Massif co-founder Randy Benham was in his early 20s when he took his first climbing trip with the Sierra Club up Oregon’s 7,000-foot Mt. Ashland. He was hooked on the spot. “It just took over like a drug,” Benham said. While he had boundless enthusiasm for climbing, Benham didn’t have money for 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”. Not one to be deterred, he bought an industrial sewing machine from his grandma for two hundred dollars and began designing and making his own climbing clothes in his garage.
Benham went on to use his own handmade gear to summit Denali, the highest peak in North America – famous for its brutal cold and dangerously unpredictable weather patterns—along with countless other ascents over the following years. In 1993 he started work as a backcountry ski ranger at Crater Lake National Park where he soon learned about the legendary Jenny Lake Climbing Rangers and applied for a job with them that winter. He got it, and left the next spring to join the team rescuing stranded hikers and climbers in Grand Teton National Park near Jackson, WY.
The Jenny Lake Rangers are considered some of the absolute best in the search and rescue (SAR) community and are regularly compared with Air Force Pararescue (PJs) or the Navy SEALs due to the dangerous nature of the rescues they carry out. It is exceptionally easy for tourists, day hikers and both casual and experienced climbers to get into serious trouble in the mountains of Grand Teton National Park. As a result, the Jenny Lake Rangers affect around 75 rescues throughout their late spring and early fall seasons. While that number alone is impressive, the high risk and technical nature of many of these rescues is what cements the group’s elite status. They are frequently tasked with rescuing injured climbers precariously huddled on ledges and dangling from rock faces thousands of feet in the air. The dynamic nature of their most technical rescues has led to one of the greatest contributions to the American mountain rescue community: the short-haul helicopter rescue. This technique uses a 100 foot line to transport rangers directly to the scene of an accident, placing the rescuers in higher danger, but can save hours in getting to critically injured climbers in life-threatening circumstances. While already a more common practice in parts of Europe and Canada, the Jenny Lake Rangers brought it to the US in 1986, and it was standard procedure by 1993 when Randy Benham started his stint with the team.
Despite their sterling record, the Jenny Lake Rangers still faced a glaring problem. In addition to the dangers of hanging from a running aircraft above the mountains, it was required to wear only fire-resistant (FR) materials when working around helicopters due to the added risk of flash burns and other aviation fire hazards. At the time, SAR professionals were stuck wearing Vietnam era flight suits with no insulation for cold weather and alpine conditions. WIthout proper cold weather FR clothing available teams were at best miserable, and at worst placed in even more danger working in the extreme conditions they frequently faced.
In the late 90s Randy was introduced to a Nomex fleece, which was the only FR insulation on the market at the time, and he found that no one was utilizing it for apparel. “The lightbulb went on that I could use this fabric to make garments you can fly in,” Benham said. He hadn’t stopped hand-making gear since acquiring the sewing machine over a decade earlier, and had further honed his skills by creating made-to-order backpacks and garments based on Rangers’ and climbers’ specific needs. He also innovated other specialized SAR gear, like a wheeled litter that allowed Rangers to move injured hikers more efficiently down trails.
That lightbulb moment was one of the key flashpoints in the founding of Massif. FR fleece was the base of the first set of Massif’s early products that fellow Jenny Lake Ranger Dave Bywater helped to sell 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,” said Bywater. “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 taking an order from a group of Air Force Pararescue (PJs) after he spent a season with them rescuing climbers in Denali National Park in Alaska. The jump from a strictly SAR-focused product line to developing gear for military applications was a key step toward what Massif looks like today.
Twenty years later, Massif has built a reputation on authenticity by creating gear designed for professionals. While our staff is now over ten times the size of the original skeleton crew and our manufacturing process is significantly more sophisticated, we haven’t forgotten where we came from. Every person at Massif knows that the products we make can mean the difference between life and death for our customers serving in the armed forces or saving lives in the backcountry. We take great pride in the fact that the end goal for every product is to protect others, and we never forget that Massif was born in the mountains.
