On the evening of August 11th, 2022, as part of the 25th Cervino Cine Mountain in Valtournenche, three great alpinists from three generations (François Cazzanelli, Christophe Profit and Kurt Diemberger) discussed with climatologist and meteorologist Luca Mercalli about their activities and the impacts of climate change.
These are the highlights of the evening.
Subtitles in Italian, English and French on YouTube.
]]>The path of research and development is never linear. We try to go forward, but sometimes we have to go back, swinging left and right, looking for the best passage. We start with ideas and often we are forced to change them, modify them, evolve them ... even distort them.
In our case, it is animated by the passion and desire to create the best products, and to always surpass ourselves.
This is the story of the latest generation of technical ice axes. A 20-year history, in seven stages. A story that is certainly not over yet.
Background - January 2002. Val Daone
I move a few steps to the right. I place my crampons and handcrafted ice axes on the ice slide that leads to the more vertical wall. I put a screw in, this is also handcrafted.
While I do this, something it touches my leg, it is Bibo, Placido's dog.
“I placed an ice screw where a dog has also climbed”.
With the suspicion of not being a vertical ice phenomenon, I reach the belay.
Bibo slipped down, using his nails in like Sylvester the cat for twenty meters but he is all right.
I had to improve, train hard, plan climbs in the cold and hours of gym … or improve the tools.
I chose to improve the tools, launching myself on a path that continues to this day.
Part 1 - 2003/2004: The Murcielago
In the very hot summer of 2003 I met Bubu Bole, one of the most prominent athletes at the time. I had emailed him a few days earlier with a couple of photos of the tools I had built and he was struck by the possibility of building tools with a complex shape. He was trying to transform into metal an idea he had been cultivating for some time: a competition tool that was not bound by the standards of mass production. We sit at the desk to design the tool of the new millennium.
Drawing a tool next to Bubu is like designing a motorcycle with Valentino Rossi, we dedicate a lot of time to each part of the tool.
I was surprised by Bubu's lack of interest in ice, he was looking for a tool for extremely overhanging walls, "the grades on ice are a closed system, the ice never overhangs and to train vertically you have to go up with skates". Over time I discovered that he was right, designing a tool for dry tooling is the best way to create a good tool for ice.
A few hundred hours of drawing and testing later, the first full ice axe made of composite material is a reality. Innovative shape, ergonomics on both grips, thin carbonkevlar grip, micro-alloy steel blade, titanium collar and head plates. Seeing it hanging in the shop amidst the competitors of the time, it looked like a Ferrari in a Twingo parking lot.They are used immediately in the world cup, the most severe terrain ever.
We derive information and use it to improve the product, continuously.
The following year, 2004, the tool is already completely new. We increase the volume of the shaft and grips, the blade is now modular and aluminum protections are added around the head. We optimize the grip for the reverse pulls. Passing from carbon kevlar to carbon, the tool acquires rigidity and the tensile strength goes from 500 to 1000 kg.
Part 2 - 2005: The FLAMINGO
Excited by the performance of the Murcielago, we then think of declining a version for ice, with the shape optimized to have the best possible swing. Thus the Flamingo was born.
The first pair of Flamingos were used by Ermanno Salvaterra on the north face of Cerro Torre, with titanium wings to float on the icy foam of the summit mushroom. We had made the drawing together a few months earlier on the table of the XII apostoli refuge, a comfortable corner in the lunar panorama of the southern part of the Brenta Dolomites, managed by Ermanno at the time. But this is another story!
The Flamingo became a very popular ice axe for many climbers, at all levels, while remaining a niche product with very limited productions. There are those who still use them and appreciate them today!
Part 3 - 2006-2010: The development of Murcielago and Flamingo
From the feedbacks coming from use in severe conditions, we continuously update the models.
These were the years of the first world titles won by athletes, of the homologations at the TUV in Munich, of the tests on the hardest dry tooling routes in the world and of the development of production techniques to meet the growing demands.
In 2009 the Murcielago Ergal arrives, born from two findings.
First, autoclave carbon molding does not allow mass production.
Second, full CNC milling is a faster and cheaper way to make complex shape tools.
For these tools, the piece is obtained from a plate of aeronautical aluminum, a bit like with sculptures, where the excess material is removed.
The strength of these tools is their extreme solidity. With the exception of the blade-shaft connection, the tool is integral, theoretically without weak points. Compared to carbon tools, however, they are heavier and less thermally insulated.
