Atlas Snowshoes and the Winter That Would Not Quit

The day Perry Klebahn broke his ankle, winter did what winter does: it kept moving. The mountain still filled up. The parking lot still turned into a boot-buckle orchestra. Somebody still forgot their gloves and tried to play it cool anyway. Friends still picked out the best-looking runs while they waited in line for the lift, like gravity was a suggestion and the weekend was a contract. And Klebahn, suddenly sidelined, ran straight into a truth winter does not bother to soften. The season does not slow down just because you are hurt.

In some versions of the story, it happened around Tahoe: a cabin, a storm cycle, the kind of place where you wake up, look out the window, and immediately start doing math in your head about how many laps you can squeeze in before the light gets flat. Klebahn could not do those laps, not on skis and not on anything that looked like his normal winter, so he found a way outside anyway. Not fast. Not smooth. Not even close to the kind of movement that makes you feel like you are flying. He strapped on snowshoes and got to work. They worked, but they moved terribly, heavy frames, a weird stride, that stiff, old-gear argument with every step, like the tool was insisting on its own idea of how a body should travel through snow. It got him out there, sure, but it also made one thought impossible to ignore: snowshoeing does not have to move like this.

Most people would log that as a lousy day, blame the rental-shop relics, and move on. Klebahn did not. He noticed the problem the way designers often notice a bad door handle, not with drama but with precision. He caught the exact moment motion breaks, when the body wants to do one thing and the tool forces another, turning a simple step into a negotiation between stride and frame. Once you see that kind of resistance, it is hard to unsee it, and once the thought exists, it starts demanding proof.

Snow is not polite terrain. It is uneven, soft in one spot and punchy in the next, slanted, drifted, wind-crusted, and chopped up by whoever got there first. Winter travel is a thousand tiny adjustments. Old snowshoes did their job by being rigid. A boot rose and fell. The frame came along for the ride, and the body adapted even when it felt clunky. The tool worked. The movement suffered. Klebahn’s background ran through Stanford and into product design, a workspace where frustration is not a dead end but raw material. You strip it down, sketch it, build it, and test it in real conditions until the idea either holds up or gets laughed off the trailhead. A single prototype is not a company. It is a dare.

In 1990, Klebahn and Jim Klingbeil developed what became Atlas’s signature technical bet, Spring-Loaded Suspension. The goal was not to reinvent winter travel from scratch but to fix how a snowshoe moved under a real body. Atlas has described the system as keeping the snowshoe close underfoot while allowing articulation, absorbing impact, and flexing side-to-side as the frame settles into the snow. It sounds like a small change until you try to keep your feet under you on sidehills, in chopped-up powder, on icy creek crossings, and in the kind of snowpack that punishes sloppy movement. Winter rewards clean mechanics and punishes gear that fights you. That early work earned patent protection in a category that had been slow to change, and Atlas leaned into an identity built on continuing to iterate. Not one clever idea followed by a logo, but a pattern of engineering attention. Snowshoeing had a movement problem. How should it move instead?

The first money was personal. One early profile put it around $15,000 of savings to get the thing off the ground, not a war chest or a safety net, just enough to make every decision feel loud and every mistake hurt. Enough to force the only rule that matters in winter equipment: it has to work. Those early days were not only about building a better snowshoe but about building belief that snowshoeing could be athletic, not just functional. Something a crew chose on purpose, not a last resort when the ski day fell apart. Better movement was the first half of the job. The second half was convincing people to show up.

Snowshoeing had an image problem for a long time, living in the same mental drawer as awkward rentals, tangled straps, and the feeling of trudging. Atlas chased momentum as much as mechanics, leaning into participation with events, tours, and reasons to show up when the snow was falling and the easy answer was staying inside. Picture a trailhead under headlamps, breath turning white, someone wrestling a binding with frozen fingers while a friend heckles helpfully, a thermos doing its best. A few people are clearly here all the time. A few are here because someone promised it would be fun. Somebody slips in the first ten minutes and laughs like it was planned, and ten minutes later, the whole group is moving together. Perfection is not the point. Winter becomes social.

One of the stranger and better examples from that era was a run of midnight snowshoe walks connected with Ben & Jerry’s, the kind of collaboration that only makes sense in winter. Equal parts absurd and perfect. A little goofy and a little brilliant. Atlas was also linked with efforts around National Winter Trails Day alongside Snowsports Industries America, aimed at getting more people outside without pretending the day needed skis, a lift ticket, or a perfect skill set. The participation story was not built around one type of athlete, either. Women were not treated as an afterthought. A two-year biomechanics study focused on women’s stance, stride, and foot anatomy informed a women’s line that was not just a shrunken men’s frame. Clinics and workshops with major outdoor retailers helped make winter travel feel approachable without making it soft. Less lecture, more competent friend showing you the right moves so you can have a better day. Better gear is one thing. A reason to use it, and a way to bring people into it, is another.

By the late 1990s, snowshoeing was growing, and Atlas grew with it. In 1999, Atlas merged with Tubbs to form WinterQuest, giving the small-brand story a bigger business structure. Then consolidation arrived. In October 2003, K2 purchased WinterQuest, reported at the time to have $18.6 million in annual sales. Scale brings distribution and visibility, but it also brings complexity. More stakeholders. More constraints. A greater distance between the drawing board and the trailhead. Some coverage from the years that followed described broader shifts in the winter industry, including changes in where parts of production were done as portfolios grew. It is not cinematic, but it is where a lot of gear lives or dies. A company can build a great tool in a small room. Keeping it great as the company grows is the harder trick.

In 2017, Newell Brands agreed to sell its winter sports business to Kohlberg & Company for expected gross proceeds of $240 million, subject to adjustments, with Atlas included alongside a long list of winter brands. The parent organization later operated as Elevate Outdoor Collective, and in October 2024 Elevate promoted COO Josee Larocque to CEO. That is the clean corporate arc. Names, dates, deals. It explains where Atlas sits now, but not what it has chased from the beginning.

Atlas starts, like most good mountain stories, with a body that refuses to accept being sidelined. An injury. A workaround. A piece of gear that did the job but moved badly. A person who could not stop thinking about why. Then came the idea, the proof, and a product line built around the belief that better mechanics make winter travel feel different. Then came something bigger than product: participation, night walks, events, and a push to make winter something people could share, not just endure. Then came scale, consolidation, and a brand carried forward inside larger portfolios. The best brands survive that journey when the core truth remains obvious on the snow. Not the logo or the ownership chart, but the feeling underfoot when the terrain gets messy. That is where winter tells the truth. The best gear does not just perform. It keeps the day alive.