Yeti Gaiters arrived like a mountaineering pandemic in 1978/9. Within a couple of years just about everyone was infected and there was no vaccination other than chucking them in the bin. They did give protection from water and snow ingress, though this assumed that the rubber rand stayed where it should and didn’t split or rip off.

Berghaus sent founder of our collection, Mick Tighe, a new pair of Yetis every few weeks in the early 1980s, each with different rubber rands, attempting to get the ideal composition. A good rubber compound was found, but a method of getting it to stay on the boot wasn’t. This led to many unhappy hours spent in the garden shed with pots of glue, attempting to get Yeti Gaiter and boot to coalesce. You got dry feet for a while, until you went to the Alps in the summer, where it was hot. Your feet sweated and wrinkled like prunes, and you got blisters on the wrinkles! You couldn’t take the gaiters off without destroying the rubber that you’d spent so much time gluing on back in the winter.

The early versions of Yetis were later replaced by better (glueless) ones, and the arrival of boots with Gore-tex membranes eased the pandemic somewhat. The newer versions of Yetis are still available in the 2020s and remain fairly popular. We have a couple of pairs elsewhere in the collection. Dating from around 1985, the pair we have here were kindly donated by our good friend Klaus Schwartz. He donated the boots that they are glued to as well!