Dead Man anchors have been used for centuries to hold things in place, or for attaching some kind of pulley system to move things around. Although the name would seem to imply that some helpless corpse was used at some point in history, we haven’t found any documentary evidence of that, the more likely system would be to bury logs or stones in soil, sand or snow with a rope or cable wrapped around it for attachment. It’s thought that the first dead man anchors for mountaineering derived from dog sled drivers who used sheets of wood to anchor their dog teams in the snow. Scottish climber, John Cunningham, worked for the British Antarctic Survey in the 1950s and we know that he experimented with metal and aluminium anchors in the Cairngorms on his return, though tradition has it that Denny Moorehouse of Clog Equipment was one of the first to produce a commercially available dead man back in the 1970s.

The dead man we have here is another example of home made technology from the 1970s. It’s been well used and we love the copper swages that weld the cable together. This is another one of the many little gems that Mick Tighe collected from ‘somewhere’ back in the early days.