Petzl
Fifty years of French vertical-safety engineering, and the spine of most rope access kits — including ours.
AE
AllEquipped
Gear to be prepared for anything.
One manufacturer at a time — who owns them now, what they actually make, and who each one is not for.
Brands We Love
Who makes gear worth owning
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Black Diamond
Salt Lake City, since 1989 — the company its own employees bought out of a bankruptcy caused by lawsuits over climbing gear.
ACR Electronics
Fort Lauderdale, since 1956 — the rescue beacon that talks to a government satellite system and never asks for a subscription.
Sterling Rope
Maine-made life-safety cordage since 1992 — the rope the other five brands' hardware runs on.
Harken
Pewaukee, Wisconsin, since 1968 — two brothers, a plastic ball-bearing block, an Olympic sailing habit, and the employee-owned company that now owns SMC.
CAMP Safety
From a blacksmith's forge in Premana, 1889 — the brand that made professional PPE light enough to forget you're wearing it.
The Journal
Notes from the trail
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Carbon monoxide on boats: why half the victims were outdoors, and what a detector can't do
The space under a swim platform can hold six times the concentration that's immediately dangerous to life. A compliant marine CO alarm may take fifteen minutes to sound at a fraction of that. Both facts are true, and together they explain who the detector actually protects.
Your flares expire in 42 months. Almost nobody can tell you what to do with the old ones
Federal law requires you to carry visual distress signals, requires you to replace them every 42 months, and then goes quiet. Firing them off is a felony, the trash is illegal, and two counties in California will take them.
The only life jacket with an expiry date: inflatable PFDs, and who tells you when they fail
An inflatable PFD is the one piece of life-saving equipment aboard with consumable parts. It also sits outside the CPSC's jurisdiction, so there is no public recall database — which makes a manufacturer's own advisory archive the only systematic record that exists.