We’re told that the first use of ice pitons for mountaineering was back in 1924 when Franz Riegele and Willi Welzenbach used them on the first ascent of a climb on the Grosses Wiesbachhorn in Austria. As these were the first pitons to be used we can only assume that Franz & Willi made them themselves, or asked the local blacksmith to fashion some lumps of metal. Either way, the idea soon caught on as the 1930 Sporthaus Jungborn catalogue (above) has Eishaken mit Zahnon (ice pitons with teeth) for sale.

Fast forward a decade or so and ice pitons were for sale in the UK (1960s/70s) mostly imported from companies like Stubai in Austria and ASMU in Germany, we have examples elsewhere in the collection.

We still had the remains of an industrial empire back in the 1960s and the engineers working in it often made their own gear, we think the ice piton we have here in the collection is a good example. It’s one of the hammer in, hack out variety, hard work and time consuming while teetering on crampon points (nailed boots in the early days), ice screws were soon to arrive rendering these guys to the history books and heritage collections.