It was night 14 and around mile 130 on the John Muir Trail. There was no moon, so the stars were especially bright, and it was surprisingly cold for August (in the low 30’s). I hadn’t thought about shoes at all, other than the fact that I had a major blister forming and my well-worn big brand hiking boots were falling apart—the sole was separating from the upper. We had set up camp at Sallie Keyes lake, just above 10,000’ in elevation, so a campfire was out of the question due to restrictions. With nothing to do and the rest of the crew getting ready to call it a night, I pulled out the map and my flashlight and checked out the surrounding area. The highest peak in the vicinity was Mount Senger, and while it didn’t have a particularly photogenic silhouette, the name stuck with me.
Fast-forward three years. We had been working on our shoe project for a couple years by this time; we’d gone through the design phase and several prototypes and were finally at a point where we were ready to bring it to market. The one thing missing was a name. We brainstormed through thousands of potential names for our company, but nothing felt quite right. The one that kept coming back was Senger. After doing a little research we discovered that Mount Senger was named after one of the founding fathers of the Sierra Club and a good friend of John Muir, Joachim Henry Senger. We wanted our company to reflect our love for the outdoors and our deep roots to the Sierras, so Senger just made sense, and the rest is history.
For a little more info on the Sierra Club found and Mount Senger, check out these links below:
https://www.summitpost.org/mount-senger/749652