Pre-Fitting Your Crampons to Your Boots for Mountaineering, Alpine Climbing, or Ice Climbing
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Many years ago, now, when I was making a summit push on Vulcan Chimborazo (20,549’), facing a fierce headwind and making my way over hard ice, one of my crampons popped off. I sat and refitted the crampon and kept going. The wind was so fierce, me and my team were collecting rime ice on our snow pickets and outer shell jackets.
…and my crampon popped off, again.
I knew how to get into crampons and thought I knew how to size those crampons to my boots properly. But, this experience had proven that I clearly did not. I didn’t go through all the difficulty of really moving all the adjustable bars for the heel and toe bails. I didn’t know how snugly the boot should fit into the heel posts. So, I talked to manufacturers. And as crampons become more and more modular, with parts you can swap in and out, the options for fine-tuning your crampons to your boots are becoming numerous. So, I wanted to make this video to help others navigate all of the changes we can make to our crampons’ fit.
Of course, there are still the basics of understanding full-strap, step-in, and hybrid types of crampon attachments, too, and so I tried to make sure we talked about the nuances of fitting for each one.
To be clear, this is the kind of fitting you do at home. You are matching the crampon to the boot you are going to be using in the comfort of your home, where you can use plyers and other tools to help. Then, you go out into the field knowing that your boots match to your crampons as well as they possibly can and it becomes the comparatively simple matter of getting the crampons on your feet without having to make any adjustments.
The crampons you see in the video are: