OPDD hosted second annual Outdoor History Summit

Utah State University’s outdoor product design program held its second annual virtual Outdoor History Summit on Sept. 14. 

Chase Anderson, the OPDD program coordinator, put together the event with Clint Pumphrey, the manuscript curator in USU’s Special Collections and Archives.  

 The keynote speaker was Boyd Smith, the curator at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Museum in Colorado Springs, Colorado. 

 Smith spoke on the different exhibits, archives and aspects of the museum. 

 “The content is really unique,” Smith said. “You’re dealing with over 100 years’ worth of history, and then you’re involved in culture, and then you’re involved in one of the most powerful things on Earth, which is sports. So you take all that content in there — you’re going to get some pretty interesting stories, as well as artifacts.” 

 Smith started working at the museum when it opened in 2020. He has 10 years of curation experience.

 The summit featured nine other professionals and historians. Some speakers came from major companies, like Katherine Connolly and Rhonda Summer from Under Armour. Other speakers included Clare Pavelka from Red Wing Shoe Company, Catherine Acosta from Vans and Darren Ritten from Arc’teryx.  

 There were also speakers from academia, including Dr. Rachel Gross from the University of Colorado-Denver, Stine Danielle from Toronto Metropolitan University, Meredith Lynn from Florida State University and Katie Hargrave from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.  

 The speakers from this year’s summit brought together different ideas and perspectives about outdoor history, how to preserve it and what it means to society. 

 The varied background of the speakers was matched by an equally varied audience, since the outdoor history summit was open to the public.  

 “The majority of our attendees are probably coming from outside of Utah to join virtually,” Anderson said. “And we have people coming from the academic community; we have people who are just purely outdoor enthusiasts. We have people coming from different brands.” 

 The first virtual Outdoor History Summit took place in 2021. It was started with the purpose of creating a community of people who have an interest in outdoor history. 

 Before the creation of the summit, Anderson said there was “no gathering place for these people to come together and talk about why it’s important to preserve the history of the outdoor industry.”  

 Along with creating a space for people to talk about outdoor product design, the summit has a goal of preserving and studying outdoor product history.  

 “Last year, (we) kind of went out on a limb and put together the first-ever outdoor history summit virtually, and brought together historians and researchers and academics and archivists and brands to talk about outdoor industry history,” Anderson said. “And it was so successful that we decided to do it again this year.”  

 Anderson has been planning the next summit since last year’s ended. Next year, he said the program hopes to hold the summit in person. 

 A significant part of publicizing the summit was done through an Instagram account that Anderson and Pumphrey started. The account, @outdoorrecarchive, has almost 19,000 followers. It features scanned images from the archives of different pieces of outdoor product history. 

 Outside of social media, the program currently has an exhibit featuring outdoor product history in the lobby of the Merrill-Cazier Library. 

-A02312868@usu.edu