline Sewing Kits of New Hampshire, The Daisy Kingdom ski wear kits, and Plain Brown Wrapper Kits.
The early Frostline
gear line-up included all the basics such as parkas, tents, and
sleeping bags, and, over the years, expanded to include many related
items. Eg. my Fall/Winter 1995 catalog lists such items as soft
luggage, bicycle panniers, short pants, tote bags, and a growing
line-up made of the trendy new material called "pile"
(which of course has gone on to revolutionize outdoor clothing
wardrobes).
ADDRESS and PHONE # OF THE COMPANY, circa 2001: "Frostline Kits and Notions. 2525 River Rd. Grand Junction, CO 81505. 1-800-548-7872" . However, in mid-2006, this 800 number got me nowhere, connecting me repeatedly to some odd "talk line" having no discernible connection to kit-building!... Please skip to next section.if you want to go straight to the very latest news about Frostline's status.
In 2000, after Frostline had had a period of failing fortunes and many feared for its final demise, the company was rescued from off the auction block at the very last minute. The new owners were Bob and Catharine Flowers. They renamed the company slightly in October 2000, calling it "Frostline Kits USA, LLC. --- Under the Clements it had carried the name "Frostline U.S.A., Inc." since 2/15/1984, with Edward Clements as President.
Soon the Flowers issued the first new Frostline catalog in several years, the "Fall/Winter 2001" catalog. There have been no further catalogs issued. The business remained in the Grand Junction, CO area, in the very town that was the birthplace of Marmot Mountain Works (see link).
COMPANY PICNICS! Frostline as an employer was so loved by its employees, reports Founder Dale Johnson, that for years after the original company under Dale Johnson had dissolved, its former employees were still holding annual "Frostline" picnics!
In early-2006, when I began this research, it looked like it was R.I.P. for Frostline Kits, which had always been one of my favorite companys in The Gear Revolution.... but as the weeks and months unfolded, a real mystery began to develop.
SUMMARY: despite a great deal of research on my part, and a large number of contacts from interested readers, the exact status of the new Frostline under Bob and Cathy Flowers is UNCERTAIN AND UNCLEAR.
On May 3, 2006, a reader contacted me with a possible new Frostline phone number, again located in Grand Junction, Colorado.... I eagerly called the number, which was not a toll-free listing (970-242-0240). A woman's voice on a recording machine answered (I called three different times, on three different days, in hopes of talking to a real person). The announcement claims it is "Frostline," and they are open one day per week, and if you leave a name, they will send "a catalog." After about three weeks, I received a rather nice glossy, color catalog, labelled as a 2001 catalog. Inside, it stated that this was their first new catalog since 1997, and that there had been a change of ownership to "Bob and Cathy Flowers." Some of my correspondents have said that the woman's name is "Linda."
I am continuing to research this "new Frostline." I will post updates as I learn more! If any of you readers get a catalog and order something, PLEASE EMAIL ME and report how it went!
May 26, 2006 Update: a reader wrote me that he had ordered items and encountered very slow delivery processes and products that were not up to the standards that he was used to compared to when he had made Frostline kits many years ago.
Mid-June update: A reader took the initiative and called Frostline and actually spoke to a real person, whose name was "Linda." Linda reportedly said that there is a new owner (not her), and that they are working on their first new catalog since 2001. Linda also gave this Frostline contact info: ph. 970-242-0240, Mountain time zone. They no longer have a website, and it seems that they do not provide customers with email access.... The physical location is now outside of Grand Junction in a town called Clifton, Co 81520 , but their mailing address is PO Box 3419 in Grand Junction, CO 81502.
November 14 update: two additional persons have reported ordering items and waiting very long periods for their orders to arrive, and being unable to reach anyone by phone about the status of their orders.
Late 2007 Update: I have received addtional reports of various ordering, delivery and customer service difficulties... READERS: PLEASE HELP ME COMPLETE THE FROSTLINE STORY. IF ANY OF YOU LEARN MORE, PLEASE EMAIL ME.
Please Note: All Material on this page, and in all my "History of Gear" webpages, is copyrighted, and no usage of my material is permitted unless explicit permission is granted by me, Bruce B. Johnson, owner of OregonPhotos.com
Classic Labels
I am developing a page full of classic, old equipment labels and readers are welcome to contribute. The link to that page is below.
The REI label to the left is a classic, representing one of the first companies in the USA to supply climbers and backpackers: this REI label dates from sometime in the 1960s, well before the era when the little climber's cooperative of Seattle exploded into the corporate giant named Recreational Equipment Inc...Click here for my REI page.... You'll note the tent shown is a primitive guy-lined A-frame, and the ice axe is wooden-shafted and with the old-fashioned pick/adze-- the axe in particular is a sign that this label dates from well before REI's neighbor in Tacoma had perfected the metal-shafted axe (Larry Penberthy's MSR, aka Mountain Safety Research; a page about MSR is under development). (image contributed by Monte Dodge). Click here to visit my page of classic, old equipment labels.
under development
Note: there has not been a cold wave in Oregon to fully equal the Dec. 1972 cold wave that is the subject of this story. Only 1989's cold wave sent the mercury lower in Oregon, but that cold wave in some respects was not as severe or widespread. And with Global Warming an acknowleged reality, 1972's cold wave will probably never be equalled again (see gear-making story below).
We stood staring at the block of ice filling the toilet in the bunkhouse. Dave puffed frosty clouds of vapor as he exclaimed, "You're insane, why don't you come stay at my Mom's place with me until this is over, it's already zero, and the radio says it's going to get a lot colder!" We had worked together for two months, trail-building under harsh late-fall conditions, but now his voice had an edge to it that I had never heard before.
How could he know that there at Allingham Guard Station I was struck by the spark of a great adventure before me? "You go, I'm staying," I said decisively, and we went our separate ways. He pulled his few belongings off his bunk and with a "Good Luck," he was gone. Brillant sun streamed through the trees, and steam rose off the swift Metolius River nearby as I set to work gathering together all my camping and backpacking gear from the bunkhouse's closets.
As I drove up the River a few miles to my chosen campsite among the big ponderosa pines, my car radio was ablaze with warnings about the worst arctic cold wave to hit the Central Oregon High Desert in decades."Twenty below" by tomorrow morning the announcers all proclaimed. But I was not frightened, I was excited to test my gear against such odds! I had sewed custom gear! What a chance! There was the sleeping bag overbag that I had constructed that needed testing! There were my heavily-modified Frostline down pants, now fully-baffled, and with the vapor barrier interiors and full-crotch zippers. And of course the cozy warmth from the 4 oz. extra down I'd stuffed into the top-side baffles of my REI sleeping bag would be a pleasure of the highest order! So what if I would be alone for five frigid days, 5 miles to the nearest help at the Camp Sherman store? All loneliness was dispelled by the simple joy of watching flashing rainbow ice crystals floating down out of a deep blue sky. And the fact that it actually did hit 28 below zero on the coldest night was just more excitement! My customized gear worked great!
Story copyrighted Bruce B. Johnson 2007
