Vacuum Pumps, Robots, and a Real-Life Time Machine: Welcome to the Outside Gear Lab at CU Denver

The room has a heartbeat. It’s the first thing I notice when I walk into the lab: the gentle thrum of machinery, the metallic click and stretch of springs, and the rhythmic thud of two boots strapped to a gadget called the Time Machine that cycles above a treadmill.

At least, that’s what Adam Trenkamp tells me it’s called. Trenkamp is the Outside engineer who runs editorial testing at this new gear facility on the University of Colorado (CU) Denver campus. The Outside Gear Lab is the first of its kind in Colorado and one of just a few in the country. Last spring, Outside Inc., CU Denver researchers, and Colorado-based outdoor startups began using it to test, study—and break—outdoor gear of all kinds.

I step further into the room, a stark white affair that’s half-classroom, half-science lab, nearly 1900 square feet in size, tucked deep in the campus’s engineering wing. Trenkamp follows me over to the Time Machine, which I later learn is a gold-standard piece of equipment designed and built by footwear test company Heeluxe. There, he pauses, then deftly catches one of the steel arms mid-swing. He holds a boot in his palm, and I peer to take a closer look at the sole.

The machine, which uses a system of weighted plates, shocks, and springs to simulate the impact forces of human legs, has been running on the treadmill for nearly 48 hours straight. That’s the equivalent of 70 miles on each shoe. I finger the tread. You can already see bits of the rubber wearing away. Corners of the sole are in shreds.

“Woah,” I say. I’ve been reviewing gear for ten years, and it usually takes me at least a month to get this kind of durability testing in the field. Trenkamp’s machine has cut that process down to a tiny fraction of the time—and in a way that’s scientific enough to accurately compare the performance of one product against another.

“This could totally change the way we test gear,” I say. Trenkamp smiles, just a little bit.

“Exactly.”

The origins of the Outside Gear Lab at CU Denver

The idea for a gear lab had been kicking around Outside CEO Robin Thurston’s head for years. After co-founding and building the fitness-tracking platform MapMyFitness, he sold the company to athletic apparel giant Under Armour, where he worked for several years as the Chief Digital Officer. Thurston was impressed with Under Armor’s in-house R&D facilities and the rigorous testing their products were put through before hitting the market. When he eventually got into the media business, he saw an opportunity: shouldn’t editorial gear reviews be informed by similar lab-based product testing?

It turned out that a fellow executive at Outside Inc, Jon Dorn, had also been dreaming of such a space. “I came on full-time as a gear editor for Backpacker in 1997, and as soon as I got into the full swing of things, it became evident to me that, as good as our field testing was, it had limitations in that so much of that testing is subjective,” Dorn says. “We did things to limit that by sending gear to different regions of the country in different seasons and with different users. But it was impossible to control for all the variables.”

What the tests were missing was an element of objectivity—hard, indisputable data that readers could use to compare one product directly to another. Back then Dorn envisioned a lab: a place where Backpacker’s editors could supplement their field work by driving various products to failure in a controlled setting. But the more he looked into it, the more it started to feel like a pipedream.

“At the time, there was just too much cost and complexity involved,” Dorn says. Building a lab is prohibitively expensive. Many of the best-in-class testing machines cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s why only the biggest gear brands in the world—think Nike, Under Armour, or The North Face—can afford to have their own in-house R&D facilities. These labs have some serious equipment, like wind tunnels, rain rooms, and universal testing machines—huge frames with hydraulic jaws designed to push and pull materials to their breaking points. Such R&D facilities are invaluable for testing current product lines, and for innovating at a faster pace than many small brands can afford to. But, they’re usually off-limits to anyone outside the company, including media brands like Outside.

But in 2021, an opportunity finally arose. At this point, Dorn had signed on to work for Thurston at Outside Inc., the parent company that acquired Outside earlier that year, merging the brand with Backpacker, SKI, Climbing, and nearly a dozen other media titles. The consolidated might of all those publications meant more funding, more stakeholders, and more collective power. Thurston presented his vision for an Outside Lab to Dorn, who immediately signed on to help make it a reality.

