Which Climbing Carabiner Gate Styles Resist Jamming with Snow and Freezing Best?
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I recently had a carabiner freeze. I was shooting some video about climbing anchors and the screw gate was frozen in a locked position. I couldn’t get it to unlock without breathing warm air onto it… which would include some water vapor (as our breath does) which will freeze, again.
Since I was just standing on the ground, filming, I was just annoyed. I could just warm it with my breath, and stick it in my pocket to warm up and dry up while I did other things. But had I been several hundred feet up, it would have been more than annoying. Wrestling with a stuck gate could take up precious time in a harsh environment. It could force me to leave the carabiner, all together. Or, as a worst-case scenario, what if the lock was actually frozen open and I didn’t notice?
That carabiner was a screw gate, and I’ve had screw gates freeze out on actual climbs, too. It never has been to the point of a safety hazard (unless, like I describe in my hypothetical above, it’s happened without me noticing). But it has forced me to take of gloves, expose my hands to the cold and the cold-conducting metal of the carabiner, and made the next few minutes of my climb very uncomfortable on stinging hands.
One of the things I used to teach my students was to at least be conscious of the fact that the same gear that you take on a summer sport climb my not be best suited for a winter alpine climb. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to buy an entirely different rack of gear, but I wanted the students to understand the limitations and tradeoffs. Another example: weight-saving, small carabiners may not be good with big, bulky gloves.
I’m not suggesting that a particular carabiner gate design should be your only consideration when thinking through what carabiners you want to take out in the cold, but I do believe it should be one consideration among the set of considerations.
So, I made this video to illustrate tradeoffs on that one point: which carabiners seem resist potentially dangerous freezing by nature of their gate designs.
I think I’ve convinced myself to carry a few more twin gates. Now, those twin gate designs have their own shortcomings in terms of useability (e.g. can’t just slap the gate across something to open it, bulky gloves are still okay with them but make things more difficult, etc.). So, it’s not like - as I said above - I’m going to replace my whole rack. But it would be nice to have a few twin gates to use when I know I’m putting the carabiners in positions where freezing is a real possibility.
If you are interested in the Grivel twin gate carabiners, here’s a couple of links to the two versions I mention in the video: