Kluane Archive
Est. 1972
Ongoing
More than fifty years of making equipment in Edmonton leaves a few things behind. Photographs, letters, catalogues, expedition reports, patterns, patches, newspaper clippings and stories that were never written down.
Edmonton, Alberta
Canada
Made here.
Taken everywhere.
Paper / Film / Objects
Edmonton, Alberta
Documents & Objects
Still growing
Expedition Record
Yukon
MT. LOGAN
Preserved in Edmonton
Before the stories became history, somebody wrote them down on the photographs.
Preserved in the Kluane archive is this image from June 1977: climbers on Mt. Logan carrying equipment made in Edmonton.
Nothing elaborate was required to preserve the record. A photograph, a date and a sentence in ink were enough.
Kluane gear on west summit of Mt. Logan — June, 1977
Correspondence
Canadian Base Camp
POSTMARKED EVEREST.
Incoming Mail
WISH YOU WERE HERE.
Edmonton, Alberta
Equipment
Down Sleeping Bag
A sleeping bag was treated like equipment.
Edmonton
Equipment / 05
Old Kluane catalogues spent surprisingly little time trying to make equipment sound mysterious.
Materials, construction, sizes, fill and intended use were simply written down.
The details changed over the years, but the underlying job did not: make something warm enough for wherever it was going.
Barry Blanchard
Field Record
Barry Blanchard became one of Canada's defining alpinists, with major climbs across the Canadian Rockies, Himalaya and Karakoram.
His connection to Kluane ran into the high mountains: in 1988 he was photographed at roughly 26,000 feet on the northeast flank of Everest wearing custom Kluane Mountaineering mittens.
Field Note
Equipment in Use
Kluane equipment was never designed to live carefully. It was made to be packed, compressed, dragged through weather, slept in, repaired and taken out again.
Some of the archive is paper. Some of it is simply the evidence left on the equipment.
Archive / 07
Not everything in the archive arrived clean. Some garments are faded, softened, stained, repaired or simply worn down by use.
Those marks are part of the record.
A pristine object can show how something was made. A worn one shows what happened after it left the shop.