How to Ice Climb Series #6: Ice Screws !

My name is Will Gadd. I'm here doing tech tips for Black Diamond and today I'm going to talk about ice screws. How to get good strong ice screws, where, what type of ice, how they work, and hopefully that helps you make good decisions about ice screws when you're out there climbing. The first thing about ice screws is what are we using them for. It sounds basic like they're there to hold falls and build belays, but they're not rock protection. If you fall off ice climbing, about a third of the time you break something major. It is something you really, really want to avoid. So I don't look at these so much as like rock climbing protection. I look at them more as like airbags on a car. So ice screws are really for catastrophic outcomes where you've screwed up and fallen off and now you're hoping this is going to work. There's a lot more variability with ice screws than there is with rock gear. Rock gear, you know what you're getting. Good cam, good nut. It's relatively straightforward to evaluate. Ice screws, you're putting them into ice and it's a lot less clear about what's going on. When I'm leading an ice climb, I try to have enough ice screws that I'm not going to hit the ground. And if I'm worried, I'll put in more. But if I'm worried, I should probably be going down. If you don't think you can climb confidently and confidently on the ice, then go top rope more, learn how to move better, get better placements, just get better at ice climbing. It's just not rock climbing. I've got way too many friends with fused ankles and yeah, a lot of really heavy injuries from relatively short falls on ice. You know, don't fall off. But if you do have enough of these in and enough good ones, you don't hit the ground. How strong ice screws are depends on a couple of key factors. How good the ice is. So is it really solid? I mean, there's no air pockets in it. It's nice and you know, basically like lake ice is the perfect ice. If you get a 20 centimeters of lake ice on your ice climb, ice screws are very, very, very strong. They're not coming out. But you got to judge the ice and ice climbs and be like, yeah, is that good ice or not? How does it work? And then how you place them. And it's not intuitive. When we first started ice climbing, we put the screws in with the hanger high. And there's all this positive angle, negative angle. I can never remember that. I just think about the angle of the hanger. Is the hanger high or is the hanger low? And in general, an ice screw that is placed with the hanger low or the tip high is a lot stronger than one that is placed like this. So if you've got good ice, all of the things being equal, this angle is a lot weaker than this angle. And hanger low, hanger high. I'm looking for most of my ice screws to be hanger low at about that angle. The exact angle isn't that important. It's not like 13.5 versus 13.1. I don't carry a protractor. Hey, like that's not the goal here. About that is just fine. If you can't remember, go 90. You get most of the strength benefits from 90 or less with the tip high or the hanger slightly low to about there. Almost all the holding power in an ice screw is in the threads. So it's not about the length of the ice screw. These two are all of the things being equal, pretty close to the same because they have about the same amount of threads on the ice screw itself. It's how good the ice is on these threads that matters the most. If you've got an air pocket for half these threads, the ice screw is a lot weaker. All these threads have to be in really good ice. The next thing that determines how strong an ice screw is, it's the rest of the ice along the barrel of the ice screw that matter. If this ice is weak, especially on the surface, then under load, it's going to start breaking the ice right here. And then you have leverage and the screw either pops out or the tube itself bends under high, high loads, and it'll actually radius over the broken ice until the force is straight down. That's why if you put an ice screw like this, it starts breaking the ice in the surface. And if the ice is good, it keeps breaking, keeps breaking and the screw bends and radius is over. More often though, what happens is it creates enough leverage that just pops the whole screw out. That's why it's critical to have the threads up high and in line with the load. If you put an ice screw in with the hanger high like this, and this is how we placed them in the 80s, fire it in there, you can see what's going to happen under load is it's all, all the load is going to go on the surface ice there and it's going to start breaking, especially if it's not perfectly high quality, some kind of junky layer in there. So if you start beating on this thing, you can see how it starts breaking the ice right there. And all it does is eventually it ends up either the two bends or ends up down here. Anyhow, all the holding power is in those threads. And as you can see, it just came out under hand pressure doing that. So you want to set it up. So the threads are in line with the pole and the surface ice fractures as little as possible in a high impact situation. There we go. That's actually not too bad. If you think about a really big load coming on this, you're noticing it's fracturing far less around the head of the ice screw. That's what we're after. They'll still fracture a bit, but the leverage on it is just so much less. It's physics, you know, it's, you don't want to get this wrong. You want your ice screws to be good. All right, so you're leading up the super sketch grade six pillar here. First, you got to get rid of the snow mushrooms. Got some pretty healthy snow mushrooms here. But you want to place ice screws. And you're looking at this ice. If you notice, this ice has undergone a bit of sublimation, it's quite white, which means some of the water in the ice has been turned into vapor, and it's a little bit weaker. So I'm going to dig off the surface layer here, just get into some nicer, bluer ice underneath it. There we go. Now we've got a pretty good chunk of ice there. You can see it's bluer. I've gotten rid of that cruddy surface ice. Boom, boom, boom. Ice screws here. Replace this thing. I'm going to twist it back and forth just like that. Now it's starting to go, but you've got to keep pressure on it. If you don't keep pressure on it, then it's just going to keep twisting. It's not going to bite. So you