Eiger, the mountain, is pretty easy to find, towering above the little Swiss town of Grindlewald, alongside its pals, The Monch and the Jungfrau. Eiger, the American equipment manufacturer, is rather more difficult to pin down. It seems to have started life in the 1960’s based out of a place called Montrose, in California. A guy called Mike Sturm seemed to be at the helm back then, though what’s happened to him and his company, some 50 years later, we are not sure. Anyway, it appears that Eiger either made gear, or at least had it made and distributed it, and curiously, it seems they struck a deal with Chouinard in the early 1970’s whereby they got Chouinard hexagonals to sell as their own, though from what we can gather, Chouinard changed the configuration of their own hexagonals soon after, so this might just have been a ploy to get rid of their old stock. Whatever, Eiger certainly sold, and probably made, all kinds of climbing gear including pitons, the karabiner and the four hexagonals we have here in the collection. Who made what, where and when, is the subject of much discussion amongst American climbers and the fact that two of the nuts that we have here are stamped “6” even though they are a different size doesn’t help clarify the situation. Neither does the two ways of writing “Eiger” The Eiger karabiner is a bit of a rarety since it seems most American climbers didn’t buy them, or threw them away not long after they did because it seems they were pretty unreliable and even got the nickname ‘death karabiners’ Quite what the problem was we are not sure but we are not using this one to go climbing! Ironically, perhaps, it was our pal, Art McCarthy, in California, who sent us this gear as part of a wee trade deal we have going.