Inside REI’s ‘Living Archive’ Vintage Gear Museum

John Junke knew the beat-up REI Half Dome tent belonged in a museum as soon as it hit the counter of the Fairbanks, Alaska, store. The customer who brought it in told him he’d slept over a thousand nights in it. But finally, it started to delaminate, and he was ready for a change.

So he’d come to cash in on the brand’s lifetime warranty. Little did he know he’d actually brought a gift to the Co-op.

That tent was one of the original production versions of the Half Dome from 1980. Junke, a savvy REI store manager, recognized it instantly. He couldn’t believe it was in such good condition. He put it in a safe, where it stayed for several years before it finally found its home and purpose.

Eventually, that old Half Dome was shipped to Seattle, cleaned up, cataloged, and entered into the brand’s “living archive” under the care of Will Dunn. There it would exist as a historical exhibit, not unlike those kept in libraries and museums.

“The 45th anniversary of the Half Dome Tent really came to life because of the 1980 Half Dome Tent that we have in the archive,” Dunn told GearJunkie. “It led to some of the design elements in the new Half Dome redux for the 45th anniversary edition.”

Dunn is REI’s historian and visual storyteller. He curates the brand’s collection of retro and historically significant gear, which it calls the living archive. It is an internal resource for product developers looking for historical inspiration and general R&D.

The 45th Anniversary Half Dome tent is a perfect example of its function. REI’s product developers used the archive’s 1980 Half Dome for color samples and to guide their design of the new tent.

The living archive is a functional resource, sure. But Dunn said it’s far more than that, as well. To him, it’s a collection of stories — almost as if every jacket, pair of pants, ice axe, photo, and love letter to REI (yes, those are in there) is a cassette he can pull out and play.

“I feel so lucky to be able to do this,” he said. “I get to spend my day hearing and learning about these stories and celebrating them.”

Entering the REI Living Archive

I got to visit the Living Archive on a media trip to the brand’s Seattle creative hub. It’s an understated, unsigned brick building. If you didn’t know it was there, you’d walk right past it. Not that you’d have any reason to visit, anyway — the REI creative hub isn’t open to the public.

I had to sign in and get a badge before they’d buzz me in from the waiting room.

The level of privacy made sense as soon as I was inside. If Willy Wonka had made outdoor gear instead of chocolate, his factory would have looked similar. There were people experimenting with sewing bags and apparel. In one corner, a team pored over color samples, images, and squares of fabric. And at the far end of the building was the Magnusson lab — where REI’s mad scientists put products through rigorous lab testing.

At the heart of it all was the living archive. It’s a clean, well-organized area with sliding shelves decked with a retro rainbow of vintage REI apparel and outerwear. Photos and some equipment hang in frames on the walls.

A large table in the middle serves as a place for people to pull items from the archive and lay them out for study — which, according to Dunn, REI Co-op team members do regularly at the creative hub.

“It’s kind of become our little campfire that everyone can gather around,” he said.

But, if it hadn’t been for Dunn and a few other REI Co-op team members, that collective little campfire wouldn’t exist as it does today.

Bringing the Archive to Life

Dunn started at REI in 2017. At that time, he said the archive was an unorganized jumble of boxes and equipment stored in a locked conference room that wasn’t even technically part of the REI office. People had been squirreling away vintage items in hopes of someday building something more organized and more useful.

Eventually, Dunn and his colleague, Halley Knigge, put together a pitch. They brought it to REI leadership, and Dunn said, “We got a knee slap and ‘Hell yeah.'”

That was the beginning of the living archive as it exists today. Dunn was put in charge of the collection, organizing it, cataloging its contents, and caring for it into the future. The program officially launched in 2022.

“When we first kicked off the project, we partnered with the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle,” Dunn told me.

They worked with a contract archivist to do all of the foundational work and to learn how to properly handle, store, and maintain historical artifacts. They ran an inventory assessment and made a collections development plan and policy. Basically, the REI archive team learned how to operate like a real museum.

“These are really treasured artifacts — at least to us — and we’re going to treat them as such,” Dunn said.

A Library of Stories

When I visited the archive, there was a smorgasbord of historical items laid on the large center table. An image on a screen caught my eye. It was a photo of a tent strapped to the top of a truck.

“That was REI’s original wind testing setup,” Dunn said. “It was just an employee’s truck that they built a platform on top of.”

He explained that someone would be in the tent with a radio while the driver picked up speed down Highway 410 by Mount Rainier. The driver would relay his speed to the tent tester, who would then describe what was happening inside. A passenger would take notes on the exchange.

“They did that from the late-70s all the way through 1993,” Dunn said.

A duct-taped Petzl ice axe with the initials E.E. written on the handle lay at the center of the table. Dunn said that had been Erin Parisi’s ice axe during her quest to become the first trans person to climb the Seven Summits.

“Her ice axe has the initials E.E. instead of E.P. because, in the country where she was climbing, it was illegal for her to physically be there as a trans person,” Dunn said, so she had to change her name on all of her documents and even her gear.

Then there was REI’s April Fools’ “ZipAll” outfit. It sports 3,500 different zip combinations and was jokingly marketed as the “only piece of outerwear you’ll ever need.”

A long wooden alpenstock was one of the oldest artifacts on the table. Scattered around were various vintage REI catalogs, board minutes from important meetings, and a huge assortment of love letters written to REI by the brand’s customers.

Every item had a number and a tag, and as Dunn had explained, every single one has a story attached to it. This wasn’t just an impressive collection of old gear. It was a library for some of REI’s most cherished stories.

REI Living Archive: Accepting Donations (But Not All)

No doubt, some of the people reading this are thinking about all of the vintage REI gear they’ve been saving that could become part of REI’s living archive.

That old tent could inspire the color scheme and layout for the newest model. The vintage REI puffy jacket could help create a new line of throwback clothing. Dunn said they even have scientists and researchers who are writing papers who come in to study the collection.

It’s possible your old gear could become part of REI history. Dunn encourages people to reach out to livingarchive@rei.com if they have something that might be of interest, like that original 1980 Half Dome Tent that was returned in Alaska.

But he also qualifies that invitation: Taking on someone’s old gear is an investment for REI. Dunn is being very intentional about what gets entered into the living archive.

“Like most museums, libraries, and archives, things are gifted to the [REI] collection,” Dunn said. “But the real treasure in all of that is the story that comes alongside it … we’re often heavily influenced by the story that follows an artifact or an item.”

Those are the pieces of gear that REI hopes to collect — the ones that come with epic stories that contribute to the brand’s history and legacy.