Asher Kelty, 84; Innovations Made Backpacking Popular

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

Kelty, who suffered from congestive heart failure, died Monday at his home in Glendale, according to his wife of 57 years, Nena.

For five decades, the Kelty name has been synonymous with backpacking.

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

From heavy and cumbersome wood frames and canvas bags, 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. And his “hold-open frame,” which was threaded through the top of the bag, allowed easy access.

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

“I call Dick the Henry Ford of 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.

“I blame him for the overcrowding of the wilderness,” Clinch said. “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.”

Rick Ridgeway, a mountaineer, writer and filmmaker, shares a similar view of the man who outfitted Ridgeway’s 1976 expedition to the summit of Mt. Everest and later hired him as a consultant for his company.

“Like many innovators in America, he was inspired by a need for a piece of gear that he couldn’t find,” Ridgeway told The Times on Wednesday. “He didn’t like the packs that were available, and he decided he had to make one himself.”

Born in Duluth, Minn., in 1919, Kelty moved with his family to Glendale in 1922. He made his first visit to the Sierra Nevada at age 6 on a family camping trip, thus sparking a lifelong passion for the outdoors in general and the Sierra in particular.

During the early years of World War II, Kelty helped modify B-17s and B-24s in Northern Ireland for Lockheed Overseas Corp and then became Lockheed’s liaison at an Army Air Forces base in England, where he met his future wife. He later joined the Navy.

Returning to Glendale after the war, Kelty worked as a carpenter and resumed hiking and camping in the Sierra. “He just loved that country and went there at every opportunity,” Nena Kelty said Wednesday.

The idea for what became known as the Kelty Pack was born on a warm July afternoon in 1951 when Kelty and his friend Clay Seaman were hiking in the Sierra above Independence.

Both men were burdened by their heavy and awkward Army-surplus rucksacks, which had U-shaped frames made of wood.

But while hiking down a trail, as Kelty recalled in a 1979 interview with The Times, Seaman let out a yell.

“Hey, Kelty -- look, I’ve found something!”

Kelty turned around and saw that Seaman had placed the bottom supports of his backpack in his rear pants pockets.

In so doing, he had caused much of the pack’s weight to shift from his shoulder to his hips. Now he could stand up straight and, best of all, the pack felt lighter.

At that moment, Kelty later recalled, backpacking’s modern era began.

“We didn’t fully understand then the significance of what Seaman had discovered,” Kelty told The Times. “But after we got back, I started making some packs in my kitchen out of nylon and aluminum tubing. They had waist straps, which put most of the weight on the hips.”

Kelty made two of the packs at first, one for Seaman and one for himself.

Then he made packs for a few other friends. Later in 1951, Kelty recalled, a stranger turned up at his door one night: It was a friend of a friend who wanted Kelty to make a pack for him, too.

“I guess it was at that moment I first saw a business opportunity in backpacks,” he said.

The Keltys launched their business with $500 borrowed against their house, which served as their factory.

Working out of his garage, Kelty cut and shaped the aluminum frames, which were professionally welded. And on her kitchen table, his wife stitched together the nylon for the bags on her Singer sewing machine, which was soon replaced by two commercial machines.

They made 29 backpacks in 1952, 90 in 1953 and 220 in 1954. As sales grew, they moved out of the house and into increasingly larger buildings.

In 1972, Kelty Pack was sold to Boston-based CML Group, which added other backpacking equipment to the line. Dick Kelty remained the Kelty chairman until retiring a few years later. Kelty Inc. is now owned by American Recreation Products Inc., headquartered in Boulder, Colo.

In addition to his wife, 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.

Contributions in memory of Kelty may be made to Big City Mountaineers, Dick Kelty Scholarship Fund, 710 10th St., No. 115, Golden, CO 80401, or the Los Angeles Times Summer Camp Campaign, File 56984, Los Angeles, CA 90074-6984.

There will be no memorial service; instead, Kelty encouraged his friends to “go take a hike!”