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 Stubai in Austria and ASMU in Germany, though impecunious ice climbers weren’t always willing to pay the price and often made their own, an excellent example of which we have here in the collection.

It’s an early tubular version, possibly an experimental precursor of the tubular ice screws that we know today, made by our good friend Alex Gillespie. The three holes were supposed to help remove ice jammed in the tube when it had been hammered in and retrieved, they didn’t work very well and needed warming to melt the ice inside, as one ice climber put it “we urinated a lot in those days”.