The Outdoor Recreation Archive is known for housing thousands of popular and lesser known catalogs from outdoor brands and magazines. But it’s also become a repository for photographs, business records, sketches, technical design documents, and other materials that tell the stories behind these brands, like Banana Equipment.

Banana Equipment, founded by Nancy Grimes and Jim Heiden in Estes Park, Colorado, began as a way for the two co-founders to live, work, and play in the outdoors while building a business rooted in that lifestyle. What started as an excuse to live an outdoor town quickly became a brand that embodied the spirit of that era, authentic and innovative.

From the start, Heiden experimented with materials like Sunbrella for the first products, fabric gaiters, newly developed 3M Thinsulate synthetic insulation, and most notably, Gore-Tex. Banana was among the early brands to introduce Gore-Tex jackets, wind pants, and their signature anorak, the “Bananorak,” hitting the market alongside early adopters like Early Winters and Sierra West.

Advertising themselves as “makers of fine shell garments,” the fledgling Banana Equipment and the newly launched Gore-Tex certainly took a chance working together that paid off as both grew with Gore-Tex eventually becoming a household name and the standard for waterproof / breathable membranes. Throughout outdoor industry history, it’s often been the small, hungry brands that take chances, introducing new materials, pioneering innovations, or popularizing new sports and categories. Banana Equipment was no exception.

Aptly named after Heiden’s favorite food, Banana Equipment embodied the personality of the 1970s outdoor boom: scrappy, authentic, and founded by those passionate about the outdoors. Their first catalog, hand drawn and mailed to retailers around the country, captured the brand’s scrappy spirit. By the time the company sold and rebranded as Chinook in 1980, it had grown financially, employing 50 sewers at its peak, outfitting Everest expeditions, and pushing the future of performance materials in outdoor apparel.

Stories like Banana’s highlight why preserving these histories matters. The Archive doesn’t just save old catalogs (although we are always looking for more catalogs!), it tells the story of real people who made gear that people loved and used from brands that connected deeply with consumers. These a stories of people who shaped the industry, one (to use Banana Equipment’s slogan) “product with appeal” at a time.