C.A.M.P. stands for ‘Costruzione Articoli Montagne Premana’ in Italian, ‘Manufacturing’ ‘Articles’ ‘Mountain’ Premana in English, so from that we can deduce that they make stuff for mountaineering in a factory in Premana, a town in Italy. They make all kinds of things: ice-axes; crampons; pitons; carabiners; camming devices etc etc, they also make ice screws and we have a couple here in the collection.

Climbers were hammering lumps of metal, known as ice pitons, into the ice to make a belay up to the 1970s, when the corkscrew ice screw came along (we have some elsewhere in the collection), they were good for opening bottles of wine and would hold a fall on ice if you only fell five feet. The next generation were the ones we have here, they held slightly bigger falls, bent a bit and didn’t open the wine.

Salewa produced thousands of similar looking ones in the 1970s, not sure who had the design first.

These ones were part of Mick Tighe’s Mountain Guiding company, Nevis Guides.