MANCOS – Craig Benally is leaning back in his chair in front of a Swiss-made seam taping machine in the Alpacka Raft factory. He is feathering laminated nylon panels beneath a tiny pipe blowing 700-degree air that seals tape on waterproof seams of the company’s groundbreaking backpacking rafts. He’s pushing the curving, sealed seams away from the machine with his bare feet.
“This one requires a strong amount of finesse and feel,” says Thor Tingey, the co-founder of 24-year-old Alpacka, explaining that the machine works at a given speed and Benally must keep up with that speed as he seals tape along sharp curves without gaps or bunching.
Benally smiles and says he loves this work: “It really appeals to my craftsman mentality.”
Tingey’s mom, Sheri, created Alpacka Raft in Alaska in 2000, in part to help her son and his Colorado College pals better traverse the creek-veined wilds of Alaska. She was an accomplished kayaker and clothing designer who wanted her son to have something better than a flimsy pool toy when fording whitewater in wild landscapes.
In 2017, a year after relocating the business from outside Anchorage to Mancos, Alpacka took over the former Mancos Valley Hardware Store, which had been empty for nearly a decade. The move tripled the company’s space from its old location in Mancos. Since then, the number of rafts the company makes every year has tripled and Alpacka now employs 45 people.
The Tingeys converted the hardware store’s lumber storage sheds into about 8,000 square feet of offices and the 12,000-square-foot solar-powered factory is now one of the largest outdoor gear factories in Colorado. With storage containers spread across the former lumber yard, the Alpacka operation spans almost a whole block in downtown Mancos.
Thor and Sheri unquestionably innovated new ways to explore wet landscapes with their lightweight, packable boats. But perhaps their most pioneering accomplishment is in that former hardware store factory. Each new boat or design slots into a complicated but streamlined manufacturing process orchestrated by 35 highly skilled factory employees.
Tingey, who has a law degree and serves as CEO, has 11 models of rafts that can be offered in 130 variations of colors, sizes, rigging and upgrades. Next year, Tingey will unveil new flat-water boats and sea kayaks.
Alpacka rafts, which sell for $750 to $2,400, are made to order, like a restaurant entree. A week’s worth of boat orders kicks off every Friday at the room-sized, custom-built Autometrix Catalyst computerized cutting machine, which cuts dozens of different shapes out of high-strength laminated nylon fabric.
That’s the sorting process. The bins of labeled, cut shapes – for 50 boats that’s more than 600 swaths of computer-cut fabric – then move to the radio-frequency welding room. A handful of workers pilot $50,000 RF welding machines that use electromagnetic energy to fuse fabric into boat shapes. They weld zippers, and laser-cut rigging and straps onto the fabric panels as the boats take shape.
The welded shapes are coded with Alpacka-specific labels and packed into bins for the sewers and assemblers.
Brianna States, who graduated from Mancos High and went to design school, has spent three years sewing just about every boat that Alpacka makes.
“This is one of the only jobs in the U.S. where I can actually sew,” says States as her hands deftly guide fabric through her industrial Juki sewing machine. “This is definitely my area of intelligence.”
Tingey says input from States and other workers often informs not only manufacturing processes but also designs. Every employee can offer insights at any point in the process, he says.
Alpacka’s specialty boats – newer designs like the whitewater-kayak inspired Valkyrie – require specialized seam taping with that Swiss hot-air taping machine. That’s Benally’s job. He’s got his own corner of the factory floor.
After sewing and seam sealing, the boats are inflated overnight to make sure they are water worthy and then they land in the flooring room. The burly floors of the Alpacka boats are glued and sealed in the final, most consequential stage of production. A mistake here scraps the entire boat. Tingey’s voice drops to a whisper in this room, to make sure he doesn’t distract the flooring guy who has been working at Alpacka for 17 years.
It takes about two weeks for a boat to wind through the Alpacka factory. The final room where boats are prepped for shipping with Astral life jackets and Werner break-down paddles. Every wall in the factory is adorned with framed posters of Alpacka paddlers plumbing wild landscapes across the planet. Outside, welders and cutters take breaks by shooting hoops next to a mural spanning half a block.
Tingey is proud of his team.
“I think we are probably the most sophisticated seam-taping operation in the world,” he says.
Tingey is not the creator type who tires of the process that follows great inventions. He loves tinkering with the flow across his factory. He spends most of his time hammering out kinks in the Alpacka system. (And he’s also an expert paddler, of course, whose river R&D has inspired most of the company’s boat designs.) His inspiration for his endless tweaking of workflows and systems is one of the largest companies in North America.
“Without question,” he says, “Amazon is the best logistics operation in the world.”
Alpacka is unaffected by the Trump administration tariffs. Every material used in the rafts is U.S. made. Those tariffs are designed, in part, to protect companies like Alpacka. Still, Tingey is not particularly impressed by the clumsy tariff effort to promote domestic manufacturing and he’s got all sorts of thoughts on how taxes on import and exports could better insulate U.S. producers and manufacturers.
He doesn’t hide a smile when he hears about the pain the tariffs are inflicting on his China-made copycats.
“I’m thrilled my knock-off competitors are taking it in the shorts from these tariffs,” he says.
He chafes at the oft-heard notion that it is impossible to manufacture complex products in the U.S.
“It’s not a ‘can’t’ thing. It’s just a really big lift that is really hard and requires huge investment,” he says, ticking off the more than $200,000 it costs for the machines to make Alpacka rafts. That doesn’t count labor or real estate. “We used to know how to make things in this country and we’ve lost that know-how. It’s slipped away from us slowly.”