In 2010, from a photo on the Exocet route, it comes to my mind to design a tool dedicated to water ice, thin and with rock underneath. In this case, instead of favoring the swing, the angle between blade and the ice and the inclination of the grip are optimized. The idea is to replace the swing with a movement similar to that of "scratching" the ice, so as not to damage it when it was too thin to undergo the classic swings of the tools.
Thus was born the Master Alloy: aeronautical aluminum, carbon inserts to reduce vibrations, replaceable blade. Versatile tool, from mixed to ice to dry tooling, with blades dedicated to various terrains, very fast, simple and reliable blade change. Personal suggestion: the Master Alloys have always reminded me of the Lancia Delta Integrale (a sportscar fron the ‘80s): sharp-cornered, rigid, angry and imperfect on any terrain, but versatile and certainly “recent” even 30 years from now.
Part 4 - 2010-2016: The Grivel “Reparto Corse” (Racing Department)
In 2010 the adventure of the “Reparto Corse” (Racing Department) in Grivel begins, where they welcome me with a demanding welcome: "in the world there are at least 6 factories capable of producing red cars that go at 300 km per hour... Ferraris, however, are only made in Maranello".
We “raised the volume” of the development of highly innovative tools with an R&D department that creates prototypes that can be used by world cup athletes but also by high-level mountaineers, committed to demanding projects and passionate about advanced materials.
As in the case of Ferrari cars, the products, in addition to being reliable and effective, must meet aesthetic requirements that make them immediately recognizable.
In the six years that the Racing Department has been operational, Grivel athletes have won 11 world titles out of 12 available.
In 2011 we began a search for alternative materials for the construction of the grips.
Steel (2011). The first is steel, with which we make the cheapest tool on the market, the X-Blade, with integral blade and shaft in micro-alloy steel. Basically indestructible and designed for mountain guides with several customers with them and to be the entry level tool with a high performance blade like the most expensive tools. One of the prototypes was in ballistic steel, if today we play with indestructible blades it is also thanks to the tests on this simple tool.
Magnesium (2012). Magnesium is the lightest of metals, specific weight 1.7 g / cm3, which compared to 2.8 for aluminum and 4.5 for titanium make it terribly fascinating. The Avatar is the first ice axe in the world to use magnesium, the Encelado is an evolution of the master alloys which with this material are lighter than carbon tools. Terribly expensive, difficult to manage and protect but super light. Will it be the weapon of the near future?
Unfortunately, only prototypes will remain, because you can’t win them all! We tested the magnesium ice axes with Angelika Rainer, multiple world champion able to understand a tool on the fly, they didn't work, too soft.
Angelika Rainer, "Clash of the Titans", Helmcken Falls, ph Klaus Dell'Orto.
Titanium (2013). Titanium is a material with a specific weight that is halfway between aluminum and steel, it has a very high resistance to corrosion, so much so that it does not require any protection by painting or anodizing. Super resistant, "titanium is forever".
In addition to the accessories for the more expensive tools, it is possible to make shafts completely in titanium, the absorption of vibrations is optimal. But even here, they remain prototypes: the balance between functionality, manufacturability and economics is not found.
Avional (aeronautical aluminum, 2014). We have made the longest competition tools ever, with details dedicated to competitions, these tools had a "bite" to easily hold the axe in the mouth. In this case, aeronautical aluminum was the most suitable material.
Variable mass (2015). Ice axe with variable mass for mixed with hard ice sections, it had 50 grams of fishing sinkers running along the shaft, in the dry sections they were inside the shaft making the tool light in the head and easy to maneuver, on the sections of ice, when you need to swing, it was enough to bring the tool over the shoulder in the strike position and let the leads slide along the shaft to the head.
We did not continue for the noise of the weights sliding in the shaft which was annoying.
Part 5 - 2016-2017: Every cloud has a silver lining.
In 2016 a particular event happens: someone brings me a Murcielago broken during a competition, to understand what could have happened.
Playing with the pieces that remained intact, I slipped the grip into an old tube of the Grivel Quantum Race, coated in carbon, it fit perfectly.
Thus, from the breaking of a tool, the Comp Machines were born, a natural evolution of the Murcielago.
The tool uses increasingly heavier materials in the direction of the head. Carbon for the grip, light and thermally insulating, tubular aluminum on the shaft, forged aluminum head, steel lip. The "density" of the materials used increases towards the part that will impact on the ice.
