UK made Alpine climbing rucksack

The Traverse backpack is a lightweight solution for alpine climbs. Streamlined and sturdy, it hugs gear close while freeing you to move fluidly up the rock.

One of the wonderful things about chatting to our Alpkiteers and customers. No matter how much thought we put into a piece of kit – nor how niche that kit is – you tend to choose something that's in noway built-for-purpose for your exploits, for reasons we don't always expect! That's why keeping an open dialogue with you – the people using our products – is crucial to our design process.

Incidentally, it was a conversation with one of the UK’s gnarliest climbers that inspired us to make this pack. The Traverse Alpine backpack was to be extremely lightweight, simple, and strong - with a decent capacity to boot. Perfect for fast, minimalist alpinism.

You set us a challenge, so we set ourselves some targets:

• Price:sub £150
• Weight:700 g
• Capacity:+35litres

Simplify, then add lightness – Colin Chapman (design guru at Lotus Racing)

Making a product complicated is easy. Add a buckle here, a compartment there, adorn with all sorts of bells and whistles: the world of features is your oyster! As the Alpinists among you know, the challenge is keeping 'stuff' to a minimum. Now that's innovative.

By making the backpack less complicated, we could put more emphasis on the materials, on how we put it together.

We make the Traverse pack in our UK factory, which means that:

• A) we get to produce a really specialist climbing pack here in Nottingham
• B) you can ask us to customise your pack for you
• C) throughout the design process we could explore different constructions, tweaking and testing the pack until we got it exactly how we thought you'd want it.

To make Traverselightweight yet durable, we use 500D Cordura® nylon with excellent abrasion-resistance and durability.

Traverse is a stripped-back rucksack for lightweight adventures and mountain minimalistswith a cavernous main pocket and a quick-pull closure. What we’ve ended up with is an incredibly hardwearing yet lightweight backpack. It fits in exactly what you need for fast and light alpine ascents and its features are tailored to a day out in the mountains. It’s simple, and therein lies its ingenuity.

Traverse comes with the 25 year Alpine Bond guarantee we put on our UK made products.