Power Chords: Kolin Powick

 Kolin Powick played a power chord on his new Paul Reed Smith guitar, his fingers moving expertly across the frets, launching into Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” at Your Mom’s House, a dive bar near the Colorado Convention Center in Denver. It was the summer 2019 Outdoor Retailer Show, and this performance marked the 10-year-anniversary gig for the BD (Black Diamond) Band, a five-member rock band that Powick has played with since their inception at the Black Diamond offices in Salt Lake City. 

 Even if you haven’t heard Powick, the Climbing Category Director at Black Diamond, jam on one of his 22 (yes, 22) guitars, you likely know him through his many videos and articles about gear. Or maybe you’ve seen the infamous April fool’s videos—think of the nonexistent HonnSolo 11 inflatable free-soloing backpack or the Hot Forge Heated Chalk Bag. And you’ve almost certainly used one of the dozens of pieces of gear that Powick has helped adapt or refine for the venerable manufacturer, which has been in business since December 1989. For two decades now, Powick’s been a fixture on the American scene, a friendly face around Utah or at Rifle, Colorado, or one of the many other venues he and his wife, Ellen, get around to. He’s also a big-time lover of dogs. And, of course, a gear nerd.

Kolin Powick works his guitar magic

Powick was born in autumn 1968 in Selkirk, a small city in Manitoba, Canada, to father, Kip, a pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and mother, Diane, a stay-at-home mom. Along with his older brother, Kevin, and younger sister, Kelly, Powick lived the peripatetic military life, as the family moved to various bases, from Ontario to Colorado to Nova Scotia, before stopping back in Ontario where he finished high school. Powick graduated from Queen’s University in Kingston in 1992 with a degree in mechanical engineering. After traveling to Australia to participate in a cross-country solar-car race, he headed to British Columbia where he fell in love with the mountains, working as a janitor at a ski hill to make ends meet. In 1993, Powick started climbing at the University of Ottawa (where he was working on a teaching degree), traversing a concrete wall with glued-on holds until he couldn’t hold on; he practiced placing Stoppers at the base of the local cliffs, working up to leading his first trad route, a 5.6. “I would read books and go out to the cliffs and see how it went,” says Powick. “If we survived the weekend, then it was a success.”

Powick moved to Calgary in 1994 to work an engineering job—and quickly plugged into alpine climbing, driving 2.5 hours every weekend to climb on Mount Edith Cavell, Mount Temple, and other Canadian alpine giants. “I’m a 5.9-with-a-pack mountain guy,” claims Powick, who has occasionally ditched his pack to climb hard sport routes like Joe Six Pack (5.13a) in the Virgin River Gorge and Vagabond D’Occident (5.12d) in Céüse. Ellen, whom he met in 1998 at the Stronghold, the local climbing gym in Calgary, is perhaps the crusher of the family, having sent routes like Pipe Dream (5.14a) in Maple  Canyon, and Queen Line (5.14b) and Terror Dome (5.14a) at the Poptire Cave. After the two were married in 1998, Powick quit his job so the pair could go on a one-year honeymoon/climbing trip with their yellow lab, Yukon, and chocolate lab, Ellis. They drove a  21-foot RV all over America, ending up in Utah, the state in which they would eventually settle.   

After a stint at a small Salt Lake City machine shop, Powick in 2002 began working for Black Diamond in the Quality Assurance department. From figuring out how much a Stopper girth-hitched to a bolt hanger could hold to the breaking strength of a belay loop, Powick sorted out the forces at play on various climbing materials. Beginning in the early 2000s, his QC Lab began publishing their findings online (blackdiamondequipment.com/en_US/qc-lab-archive.html). In 2010, Powick presented testing on the dangers of worn carabiners after a climber in the Red River Gorge cut their rope on a sharply grooved fixed carabiner and decked from the first bolt. Digging deep, Powick uncovered information about which biners get badly grooved (typically the first bolt, crux bolt, and out-of-line bolts) as well as how to mitigate the dangers of a rope getting sheathed in a fall (have the belayer stand close to the first bolt, use steel biners, inspect biners often). As with the 34 other installments in his QC Lab series, this info has helped climbers be a bit safer.