The Comp Machine will never become a product, but it will remain an evolved prototype, used and appreciated by many athletes but without reaching the market. It needed an extra step ...
Thomas Bubendorfer, ph Lorenzo Belfrond Photographia for Grivel
Part 6 - 2018: Dark Machine X and Dark Machine
The evolution of tools has always gone through misconceptions, abandoned prototypes and unrealizable solutions. The search for lightness, however, has remained constant over the decades; at the end of the 1980s the tools weighed more than 800 grams, in forty years we have halved the weight with steps of 10 grams at a time.
The tests on the most severe terrains remained constant, here below Gabriele Bagnoli tests his blades in ballistic steel on the hardest terrain. D15, a difficulty that 20 years ago was not even conceivable and where ergonomics and lightness are not a comfortable improvement, they are necessary to bear the loads on the hands.
Angelika Rainer on the hardest ice routes on the planet. Ph Nikki Smith.
The evolution of the Comp is the Dark Machine X, an optimized grip obtained made of carbon, a carbon-coated aeronautical aluminum tubular shaft to optimize weight and thermal insulation, forged head, special blades for dry tooling and ice.
Thus was born also the Dark Machine, with an optimized grip for ice climbing, less extreme than the Dark X, it facilitates swinging, extraction and control, and reduces weight compared to the X.
Every millimeter of this tool is studied and reasoned and the result is the perfect balance between hooking and striking, penetration and extraction.
10 years ago a tool to be acceptable had to weigh less than 650 grams, today the limit is 500 grams.
The Dark Machine weighs 490 grams, with a heavy blade, not filled with holes to cheat the scales. They adopt the Vario system to quickly configure the head (neutral, adze, light hammer, heavy hammer). We put everything we knew into it.
The Dark Machine and Dark Machine X are presented to the market at the ISPO in January 2019, and are available in stores since November 2019.
For the first time in this long story, we have now "industrial" products that have passed the artisanal/ pioneering phase and are mass-produced, in large quantities, certified according to standards, and sold all over the world. Despite the very high price, their success exceeds expectations.
Part 7 - 2019-2022: Towards the future, from the pandemic to Shakespeare
Since 2019, the special group "Tools of the future" is active within Grivel, dedicated to the development of these tools, from shapes to technologies to materials.
Sharing is fast, ideas circulate quickly. Drafts, projects, tests, photos, etc.
A small revolution, a reality in which improving the same product every year is part of the company itself.
2020 begins with doubts related to the possibility that the coronavirus epidemic could reach Europe. At the Ispo show in January we talk about nothing else, the fair with thousands of people from all over the world without a mask seems decades away, but only 24 months have gone by.
The new idea of a carbon tool was born in the lockdown weeks of spring 2020.
The day before putting my ideas on paper I went to the Ferrari museum in Maranello, there was Mansell's 1990 Formula 1 car, clean, essential, perfect even with the glasses fogged up by the mask.
The new tool weighs 400 grams.
The concepts of the Dark Machine and Dark Machine X are taken to extremes: extreme lightness, high center of gravity and very close to the blade, minimal ergonomics of the grip.
The distance between this tool and the competition is the same that separates the chess from tic-tac-toe, the same as between Mansell's Ferrari and the Fiat “Uno” turbo.
Are we really going to make it? To be or not to be, that is the question!
And once again it didn’t come. Or, at least, it didn’t come as we expected and possibly it won’t, in another non-wintry winter in the place where we are writing about it. The snow, yes, the snow that in wintertime should, at least in our hope of children of a bygone snow-rich time, be part of the postcard set of our well-deserved fun holidays. And when there is, the supposedly white snow looks more like whitish rags spread on a brown floor, fake, in fact.
Talk of snow, and there you go… mountains, the giants that tower above us, who look at them with awe. They, these giants, have followed their trajectory – which dates back millions of years – with undetectable modifications. However, the long-lasting ecology of mountains couldn’t withstand the 70 years great acceleration of the Anthropocene. The order of things seems to have gone upside down: humanity is unraveling the ecological life of mountains, something unthinkable only a few years ago. Mountain are changing color, odor, shape; they are losing their identity, just as their ecology changes and their people live their brave new live in a new, almost dystopian, reality.
