Please Note: All Material below, 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. Some of the material below is derived from interviews and/or correspondence with Bob Gillis, Bob Howe, Mark Erickson, Bob Woodward, and others not named, as well as my own research......Gear Lovers: if you were involved with one of the old-line, vintage gear companies and have a story to tell in these pages, please contact me soon.
ALERT: MY BOOK ABOUT FROSTLINE KITS WAS PUBLISHED FALL 2007. PLEASE GO TO MY FROSTLINE PAGE FOR THE LINK TO ORDER IT, OR TO VIEW A PDF BOOK PREVIEW.... My next two books will cover the stories of Holubar and GERRY, and are already well underway. The GERRY book will be available May 20, 2008, and is 78 pages full of big color images and text. Gerry Cunningham himself is a major contributor.
Within the overall History of Outdoor Gear, I like to think of the period 1945 to 1980 as representing a sort of "Golden Age" because so many small companies and individual innovators were making their marks during this time frame. I will begin with the creation of the World's first modern geodesic backpacking tent, circa 1975.
Pioneers: Robert "Bob" Gillis, and staff at The North Face, especially Mark Erickson and Bruce Hamilton.
Credit: World's first geodesic backpacking tent, introduced 1975.
Backstory: another tent designer had
teamed up with another major company and were about to introduce
their own geodesic tent, but things fell apart at the last minute..
Click here to skip to that story.
The US postage stamp shown above
does not picture Bob Gillis! Across the top of the stamp,
you see "R. Buckminster Fuller." His nickname was "Bucky,"
and many regard him as the Forerunner of the whole geodesic tent
revolution. He is undoubtably the person who made the world's
first geodesic tents, and even sold some to the US Army in the
1950s. But in terms of a modern backpacking geodesic that made
it to the retail market, Bob Gillis was centrally involved. He's
the guy who showed up at North Face one day and met with owner
Hap Klopp to present a geodesic tent concept.
Gillis' involvement with North Face designers led directly to the introduction of a stunning new tent based on geodesics! The historic tent was the "OI," the World's first successfully commercialized geodesic dome tent that was made of modern backpacking materials-- lightweight aluminum poles and lightweight nylon fabrics.... "OI" stands for "Oval Intention," a delightful name which seems to incorporate plays on words, eg. "In-tent-" and "intention," as in a designer's "intention" to revolution the tent design industry! Click here to skip to a picture of one of Gillis' giant-sized, modern geodesic domes (a 20 foot diameter dome manufactured in 1998)
Bob Gillis is the holder of at least one patent regarding design of geodesic dome tents. The "Oval" capitalized upon the untoward strength of a geodesic design, and was marketed as an exceptionally sturdy 4-season mountaineering tent. Bob Gillis states that he licensed the tent to The North Face (TNF). They brought the tent to market in 1975. Along the way, North Face worked with Jim Easteon of Easton Aluminum Company to modify arrow shafts into the first thin, flexible aluminum tent poles, essential to the structure of the Oval Intention....This particular tent and its design are so central to the later developments in backpacking and climbing shelters that I have included a high resolution copy of a North Face catalog advertising the Oval Intention. See Below.
Gillis began "Shelter Systems Company" in 1976, the year after TNF began to sell the Oval Intention..... I am pleased to report that in 2007 Shelter Systems is still a company building innovative geodesic and "tensegrity" portable tents, domes and shelters. Various Shelter System shelters and other products have become central in disaster relief programs worldwide.
Grip-Glips: Bob states that he is also the holder of the patents for the now widely-used "Grip-Clip," which he states was similarly licensed, this time to North Face's long-time competitor Sierra Designs. There is some debate in the industry about these matters. The Sierra Design "Swift Clips" have been in very successful use for many years now...... Below is a picture of Bob Gillis circa 1984:
http:www.YurtDomes.com http:www.GripClips.com
http:www.ReliefTents.com, and Shelter
Systems main website.
