Boots can be one of the most frustrating purchases on the planet, firstly, they all fit different, secondly, they can hurt your feet quite a lot to break in, and thirdly a lot of them don’t look all that good. Once you’ve found a good pair of boots, it’s probably best to look after them and make them last as long as possible, so as to not endure the mentally and physically painful process that has just been mentioned.
As we’ve said, quite a large proportion of boots don’t seem to look that good, but one brand that doesn’t seem to make a bad pair of boots is Danner, our love of the Mountain Light has been widely covered, and that’s for good reason – they’re a quality pair of stompers, both visually and in the way they’re constructed.
Other than Danner being beautiful and well-built, we don’t actually know all that much about them, so that’s what has prompted this mid-depth dive into the brand’s history.

Beginnings
Believe it or not, the brand was created by a guy called Charles Danner, not Daniel Danner.
Charles was a man with a passion for quality craftsmanship and was keen to put his passion into making something functional for people who would really appreciate his product. After wandering around an area in the U.S.A. known as Chippewa Falls in Wisconsin, Charles realised two things – it was a very beautiful place, and also that the men in the logging industry were wearing subpar footwear. So, in 1932 Danner set up a small workshop that was dedicated to crafting boots for those involved in the logging industry – you know blokes that have moustaches and wear a lot of denim.
The footwear was a hit with the facially haired men, but Chippewa Falls beauty had worn off on Charles – and there weren’t that many loggers to sell boots to there. In 1936 he decided that relocation was necessary.
He settled on Portland, which the observant of you will know that this is still where all of Danners Made in U.S.A. products are produced. Danner quickly became a revered name amongst the loggers of Portland and Charles was flogging his spiky boots for $20 a go – a considerable amount of money during the height of the Great Depression.
WW2
The business was growing at such a rate that Charles had no choice but to bring in outside help for day-to-day operations, well it wasn’t from that far outside, as he employed his two sons John and Bill Danner. We’re not entirely sure what we expected the Danner family members to be called, but the names Charles, John and Bill seem to be very much in line with that of hardcore American bootmakers. Anyway, the Danners continued to produce their logging boots until disaster struck, well actually it struck twice. – President Roosevelt declared the U.S.’s involvement in WW2, and worse yet…
John and Bill had to go.

But as they say, every cloud has a silver lining, and the silver lining in this case was that Charles won a contract to supply his boots to the government during the war, this obviously increased demand significantly and it was decided that that a bigger, better, more American factory was needed in the North of Portland. Fortunately, the war ended, and regular life returned, as did John and Bill.
1960’s Outdoor Recreation Boom
Danner went back to producing logging boots and everything was alright for a while, that was until the Danners noticed all of their clients were disappearing for a quarter of the year to partake in camping, hiking and other outdoor adventures around the U.S., with Charles now being quite an old fellow, his sons were tasked with creating a master plan to react to the outdoor boom of the 1960s, and it probably didn’t take a genius to figure out that they needed to get into the business of making hiking boots.
After a quick bit of market research, they realised that there was one big difference between their work boots to traditional hiking boots – they didn’t weigh a ton. Looking to European boot designs the Danner brothers realised that they needed to slim down the construction of their boots for the outdoor recreation market and include this fancy Italian sole that everyone was raving about, it was called Vibram.

The 6490 Mountain Trail
After a few models that didn’t do fantastically well, the boys decided to really put their heads together and have one final roll of the dice.
The result of this was a boot called the 6490, this name proved to not be that catchy and was renamed the Danner 6490 Mountain Trail – this is the boot that ended up being the blueprint for their most iconic model of the modern day, the Mountain Light. The Mountain Trail didn’t just have a catchy name, it was an incredibly innovative boot – in the early ’70s most hiking boots weighed five pounds, but the Mountain Trail only weighed four. For reference, most boots now weigh two pounds.
It wasn’t just the lightweightness of the Mountain Trail that made it such a hit with those who thumbed through backpacking magazines in their spare time though, but also the beautifully handcrafted construction. The entire boot was made of one single piece of leather that was accompanied by metal D-ring eyelets and colourful laces, the minimalist construction of the 6490 gave it a rapid break-in time and also a great deal of water resistance as there were no welts for liquids to penetrate.

First Waterproof Boot
The Danner brothers weren’t satisfied with just a great deal of water resistance though and in 1979 they had a meeting with a man called Robert Gore who was waxing lyrical about his creation of a waterproof but breathable membrane that he had coined GORE-TEX. The two companies came to an agreement and Danner held the crown of producing the first fully waterproof hiking boot.
In 1984, Danner unveiled the new waterproof version of a slimmed-down Mountain Trail that they called the Danner Light. Having arguably the best-looking and definitely the only waterproof hiking boot on the outdoor market paid dividends for Danner and they decided to have a bit of a jolly after all of their hard work.
This jolly involved making a pair of size 150 boots for an elephant called Tuy Hoa. Don’t worry though it wasn’t just for a laugh – it was to help heal her cracked feet.

Sale of the Company
After achieving what no boot company had done before – producing waterproof boots for an elephant, Bill and John decided to hang up their boots and sold Danner to a man called Eric Merk in 1983, the deal was made on one condition though – that Eric would take Danner forward with the same commitment to craftmanship that their father had pledged when he started the company over fifty years ago.
To give this story an antagonist we’d like to say that Eric ignored the boys requests and completely ruined the company, but this simply isn’t true and you’ve only got to look at what Danner are doing now to see this.
What they’re doing now is exactly the same as they were doing before, which might sound like a terrible way to run a business, but in Danner’s case it’s not. Looking at the present day many of Danners boots are still handcrafted by the local men and women of Portland. Intense checks are carried out at every stage during the boots production and each boot undergoes scrutinising quality checks.
The end product is boots that last as long as old boots – which makes sense because they pretty much are old boots.
Modern Day Danners
In more recent years, Danner is now recognized as being one of the most sought-after American brands in Japan, and if people in Japan think your product is cool, then it most definitely is.
Predictably Danner have also made a fair few big-screen cameos such as when Reese Witherspoon sported a pair of Mountain Light’s in the film WILD and when James Bond was spotted wearing a blacked-out pair of Mountain Light’s in Spectre.

Basically, we reckon Danner are probably some of the best-looking boots on the market, and this is largely contributed to by their pledge to quality craftmanship that has run throughout the brand’s history that we’ve looked at today.
It sounds pretty cliché but we reckon it’s true, if you look after a pair of Danners, they’ll look after you.
If you fancy purchasing a pair of Danners and testing this theory, we recommend doing so from here, or here.
