It started, as these things often do, with a coffee at the Beacon Climbing Centre. Fred Hall (one of the founders of DMM), who most of you will know as a man with a lifetime of stories tucked away behind a modest smile, began reminiscing about ice axes and the memories tied to them. Then he quietly mentioned that he had a ‘pretty good’ collection of axes dating back to 1875. And if you know Fred, you know that when he shares knowledge, you listen and naturally, we also made him bring part of his collection. He arrived with a timeline of tools, tales, and turning points in climbing history.
As Fred puts it himself, this is “by no means a history lesson, it’s a few interesting bits.” But the modern ice axe, he explains, is the end product of a long evolution, born first from the hand axe and the Alpenstock, and the DMM Predator, which changed the direction of ice tool design in a way that still shapes the modern era.
Below is a guided wander through the ages with Fred.
Alpenstock: The mother and father of ice axes.
Fred starts right at the very beginning with the Alpenstock. He brings out one from 1876 originally owned by a French gentleman, and you can hear the fondness in his voice when he calls it “the mother and father of ice axes.”
It’s a beautiful ice axe to look at with its light wooden shaft, steel spike, and even a chamois horn on top. Simple, but beautiful.
Back in the day, these were used for everything: walking, balancing, even giving someone a hand up on the way. They were tools with a lot of life in them.
What makes Fred’s Alpenstock extra special is the names of tours and mountains burned into the shaft.
“You will have done your tour of Cham or gone up wherever you were going, and if you felt like it, you would have gone to the local climbing shop. Using a branding iron—this one says Chamonix, obviously the branding is backwards—it would be put in a fire, taken out, and rolled around the shaft so that you could have a memory of your achievements.”
Fred also points out something you don’t immediately consider: many of the routes branded into the shaft would have been very difficult to reach before the Swiss railways existed. Climbing wasn’t just linked to the mountains themselves; it was linked to the transport that allowed you to get to them. A way of marking achievements before photos and social media ever existed.
The Alpenstock is rare to see, full of character and history. You can see exactly why Fred loves them.
A Step Forward: A Child or Lady’s Ice Axe
From the Alpenstock, Fred moves on to a much smaller straight shafted axe - a child or lady’s model, probably from somewhere around 1930s- 1950s, though he admits it’s “almost impossible to tell the year.”
“This one shows the classic step forward from the Alpenstock: it has a head on it. It’s very straight , has a few teeth, and two sides that come down and are riveted across. And just like today, there were endless shapes and designs, each made by a different company or sometimes by a single blacksmith. The important part is that it’s moved on from being a simple stick. Now you can cut steps with it and put it into snow and ice”
Fred explains that back then, ice axes were often custom built. A climber would simply walk into a blacksmith's shop and say, “I’d like an axe that does this, weighs that, and is this long.” And the blacksmith would forge it for them.
Axes like this carried on well into the '60s. Over time the picks got a bit steeper, a few more teeth appeared, but it stays basically the same: adze, pick, wooden shaft, spike. Simple, reliable, and made to fit the climber.
The Game Changers: The Terrordactyls
And then Fred’s eyes light up, because now we’re getting to the tools that truly changed the world of ice climbing: the MacInnes Peck Terrordactyl. Made by a man called Trevor Peck but designed by the legendary Hamish MacInnes.
“These changed the whole landscape. They moved people from climbing slopes to climbing vertical and overhanging ice,” Fred says, holding up the axe and hammer pair. Their steep picks meant climbers could suddenly hook and climb very steep ice which was groundbreaking at the time.
As they were designed by Hamish MacInnes, he took into consideration, Scottish conditions and put a massive adze on the axe. Ideal for Scottish turf and other insecure placements. As Fred puts it with a smile, “They’re agriculturally engineered.”
Today they’d be considered crude, heavy, and far too short and, as more than one climber discovered, incredibly painful to use because they were renowned for bashing your knuckles into the ice.
