Snow stakes are a Kiwi invention and have been around since the early 1970s. It is a piece of aluminium alloy profile with a tape attached to the top end. Mostly the V profile has been used, occasionally the U profile. As mountaineers always look for gear that serves more than one purpose the snow stake comes in handy. It served me well when digging out the dirt under a bivy rock in the Betham Valley when our tents got blown down – that was before the arrival of the now no longer existing Betham Hut – and then served as a gutter to channel the drips away from my sleeping bag. The snow stake was particularly welcome to save our ice axes from being hammered into the frozen snow; the ice axes didn’t particularly like it, to say the least, nor did their owners.