Yet, every year history – one of the many minute yet important histories of our stupefied time – repeats itself: millions of non-mountain people move temporarily to the mountains in search of what until a few years ago they – we – could enjoyed effortlessly, ‘naturally’: snow. And when this crowd moves, other people – mountain people – brace to welcome them and to ensure that they have the expected fun. And so, a circuit where tourists and tourism workers, traders and entrepreneurs meet in an environment born millions of years ago is delimited. 44% of the world’s skiers choose the Alps as their playground; more than 100 million people visit the Alpine region every year, an astounding 12% of all tourists worldwide. Indeed, the winter tourism industry contributes significantly to the economy of the countries of the Alpine arc: it generates almost 50-70 billion dollars in annual turnover and provides between 10 and 12% of jobs in the region.
Setting aside the unimaginative world of economics, mountain used to produce imaginations of adventure, leisure, challenge, gain, and everybody is looking for snow and for the fun that it brings about. And while climate has changed, the same doesn’t hold for the habits of those who carry on as if it hadn’t. A particular case of irrational non-adaptive behavior, apparently: have they – we – all gone mad? Or is it simply that changing habits, especially pleasant ones, is not exactly one of the easiest tasks in life?
At any rate, snow is not just an aesthetic extra, a plus up there just for magic and fun; it plays an important role in regulating the climate: it reflects the incoming sunlight back into space, preventing the planet from warming up, the so called albedo effect crucial in cooling the planet. Snow, in fact, supports life. In many parts of the world its melting is an essential element for human and animal life, and for crops. Melting snow hydrates the soil, supporting a multitude of life forms and, by keeping the soil hydrated, it contributes to the reduction of fire risks. Snow is an important factor in the socio-ecological regulation of the life of many people.
These specificities have been acknowledged by the Inuit – the only indigenous people left in Europe – who have more than 200 words to christen snow. One might think that this is just hair splitting; but in fact, it is quite the opposite. As people who wrote their history in snow, distinguishing meticulously its particularities is an indispensable factor of pragmatic orientation for Inuit. The problem with the latest snow Inuit witnessed is that they do not have a name for it. It is a different, almost useless snow which doesn’t contribute to the support of life as it used to do in those harsh territories.
Contrasting the civilization-threatening challenge of the Inuit people with the disappointment of tourists about the lack of snow is almost profane. For Inuit, the fundamental question is stopping the main cause of the lack of snow, i.e., climate change which, literally, dooms their way of life. For many of those who seek snow for fun and leisure, its disappearance will not certainly have the same implications. Indeed, for those who made a livelihood on snow the ‘snow crisis’ will produce effects that, if not as catastrophic as those suffered by the Inuit, will still be very serious.
And, willing or not, this catapults us into the dangers of mountains’ ‘monoculture’ and the demand for a ‘good’ that can no longer be ‘produced naturally’ with the comforting regularity we were used to. Of the 200 names for the snow of the Inuit, we have to come to one in our alpine resorts: artificial – yes, fake – snow, produced through the use of water, energy and money devouring beasts. Fake snow must reproduce what the environmental psychologist James Gibson has defined as “affordances”: a surface suitable for the practice of different kinds of sports in the mountain environment. By the way, fake snow is the only snow – produced, though Italian technology, using 1.3 million liters of water – of the 2022 Beijing Olympics.
The Eurac Research dossier “Snow” describes the looming snow crisis in the Alpine region: “By the end of the century, current snow cover conditions could shift 500-1000 meters higher, i.e. by 2100 snow conditions at 2000 meters will correspond to those found today at 1000-1500 meters”. Legambiente, WWF Italia and the Club Alpino Italiano already expressed their opposition to the massive use of fake snow to reproduce, albeit approximatively, snow experiences. The main reasons are environmental, economic and social. Snowmaking systems are impressive assemblages of water collection devices and tanks, pumps; pipes (for water, electricity, compressed air); withdrawal points; warehouses; compressors; power systems and underground cables; control system; cooling systems; small weather station; snow makers. According to the autonomous province of Bolzano-Alto Adige “With 1 m³ of water, an average of 2.5 m³ of snow can be produced. To achieve a snow layer of 30 cm (basic snow cover) on one hectare of ski slopes, about 1000 - 1200 m³ of water are needed. In the 2018-19 season, approximately 11 million cubic meters of water were used for scheduled snow production”.
To get an idea of what these figures mean, a comparison is in order. According to the International Commission for the Protection of the Alps (CIPRA), the 23,800 hectares of possibly artificially snowed runways would require around 95 million cubic meters of water per year, which is equivalent to the annual consumption of a city of 1.5 million people; the total energy consumption would be 600 GWh, roughly corresponding to the annual electricity consumption of 130,000 families of four. One kilometer of fake snow costs about 930,000 euros.
