Looking rather more like a Meccano set than a pair of crampons, these Giant Footfangs are a copy of the original versions which were created by American climber, Mike Lowe, in 1976. Quite how Grivel got around the patent laws we are not sure, but assume the Grivel versions appeared a couple of years after Mike Lowe’s originals. – 1979/80. At this time climbers were looking to climb ever steeper ice and needed rigid crampons to compliment the front points. Another American, Yvon Chouinard, had created his own rigid crampons in 1968 and the Footfangs were a pretty poor variation on the theme. Consequently, they went in and out of fashion very quickly, though the ‘mono’ print version had some popularity in later years.