With its bulbous, glass-fibre shaft and drooped pick, it’s difficult to tell the difference between this Stubai Nanga Parbat Extrem Ice Axe and a Snowden Curver, making us wonder if ‘someone’ stole someone else’s idea, or was it just coincidence. Both date from the 1970s when ice axes were moving from the wooden-shafted era to metal or composite materials like the glass-fibre on this one. The Snowden Mouldings pick was ‘drooped’ intentionally as part of the manufacturing process, whereas it looks like this one has been ‘drooped’ by the owner, or his pal, in the garden shed. Stubai are renowned for making basic, robust and usable equipment like this axe, the wooden-shafted Aschenbrenner and Nanga Parbat axes were probably the most successful axes ever, and it looks like they were hoping to continue the trend by creating this new version and adding ‘extrem’ to the title. They did have some success though a multitude of other axes hit the market around the same time, diluting things a little. This one was kindly donated by Chris Woods, one time instructor at Tulloch Mountaincraft.