Kluane
Mountaineering
Kluane Mountaineering has been making down equipment in Edmonton since 1972.
It started with two climbers making sleeping bags because they could not afford the ones they wanted.
We are still here, and we are still making them.
Two sleeping bags.
In the early 1970s, John Faulkner and Jim Brown were university students and climbers in Edmonton. They wanted good sleeping bags, but they were expensive.
So they made two themselves.
Friends wanted them too. Then friends of friends. Before long there was a little company.
It was a practical beginning. The equipment was made for people who were actually going outside: climbers, skiers, travellers and people who simply needed to stay warm through an Edmonton winter.
Patterns were developed at the cutting table, changed when something could work better, and used again. Jackets and sleeping bags left the shop one at a time.
That way of working became Kluane. Small production, good materials and equipment made by people who knew exactly where it had come from.
Lucy helped turn the little operation into a real production shop making jackets and sleeping bags. Betty, who worked beside her for years, still credits Lucy with making Kluane what it became.
Betty joined Kluane in 1982 and worked alongside Lucy for the next twenty-five years. She knew the patterns, the machines, the customers and the work.
Betty bought the company in 2007 and carried it through another generation. In all, she spent 42 years at Kluane.
She retired from full-time work in 2024. She still comes in a day or two most months.
In 2010, Dylan Lynch walked into Kluane for the first time and became immediately obsessed with the place. He left telling friends, only half joking, “I'm going to run that place one day.”
Over the years that followed, he kept pointing his life in that direction. In 2024, fourteen years after that first visit, Betty handed Kluane over to him.
The equipment got around.
1970s — Present
Kluane jackets and sleeping bags travelled into the Rockies, the Himalaya, the Arctic and plenty of places in between. Some of the evidence eventually came home.
Still in Edmonton.
Kluane never disappeared and came back. The shop simply kept going. The machines changed, the people changed, and the racks got a little more crowded.
Made here.
Jackets, vests and sleeping bags are still cut, sewn and filled in the shop.
The models are starting points. Colours, fabrics and details change. Most things end up a little different from the last one.
A small company.
The shop is still full of sewing machines, fabric, jackets, old photographs, catalogues and people making things. That is more or less the whole story.
Edmonton, Alberta
Still making down equipment.
More than fifty years later, that part has not changed very much.