CARRYING THE LOAD One Pack Manufacturer’s SOF Experience
BY SCOTT R. GOURLEY
operations requirements community. Other times, that niche just seems to find them. One example of the latter instance involves Mystery Ranch, the current manufacturer of a range of pack products used by special operations elements in the United States and several partner nations. “I was in my office at a company called Dana Design, where I was one of the two owners, and the designer, in 1989,” recalled Dana Gleason, principal/ designer at Mystery Ranch. “One day I got a phone call kicked up to me from customer service. When I picked up the phone, there was no ‘Hello.’ There was no ‘Hi, my name is.’ All there was was someone practically shouting, ‘How do I keep that paint on?’ Obviously I had to respond to this in some way. So after a moment, I just said, ‘You’re painting my babies???!!!’ And we started talking.” Gleason learned that the caller was from SEAL Team Two and working with unit elements in Alaska on mountain warfare techniques. “They had used military pack stuff, thrown it away, and then went for the best civilian backpack they could get,” Gleason explained. “We did a thing for high mountain in Alaska or the Himalayas at Dana Design called the Astralplane, which was a play on words, since our most popular pack at the time was called the Terraplane.” At the time, the pack was only produced in a bright red color, because high visibility was a desired trait in mountaineering. Moreover, the company had just changed the waterproof coating on those packs, transitioning from an older waterproofing product to a Teflon coating. “We were one of the first people to start working with DuPont on using Teflon as a water repellant for nylon materials,” Gleason said. “The trouble was that the SEALs had first gotten half a dozen packs from a shop called Alaska Mountaineering and Hiking up in Anchorage. They had spray painted them to get the red off and it worked great. They then got more packs. But the new ones had the Teflon on it, and the spray paint would just peel up and fall off. And hence the phone call.” Gleason said that over the course of a 45-minute phone call, he was convinced that the SEALs might possibly buy 25 packs if he could change the color and add a few design features. “So on the phone, I said that we would build you a special version in black, which was a tactical color at that time, and a little heavier material, with features like inside zippers. And one of the reasons I bought into it was because I came up with a halfway clever name for it: the Overkill pack. And over the course of the next decade, we sold over a thousand of them, mainly to SEALs but to other folk as well. Basically, it was simple: This guy seemed like a hardcore user. We like the people who use our gear the hardest. And it just came around to ‘let’s build what they need.’ That was our starting point,” he said.
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Special Operations Outlook
Navy SEALs train in Alaska. Mystery Ranch has been making packs for special operations forces for nearly 30 years.
U.S. NAVY PHOTOS BY SENIOR CHIEF PETTY OFFICER SCOTT WILLIAMS
some cases, U.S. Special Operations Command’s (USSOCOM) industry y Inpartners work hard to identify and explore their niche within the special
