How to Switch Hands On Your Ice Climbing Tools
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As the video states, I have personally found that most things in climbing come with tradeoffs, and I firmly believe there are no perfect solutions to the problems we face when we climb. If you think about it, if there were perfect solutions, the climb would never be in doubt; we could apply those perfect solutions and achieve each and every climb. We’d never be caught in bad weather. We’d never need our equipment to do “something else” other than what it was designed for. We’d never have a technique that was anything other than perfectly adapted to the situation we find ourselves in.
That’s not how climbing works.
I love using these different types of techniques for switching hands on tools as an example of this “imperfection.” Not only is it important to know when, why, and how to apply the mechanics of switching hands (which the video goes into), but the contrast in techniques also lays bare the reality that there are pros and cons to each option.
Extrapolate that to… well… pretty much everything else in climbing, and you have a fairly universal truth that our particular hobby is fraught with these inherent difficulties. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I would argue that it’s fundamental to the enjoyment of climbing: applying the right tool or technique at the right time and in the right way is what makes this a “thinker’s” sport, and I love the fact that we need to rely as much on our brain as our body in order to navigate the eccentricities of each and every climb.
So, hopefully this video is not only instructional in terms of the motions we need to make with our body, in sequence, in order to most-safely switch our tools from one hand to another but also informative as we think about this reality that we are constantly weighing tradeoffs in climbing.
That being said, we still need the right tools in order to apply them in the right way. For this video, for those wondering, I am climbing on my favorite tools, the C.A.M.P. USA X-Dream Alpine Ice Tools, which can be found in the link.
Have fun solving puzzles out there!