Knowing the intricacies of climbing gear launched Powick toward a position as the Climbing Category Director, a role he’s held since 2014. Powick operates as a human funnel, defining which products should be brought to market according to customer demands, cost, and available technology. “It’s pretty rare that someone understands the engineering side and is good at marketing, too,” says Alex Baker, a BD design engineer employee who worked under Powick in Quality Assurance and then helped Powick with his first Category Director job: revamping the company’s camming devices, in 2014. Powick attributes his marketing acumen to the fact that he uses the products he helps create. “I’m able to put myself in the end consumer’s shoes,” says Powick. “When it comes to climbing gear, I am the customer!”

Adds Baker, “We appreciate that he’s a legitimate climber, from sport climbing to alpine climbing to traditional climbing.” His experience across the disciplines has helped Powick infuse projects with much-needed authenticity. Along with the 20-plus BD engineers, designers, and developers he works with, Powick has successfully revamped packs, ice tools, carabiners, harnesses, slings, quickdraws, helmets, and protection, including the Camalot, which in spring 2016 came out in the Camalot Ultralight after an 18-month R & D process.

“At first we didn’t even know if it was going to work,” recalls Baker of their attempts to slim down the iconic double-axle cam. Replacing the traditional steel trigger cable with Dyneema required re-engineering the stem and crossbar. Making the cams lighter would also involve redoing all the other components—an intricate, laborious process. “Even the plastic of the thumb loop is custom engineered to protect the Dyneema and give the cam the right stiffness,” says Baker. Despite the difficulties, the team successfully reduced the weight of the cams by approximately 25 percent. (The project in turn informed BD on how to revamp the regular Camalots, which came out in 2019 in their latest iteration.)

 These days, you’ll find Powick at his desk at BD giving input on the team’s latest creations, his fox-red lab, Rumple, curled up at his feet,

Kolin Powick sorts his gear

What would you tell someone who wants to get into inventing climbing gear?

 Kolin Powick: There are a few different avenues you can take. You can try to get a job at a climbing company, though that’s tough, as there aren’t that many jobs out there and generally people stay at these companies for a while. Or you can work up your ideas, ideally to the functional prototype stage with IP [Intellectual Property] protection, and pitch them to companies. We get that a lot.

I get a version of that question a lot—usually about educational requirements—from high school and university students. The most obvious answer from an educational standpoint is being an engineer, usually a mechanical engineer, or designer, though of course there are needs for industrial designers, manufacturing, electrical and metallurgical engineers, and such. It seems that there are many engineers who climb because of the problem-solving mentality. Engineers are problem-solvers, and a climb or a route is just a big problem that needs to be solved.

  You’ve seen cams change from dual stem to single stem, from heavy to light, and from slow and difficult to place to fast and easy. This progression has been mirrored in other products, too. What has most helped the development of better equipment?

Powick: Technology, from material development and improvements in manufacturing capabilities to computer modeling—which allows designs to be more refined as opposed to the “trial and error” of the recent past—has helped significantly. Also, there are more climbing companies doing really cool things nowadays. Good competition is healthy and forces everyone to up their game. Finally, just the pure number of climbers out there creates a larger pool of creative, smart people who can help take gear to the next level.

 You’ve been injured a lot – herniated disks in your neck, numerous finger injuries, one burst appendix at the base of El Capitan and six surgeries in the past 10 years. Bad luck, bad genetics, or do you just go really hard?

Powick: When my shoulder started acting up many years ago, I went through all the stages of attempted rehab. I did PT for six months, no climbing, some climbing, injections, voodoo, the whole deal. Unfortunately, I ended up having surgery. My doctor said the root cause was “pushingfortyitis.” The fact is, I was just getting old and my body was wearing down.

I do think it’s a matter of genetics because I don’t climb that hard and never have. I always warm up and I just don’t try that hard because I can’t. My wife has been crushing hard routes for 25 years and has literally never missed a day of climbing because of an injury. She’s never even taped a finger. I’m taking the injury-hit for the Powick family, and that’s OK, because if Ellen was sidelined and couldn’t climb, that would be bad—really bad.

  What sort of feedback did you get on the QC Lab pieces and videos—were people grateful, combative? Did you save any lives?

Powick: We started the QC Lab over 15 years ago as a way to get nuggets of technical info out there, and it’s been super successful. People seem to appreciate the information, and it usually sparks good discussions. However, as far as saving lives, I’m not sure—I wish I could do more, as I have a list a mile-long in my head. But doing the testing with the QA [quality assurance] guys and then writing it up takes time. We’re all pretty maxed, so we just try to squeeze this stuff in when we can.

