- Joe Vogel walked away from a tenured professorship to launch an outdoor lifestyle brand.
- Vogel has written acclaimed books about Michael Moore, Michael Jackson and Prince.
- Provo-based Timpanogos Hiking Co. just exceeded seven figures in revenue.
Sometime between seeing the coming-of-age drama “Dead Poets Society” and his first college literature class, Joe Vogel decided he was going to be a professor.
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He didn’t fall far from the tree, as the saying goes. Both of his parents, Charles and Sandy Vogel, were English professors at Utah Valley University. Vogel earned his undergraduate degree at the Orem school. He obtained master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Rochester.
While in graduate school, he wrote the critically acclaimed 2011 book “Man in the Music: The Creative Life and Work of Michael Jackson.” That led to an offer to write about another pop star. ”This Thing Called Life: Prince, Race, Sex, Religion and Music” came out a few years later.
Vogel landed a job teaching at Merrimack College, a private Augustinian school in Massachusetts. Over the next decade, he taught literature, headed the film studies department and rose to English department chair. There were other books about music, literature, film and popular culture as well. He loved being on campus, loved teaching and writing.
He was a rising star in his field. Invitations to lecture, publish articles in journals, write books poured in. He became a tenured professor. Job security for life.
But he wasn’t in a good place. His marriage of 15 years ended. He felt lonely and depressed. His career success couldn’t fill the void anymore. The pandemic put distance between him and his students. His mother suffered a traumatic brain injury from a fall down a flight of stairs shortly after she retired. His father nearly died of COVID-19.
“Everything about my work life was different, so I just think I had a kind of existential crisis. None of the achievements really mattered anymore. The books and the tenure and all that. I mean, it mattered on some level, but it was more like, what do I want to do with the rest of my life?” Vogel, 44, said.
Though he made a couple of trips to Utah each year to visit family, the trips became more frequent as his parents’ health deteriorated. In between running errands for them and long talks with his mom, Vogel hiked the mountains and canyons where he’d spent his teenage years in the shadow of Mount Timpanogos, the second-highest peak in the Wasatch range. (His family moved from California when he was 13.)
Something happened on those hikes, especially on the mountain everyone simply refers to as Timp. He started to feel things again. He reconnected with a part of himself that he’d forgotten or lost. He gained clarity and a new sense of purpose.
Vogel poignantly described his existential crisis in a candid 2023 article titled “What I Found in the Mountains of Utah” posted on Medium, a popular open-publishing platform.
The first line says, “It’s not easy to walk away from security.”
But that’s what he did.
Michael Jackson and his music
Vogel grew up listening to Michael Jackson. He found the pop star fascinating and brilliant. But he couldn’t find a book that focused on him as an artist.
So following Toni Morrison’s admonition — “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it” — Vogel set out to write that book. He was in grad school at the time.
He reached out to the singer’s manager, hoping to score an interview. Jackson had just announced his highly anticipated comeback tour “This Is It” in March 2009. He died three months later.
After getting the brush-off from Jackson’s estate, Vogel tried John Branca, Jackson’s longtime entertainment attorney, business advisor and personal friend. He responded. Branca read two chapters of the book and the floodgates opened. Vogel gained access to everything and everybody in Jackson’s orbit. He had pizza with Spike Lee, who wrote the blurb for the second edition.
“It was just kind of one of those weird things. I was just a kid in California listening to Michael Jackson on my Walkman, and then suddenly I’m like meeting all these people that worked on him and worked with him in the studio and had all these experiences with him. And so it was kind of crazy,” Vogel said.
“The Man in the Music” came out 15 years ago. But it’s not forgotten. Vogel received interview requests from all the major media outlets when the movie “Michael” premiered earlier this year.
In addition to writing about Jackson and Prince, Vogel wrote books about American writer and civil right activist James Baldwin and the TV series “Stranger Things.”
Michael Moore and free speech
Before making his mark in academia and writing books, Vogel made national headlines when, as student body vice president at what was then Utah Valley State College, he brought Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore to campus in 2004.
Political conservatives were outraged. Donors to the college pulled back. One man filed a lawsuit. Vogel and student body president Jim Bassi received death threats. A week before Moore arrived, the school brought in conservative commentator Sean Hannity to assuage the uprising.
Vogel’s role in student government was to invite speakers to campus. The filmmaker’s name came across in an email amid offers from dozens of other available speakers. The U.S. was at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moore’s documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11” questioning the Bush administration’s motives for the invasions had just come out.
“I wasn’t even really that political at the time. I just thought this would be a good way to energize the campus and get people talking about an important subject,” he said.
Moore spoke to a sold-out arena as part of his “Slacker Uprising Tour” just weeks before the 2004 presidential election.
Utah Valley State College later honored Vogel for bringing Moore to campus, with the dean of the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences saying, “His courage is a wonderful example to the faculty, students and staff of this college, and the college is stronger for it.”
