What Type of Crampon's Do I Need? A Guide to Front Points for New Winter Climbers

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Quite a long time ago, now, I did my first technical climbing, that is fully roped up and using pitched out belays and all of that. It happened to be ice climbing, rather than rock climbing. My wife had bought me two days of ice climbing lessons, working with a guide, in Ouray at the (amazing) ice park.

When I got on the phone with the guide, prior to the trip, he had some basic questions about my climbing experience, what I hoped to get from the lessons, and the like. He needed to know my starting point; he needed to know how much he could rely on me to be a functioning part of his safety; he needed to know if we even shared a common language with all of the climbing terminology.

I was truly a beginner at that point, so I didn’t know much. I really had only done non-technical (and maybe some light scrambling) peak bagging. As he said, “…beyond basic fitness, then, we are starting from scratch.” “Scratch” may have been a bit overstated, but not by much.

One of the questions he asked me was about gear. He needed to know what I had so that he know what he needed to bring with him to outfit me: ice tools? crampons?

Of course, I didn’t own tools, yet, but I did own crampons. Over the phone, I proudly told him about the new Black Diamond crampon model I had. I didn’t know enough to know that I had a general mountaineering crampon, good for snow climbing, with horizontal front points. Vertical front points, while comparatively obscure, certainly were not obscure in a place like Ouray, and had been around since the early 1970s when Mike Lowe made the Footfangs.

But I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Being a professional, the guide was gracious while he educated me a bit.

It is in this spirit of remembering that we are all beginners at some point that I offer this video on the basics of the three major crampon front point configurations: horizontal, vertical, and mono. The video goes into what type of climbs are best for each, but maybe more importantly gets into why.

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