In another article we have already talked about the overall cost of ski infrastructures in the new unfavorable climatic conditions. And that must include the cost of fake snow. We cannot simply ignore the additional burden of offering fake snow to those who seek and find in mountain areas the opportunity to have experiences impossible elsewhere. To the already visible ruins of a gone era of snow abundance, we are adding new ones. And the problem is once again pushed forward in the hope that our children will be more resolute – or simply smarter – then us and make more reasonable choices in the face of an irreversible situation.
Marco Grasso is Professor of Economic and Political Geography at the Università of Milan-Bicocca. His research interests include international environmental policy and climate change governance. He currently works on a project on the role of the fossil fuel industry in climate change and the decarbonisation of energy systems.
]]>The temperature on Earth has been climbing steadily for the past two centuries, but since the post-war boom in both consumption and population it has rocketed. This increase in energy in the atmosphere is provoking a surge in extreme weather events, in terms of both frequency and intensity. As the climate related disasters of the summer of 2021 – virtually impossible without climate change – testify, no place is safe anymore: humanity is living a global climate emergency, whose probability to further worsen has increased. Over three billion people could live in ‘near unlivable’ heat by 2070 and the tropics, home to 40% of global population, will become ‘uninhabitable’ by 2050 if carbon emissions do not decrease dramatically in a short span of time. Unfortunately, the current pattern of decarbonisation of global socio-economic systems is all but adequate: coal is resurgent and the ongoing economic recovery in several countries, particularly in Asia, is being powered mostly by it.
To prevent the most disastrous impacts of the climate crisis, the Paris Climate Agreement set an aspirational target to pursue efforts to limit global temperatures to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. How close we can get to this target – and avoid plunging humanity into possibly irreversible catastrophe – depends very much on our ability and willingness to create socio-economic models that diverge from the current fossil-fuel reliant one.
Given the urgency to tackle the climate crisis testified unequivocally by the last (2021) IPCC report, fossil fuels and their infrastructure must be phased out in a short time span. This calls for ground-breaking, ambitious, yet fair, initiatives able to profoundly re-shape our societies swiftly, starting from our energy systems.
The rationale for the choice of energy systems as the first system to be transformed depends on the impact of their decarbonisation on the achievement of a low carbon future and the relatively short operational lag that it requires; in other words, energy systems are high-leverage systems, i.e., they have the capacity to rapidly trigger a low carbon future from relatively limited technological and economic inputs. To radically modify our current energy systems a much greater reliance on renewable sources is critical. Among renewables, the energy generated through hydroelectric power – which relies on the water cycle driven by the sun – is very important for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it doesn’t pollute the air, nor it releases greenhouse gases which concur to heating the planet.
Hydropower is a local source of energy which ensures a certain degree of energy independence to local communities. Additionally, hydropower impoundments often create reservoirs that offer recreational opportunities such as fishing, boating, and hiking and more generally grants benefits beyond electricity generation thanks to the provision of flood control, irrigation support, and clean drinking water. This very nature of hydropower makes it a flexible and affordable source of energy that can provide essential backup power during electricity outages or disruptions: reservoirs are filled with water, which is then typically released for electricity generation during shortfalls from other sources; when there is an oversupply of power, water is pumped and stored back upstream in reservoirs. This cyclical system works well at regulating electricity generation since it is able to compensate fluctuations in other renewable sources like sun and wind.
Hydropower was, and still is, mostly a mountain affair. In Italy, for instance, where hydroelectric production accounts for more than 13% of national power production, the majority of plants and of installed power are located in the Alps. At the end of 2018, Piedmont had 930 plants, more than one fifth of the national total, generating 14.6% of the national hydropower production. Lombardy followed suit with 661 plants, which however contributed the most to Italian hydropower: 27.2%. The autonomous provinces of Trento and Bolzano, with 268 and 543 plants respectively, together accounted instead for 19.3% of Italian hydroelectricity. Then Veneto (392 plants and 6.2% of power), Valle d'Aosta (173 and 5.2%) and Friuli Venezia Giulia (233 and 2.8%). All these plants, as said, are located in mountainous areas of these territories.