Vogel wrote a book about the experience titled “Free Speech 101: The Utah Valley Uproar Over Michael Moore.”
“But don’t judge it too much. I was 22. I’ve gotten better as a writer,” he said, sitting in his home office in Lehi where posters of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” and Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” adorn the walls along with a print of God’s and Adam’s fingers in Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” and photo of his beloved parents.
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On Charlie Kirk and Sharon McMahon
Having brought the lightning rod Moore to campus gives Vogel a unique perspective on the equally controversial Charlie Kirk and Sharon McMahon being invited to UVU.
Vogel said he had no problem with Kirk appearing at the school because the same free speech principles apply. “Regardless of whether I agreed with all his views, I thought he was doing something of value, which is getting people talking. Students should be thinking about these things, right?” he said.
But in light of the Moore uproar, he said, “I was a little surprised UVU, given that history, wasn’t a little more careful” in hosting Kirk.
“Back then, we were talking about bulletproof vests. We had gotten so many weird emails and threats and all this stuff that there was a legitimate concern. And it was also why we had it indoors and a lot of precautions were taken,” Vogel said.
As for McMahon, whose comments about Kirk after his death were not well received in Utah, Vogel said he was surprised UVU invited her to speak at commencement in the first place. Amid backlash, the school withdrew the invitation.
“In a normal situation it shouldn’t be a big deal, right? But we don’t live in normal times,” Vogel said.
Escaping the noise
The pandemic brought that home.
As Vogel wrote on Medium, “It was a rough time. Life felt different. The texture and rhythm of everything. The college felt soulless. The country was in disarray. People were angry, overwhelmed, exhausted, lonely. I was one of those people.”
He tried to push through and be strong for his ailing parents and his two kids. But he only felt dread.
As Vogel’s trips to Utah became more regular due to his parents’ failing health, so did his forays into the canyons.
“I think for me it was around the time of the pandemic when all this stuff was happening that I just, I don’t know, I got disillusioned with politics, both sides,” he said. “And I just, I’m like, peace out. I’ll be in the mountains.”
The idea that would prompt him to walk away from his tenured professorship came to him during a restless night in his cluttered basement in Massachusetts. He could see the name in his head: Timpanogos Hiking Co. Its slogan came just as clearly: “Escape the noise.” The outdoor brand would sell shirts and hoodies but be centered on the connection between hiking and mental health.
Vogel grew up on the Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Blake, Keats and Shelley along with the transcendentalists like Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau. Their return-to-nature themes informed his company.
“This kind of sense that society has it wrong, that we almost have to strip away the things that were taught and kind of go back to basics. That’s a very romantic and transcendentalist idea. And so that was really infused in the philosophy of the business,” he said.
Vogel sees hiking as the great antidote to the stress, distractions, feeling overwhelmed, addiction to algorithms and alerts and cheap dopamine that prevails in modern, digital life.
“I can tell you honestly, there’s nothing that I’ve found that’s better for me than getting outdoors. It’s just getting out in the mountains. It just makes me feel better. And I’ve just heard it from so many people,” he said.
Risk and reward
Bootstrapping his retirement, short-term loans and money from his parents, Vogel launched his outdoor brand in 2022 on Shopify, an online retail platform. He bounced between Massachusetts and Utah to get the business going. One one visit, he noticed how much downtown Provo had awakened since he’d been away. Nice restaurants, independent businesses and even some coffee shops now line the streets.
Vogel saw a vacant storefront that he thought would be perfect for a physical shop. It’s 15 minutes from Sundance and the base of Timp. He could see the mountain from the store. After a soul-searching drive around Utah Lake, he decided to go for it. He moved back to Utah to oversee the brand full time.
The store opened on Memorial Day in 2023, and has taken off. It hit seven figures in revenue this past year.
While he has found establishing Timpanogos Hiking Co. demanding but professionally fulfilling, he experienced more recent personal heartache. His dad died in May 2025. His mother died this past February. Both were only in their 60s.
“She was the center of our family and my universe,” Vogel said.
Vogel credits his parents with letting him dream big dreams. It allowed him to go after things he wants in life. “Everybody has lots of flaws, and maybe if we’re lucky, a couple gifts. But one of my gifts is that I can see something in my head and I can make it come to life.”
That has proven true with his books and his business.
“My mom always taught me to trust my intuition. My intuition was that I needed to come to Utah. Even though I left my career, I got the final few years of my parents’ lives,” he said. “I wouldn’t trade that for anything. Even if I go bankrupt now, I would not trade it.”
While running his business, he still steals away for regular hikes. He also continues to write.
After his mother’s death, Vogel poured himself into finishing a novel he started during the pandemic, a coming-of-age story and his first work of fiction. He plans to start working on a memoir next.