We don’t know an awful lot about ‘tape’ and even the word can be rather confusing since climbers/mountaineers play tapes on their stereos, use tape to cover their cuts, patch their gear with duct tape and hang tape slings over rock spikes to make belays/anchors. It’s the latter version that we have here and since these two wee rolls of ‘tape’ had been lying around for a while we thought we’d save them for posterity. We think that tape for mountaineering first appeared in the 1960’s – maybe a wee bit earlier – and early versions were tubular. Knots were used to join the tape together initially until a strong enough stitching system was invented. The British firm, Troll , were one of the first on the scene in the 1960/70’s, their stitching system allowing them to create slings, climbing etriers and the revolutionary Whillan’s climbing harness. Various forms of nylon seem to be the main construction material and refinements of this, such as dyeema, continue in the modern era. Other than it being orange and tape, we don’t know much about these two rolls, but suspect it’s Troll from the 1970’s and once belonged to Mick Tighe.