Ice axe 1786, Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard made the first ascent of Mont Blanc. Balmat, a chamois hunter and crystal collector, had experience with high mountain travel, and Paccard had made previous attempts to climb the peak. Illustrations show Balmat carrying two separate tools that would later be merged into the ice axe – an alpenstock (or baton) and a small axe that could be used to chop steps on icy slopes. According to the earliest manufacturer of ice axes, Grivel, these two tools were merged to create the first true ice axe around 1840. Early ice axes had a vertical
Climbers (novel) Climbers (novel) Climbers is a literary novel by the British author M. John Harrison. First published in 1989 and apparently set several years earlier, the book had been out of print for several years but was reissued in paperback by Phoenix in 2004. It has attracted considerable critical acclaim and won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature in 1989. It was not, however, universally popular with the British climbing public and received at least one negative review in the popular magazine Climber. The novel concerns the adventures of “Mike”, who, recovering from a failed marriage, falls in with a