Why Terlingua Threads Exists

The drive from El Paso to Terlingua takes about three hours if you don't stop, and you will stop. You pass through Marfa, which is either an art world phenomenon or a punchline depending on who you ask, and then through Alpine, which is a real town that exists for real reasons, and then the highway starts doing something the highways in consulting PowerPoints never do: it empties out. By the time you turn south toward the park, you're looking at a horizon with almost nothing on it, which after months of back-to-back client engagements feels less like scenery and more like a physical sensation.

I was in Big Bend on a solo trip, the 40-something-eth park on my journey to visit all 63. I'd been working remotely from El Paso for a few days and used the extended weekend to push south. The rental car company upgraded me to a bright blue Audi Q3, which looked slightly out-of-place against the Chihuahuan Desert but drove well on the long, lonely highways past Marfa (fun fact - that's where you see the famous "Prada" display in the middle of the desert). I kayaked the Rio Grande with a tour group one morning, the canyon walls rising several hundred feet on either side, the Mexican bank visible twenty feet to my left. I did some solo hiking in the Chisos Mountains, where a ranger eventually turned me back at the trailhead due to mountain lion activity, which I've written about elsewhere and which I want to be honest was not an outcome I entirely resented. I ate at the Starlight Theatre in Terlingua. Fun fact - they have some of the best passionfruit sotol margaritas you will find on the planet. 

My Airbnb was a hollowed-out Airstream on the edge of town. No electricity. No plumbing. No wifi. My cell carrier had no signal out there. I had my laptop, which was useless without internet, my Bible app downloaded for offline reading, and the Chess.com app that allowed me to play against the computer. But that was the full inventory of available activities.

So I thought.

My undergrad gave me a deep love of game theory, specifically in playing out second and third order effects: not just what happens when you do something, but what happens after that, and after that, and how far down the chain you can take it. When you're lying in a dark Airstream in Terlingua with no wifi and no one to call, the habit takes over.

I'd been in the heat all day. The wildlife in Big Bend moves differently in that heat. The light hitting the Chisos is different. The Rio Grande felt colder in a way that registered physically before it registered mentally. Sitting in the Airstream that evening, I started running the second and third order effects of something I'd been half-thinking about for months: what happens to outdoor adventure as temperatures climb?

The first-order answer is obvious. It gets harder. More dangerous. Some places become inaccessible in summer without careful planning. More people get hurt.

The second-order answer is more interesting. Most people's response to increasing heat is retreat: stay inside, go earlier in the morning, skip the parks that are too hot. Which means the places most worth experiencing become visited by fewer people, less carefully, for shorter periods. The knowledge of how to move through those places safely doesn't deepen. It thins.

The third-order answer is what kept me up. The gear industry has spent decades engineering for cold. Patagonia, Arc'teryx, The North Face: their technical innovation is almost entirely oriented toward heat retention. Walk into any gear shop and even in summer you'll find walls of down insulation and thermal layers and expedition parkas. The heat side of the equation had been largely left to cotton, which is good but not great in the hottest temps, and polyester, which straight-up feels like wearing a plastic bag in the conditions where you'd want them most. Nobody had built a brand specifically around the problem I was thinking about.

I wrote it down in my journal that night. Not a business plan, just a question: what would gear designed specifically for extreme heat actually look like if you started from the physics rather than from what already existed? 

When I got back to El Paso, I messaged one of my best friends Daniel from business school. He and I had always been brainstorming buddies. And we started laying out the vision. 

We really ran through each permutation of what fabrics might be best. Bamboo, cotton, synthetics, linen – no joke, we even considered what a fishnet-esque weave might offer (spoiler - looks a bit weird, and doesn't do squat for UV protection). 

The answer several outdoor experts kept nudging us towards (including one of best friends Joel from UCLA, who really has been one of the biggest influences in my outdoor upskilling) was hemp. It's not a new fiber, it's one of the oldest cultivated plants in human history, but its performance properties in heat are genuinely unusual. Hemp wicks moisture away from the skin and releases it into the air faster than cotton, which means evaporative cooling happens at the skin surface rather than pooling against the fabric. It softens with each wash. It doesn't trap odor. In arid conditions, independent research has shown hemp outperforms synthetic moisture-wicking fabrics on evaporative efficiency by a meaningful margin. 

We named the brand after the town where the idea started. Terlingua, Texas. The products are named after the parks that formed the experiential foundation for what we're building: White Sands, Canyonlands, Everglades, Joshua Tree. The garments are made in a craftshop outside Porto, Portugal, where the textile tradition is serious and the attention to construction shows in the finished product.

The line currently has four pieces. The White Sands Hooded Henley, our hemp-tencel blend, with an oversized hood designed for sun coverage on exposed terrain. The Canyonlands Long-Sleeve Button-Up, 100% woven hemp with ventilation panels positioned where blood vessels run close to the surface. The Everglades Short-Sleeve Button-Up, the same ventilated construction for humid conditions. And the Joshua Tree Trail Pants, relaxed fit woven hemp with a cut designed to create airflow around the areas where conductive heat transfer typically causes the most discomfort. All four available in both men's and women's cuts.

None of this existed when I was lying in that Airstream writing in my journal. The Airstream had no electricity, which meant no fan, which meant the night air through the window was the only cooling system available. 

Flash forward nearly three years, and after a lot of behind the scenes work, we've just begun to be ready to publicly launch. There's still lots of iteration and learning we do every day, but that's just keeps the adventure going.