Backpack designer
Dick Kelty dies

By Dennis McLellan
Los Angeles Times
Posted Jan. 19, 2004

LOS ANGELES — Asher “Dick” Kelty, whose innovative aluminum external-framed backpacks with waist straps revolutionized backpacking in the 1950s, has died. He was 84.

Mr. Kelty, who had congestive heart failure, died Monday at his home in Glendale, said his wife of 57 years, Nena.

For more than 50 years, the Kelty name has been synonymous with backpacks and backpacking.

A one-time cottage industry launched in the Keltys’ two-bedroom home in Glendale in 1952, Kelty Packs earned a reputation as the Cadillac of backpacks.

From heavy and cumbersome wood frames and canvas bags, Mr. Kelty went to a lightweight aluminum frame contoured to the human body and a nylon bag. He also padded the shoulder straps and added upright partitions inside the bag. His “hold-open frame,” which was threaded through the top of the bag, allowed easy access.

But most significantly, Mr. Kelty added the waist strap, which took the weight of the pack off the shoulders and redistributed it to the hips.

“By taking the weight off the hiker’s shoulders and putting it on the hips, he took the misery out of the sport. He made it enjoyable for people to go backpacking,” Nick Clinch, an explorer for National Geographic magazine, told Nena Kelty in “Backpacking the Kelty Way,” the book she co-wrote with Steve Bogain in 2000.

Kelty Pack is now owned by American Recreation Products headquartered in Boulder, Colo.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Kelty is survived by his son, Richard, of Santa Barbara, daughters Anita Nitta, of Manhattan Beach, and Angie Herman, of Willits, Calif.; five grandchildren; and three great grandchildren.

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An Appreciation

Salute to a Backpacking Legend

By Lowell Branham
Knoxville News-Sentinel
Posted Jan. 19, 2004

I saw in the newspaper the other day that Dick Kelty died Monday, Jan. 12, of congestive heart failure at age 84.

If you don’t camp, you might not have heard of Dick Kelty. It’s possible you might not know who he is even if you do camp. But if you do much of the kind of camping called backpacking, you owe Dick Kelty a debt of gratitude whether you’ve heard of him or not.

Dick Kelty is the inventor and popularizer of the external-frame backpack. He ought to get credit for the internal-frame pack as well because if the external-frame pack had not led the way, the internal-frame version wouldn’t have followed it.

For a while in the 1990s it appeared as if internal-frame packs would supplant their external-framed counterparts. The trend was due purely to fashion, not practicality.

I’ve used both varieties of packs, and there’s no doubt in my mind the external-frame is the more efficient of the two. Evidently the backpacking clan has belatedly discovered that what works best counts for more than what looks best because the external-frame pack is making a comeback in the outdoor stores.

You’ve got to have frost on your whiskers and good bit of snow on top to remember how it was before frame packs came along. I’ve got both, and I can tell you that while camping was just as much fun back then, you paid a higher price in pain to enjoy it. That’s because the packs of the pre-Kelty era were instruments of torture.

I well remember the first pack I ever owned. It was an official Boy Scouts of America Yucca pack of about 1947 vintage. After the boys made a few trips toting one of those things, it’s a wonder they stayed in the Scouts. The fiend who designed it must’ve had a serious grudge against outdoor-minded youngsters.

The Yucca pack was just a simple canvas bag with an integral flap top and a pair of skimpy shoulder straps sewn onto it. Sweat on those straps for a couple of hours on a hot summer day and they roll up into pencil-thin cylinders that would eat into your shoulders like a sidewinder shimmying into a sand dune.

D-rings all around the outer perimeter of the Yucca pack allowed you to lash a blanket in horseshoe fashion to the exterior. The blanket was about as poor a choice for sleeping as the pack was for carrying stuff, but they made a picturesque package when done up together.

When you loaded the pack, you put soft items like clothing at the back to form a protective cushion and hard items like tins cans or tools at the front so they wouldn’t dig into your back.

That was the theory anyway. But about an hour on the trail was all it took to rearrange everything so that the soft items had descended to the bottom of the pack and all the hard stuff was busily eating holes into your back.

Dick Kelty’s wonderful invention did away with those kinds of woes forever. Always before the human body had to accommodate itself to the shape of the pack. Kelty changed that by making the aluminum pack frame conform to the contours of the human body. The frame also kept unwieldy items within the pack from coming in contact with the back.

But the best thing about Kelty’s invention was the waist belt. By cinching it up really tight, you can transfer much of the weight of the pack from one’s weary shoulders and back to the more durable hips.

According to Kelty’s obituary, he got the idea for his invention when he and a friend named Clay Seaman were hiking in the Sierra Nevada, and Seaman stuck projections from his pack into the rear pockets of his pants and discovered that it seemed to lighten the load.

The story says Kelty and Seaman were using Army surplus rucksacks, but rucksacks have no projections. If you read on, it becomes obvious that what they must’ve had were surplus Army packboards.

Whatever they were using, life for backpackers has been much easier since Kelty had his spark of inspiration in the Sierras half a century ago.

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