Crampon Review - No 226 - December 2003

Power Points
Eight crampons for steep-ice and mixed climbing

Test Results:

Black Diamond Bionic
Cassin C14
DMM Terminator
Grivel G14
Petzl Charlet M10
Simond Pitbull Speed RS
Stubai X-Dream
Trango Hyper Harpoon

History of Crampons Timeline

My first experience with a monopoint crampon was way back in 1984. I was about 15 feet out from the belay when my partner suddenly called up, “Hang on, you’ve left something behind!” Searching for stable footing from which to investigate this curious announcement, I shifted nearly all my weight onto my right crampon — and almost pinwheeled off into the winter wind. Turns out that what I’d left behind was a front point, buried neatly in the ice. Beneath my boot, only a mangled stub protruded, ragged testimony to the ruinous climax of metal fatigue.
Perhaps if I’d been a more curious or inventive person, this experience might have inspired me to explore some potential advantages of a single frontpoint. A light bulb might have snapped on, illuminating an ability to toe into tight pockets and hook short ledges or even vertical cracks. I might have deduced that it takes less energy for a single point to penetrate hard ice — especially since the possibility exists for stepping into pre-existing ice tool placements. Instead, the only thing that snapped was my point, and the only thing it inspired was utter panic. Somehow I finished the pitch, scratching and kicking like a clawless cat on a polished staircase. One thing I knew for sure: it was always going to be two beefy points for me. Two years later, Grivel and Charlet Moser simultaneously introduced monopoint designs, and today, that’s pretty much all I use.
History is full of climbers better able than me to see into the future, climbers like Oscar Eckenstein, the Englishman credited with realizing the full potential of the modern crampon in 1908, and Laurent Grivel, the Italian smithy who, in 1929, added front points to Eckenstein’s 10-point version — and, of course, America’s own Yvon Chouinard and Tom Frost, whose 1967 rigid design unhinged more than crampons. Innovators like these have exposed new thresholds of climbing possibilities. Exactly how they got to those thresholds is something of a “chicken or the egg?” conundrum: does gear evolve in response to new climbing styles, or is it the other way around? The only conclusive answer is that both are advanced through imagination.
The current crop of crampons for steep ice and mixed climbing certainly reflects that inventiveness. Ten years ago, any one of these crampons would have perforated the competition. Today, it’s a real horse race. Crampon designers’ imaginations are working overtime: rigid vs. semi-rigid, straight or anatomic frames, mono and dual front point configurations. The only certainty is that nobody’s coasting.
To make our evaluations, we asked the various manufacturers to box up their top vertical ice-and-mixed crampons and ship ’em to northern Minnesota, where the cold once popped a filling right out of my tooth, where the waterfall ice is flint hard, and where my climbing chums (we still use words like that up here) and I spent an entire winter putting crampons through their paces. Here then, is how the points were scored.
Semi-rigid versus rigid frames. Once upon a time, all crampon frames were flexible. This was fine — even preferable — as long as the angle of the snow and ice stayed at or below 45 degrees. Even when ice pioneers started venturing onto the steeper gullies and chutes in the Alps and on Scotland’s Ben Nevis, they made do by chopping steps that cradled their hinged cleats. Chouinard and Frost imagined a faster, more elegant solution. They saw the promise of front points and understood that their potential was being limited by the energy-robbing vibrations of the flexible crampon frame. So, they fabricated a rigid design. In conjunction with their short, curved-pick ice axes, Chouinard and Frost’s rigid crampon ushered in the era of vertical ice, and the standards rose like Lazarus on fire.

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