Not long after, Thurston was at a University of Colorado business school shindig, where he happened to be seated next to Michelle Marks, then the chancellor of CU Denver. He mentioned the idea of a lab, and she perked up right away. As it turned out, the university was at a bit of a turning point. The school was working hard to expand its engineering program and offer its students more opportunities for hands-on learning. So a lab seemed just about perfect.

Conversations started rolling, and grant applications flew. By March 2023, CU Denver and Outside Inc. had signed a memorandum of understanding to co-found the Outside Lab at CU Denver. That fall, the partners won $700,000 in funding, anchored by support from the state, to outfit the new facility. Outside also hired Trenkamp, a full-time engineer with a background in gear testing at several well-known sporting-goods companies, to design experiments and oversee tests. And then the partners turned to the fun part: ordering some pretty space-age-looking equipment.

Reviewing the Lab’s Capabilities

The Time Machine is just one instrument in the Outside Gear Lab’s vast arsenal. Strange contraptions line every wall. There’s a long box equipped with headlamp mounts and sensors to test light output, brightness, and battery time. A group of mannequins stands in the corner, awaiting hipbelt and shoulder-strap pressure sensors to measure how efficiently a pack transfers weight.

There’s a station for measuring pack volume, and another for using air pressure to push water through rain-shell fabric to determine just how waterproof a jacket really is. The universal testing machine sits on a table in the center of the room, equipped with a heavy claw used to stretch climbing ropes, rip gear apart, puncture sleeping pads, and more.

“We also use it to test how much pressure and impact the heel of a running shoe can take,” Trenkamp says. He walks to the back of the room and unlocks a metal cabinet. When he turns back to me, he’s holding a running shoe—well, half of a running shoe. The shoe has been cut down the middle with a bandsaw to reveal a tidy cross-section. The slice lets Trenkamp measure the thickness of the midsole foam before and after testing—an effective way to determine a foam’s compression resistance over time.

Soon, Trenkamp says, the lab will also have a first-of-its-kind ski-test machine—a little something CU Denver lab manager, Trevor Young, designed himself.

Young, who is in the final stage of his PhD, has something of a special connection to the lab. Before he began his pursuit of an advanced degree in engineering, he was a college football player at the University of San Diego. But midway through a promising athletic career, he sustained a concussion on the field, an injury his helmet was ill-equipped to protect him from. Young’s symptoms were serious, and he’s still dealing with the aftermath years later. He had to give up football for good.

But Young also gained something from the incident: a passionate interest in concussion prevention and helmet design. In fact, he enrolled in graduate school at CU Denver specifically to work with football-helmet researchers there. But when he saw a cycling helmet test demonstration at the Outside Lab’s launch party last fall, it caught his attention.

“I asked right away if they needed anyone to work there or volunteer,” Young says. In November, CU Denver brought on Young as lab manager—essentially Trenkamp’s counterpart on the CU side. Young’s first task: design a ski and snowboard test machine.

The design process took three painstaking months. But the concept Young came up with is astoundingly versatile. The custom machine will be able to test flex along the ski or board’s length, torsional flex, twisting resistance, and flex between any two points. (Most ski-testing machines can only test end-to-end flex.) An attached 3D scanner will be able to take a full profile of the ski and measure its sidecut and camber profile, as well.

The machine is in production now, and should take up residence at the lab within the next few months. Young and Trenkamp have already concocted a number of experiments. And in the future, Young—who has a background in mechanical design—also hopes to use it to design new gear and equipment for adaptive skiers and snowboarders.

But for now, he already has his hands full, both with existing tests, and with a class of students he’s teaching as part of a new master’s program.

A Pipeline for Tomorrow’s Gear Designers

This August, CU Denver launched the Master’s of Science in Outdoor Gear. The four-semester program will teach students the ins and outs of the outdoor recreation industry, outdoor product design and development, materials, technology, sustainability, human performance, and testing. The program revolves around the Outside Lab, which will give students access to design methodologies, testing equipment, real-world case studies, and the experience they need to jump into the workforce preloaded with practical skills.

