Re: Self-made

Reason why GoLite's tent looks a lot like Brower's is that Ray Jardine (and all of us in the 1950s and 60s) read Dave's books (and others of the Sierra Club how-to books when the Club was doing lots of instruction and Dave had not yet changed the Club to a primarily political organization). GoLite, as mentioned before, got its start by commercializing Jardine's ultralite designs.

As for the food, well, remember, that was in the days when we all still got "healthy" tans, ate large quantities of steaks, and before the "fast food" (almost typed "fat foods") franchises ruled the world, and also before Adelle Davis wrote her books waking us up to the problems of the "steak and potatoes" diet so common at the time. And that was also when famous athletes and "doctors" were featured in the tobacco company ads (other old grey heads here probably remember the "T-zone" ads, and "I'd walk a mile for a Camel").

And Dave's books were also before he became the great prophet and Chief Druid of the environmental movement. So there are lots of things in them we now realize weren't quite right. The last photo I took of Dave was at the dedication of the Jules Eichorn redwood grove in Big Basin. He made several comments at that dedication about how much our views have changed over the years.

But there are lots of great ideas there. Tent designs actually haven't changed much in more than a century. I was looking through a portfolio of Frank Hurley's photographs yesterday, with a large section devoted to Shackleton's Endurance expedition. Besides the Logan tents, Shackleton took several hoop tents (yes, they used that term then) that look a lot like Stephensons and Hilleberg tents. Scott's, Amundsen's, and Shackleton's earlier expeditions also used pyramid tents that look a lot like the Megamid and GoLite versions. Of course, they did not have the modern materials (nylon wasn't invented until the 1940s or so, and silcoat not until the 1980s). So those tents weren't exactly "ultralite". But those designs have been long proven to stand up well in polar conditions of high winds and cold.