Fred also shows a Clog Vulture- Clog's version of the Terrordactyl. It has a gently curved blade, a small tweak that made it easier to place and remove, yet still incredibly secure. Fred laughs as he admits:
“Actually, I probably made this one myself when I was at Clog.”
Clog was born in North Wales in the '60s, tied closely to the quarrying history of the area. At its peak, the local slate quarry was the biggest in Europe and in Clog making axes, crampon and pegs was the last blacksmith who worked in the quarry!
The Chouinard Zero: An Icon With a Bamboo Shaft
Next, Fred lifts up an axe that almost every climber recognises: the Chouinard Zero, this one with a laminated bamboo shaft.
It looks like something that should be hanging in a museum or possibly over someone’s mantelpiece. Heavy, yes, but beautifully made. The one he holds was made in Italy, though some were produced in America too.
The bamboo wasn’t just for looks either; it actually gave the shaft more strength than a plain ash shaft. This was very strong, particularly in bending and it was an innovative use of the material. They did come in various lengths, and this one is the classic 50cm version.
“They’re a very iconic axe and hammer.” Fred says as he gently puts it down, eager to move on to the next which is a strange one…. And they were loved by many climbers.
The Snowdon Mouldings Curver: A Strange Relic
Now Fred jumps to something he calls “a strange little relic”: the Snowdon Mouldings Curver. The head originally came from Stubai, paired with a fibreglass shaft made by Snowdon Mouldings, one of the very first axes ever to use fibreglass. The shape and roughness of the shaft made it surprisingly pleasant to hold. This particular one, though, has been modified.
Fred explains that the original owner clearly wanted it to climb more like a Terrordactyl, so they took it to a blacksmith, heated up the head, bent it, and shortened it. Proper old-school tinkering.
It has a massively thick pick, far more suited to snow climbing than ice and the shaft was reinforced with a steel rod for strength. Not the easiest axe to climb with, Fred admits, but plenty of hard routes were still climbed using these.
The Barracouda (and Friends): Enter the Banana Pick
Next up, Fred takes us through axes that modern climbers will immediately recognise. Fred holds up the Barracouda, a very important tool in the evolution of ice climbing. The big advancement here is the banana pick - a curved pick shape that made removing the axe from ice much easier. Less fatigue, more efficiency, longer and harder routes suddenly possible. “It looks like it shouldn’t work,” Fred says, “but it really did.”
The Barracouda wasn’t alone either, tools like the Chacal helped push this design forward. Fred also shows a Cassin hammer, another example using the same banana-pick concept.
The Hummingbird: The Swiss Army Knife of Ice Tools
And then Fred picks up a tool he lovingly calls “almost the Swiss army knife of climbing.”
The Hummingbird is a Lowe-Alpine axe with interchangeable parts, tubular picks, curved picks, straight blades, you name it. You could even remove the adze and turn it into a hammer, or have two hammers, or two adzes.
Clever to the point of being “over clever,” as Fred says with a grin. It saw more use in America than Europe.
DMM Venom: Lighter, Kinked, and More Refined
At this point, Fred brings the conversation closer to home with the DMM Venom. This shows a move towards a changing shaft.
Axes were getting lighter and far more engineered:
- kinked shafts to protect knuckles
- thinner but stronger tubing
- Banana pick
This is where the shift toward sleek, lightweight tools really gains momentum—and most manufacturers moved in this direction.
The Game-Changer: DMM Predator
At this point Fred skips ahead a bit because now we’re getting to something truly significant. He picks up the DMM Predator, and you can tell this one means a lot to him.
This was the very first ice axe with a fully curved shaft, and it completely changed the direction of modern technical ice tool design.