But there’s the rub: the same climate crisis that on the one hand would require a larger reliance on hydropower, on the other hand affects the alpine region severely, since the Alps experienced a temperature increase of roughly 2 °C, compared to an average of 1.1 °C in the northern hemisphere. In fact, warmer temperatures can prompt the sudden release of meltwater from glacial lakes and the collapse of entire glaciers; more landslides are expected when glaciers thin and recede and cannot any longer provide support to adjacent valley slopes; permafrost thawing removes the icy ‘cement’ that binds tighter rocks and sediment.
So, it seems safe to be very careful about hydropower plants in mountain regions. Fortunately, science has developed several effective tools, largely based on satellite imagery, to monitor the stability of mountain territories and to spot warning signs of events potentially disruptive for hydropower production and, indeed, for the populations living nearby. At the same time the retreat of alpine glaciers can provide opportunities for building new dams and reservoirs in mountain terrain, increasing the capacity for hydropower production and storage in the Alps.
Hydroelectric plants mostly get water from rainfall and snowmelt. In the last few decades the climate change-induced melting of the glaciers has been providing water for electricity generation too by filling alpine reservoirs: in Switzerland, the second largest user of hydropower in Europe, the fraction of hydroelectric energy produced in this way amounts to 4% of the country’s total.
Unfortunately, in the alpine region the glaciers will have melted so much by 2040 – despite the efforts of human ingenuity – they will no longer be able to provide the amount of water required for this kind of hydroelectric energy production.
Despairing as it is and obnoxious for countless reasons, the melting of glaciers should not necessarily be an issue for hydroelectricity production though: the consequent decrease in the amount of water flowing into reservoirs may, in fact, be offset by an increase in precipitation due to climate change. It can even create new opportunities in the Alpine region for operators of hydroelectric plants and for the development of renewable energy sources in general. As glaciers melt, new areas are freed up that may be ideal for locating new dams and reservoirs. These new facilities are expected to increase hydro-electric production during the winter and can actually contribute to diminish the risk of floods and landslides, all the while functioning as water reserves during drought and providing irrigation for agriculture.
In this regard, a recent study found that at the global level the 185,000 current glacierized sites can provide a very large reservoir storage volume and hydropower potential. The study calculated for these sites a maximum theoretical storage potential of 875 cubic kilometers (km3) and a maximum theoretical hydropower potential of 1350 terawatt hours (TWh) per year, which corresponds to about one third of current hydropower production worldwide. The study further identified roughly 40 percent of this enormous theoretical potential – 355 km3 and 533 TWh per year, or 13 percent of worldwide hydropower production – as ‘potentially’ usable. Assuming the outcomes of state-of-the-art climate predictions, about three-quarters of this storage potential could become ice-free by 2050. The study concluded by arguing that deglaciating basins could make important contributions to national energy supplies in several countries, particularly in High Mountain Asia.
“Can [...] the leopard [change] his spots? Then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil.” This passage from the King James Bible contradicts the idiom which has fallen into popular use, that an ‘evil’ entrenched nature cannot be modified to ‘do good’. Coming to climate change, melting glaciers, and hydropower the point becomes: can even the evil entrenched nature of the climate crisis be turned into some good? Maybe yes, scientists argue; albeit we don’t like this evil in any of its parts, some of its outcomes may do some good. Hopefully.
]]>
The summer of 2021 was the hottest on record both in Europe and the United States; July 2021 was the hottest month ever recorded; the ten warmest years occurred after 2005, while the six warmest after 2015.
The torrid heat is one of those – excuse the banal pun – hot topics that are truly emblematic of climate change, in fact the one that triggers its countless cascading effects. In most places it is already hotter than our bodies can stand. Humans are not supposed to live in temperatures that high: when our core body temperature reaches 42°C, death can be imminent. As humans, we can only adapt so much. Once the air temperature is above 48°C, there’s not much to do, except rely on air-conditioning and other mitigation strategies.
What should be done? This is what we have been talking about and negotiating for decades, and unfortunately it turned out to be much ado about nothing. A molehill was made out of a mountain – pun intended, of course – to the point that we find ourselves in the situation of fervently wishing that the temperature will only get 2°C hotter than the pre-industrial level.
We cling to this figure hopefully but also a little bitterly, and meanwhile the new mantra is "watch out, the weather has changed, better to protect yourself": hat, sunscreen, a bottle of water are now mandatory items for summer walkabouts.
Right, better safe than sorry; but what about protecting our planet altogether as well? Animals, plants, Earth’s bounties, the Earth itself?
