Tucked in a corner of South Boulder, a mountaineering shop doubles as a museum. Between racks of new climbing gear, ice axes from the 1930s hang beside expedition jackets and boots once used on Everest. Every climber leaves something behind – wooden skis, a boot print, a story – and Gary Neptune has spent a lifetime collecting them.

Neptune Mountaineering houses one of the most extensive mountaineering memorabilia collections in the country, telling the story of outdoor history through the tools that carried people to the world’s highest places. Half a century after opening the shop, Gary Neptune remains its quiet curator, tending to the glass cases and memories alike.

But the true museum isn’t just in the gear – it’s in Neptune himself.

For decades, he’s amassed an impressive treasure trove of alpine history, with artifacts dating back more than a century. Leather boots worn on the first known summit of Mount Everest. Wood-plank skis with leather toe straps. Hand-forged alloy pitons from Yvon Chouinard, world-class climber and founder of Patagonia. A comic strip pinned beside tattered jackets pokes fun at the “brain damage” it takes to be a mountaineer.

The most fascinating relic might be Neptune himself – equal parts climber, collector and historian.

 

Neptune was never supposed to become a mountaineer. The son of a traveling oil salesman, he spent his childhood moving – living everywhere from Missouri to Louisiana to New York to Egypt – rarely staying anywhere long, and never near mountains. He also had asthma as a kid, and unable to play team sports, he turned to gymnastics.

The first book he read as a child was Our Everest Adventure, a pictorial account of a British expedition. None of the adults in his life could explain the photographs or terms. “I remembered concepts, names of mountains and photos from that book for years after,” he said. “That’s what lit the spark.” A copy of the hardcover now sits in an exhibit at the back of the store.

Neptune made his way to Boulder in the 1960s, not for the scene but for the outdoor access. “I wanted to live in a place I could climb before and after work. During work, too,” he said.

He spent years fixing boots and scrambling the Flatirons. In 1973, he used a small inheritance to open Neptune Mountaineering. The shop was just barely             1,000 square feet.

In Boulder, Neptune lived in a trailer, grew his own vegetables and biked a mile to the shop each day. He sold climbing gear and offered boot repairs. His customers were dirtbag climbers, his profit margins nonexistent.

But Neptune kept climbing. He saved every penny and summited peaks including Everest, Ama Dablam, Makalu and Gasherbrum II. He repeated ski routes around Colorado with handmade wooden skis and climbed in Eldorado Canyon on old gear to understand what early pioneers felt. He even plucked pillow feathers to sew his own down pants for his Everest expedition. “I never saw it as sacrificing things,” he said. “I was just doing what I loved.”

Years of expeditions left him with more memories – and more gear – than his small home could hold.

“I ran out of room in my basement,” Neptune said. “So I started hanging stuff on the shop walls.” At first, it was his own gear. Then customers began donating, and friends mailed him relics from around the globe, many with handwritten notes or stories passed down for generations.

By 1983, he had moved into a larger space on South Broadway in Boulder’s Table Mesa neighborhood, where the shop still sits at the foot of the Flatirons, a fitting backdrop for a climber’s museum. Alongside his growing collection, Neptune began hosting slide shows and talks by climbing partners recounting their far-flung adventures. A small crowd would huddle around a projector as his buddies described harrowing journeys in distant mountains. The store still hosts athletes for speaking events today.

 

Today, the museum sprawls throughout the 20,000-square-foot Neptune Mountaineering store in South Boulder, where walls of new gear mingle with relics of mountaineering’s golden age. Neptune sold the business in 2013 and continues to live nearby in Longmont, still curating his exhibits with tireless precision.

He often drifts through the museum barefoot, padding between displays as if walking familiar trails. “I just like it,” he says with a shrug. “Shoes and I don’t really get along.”

When asked why there’s no digital inventory of every single item, Neptune smiled. “There’s a unique value in coming here and looking at it all – the timeline of history laid out across the store.” Hundreds of relics live here, though Neptune can’t be sure of the exact number.

He runs his hand along the worn wood of an old ice axe from the 1800s, its shaft smoothed by centuries of use. “The gear’s lighter now, more refined. But it’s really not that different,” he said. “Those early climbers figured it out first – we’re just following their lead. They’ve allowed us to go further, faster, higher.”

His collection interlaces with racks of new gear. The walls are lined with old crampons above the latest climbing shoes. Faded expedition posters and skis from Colorado’s 10th Mountain Division date back to the 1940s. Beneath a worn rucksack pinned to the wall, a bright red pack sits on the shelf for sale.

There’s a backpack from Tony Larsen’s unsupported North Pole trek, during which the explorer lost 60 pounds. Look closely and you’ll notice the padding has been cut from the waist belt so he could pull it tight enough. There’s even a toe, not Neptune’s, but his friend Malcolm Daly’s. The frostbitten appendage sits in a small jar next to another toe, donated by a customer, Mike, who froze both big toes on Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park.

 

More than just gear, each piece tells a story, and it’s one Neptune usually knows by heart. He can recall who used it, where they went, what the weather was like. Sometimes, he’s the one who wore it. “When possible, I use the original gear if I repeat an important climb or ski route. I try to appreciate the experience from their perspective,” he said.

He’s skied Colorado’s Commando Run near Vail on antique wooden skis and climbed with rope-soled shoes. He even learned to make wooden skis in Minnesota and still uses them today.

Humor threads through the exhibits too. A comic near the crampons reads: “Brain damage leads to mountaineering, study says.” Laughter often drifts from a corner of the store as a visitor catches one of the quips tucked along the walls.

In the fast-moving world of retail chains and new gear, the Neptune Mountaineering remains defiantly analog. It’s a gear shop, yes – but it is also a living archive. A museum curated by a man who cut his own skis, made his own gear and built a climbing community in Boulder since the 1970s.

“Gary Neptune’s legacy as a pioneering climber, longtime specialty retailer and gear expert lives on through the museum,” said store owner Maile Spung. “The equipment he sold and used for decades is preserved in one of the most unique mountaineering collections in the world.”

But Neptune will never brag. He’ll probably deflect and tell a story about someone else.

That’s the story he’s been telling all along – of the climbers who left something behind, and of the man who chose to preserve it all.