UKC

Black Diamond Equipment 50 years old

© Black Diamond
Mick Ryan

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Black Diamond Equipment is celebrating two anniversaries in 2007. The company was founded fifty years ago in the US and Black Diamond Europe is celebrating its ten year anniversary.

It all began way back in 1957 when an eighteen year old Yvon Chouinard began pounding out hand-forged pitons selling them at Yosemite's Camp 4. By 1958 his chrome-moly steel pitons were popular and he began Chouinard Equipment, located in Ventura, California.

Chouinard Equipment developed and introduced the Chouinard Standard, a light and strong carabiner, the world's first rigid crampon and of course Chouinard conceived, tested and forged the first curved picks onto all his ice axes. When 'clean climbing' became popular in the US after an article by Doug Robinson in the 1972 Chouinard catalogue, Hexs and Stoppers were added to the ever expanding mountaineering product range.

In the Eighties, liability litigation reared its ugly head, and Chouinard Equipment had to file for bankruptcy, forced into it by several lawsuits claiming that Chouinard Equipment had "failed to warn" customers of the potential dangers inherent in the use of climbing equipment!

Out of these ashes arose the first employee-owned company in the climbing industry, Black Diamond Equipment and an expanded product range to include not only climbing and mountaineering gear but backcountry skiing equipment especially telemark gear and the famous Bibler tents.

Black Diamond Equipment is based in Salt Lake City, Utah and in Europe, in the Swiss Jura mountains near Basel. Whilst BD USA celebrates its fiftieth birthday Christian Jaeggi (CEO Black Diamond Europe) leads BD Europe in a celebration of their tenth birthday. You can meet the people behind BD Europe here

You can read more about the origins of Black Diamond Equipment at their website www.blackdiamondequipment.com

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Comments

mickyconnor
12 Jun, 2007
I've come across a few postings on U.S. sites that imply Black Diamond is disliked as a company by many U.S. climbers. Of course, I can't find these postings now, but this does seem strange now that I know they are employee owned, especially as all the BD kit I've seen looks well made and designed. I own one of their Blizzard harnesses, and like it a lot. I should have thought they would appeal, does anyone have any perspective on this?
GarethSL
12 Jun, 2007
whats the oldest bit o'BD gear? is it in a museum somewhere?
Chris Craggs
12 Jun, 2007
Might be in my box of pegs in the garage! Chris
Michael Ryan
12 Jun, 2007
Maybe here YOSEMITE CLIMBING MUSEUM During three decades as a rock climber, Ken Yager has amassed plenty of personal history on the towering granite walls framing Yosemite Valley. He's ascended El Capitan's wrinkled face more than 50 times and established scores of knee-quaking routes up other cliffs and sheer spires. But his biggest mark may come on flat terra firma. Yager is behind the push to build a museum celebrating Yosemite Valley's center-stage role in the development of modern rock climbing. If Chamonix in the French Alps is a birthplace of the sport and Everest its most celebrated conquest, then Yosemite is the Cape Canaveral of climbing, a place where Americans rocketed past the dominant Europeans in the 1950s and '60s with new techniques, tools and raw tenacity. They did it while practicing an environmental ethos passed through the years from naturalist John Muir -- one of Yosemite's early climbers -- to big wall pioneers like Royal Robbins, who took pains to avoid defacing the rock. You'd barely know that rich history existed by visiting the valley today. Although contemporary climbers use sweat and chalk-dusted hands to spider up 3, 000-foot cliffs once deemed unassailable, the park has provided virtually no record of the climbing revolution that unfolded on those shoulders of granite. Into that void has slogged Yager. At 46, straddling the years between old-timers and the current crop of youthful climbers, the tousle-haired Yager has toiled for more than a dozen years to see a climbing museum planted in the valley. To that end, he has gathered a collection of 5,000 artifacts, much of it stuffed for now in cardboard boxes relegated to his garage. There are antiquated hobnail mountaineering boots and huge old iron pitons fashioned out of hacksawed stove legs. His storehouse includes countless early versions of nuts and cams and other safety equipment that revolutionized the sport. Yager has also conducted video interviews with gray-haired climbing icons, coaxing old stories from the rock. The old-timers often pulled out dusty heirlooms: journals of epic first ascents, black-and-white photos, postcards and letters bounced between peers. Perhaps his biggest accomplishment has been cajoling National Park Service officials, long at odds with the climbing community, to include the museum in Yosemite's much-debated blueprints for the valley's future. Construction is envisioned for 2011 adjacent to the climbers' historic launch pad, an unassuming collection of picnic tables and fire rings dubbed Camp 4. "You have to do pretty extreme stuff to make the record books. You have to be first one there, you have to open a door. Well, Ken is opening a door with this museum," said Tom Frost, a groundbreaking Yosemite climber during the '60s. "He's the guy on this one. He has the attributes to bring everyone together." Yager offers a more humble assessment: "I just want to see this thing happen." The push to preserve Yosemite's climbing heritage began in 1991 out of ruminations among kindred souls. Yager had built a climbing wall at his home just outside the park. It became a rainy day hangout for aficionados. Yager's longtime climbing buddy, Mike Corbett, suggested they preserve some of the old gear folks would cart along. Yager jumped at the idea. After a fast start, the museum effort hit steep realities, most notably a balky park hierarchy. In the view of many Yosemite rangers, climbers were a scruffy lot who hogged campsites, sometimes shoplifted and grabbed leftover food off vacated commissary tables. "They didn't see the importance of it," Yager recalled. Corbett eventually parted ways with the project, but Yager continued to push this longshot dream. All the while, he had the blessing of the old guard, folks like George Whitmore. "So often artifacts will be kept for a while and then eventually disappear, and nobody knows what happened," said Whitmore, 74, now the Sierra Club's Yosemite liaison. "It would be nice to see it preserved." Whitmore made his own contribution to Yager's archives: a couple of pitons he fashioned out of I-beam steel for the successful 1958 first ascent of El Capitan, led by the legendary Warren Harding. The bigger of the two, nearly a foot long, was named Big Brute. http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/04/17/BAG1EC8U5U1.DTL
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