We try not to use the word ‘icon’ too much, but we do seem to have quite a lot of them in our collection, and this Chouinard Zero ice axe is certainly one of them. American mountaineer, Yvon Chouinard, created it way back in 1969 and it quickly became the must have ice axe. It was a time when ice climbers were venturing out onto ever steeper walls of ice, the days of step cutting were quickly coming to an end, being replaced by crampons with front points and ice axes with a curved pick and backward facing teeth that stopped them popping back out, indeed, it was quite hard to get them out even when you wanted to.

Unfortunately, the Zero rose to fame just as wooden shafted ice axes were fast becoming obsolete. They had been used for decades, often as anchors, driven into the snow with the rope wrapped around to make a belay. Steeper climbs had led to bigger falls when things went wrong, the axes snapped and climbers died. One such incident on Ben Nevis prompted Scottish mountaineer, Hamish MacInnes, to produce the world’s first all-metal ice axe, many others would follow his example – including Chouinard.

Chouinard was quick to realise that the head of his Zero was good, but the wooden shaft was not. The answer was to graft a metal shaft onto the original head. We have a fine example of the latter elsewhere in the collection.

By this time Chouinard had out-sourced production of his ice axes to the Italian company CAMP, who were based in the town of Premana, which is why Chouinard axes from this era had the Chouinard logo (as above) on one side of the pick, and ‘Made in Italy Premana’ on the other.