Winter Ice

Since being in Chamonix I've had the chance to get out ice climbing a bit, most recently over the border in Switzerland at Trient. On a day that turned out to be lovely and sunny we found better ice than we had expected and the walk-in gave us a good warm-up. We climbed three pitches (the first pitch being a lot steeper than it looked!) before abseiling back to the ground via our own Abolokov anchors: these are made by placing two ice screws into the ice in a V-shape, removing the screws to leave a V-shape hole and then passing some cord through the V-shape using a special threader (or a bit of coat hanger if you don't have one!) that you can tie an overhand in to leave a loop of rope through the ice to abseil off. It is always important that these are tested with the back-up of an ice screw when the first person goes down. This day of climbing was the second outing of a new set of Black Diamond Turbo Express ice screws that I had purchased back in November. I can honestly say that they did not fail to disappoint in any way when I was on lead and it was nice to know that I had ice screws that were sharp and easy to use to hand...see this http://www.ukclimbing.com/ review for more details: http://www.ukclimbing.com/gear/review.php?id=860