I personally owned one of the first Oval Intention tents, buying mine in 1976. It was the vintage, original model, called the "Ring Oval," so-named because its poles were placed through small metal rings at each intersection (see drawing above); later the "ring Oval" was replaced by the "Pole Sleeve Oval," where the poles travelled through sleeves of nylon fabric, a design favored by TNF (The North Face Company) in its evolving line of geodesics such as the "VE-24" (1978) and the big "North Star" dome (1979). For many years now, geodesic mountaineering tents have been favored by major expeditions, and have sterling reputations for great strength during high winds and with high snow-loading; however, one of the strongest tents ever made was a diminutive modified A-frame called the Rivendell "Bombshelter" (click for more info).....For more on "Bucky" (Buckminster) Fuller, see below.
Click here to see an even larger geodesic tent, this one made for expeditionary use by Mountain Hardwear, and a full 6 meters in diameter!
Link to Shelter Systems website, showing what Bob Gillis names as the original Oval Intention tent, page one, then to another of his webpages showing the Award-winning final design which he states that he licensed to the North Face, page two...
Memories: My "Oval" had an interior that I especially loved--- spacious, with very warm, tasteful use of the colors tan, yellow and blue. Even on dull, cold days, the light spectrum filtering inside made one feel sure that it was sunny outside....It was a very pleasant tent to be inside, and yet it was also an extremely strong and secure tent in which to sit out a big snow or windstorm. I remember well a big storm above timberline on Mt. Shasta where friends nearby in A-frame design mountaineering tents spent a nerve-wracked night full of fears that their noisy, flapping, cracking tents were about to self-destruct, while my Oval Intention was like a bomb shelter-- when extra-heavy gusts hit it, all it would do was "creak" a little as it seemed to settle lower into the ground and distribute the stress all over its outer skin. Alas, I no longer have it--- I sold it because of its large packed size and 11 pound weight, a bit too much for me since I was using it mainly as a two-man mountain tent.
Notes about the image below-- the reddish-orange tent in this 1977 image is a top-quality expeditionary A-frame called the REI Denali Expedition, as evidenced by its rear vestibule/tunnel entrance area and zippered cookhole in the floor (the Denali was similar to the Glacier made by Sierra Designs and also to an REI stablemate called the Crestline); it required a veritable forest of stakes in high wind conditions, but even with lots of staking was not very quiet or reassuring in severe winds; also, it was not particularly lightweight..... Visible on the left is a North Face Dandelion tent. This was a spacious NF tent, not a geodesic, although it did utilize the exact same colors as the Oval Intention which I had owned a year or two before.... Regarding the Dandelion, its designer Mark Erickson told me this story, "....At the time, we joked that the tent was so named because it was "dandy lyin' in it." A large capacity Kelty "BB5" frame pack pokes up over the edge of the Dandelion.
Please Note: All Material above, 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
This 315 sz. foot white dome has seen hard
duty at the Oregon Star Party,
where strong winds, powerful sun, and lots of dust have aged it.
But the design lends itself to easy maintainance and repairs.
For scale (and for FUN), I set up my Sierra Designs "Tiros"
geodesic tent inside of the Gillis dome.
In fact, this arrangement
makes a fabulous base camp. In effect, one has created a bright,
dry greenhouse in which to camp, each morning emerging to a dry
camp with no bugs! Incidentally, influential, long-time tent
designer Bob Howe rates the 7 lb. Tiros as one of the few
tents he'd carry for use in such snowy, wind-blasted places as
Mt. Everest (click to view pages about Bob
Howe's many contributions to the industry. This also leads
to a page about the Tiros in particular)
Please Note: All Material above, 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. Some of the material above
is derived from interviews and correspondence with Bob Gillis,
Bob Howe, Mark Erickson, Bob Woodward, and others not named, as
well as my own research..... Editors: Please contact me if you have interest
in publishing....Others: if you were involved
with one of the old-line, vintage gear companies and have a story
to tell in these pages, please contact me soon.
