The path that Massif took from a scrappy four-person company to the industry standard for quality military gear is a multi-layered one. While the road here is a winding one with plenty of detours and stops along the way, where it starts is anything but circuitous. Massif was born in the mountains.
Massif co-founder, Randy Benham, took his first climbing trip with the Sierra Club up on Mt. Ashland in his early 20s. He was immediately hooked on the sport. “It just took over like a drug,” Benham said. While Benham had boundless enthusiasm for climbing he didn’t have the money to buy the gear. “Back in the early 80s, Patagonia, North Face, and Sierra Designs were the norm. Me being a climber and broke at the time, I couldn’t afford a lot of that stuff,” Benham said. Benham was not deterred by the financial barrier to entry, he just bought an industrial sewing machine from his grandma for two hundred dollars and started sewing his own climbing clothes.
Benham used his own handmade gear to summit Denali—the largest peak in North America which is famous for its brutally cold and dangerous weather patterns—and countless other climbs over the next decades. In 1993 he became a backcountry ski ranger at Crater Lake National Park where he learned about the legendary Jenny Lake Climbing Rangers in Grand Teton National Park. He applied for a job at Jenny Lake that winter and got the job—leaving the next spring to rescue stranded hikers and climbers in Grand Teton National Park.

It is not an exaggeration to call the Jenny Lake Rangers legendary. They are regularly compared with the Navy SEALs or the Army’s Delta Force because of the elite nature of the missions they carry out. It is exceptionally easy for tourists to access very rugged terrain and climb high into the mountains of Grand Teton National Park near Jackson, WY. As a result, Jenny Lake Climbing Rangers affect around 75 rescues throughout their late spring through early fall season. While that number alone is impressive for the 14 person team, the dramatic and technical nature of many of these rescues is what makes the group so renowned. While part of their job is to help dehydrated hikers with twisted ankles on day hikes, they are also the team tasked with rescuing injured climbers precariously huddled on ledges thousands of feet in the air.
The dynamic nature of their most technical rescues led to one of the biggest breakthroughs in the American mountain rescue community: short-haul helicopter rescue. Short-haul rescue uses 100 feet line to transport rescuers directly to the scene of an accident. It places the rescuer in higher danger but shaves off potentially life-saving hours in getting the ranger to the injured climber. While already common practice in parts of Europe and Canada, the Jenny Lake Rangers brought it to the US in 1986. While relatively new to the US in general, short-haul rescue was common practice for the Jenny Lake Climbing Rangers by 1993, when Randy Benham started his stint with the team.

While using helicopters to rescue injured climbers proved fantastically useful and the Jenny Lake team had a sterling record of keeping their Rangers safe, there was a serious problem with the apparel being used on these rescues. It was regulation to wear only fire-resistant (FR) materials when dealing with the helicopter. There were no real insulative layer options available at the time so the Search and Rescue (SAR) professionals were stuck wearing Vietnam era flight suits with no insulation. The result was at best miserable and at worst downright dangerous.
Randy hadn’t stopped hand-making gear since he had started over a decade before. He honed his skills by creating made to order backpacks and garments based on Rangers’ and climbers’ specific needs. He also innovated other SAR gear like a wheeled litter that allowed Rangers to move injured hikers more efficiently down trails. In the late 90s, he was introduced to a Nomex fleece which was the only FR fleece on the market at the time. No one was utilizing it in garments. “The lightbulb went on that I could use this fabric to make garments you can fly in,” Benham said.

That lightbulb is one of the key moments in the founding of Massif. FR fleece was the base of the first set of SAR professional focused gear that fellow Jenny Lake Ranger Dave Bywater sold around the country in the early aughts. “It was a fun thing to be behind as a salesperson telling that story. I believed in it from a user’s perspective,” Bywater said. “I knew all of these people out there who were suffering the way I was suffering and there just wasn’t anything that was a good product to help out with the needs. For a salesperson, it was a great product to get behind.” On top of selling to firefighters and mountain rescue outfits, Bywater ended up selling an order to a group of Air Force Pararescue (PJs) as the result of a season he spent with them rescuing climbers in Denali [more on that story in a different post]. The jump from SAR-only to SAR and military is a key part of what Massif looks like today.
Twenty years later, Massif has built a reputation by remaining authentic. While our staff is over ten times the size of the original hardscrabble crew and our manufacturing process has become significantly more sophisticated than one person hand sewing garments in a garage, we haven’t forgotten our roots. Every person here knows that the products we make can mean the difference between life and death for the heroes protecting us from harm in the military or saving lives in the mountains. We take great pride and never forget that the end goal of our products is to protect others and that our brand was born in the mountains.
