The Simond brothers started making ice axes in the little town of Chamonix, France, in the 1860s. There seem to have been quite a lot of them ; Adolpus, Francois and Claudius are the ones we know about, the latter putting his name to the two pitons we have here in the collection.

Pitons with eyes to clip a karabiner on only started to appear in the 1930s since that’s when the first karabiners also arrived. Simond capitalised on the new idea by creating their own pitons using the metalworking skills gleaned from ice axe manufacturing.

The couple we have here probably date from the 1950s, a time when hardly anyone was making pitons in the UK and imports from the continent were the norm. Alpine guides back then would often place pitons on their regular climbing routes and leave them in situ for future use. The style of these pitons fits that scenario since once ‘wellied’ into a crack they would be very hard to remove.

The Scots, of course, always got them out as they couldn’t possibly leave expensive pitons behind !