UKH

So santa has come early and brought me a pointy new pair of crampons. In the end I went for some rambo 4 evos, which I'll be testing out up at the ice factor in a few weeks. Which brings me on the the heel spurs they come with. I've seem them used to pull off some mixed acrobatics and in a few comps, but does anyone actually find them useful for ice or mixed routes which aren't seriously overhanging? I've fitted one of them and it looks like it'd do more harm then good.

In reply to mmmhumous:

I thought heel spurs were banned from ice comps?

I have never see anyone with them in recent years, even on fruit boots. They were popular about 10 years or so ago, but I think modern techniques make them somewhat redundant.

In reply to GarethSL:


They are, at least from the UIAA rules. I suppose individual comps can instigate whatever rules they want, but like you I don't know anyone who uses them. Whether or not they offer any technical advantage, I'd be constantly worrying about what part of my leg/arse they're going to spear if/when I fall off.

In reply to planetmarshall:


Absolutely, back when Will Gadd wrote his bareback ethics for mixed climbing, one of the things that really came across was how dangerous those things are.

In reply to mmmhumous:

It wasn't far off 10 years ago looking at the date on the video I spotted them being used in: youtube.com/watch?v=6pceY_R6LDM&

As any dangling upside down by the heels of my crampons is likely to be unintentional, I think I'll leave them sans-spurs. I think my shins will thank me

In reply to mmmhumous:

I suppose they'd be handy if you used a horse to do the approach walk-in.

In reply to Dave Perry:

Not really, unless you had a pretty good supply of horses... them crampon heel spurs look a tad different from the spurs normally associated with horses...

In reply to mmmhumous:
Spurs have never been used for Scottish winter climbing as far as I know and haven't been used for tooling or continental mixed for many years. They are essentially considered cheating because you can sometimes rest by doing bat hangs off them or heel hook very small holds when doing moves. You can see in the video that he's using the spurs a lot of the time, particularly on the hanging ice blobs. Without them, I guess he'd have to use fig 4s/9s instead and I can say from experience that heel hooking makes things a lot less strenuous (it's sometimes possible to heel hook on tooling routes even with just a rubber heel, if there's a half decent ledge).

There's also the added risk of serious injury as others have said.

In fact for pure dry tooling outdoors most people who have purpose built or DIY fruit boots don't have any pointy bits on the heels at all, i.e. just have a five point crampon piece at the front. You simply don't need the heel crampons and it's safer not to have them, particularly when doing fig 4s/9s. Which makes me wonder if heel crampons (as opposed to spurs) are used/allowed in UIAA comps, never though to pay attention to that.