Blue Ice Choucas Pro Harness Review for Alpine Climbing, Alpine Scrambles, and Multi-Pitch Climbing

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If you’ve ever read or watched one of my gear reviews, you know that I expect all gear to have tradeoffs. That heavy tent slows you down but is bombproof even up in the Himalaya getting lashed by the jet stream. That stove is really light, but you can’t dim the flame and the heat loss above the burner make it less efficient. Basically, sure sure can get the groceries and pick up the kids in a Formula One racer, but with only one seat they better to be able to hang on tightly.

So when I do reviews, I often will go take the piece of gear out for a type of activity that it isn’t designed for. As an example, I took the La Sportiva Aequilibrium boots out dry tooling, a type of climbing that demands a highly rigid shoe or boot even though the Aequilibrium isn’t designed to be perfectly rigid. It’s not to put the gear through an unfair test, but rather it’s to see where the limits of the gear truly are. To keep running with the story, I found the Aequilibrium did suffer in performance when needing to balance on the micro edge of a front point on rock, but surprisingly not as big of a performance hit as I expected. Basically, there is a trade off for hiking comfort that means a loss of technical performance, but it wasn’t nearly as big of a trade-off as I assumed it would be. That’s good to know, and it opens up more times I can take the boot out.

Well, with the Blue Ice Choucas Pro harness, I did a similar thing. This is a very light harness, and it’s designed to take on climbs that put a premium on cutting weight and moving fast. So, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to load it down with gear. The harness isn’t designed to carry all of that gear, and the weight of the gear, itself, probably would be precluding you from moving super fast.

That being said, though, the harness does have four gear loops, for slots for ice screw holders, and a haul loop. That’s about as much gear carrying setup as a harness could have. So, the question in my head was, can it actually carry all of that gear well, or would Blue Ice have been better off removing two of the gear loops and two ice screw holder slots? Is it, in effect, a waist to add those features because the rest of the harness’ construction wouldn’t stand up to all that stuff, anyway?

That’s why I took it out trad climbing and loaded it down. And, again, I was surprised. It carried gear really well. I didn’t feel the waist cutting into me or sagging down. I could get to my gear easily and keep it organized. So, again, more opportunities to take the harness out. Maybe multi-pitch climbs that need a lot of pro aren’t beyond this harness’ capabilities.

The Blue Ice Choucas Pro harness has become my new favorite harness. It’s very comfortable to wear while obviously weighing me down very little. And with good gear carrying abilities, there aren’t a lot of down sides.

But, of course, there are downsides. I wouldn’t wear this doing laps at the local crag and just wearing at the hardpoints where I tie in. I would be cutting down the life of the harness. And if I shorten it’s life too fast, I take away the number of times I can use it where it really excels: heading up into the high places where I’m trying to take only what I need and nothing I don’t.