When we are using our mountaineering ice axe in "cane" position, we want to keep it in our uphill hand. Here is why.

As a climbing team on a glacier, we need to be prepared for a crevasse fall, but we also want to have the route planning and navigation skills to reduce the likelihood of having a crevasse fall. The full video provides ideas on how to plan route paths that help avoid crevasses.

The Garda hitch allows us to capture progress of the climbing rope through a haul system with only two, identical, snapgate carabiners. It's a good technique to have in case of emergencies, but it comes with some major downsides that limit the times I might want to use it.

Deciding how much climbing rope you need for glacier travel is a product of many factors. The number of teammates, the snow conditions, crevasse sizes, and preferred rescue systems are all inputs into how much space to have between climbers, how much length to keep in spare coils, and whether to have brake knots in the rope. All of that will calculate out to your total rope length. The full video explores some of these considerations.

A number of self-rescue techniques, across all types of climbing, require the use of a foot prusik to temporarily unweight the rope (usually when alternating weighting a waist prusik or other rope progress capture). It is very easy for that foot prusik to slide off of our foot, which slows us down and can be hard to get back in place if we are hanging in space. Simply girth hitching it to our foot can solve this problem.

In this next episode of our glacier travel series, we are presenting several options for climbers to tie into the rope and how we may choose to match our tie-in setups to our circumstances, gear, and position on the rope.

The "self-tending" prusik using a belay device to capture progress on a climbing haul system, often used for crevasse rescue, has become more complicated due to modern ropes. The thinner diameter of these ropes means tighter wraps on the prusik, which - in turn - means those wraps are small enough to get stuck in the device and break the capture system.

Continuing our glacier travel series, the full video shows the 6:1 drop loop crevasse rescue haul system and discusses how to modify it to meet some of the gear we may have, the rope we have available, and the status of the fallen climber.

Maybe you want to keep crampon straps longer, either because - like my kids - your feet are still growing, or you have both small and large boots that need different strap lengths, or you want to be able to lend out the crampons to anyone with feet bigger than yours. Regardless of reason, here is a solution to keep those straps out of the way if you do decide to keep a little extra length.

As we get deeper into a glacier travel series, we want to note that there are many effective ways to develop our climbing systems for safe passage on glaciated mountains. The full video gets into my perspective that, maybe, the single biggest thing we can do wrong, however, is get dogmatic about those systems and assume that, while risks change from glacier to glacier, our systems don't have to change as well.

As the seasons change in the alpine, so do our climbing equipment needs. Maybe an overlooked item that works slightly less well in extreme cold are standard locking carabiners. By swapping out a few standard lockers for double-gate carabiners, I can have a few carabiners that will prove more resistant to freezing.

We will frequently choose to connect ourselves to the climbing rope with a carabiner, rather than a knot, when on a glacier in order to facilitate things like crevasse rescue systems. We need to be considerate of the strengths and weaknesses of carabiner types in order to select the best carabiner for our climb of a glaciated peak. The full video offers some of the criteria I use to help me choose.

Thin and light, modern climbing slings and cord can be very difficult to untie when taking on heavy loads or becoming wet. Here's how using a particular type of carabiner can help solve that problem in the right circumstances.

We isolate damaged sections of a climbing rope by tying a knot with the damaged section in the knot bight. That keeps any load - you - off of the damaged section. But if we need to rappel past a damaged section, we need to be able to get our rappel setup from above that knot to below it while staying firmly and safely connected to the rope. The full video provides a procedure to do that.

My go-to "catastrophe" knot, the knot that is my safety backup, when ascending a climbing rope is the clove hitch. Here's why.

Extending your rappel (abseil) device away from your harness after a climb comes with a number of benefits. But how we choose to make our rappel extension can make navigating certain kinds of anchors or rappels easier or harder. The full video provides three different extension configurations and some of the reasons why one might be a better choice for a given circumstance compared to others.

Note: It does weaken the sling, but not to the point that it cannot take the loads we produce in climbing scenarios. We can never perfectly equalize our anchor points when making a climbing anchor, but sometimes we will want to make an adjustment to the length of one leg of an anchor to fix an obvious lack of equalization. Here's a quick way to do it that requires no more material than you've already put into the anchor.

You need to rappel (abseil), but you've dropped your rappel device down a climbing route. The full video provides three different rappel setups you can use in an emergency that don't require a device. There are pros and cons to each and so choosing the right one for the right circumstance may help reduce risk.

There are a pair of gloves that alpinists are turning to for their mountain ascents and ice climbs. Can you believe they are a third to a fifth of the cost of other climbing gloves!? Here they are, and here is what I love about them.

If you are facing many rappels (abseils) and only have a limited number of snow pickets, you can construct a retrievable anchor so that you can reuse your pickets again and again. The full video provides one method for building that anchor.