“As soon as I heard about this program, I immediately thought, ‘This is the program I’d have done—I wouldn’t be getting a PhD if they’d launched this program four years ago,’” Young says. “But it’s exciting because it gives me the opportunity to help build the curriculum I would have wanted when I was first coming through school.”

Two members of the CU faculty, Dana Carpenter and Dan Griner, also help run the master’s program. They’ve both been involved with the gear lab since the beginning, albeit for different reasons.

Carpenter is a mechanical engineering professor and biomechanics researcher.

“I first subscribed to Outside when I was in the ninth grade and was an avid reader for years,” says Carpenter. “So having the company as a part of this lab was definitely interesting to me.” Plus, he adds, so many students come to Colorado because they want to be close to the mountains. Many of these folks mountain bike or ski, and Carpenter loves using those interests to keep students engaged in their studies.

“We have a class where we teach students how to do materials testing,” Carpenter says. “Now, instead of some generic material sample, we can have them test a ski.”

As for Griner? His interest in the program is more on behalf of Colorado small businesses. He helps run an entrepreneurship program and startup incubator through CU Denver—which means he’s hyper aware of the obstacles small businesses face in trying to test and develop gear. One of those obstacles is access to good testing.

“This is something a lot of small companies in Colorado don’t have the expertise or funding to undertake,” Griner says. “To be able to test products and know they will perform to a certain standard or benchmark—that gives these small companies more weapons from a design standpoint to go out and make better products.”

Already, a handful of Colorado brands have started using the lab. Send It, a local brand that launched its first line of mountain bike tailgate pads in 2023, ships their products to the lab for a variety of tests. The abrasion machine scrubs at the pads’ outer fabrics. The universal testing machine tries to break buckles and pry webbing apart.

“Our goal is to create a product that’s overbuilt and over-designed and, by our definition, indestructible via lifetime warranty,” explains Britt Chester, Send It’s head of sales and marketing. The Outside Lab has helped Send It’s team validate a lot of their design choices and get a better understanding of how to design and test their products going forward.

“As a small brand and emerging company in a huge industry that has a lot of big legacy brands, we feel this is incredibly valuable from a growth and development standpoint,” Chester says.

Griner also says the lab will help CU Denver stand out as a specialist in outdoor product engineering. Not only will students come to Denver specifically to learn these skills, but scientists from all over the world may soon see CU Denver as a hub of cutting-edge research. The community and energy surrounding the work will snowball from there, Griner says.

The future of gear testing

This fall, the benefits of the gear lab won’t be limited to campus, either. Outside, Backpacker, RUN, and other titles are starting to incorporate lab testing results in reviews—including data on hiking-shoe durability, running-shoe cushioning, backpack volume, jacket abrasion resistance, and even heat retention on your favorite travel mugs. And in 2025, editors hope to test a vast array of new features, including water filter flow rates, sleeping bag warmth retention, and backpack load capacity. By next spring, the lab will start running that aforementioned ski strength and flex test—a valuable source of data that will supplement next year’s on-mountain reviews and help the team make even more objective Editors’ Choice picks. Outside is also working on a digital module that will make it easy for readers to compare product reviews and stats side-by-side.

“We already have one of the most rigorous field tests in the country, if not the world,” says Outside Senior Gear Editor Ben Tepler. “But having the lab data will give us these hard numbers we can show to readers to help them really compare gear in an apples-to-apples kind of way. For consumers, that’s invaluable.”

After all, nothing cuts through the noise of subjectivity, human bias, and marketing speak like real, concrete data. Plus, Trenkamp adds, many brands make bold claims or provide stats for their gear, but each brand measures these stats differently. That makes it impossible to truly compare one product to another without independent testing.

“The Outside Lab will really shine a light on what products perform to their advertised level,” Trenkamp says. “We’re arming people with the knowledge they need to make informed choices—and figure out the best gear for them.”

If you’re a brand interested in exploring the Outside Lab @ CU Denver’s testing capabilities and other offerings, please contact the lab here.