Oscar Eckenstein (1854-1921) was a British railway engineer and, more importantly for us, a mountaineer of some repute; he is credited with inventing the first crampons for walking on ice and general mountaineering. Various spikes, claws and nails had been attached to boots for centuries, but Eckenstein had an idea for mountaineering crampons, pretty much as we know them today, and took some rudimentary drawings along to Italian blacksmith, Henry Grivel, in the early 1900s to see what could be done, the results were very similar to the crampons we have here in the collection dating from the 1930s.

Anton Hupfauf was an Austrian blacksmith who decided to move from his Tyrolean homeland to Einsiedeln, Switzerland, in 1898. Like many blacksmiths of the the era he began by making knives and farm tools before gradually moving to ice-axes and crampons, catering for the ever-growing market for mountaineers.

We’re not sure of the link between Eckenstein and Hupfauf, maybe they had a deal going, or maybe the crampons were a ‘Eckenstein’ style, though it’s unlikely the ‘Eckenstein’ would be used without permission. Anton Hupfauf was succeeded by a second Anton Hupfauf who took over the business in 1930 and we suspect the crampons we have here date from that era.

The mystery continues as we are not sure where this pair of crampons came from, things just seem to appear sometimes! A nice addition to our collection whatever.