got to keep pressure on it. This is why I tend to place ice screws mostly from my chest down to about my knees. If you're placing one here, then you're starting to push out a lot, and you're changing the angle of pull on your ice tool, and it gets sketchy. Not good. So generally about sort of shoulders to waist, knees in there. Keep pressure on it as you start twisting it in. Oh yeah, it's going to be a good one. Start twisting, twisting, keeping pressure. Now it's in there. About the first three threads. Spin it in. I've placed it slightly tip high, hanger low. And this is important. You notice how it's spinning quite regularly. It's not, ah, now there's no resistance at all. That means it's hit a big air pocket in there. This ice screw is junk. Starting to get a little tension on the threads, but that's junk. If it's not nice and consistent all the way in, it's no good. So, fail. Chipped away the surface ice here. I've got down some ice that's bluer, more solid ice. Start it going. Tip a little bit high, hanger a little bit low. Nothing dramatic. That's about the right angle there. Again, if you can't remember, go for 90. You get most of your strength gains just by going at 90 to the ice. Twisting it in. Oh yeah, that's good. Nice even tension. No big holes. Oh, there's another hole. Can't get a good ice screw here, so go somewhere else. Oh yeah, that's pretty good. Oh yeah, nice dense core coming out. Lots of resistance in the threads. It's going in really well. Ah, but I can't keep turning it because I need that whole barrel supported by ice. So again, I'm just going to chip it out a bit. Keep spinning in. Good. Now it's right up flush against the ice, especially on the underside. That is a truck ice screw. I would trust that for two of those and you have a belay. That's great. If you over crank it, it fractures the ice and you don't want to do that. So some people will take their ice tool and do this, but as you see, it starts actually fracturing the ice in the surface. You see all the cracks radiating out and that's not what you want because that ice will break under load and then, yeah, again, increase leverage. It's all about reducing the leverage on the ice screw and just making it as in line with the forces as possible. Cleaning an ice screw, you want to clean it as soon as it comes out of the ice. If you wait, the ice freezes into it and then you're doomed. You have to put it inside your jacket or something. So the easiest way to clean it is just take it out and then beat the hanger like that on the ice and even in pretty moist cold conditions, almost always the ice will come zapping right out of there. If you don't clean them, then you're trying to place them on lead and it's just desperate. It will not work well. It will not be good. Don't take your pick and stick it in there. You'll make the insider off and then ice will freeze in there forever more and your screw is basically fubared. Say you're climbing up here, you're going for the rata set, you want to get an ice screw. A few things to think about here. You're looking for well-consolidated pieces of ice and generally you can see this is icicles down here and then there's kind of a ledge back in there and it's created this big bulge here. If I put an ice screw into here with no preparation, it's probably going to break the ice and it's not going to be very good. But if I dig in there a bit, oh yeah, check that ice out. Now we're starting to get some pretty decent ice in there and I'll bet that takes a decent ice screw. If I put this ice screw in, it's almost certain to hit the rock behind it and again a tied off ice screw is junk. So that's why I prefer these shorter ones and down to this size. If you get much below 13, it's getting marginal but a 13 is very strong again as long as it's well placed and it'll work in a lot of places where one of the longer ice screws won't. So here if we go for this tip slightly high, it's a little bit complicated by this ledge here. Let's start spinning it in. There's this big block of ice here where the water is slowly rolled off that ledge. Down here it's all icicles. I'm going to get hollows and stuff but right here that's a good block of ice. Tip slightly high. I could have placed it slightly higher maybe. Check out the core coming out. That's all little chips. It's not an actual solid piece of ice. It's just chips. It's nice and homogenous. I've gotten rid of the weak surface ice. Oh this is good. It's actually getting hard to turn. Oh I want to go one more revolution but I've gotten blocked by that. I'm just going to chip that out. Give it a bit of a whack. Oh yeah. Now the hanger is nice and flush with the ice. That is a good ice screw. I would do two of those and I've got a belay. I'm happy with it but it took a bit of prep. You know down here it wouldn't have worked. Up there it's more icicly. This one specific spot and it got good tension turning it all the way in. Nice pieces of little ice coming out of it. That is a great ice screw. You can get aluminum ice screws and steel ice screws these days and they both have their place. I tend to use these when the walks are really long but they're not as durable. This ice screw will take like years of abuse if you don't put it into a rock. This one is meant to be ultra light and and just not take the abuse that this one will. So I tend to use aluminum screws you know about a third of the time that I go ice climbing. Most of the time I prefer the steel ice screws. They're a little bit heavier but they're a lot more durable and they also tend to work a little bit better when the ice is wet. All aluminum screws bind in the ice to one extent or another so I tend to mostly go with steel screws when I'm climbing. On the average day of ice climbing I usually carry about 12 ice screws. It depends a little bit but 12 is a good number and eight of them will be this length and a couple will be longer and then a couple of really long ones to build v-threads or no threads with to get off. That's my standard rack most days. Modern ice screws are awesome. If they're placed in good ice they're super strong and they make great belays and they're just a joy to place really compared to what we used to climb with. So go forth practice placing them on the ground. Stand there and place like 50 of them. Take them in, take them out. Try and feel what the ice is doing and you'll get a pretty intuitive sense fast. Good luck. Don't fall off.