“It was dreamed up by a very lovely guy called Phil Waters who was a cartoonist and a very good ice climber and he came to us with his idea, then we worked with him to convert his ideas into a product. It was difficult for us to do, we were a very small company at that time. Phil had all sorts of things that he wanted”
Phil arrived with a long list of things he wanted this axe to do:
- a big adze for climbing turf and horrible ground
- a hammer
- a hammerable head so he could drive the shaft into snow and ice
- a banana pick
- the ability to jam in cracks
- and a twin-bladed spike which bit into the ice and gave it stability
And, of course, it had to be able to open a beer bottle, “quite an important thing,” as Fred says with a grin.
The head was forged aluminium, the blade double-bolted with an anvil on top, and the adze fitted separately. The spike at the bottom had two fins so that when you whacked it into the ice, it bit and stayed put, giving you that little extra confidence when things got steep.
It was a lot of change packed into one axe, but this was the move that set the trend. And if you look at any steep technical climbing tool today—curved shafts, formed handles, all the refinements, they can trace their lineage straight back to the Predator. This was the original curve that changed everything.
The reception was brilliant, and almost instantly, curved shafts became the norm for steep climbing. A real milestone.
The Charlet Axe: Built for the First World Cup Climbing Competition
Fred then reveals a rare oddity: a Charlet axe made specifically for the first World Cup climbing competition. “Made by Charlet Moser, only a couple of these exist. It's a curved shaft that's been cut off and then a special fibreglass handle stuck on to the end of it so you could do all sorts of different manoeuvres and again you can see how design moves and changes with different times and requirements”
The Forged Rebel: Breaking the Mould (and Starring in Films)
Then Fred picks up the forged Rebel, and you can feel the pride in this one too.
This axe really broke the mould for DMM.
Fred continues to explain “the whole axe is forged, it has an adjustable handle, and a curved blade which has hedgehogs on the top so you can walk along with it, it has a serrated adze so you can jam it in cracks as well as using it for its normal purpose.”
But the really important thing, Fred says, is that the shaft and head are all one piece, giving the axe a different feel, a ton of security, and a huge amount of strength.
And then he casually adds one of the best details of the whole collection: Appearing in Alicia Vikander's Tomb Raider (2018). This very axe was used by the Lara Croft film company, appearing in several movies as Lara’s ice-axe “weapon.”
The Cortex: The Latest Chapter
Finally, Fred jumps forward to the present day with DMM’s newest tool: the Cortex.
“This is CNC machined out of a solid block of aluminium so all the way through the handle and everything is all one and then the blade is then fitted in with a hammer or an adze. It's beautifully balanced, it's immensely strong and gives you the opportunity and is designed for leashless climbing. It has a very balanced swing, a double handle making it easy to move up the shaft. The important thing for us was making a top end axe that had the least amount of joints so that the climber has maximum security.
Turn it around and you can see the strong I-beam construction inside, removing as much material as possible while keeping the axe light and incredibly strong.
Wrapping Up With Fred
Fred finishes by reminding us again that this was never meant to be a perfect history lesson, just a quick, fascinating dip into the tools that shaped climbing, shared through the pieces he’s collected over the years.
“I find ice axes are remarkable things. They're one of the earliest bits of climbing equipment ever to be invented. Obviously, boots would be before. But ice axes are a wonderful tool, and good axes will always feel right. It's like owning a wonderful hand tool, whether you're a carpenter or an engineer. What they have done is they have kept pace right the way through their history and they've changed, adapted and I believe they'll carry on changing and adapting as life goes on. Different climbers come along with different ideas, they do different things, they have requirements that change. The strength, the weight, the size.
Then he picks up a book he’d brought along. He’d already mentioned it several times in passing, so he smiles and adds:
“For any of you that are very interested in ice axes, I can recommend a book. Unfortunately, it's only printed in French, but this is a wonderful history of the manufacture of ice axes through the times. It's beautifully illustrated. And it is Des Piolets et des Hommes by a French mountain guide and avid ice axe collector, Denis Pivot”
A coffee with Fred became a journey through time, innovation, and craftsmanship, and a reminder that every tool carries not just design, but the stories of those who used and built it.
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