Climbing Culture w/Dana Gleason

There’s a surf shop out of Brooklyn that runs by the name of ‘Pilgrim Surf + Supply‘, they’re all about surfing in NY. Spending a lot of time in Montauk or Long Beach chasing the swells and living the lifestyle. Quite the opposite when you think of NYC right? But if you’re ever in the area, go take a look.

Why are we talking about Pilgrim? They’ve just teamed up with Dana to create a Kletterworks/Pilgrim pack and to really round out the collaboration they put together a neat article on Dana Gleason. Dana’s talking about his discovery for climbing, the early days of Kletterwerks and a little about the generation before him. All in all, it’s a really interesting read and something we thought you guys would love to check out…

Below you’ll find some of the article that we thought correlated best with Carryology, and if you want to read the entire thing please head over to Pilgrim to check it out.  And if you still need more Dana, you can always check out the Carry Conversation we had with him last year.

On his discovery of climbing…

“My relationship with the outdoors and climbing certainly preceded any bits of gear that I actually built. My parents had campers, and we went up to New Hampshire from Boston every summer. We would go out and do day hikes and things like that, and we didn’t really think anything of it, we were just going camping.”

What are you thinking about when you design gear?

“For us, it’s a little bit different because a lot of our customers use it hard and if they break it they have big consequences, which is why our stuff tends to be a little overbuilt.”

“When we design we think about two things: In the first few years, we thought about how to build it so it would not break; it was a huge concern. And we knew very well what would break from doing repairs of people’s gear. I was hugely fortunate that I did not have an education within the business; we ended up learning and making this stuff up for the first decade.”

“There’s a generation even older than I am that really pioneered this stuff, I would say I am out of the second generation. It’s been one hell of an amazing ride. And with Kletterwerks as being seen as cool enough to bring back around — I’m amazed. I’m truly amazed that I have one of my sons doing the design work to bring it back with a little more modern materials.”