For more than 30 years, PMI has brought you quality gear. Find out how it all began and get more information about who we are and what we do.Once a year we publish a catalog full of our Rescue & Safety equipment; rope, hardware, litters and more – plus a ton of technical information to help find the gear you need. We also produce a VRS Course Catalog annually. Our Industry-Specific Catalogs contain our Rescue & Safety equipment for your specific industry. Click on an image below to view the catalog in our interactive viewer, or you can click the “download” link below the image to download a PDF.Pigeon Mountain Industries may seem like an unlikely name for a rope company – unless you have reason to know just how much rope Pigeon Mountain has consumed in its time.

PMI (the rope company) is actually named for what is perhaps the premier vertical caving area here in the United States: Pigeon Mountain in Northwest Georgia. Pigeon Mountain takes its name from the Passenger Pigeon, which was native to the area before its extinction. Pigeon Mountain is in the heart of the renowned TAG caving area of the USA, and is home to numerous caves including the two of the deepest natural pit caves in the USA.

When PMI Founder Steve Hudson first took up the sport of caving at the ripe old age of 18, what he had on his mind was pretty much the same as most 18 year old boys: exploration, challenge, and having fun. He learned to use the same equipment as everyone else was using in those days, applying it on rope that was borrowed from other industries – sailing rope, commodity rope, etc. Life safety rope could then be defined then as “any rope that saved your life”.

Steve soon found, along with other cavers of his genre, that there were some limitations to the ropes they were using for caving. The ropes were not as consistent as perhaps the cavers and climbers might have wished, they wore very quickly, and the quality was occasionally in question. You could say that growing up with the problem put Steve in a perfect position to create an answer some 9 years later.

Before he left college, Steve had begun to dabble in ropes. By 1976 he had teamed up with three other caving families, bought a rope braider, incorporated PMI and began in earnest the application of his skills and knowledge to kernmantle ropemaking.