To be honest, if all those who are concerned about the state of our planet had to wait for political decisions to guarantee its safety in the midst of the current climate crisis, perhaps our beautiful and unique nest would already be in a state of irreversible misery. In a previous piece we talked about the effort to preserve and regenerate the ecology of territories; there is a particularly vulnerable territory though, the frozen one. As we have already said heat is shrinking mountain glaciers from the Alps, to the Himalaya and the Andes. In a nutshell, ice is suffering: it is melting worldwide especially at the Earth’s poles, where climate is changing and temperatures are increasing at an extremely rapid pace. While in the 1990s, our planet lost roughly 800 billion tons of ice each year, today, due to increasing air temperatures, that number has surged to around 1.2 trillion tons: altogether, 28 trillion tons of ice disappeared between 1994 and 2017. This mass melting has even caused a shift in the Earth’s axis of rotation since the 1990s.
It is therefore certainly interesting – and instructive – to see what scientists, activists, and artists propose and do to protect and guarantee the stability of frozen territories. One approach seems particularly appealing in its apparent naiveness: it is an almost desperate act of protecting mountain glacier’s peaks through an imaginative technique. Covering them with large white blankets so that the sun’s rays are reflected rather than absorbed by the ice. It’s a bit like putting on a T-shirt to avoid over exposition to the sun on a bright summer day.
Called geotextiles, these blankets, typically, consist of polyester and polypropylene fibres and are manufactured in rolls 50 meter long and 4 to 5 wide; they weigh about 0.5 kilos per square meter and are 3-4 millimetre thick. Geotextiles used for protecting ice have a high albedo effect and reflect more short-wave radiation than melting snow and ice surfaces. By so doing, they significantly reduce the overall energy available for glaciers to melt. Additionally, geotextiles’ semi-permeable characteristics inhibit the formation of puddles that would heat and affect the snow through water infiltration. At any rate, it seems to be working.
In the Swiss Alps this technique has been used since 2009: some glacier ski resorts and chunks of glaciers sought-after by tourist are using geotextiles. For instance, from the town of Belvédère in the Alps of southern Switzerland, it’s possible to stroll through the Rhône Glacier, one of Europe’s largest, through a 100-metre tunnel dug in 1870. Paying visitors – who pay for such a whim through the nose – could walk through a frozen grotto suffused with the various tones of blue produced by the ice-filtered sunlight. Between 2011 and 2016, the Rhône glacier retreated by about 150 meters. To slow the ice melt, the family managing the grotto came up with the idea of covering their portion of the glacier with blankets to reflect the sunlight.
To many extents, this Sisyphean task of remedying the environmental devastation of climate change works: geotextiles are able to save small portions of glaciers. Unfortunately, they cannot be employed on entire glaciers on a global scale. While these fabrics could reduce glacial melt by 59% locally, the strategy is too expensive to protect the more than 1,165,000 square kilometres of glaciers around the world. In a recent study Swiss scientists conclude that “measures to artificially reduce ice melt with the purpose of saving glaciers at the mountain-range scale are clearly unsustainable.” All in all, the use of geotextiles to protect ice is just for those portions of glaciers that have stable winter incomes that enable funding this expensive technique during summer months.
The debate raised by the use of geotextiles, however, does not concern its efficiency, or its cost altogether. It rather involves crucial climate and ecological issues: blanketing glaciers acts on the direct effects of the rise in temperature and the transformation of territories. The potential impacts, as can be easily imagined, are immense. In the first place, this transformation implies adaptation costs; second, it changes how the territory will be used economically; third, by modifying the environmental regularity, it generates particularly worrying risks with regard to those resources which are indispensable on a daily basis, such as water.
We argued that geotextiles, like other manipulative interventions to modify the climate system or its impacts, are useful at the local scale if connected to profitable activities that can sustain their high cost. But upscaling them would entail exceptional impacts on both the landscape and the environment with inevitable ethical conundrums. Despite the lure of their potential effectiveness and a related somewhat blind faith in science and technology, large-scale manipulative techniques’ uncertainties and problems, coupled with as yet manifestly insufficient factual knowledge, have contributed to generating a rational fear that ‘hacking the planet’ could/would have undesirable and potentially appalling outcomes and implications.
