1960’s, and big changes were afoot in the mountains: For a century or so mountaineers had been hacking footsteps out of steep ice with their long, wooden shafted ice axes but now they wanted to climb ever steeper ice and instead of cutting steps in the ice the axe was required to hook into it to maintain balance and make progress. Hamish MacInnes’s Terrordactyls and Yvon Chouinard’s Zero’s, with their drooped and curved picks were a decade or so away, so the ice tigers disappeared into their workshops and started hacking their ice axes to pieces, only to rebuild them in a new shape and form. In this excellent example of homemade technology, Ian Sykes has taken his old Stubai axe and removed the wooden shaft and replaced it with a much shorter version made from glassfibre. He has also drooped the pick a little and coated the whole lot with some kind of lacquer…..an excellent piece of evolutionary history which we are delighted to have in the collection.