On a fishing trip to Alaska in 1950, William Albee observed a group of Eskimos preparing to remove a heavy wooden boat from the Arctic waters. Albee wondered how the small, heavily clad men would manage the boat up the muddy bank. The Eskimos produced and inflated several air-tight seal skins on which they rolled the boat out of the water and up the bank. With this in mind, Albee returned to California and began developing the first Rolligon low-pressure, off-road tire, testing it in 1958.
