Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
discussions with Mike Parsons, owner of Karrimor and an industry guru, who
hired Alex as a design consultant in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
'Alex taught me more about lightweight than anyone else - he taught me that it
was about commitment,' Mike said. 'Going lightweight was for Alex about going on
the mountain with less than you were mentally comfortable with. His audacity as-
tonished me and set him apart from all the others.'
I have no doubt that Alex would have had a place on the list of people who made
advances in equipment design had he lived long enough to refine his technical un-
derstanding. He probably should be there anyway. That's also Mike's view.
'I was accustomed to working with and around great performers, like Don Whil-
lans and Dougal Haston. I pressed them for technical advances in rucksacks, and
eventually extracted some rough ideas. From a few suggestions on where to locate
loops and where there was likely to be excessive wear, I designed rucksacks that
bore their names. But that was it. Neither Don nor Dougal were interested in keep-
ing the product up-to-date.'
It was worse for Mike when he had whole expeditions with many different de-
mands to equip. 'Don was the expedition equipment manager on the 1970 Boning-
ton expedition to Annapurna and Karrimor pretty much supplied a great deal of
equipment for it. I had to fill orders and design equipment on the back of a few
cryptic conversations with Don and Dougal wasn't any better.'
Mike is an intense and passionate lover of everything to do with the outdoors,
but also an engineer and designer who understands a piece of kit that is merely ad-
equate simply isn't good enough. He always strove for improvement and tried to
express his vision through annual technical catalogues. The general theme of these
was how better gear would make for better climbing. But the relationship between
non-climbing manuacturers like Mike and the climbing community was snobbish
in those early days. Peter Boardman told Mike that he could not understand what
his catalogues were trying to say and 'why bother because climbers will never read
this stuff.'
'When Alex arrived at my door sometime in 1978,' says Mike, 'it was a revelation.
Finally, I had someone able and willing to take me on in dialogue as to what the
product should be. He was bright and analytical and could see the product not
merely as something he needed but also from the market angle and how it might
reach non-specialist climbers.'
Alex transformed many ideas in Mike's head into workable and saleable
products. It was Alex's ideas and designs that eventually led to the OMM light-
weight pack range. This came on the back of his design for the original Macsac, an
eighty-litre sack that weighed a mere 800 grams. It became much sought after by
