Plastic boots hit the mountaineering world like a plague around 1979/80. Within a couple of years a large percentage of the outdoor fraternity were infected. Symptoms included swollen ankles, wrinkled (prune-like) feet, multiple blisters and a strong unpleasant aroma from the boot inners. There were also rather crude analogies of a sexual nature that we couldn’t possibly mention on our web site, so lets just say they were insensitive. One lady headed for the hills on a fine winter’s morning with her size 5 inners and her husband’s size 10 outers – only realising the mistake when her crampons would not fit! Some folk were immune and just loved the fact that they had dry feet for the first time and somewhere for the mice to live in off season. The Austrian company Koflach and the Italian’s Asolo were the two main instigators of this disease and it’s the Asolo supersoft version that we have here in the collection. They once belonged to Jim(Skooby)Paterson, ex RAF and Lochaber Mountain Rescue Team and mate of Mick Tighe. Skooby hung up these little used boots in the early 1990’s when leather and compound boots recaptured the market and dustbins were filled with smelly plastic boots!