Ray Jardine invented his spring loaded camming device for rock climbing back in the 1970’s and while attempting to hide the prototype from his climbing pals during the development stage, he nicknamed them ‘friends’ and the name stuck. Having failed to get a commercial backer in his native America, Jardine turned to a guy called Mark Valance in the UK. He owned a company called Wild Country so the two got together and a star was born. You’ll find some of the original rigid stemmed ‘ friends’ elsewhere in the collection but the one we have here is the titanium version which was designed for greater strength and durability. Flexible Friends came along soon after the titanium version and pretty soon captured the market, helped in no small part by Wild Country ceasing to produce the trigger repair kits which kept the old ones servicable. This particular one came from our fellow collector, Art McCarthy, in America, which means it’s probably gone from the UK to the USA and back again!