Morkovka means carrot in Russian and we assume that, in this case, it refers to the shape of this ice piton. It seems these ones were made in the Leningrad shipyards in the 1950s, Leningrad has now been renamed (1991) and is called St Petersburg and we don’t think they make ice pitons in the shipyards there anymore.

Technical term for these guys is ‘drive-in screw-out’ and we don’t reckon they were very good at either, the carrot shape didn’t endear itself to the ice very much and it doesn’t look like the screw is very un-screwable, so maybe ‘drive-in hack-out’!

Very few of these guys made their way across Europe to the UK so they are a bit of a rarity, our good friend Dawson Stelfox acquired this one somewhere along the way and kindly passed it on to us.

P.S. We should have said the hanger (that’s the bit you clip the karabiner in) slips down to act like a spanner to remove the screw – allegedly!