  The HonnSolo 11, an inflatable backpack for free soloing, then the Hot Forge Heated Chalk Bag, then the Honnold Signature Spatula have all been part of your April Fool’s jokes. What’s the appeal of these pranks?

Powick: We wanted to show the climbing community that we don’t always take ourselves too seriously. We also wanted to keep people on their toes—the confusion of an absurd product, followed by the double-bluff of a product that didn’t seem like a product that actually was (and still is) a product, followed by the ridiculousness of the spatula. Ultimately, it’s all in good fun. Hopefully the folks who see these launches get a kick out of them, because we sure have fun making them.

  When or how do you “know” a product is ready for market?

 Powick: The first step is knowing when we’re “on to something,” and that part is easy. Basically, if you have a prototype on your desk and it constantly disappears, or people often “forget” it at home after a weekend of testing, then that’s a good sign. As far as knowing when it’s ready for market, there are many steps involved. First, it has to pass all of the structural and functional internal R & D testing, then the rigorous field-test program. The manufacturing process has to be assessed and approved. The climbing gear needs to be certified (climbing gear needs CE certification to be sold internationally; voluntary UIAA certification is seen as above and beyond CE certification). We need to ensure costing is appropriate, and we need to get buy-in from our reps and consumer base. Once all that is accomplished, then we’ll feel ready to release it to the market.

  How much field testing do you do or oversee yourself, and what does a typical day out with new gear look like?

Powick: It usually starts off with just a few key members of the design team taking a prototype out over the weekend or before or after work. They’re aware of how sketchy something is and know how to not get themselves killed. In my case, unfortunately for Ellen, the person on the receiving end of a lot of this testing is my wife, but she puts up with it.

Once a prototype gets more dialed in, we’ll do more testing, still from usually within the building— climbers in other departments, or folks who aren’t maybe as familiar with the product. And the next stage is getting the product to our field-test team, located throughout the world. These folks will give us unbiased real-time feedback so that we can iterate and tweak repeatedly until we’re ready for production.

 What do you see in the future of climbing gear? Will it get lighter, less expensive, stronger—or all three? 

Powick: In general, climbing gear is [already] pretty darn strong. You don’t hear of gear breaking that often under normal circumstances. Also, gear is relatively inexpensive in the grand scheme of things. Carabiners can cost down to $6, and you can buy a harness that will last you a half-dozen years for the cost of a dinner for two. Sure, people always want things to be less expensive, and oftentimes unnecessarily stronger, but the future of climbing gear will be in technology. Ultimately, I think tech will allow gear to be more functional across a broader range of conditions or use-cases, lighter, easier to use, and in some cases “safer.”  

Dogs are a big part of your life—and a key part of the workplace at BD. Will Rumple make CEO this year?

Powick: I’ve been lucky enough to have had some incredible dogs, and am fortunate that dogs are a part of the culture at BD. On any given day, there are upward of over 20 dogs in the office. It’s a great stress reliever—just lying on the floor with your dog, or someone else’s, is a surefire way to put yourself in a better mood. And having to take them out for walks is a great way to get a break, clear your mind, and stretch your legs.

 As far as Rumple goes, we all know he’s already running the place! He’s been here longer than lots of the people, having celebrated his eleventh year in the office last fall. He’s definitely a crowd favorite.

If you ever get a birthday message from Rumpl, you’re special!

Kolin Powick’s Picks the Top 8 Pieces of Revolutionary Gear

Technical ice gear: Reverse-curve picks along with front points on crampons allowed vertical ice to be climbed without chopping steps, opening steeper lines.

Tubular ice screws: Placing ice screws became easier, and ice climbing became significantly safer.

Dynamic ropes: Climbing on stretchy ropes allowed climbers to safely fall, and hence push their limits.

Wiregate carabiners: Lighter biners that don’t freeze in winter conditions and are less likely to have gate whiplash made the sport infinitely safer.

ATC-Guide/plaquette/assisted-braking devices: The ease of belaying the second and the ability to dog routes helped increase free-climbing standards.

Cams: While complicated, these devices made crack climbing easier, faster, and safer, and helped cement the clean-climbing revolution, allowing climbers to maintain the integrity of the rock.  

Helmet tech: Air vents, lighter materials, better buckles, enhanced fit, and better style made it so climbers would actually wear helmets and ultimately be safer out there.

Gyms: While not a technical piece of gear, climbing gyms and the training tools developed there have let us push the limits.

First published in Climbing 372