And here we find ourselves caught in one of the archetypical conflicts of climate policy: how to strike a balance between the actual usefulness of this kind of techniques and the degree to which they are just another human attempt to dominate the planet – another tile in the anthropocentric mosaic – and to further push back the inevitable acknowledgment of the ongoing global ecological crisis and the consequent – costly – measures. This is no mean feat, given the overall complexity and implications that these approaches would have on national, regional, and global socioeconomic systems. There is a fine tightrope being trodden, on the one side hope, on the other despair… The seemingly naïve attempt of coddling glaciers in blankets like a precious newborn to ensure their survival is really a hot topic.
Marco Grasso is Professor of Economic and Political Geography at the Università of Milan-Bicocca. His research interests include international environmental policy and climate change governance. He currently works on a project on the role of the fossil fuel industry in climate change and the decarbonisation of energy systems.
]]>
We need to change; we tend to consider this recurrent claim as an injunction to transform our habits and comfortable lifestyles; ‘we need to change’ is a sort of wakeup call that reminds us that it is necessary to do what we have done up to now – methodically, persistently, and industriously – in a different way. We may think, for example, that due to the high blood pressure and cholesterol revealed by a routine blood test, we will be faced with definitive choices: to change in order to reduce the risks, or to continue in the same way accepting the risks and their consequences. There’s no shortcut: pledging that we will change and not actually doing it will not save us from the next blood test and, mostly, from the pathologies associated to what its result. We must decide. Practically, to change the current malfunctioning of our body, we must change our diet, exercise, quit smoking, relax; in other words, we must acquire new habits and transform the ones we can’t give up.
When we speak of transforming the way we produce our goods and services something similar happens; we must establish new relationships that allow us to continue our modes of production while excluding those arising from old thoughtless habits which have engendered harmful consequences. Society is not a human body and our biomedical metaphor applies only to a certain extent. However, the present situation forces us to reflect – more and more frequently and deeply – about how to radically change current socio-economic systems in order to avert the impeding global ecological crisis.
Among these unavoidable changes, the progressive abandonment of fossil fuels is certainly the most urgent. But it is hard to go on with our lives without relying on fossil fuels, very hard. Fossil fuels permeate our lives in endless ways. They are everywhere, in clothing, in furniture, in computers and smartphones, in toothpaste, lipstick, and medicines; they are the global economy’s primary energy and fuel source. Fossil fuels also lubricate the global supply chains that bring us the Earth’s bounty. Even one of the simplest consumer products imaginable, a mainstay of everyone’s wardrobe, from hipster Brooklynites to the most humble immigrant tomato-pickers in Southern Europe, a plain white cotton t-shirt, seemingly oil-free, is a masterful triumph of global cooperation and coordination. Cotton is planted, cultivated, and harvested in Mississippi with oil-based chemicals and machinery; then it is sent through oil-powered shipping vectors to spinning factories in Indonesia; the spooled yarn travels on oil-propelled vessels to garment factories in South Asia and Latin America. Finally, the global shipping industry that is the very foundation of the entire global consumer economy – it takes only fifteen super vessels powered by dirty high sulphur heavy fuel oil to emit as much sulphur as all the world’s cars and as much greenhouse gas as 760 million cars – brings the unassuming cotton t-shirt to a store near you.
The ubiquitousness of fossil fuels is exactly the point that takes us away from the human body metaphor. Phasing out and replacing them require research, tests, investments, calculations … and courage. Instead of establishing a new diet – which would lead us to recombine the usual foods – when it comes to fossil fuels it is a matter of looking for ‘new food’. And this, obviously, has consequences that reverberate all over our societies. Humanity must look to viable alternatives, to move towards the so-called low carbon transition, i.e. to the progressive elimination of carbon from human systems. This is possibly one of the most powerful narratives that underpin current thinking about the future of economies, societies, and the planet, one that requires a rapid and profound modification of collective and individual attitudes, behaviors, and values, and of norms, incentives, and policy, and where the roles and actions of multiple agents are central.
To increase the effectiveness of the low carbon transition, fossil fuels and their infrastructure need to be phased out in a short time span. This calls for ground-breaking, ambitious action able to profoundly re-shape our societies, actions which require boldness, but also care and attention. Such required actions will distribute the burdens and the benefits of the transition across peoples and generations, change habits, practices, and the way we build our personal and collective life. Generally, when we think about these transformative actions we look mainly at the small and big things that makes up our daily life; but we cannot forget that a just low carbon transition is mostly a problem that concerns large scales, where big industries cannot simply be compared with millions of small consumers. As a matter of facts, most of the energy currently produced worldwide is not used to move cars, heat/cool houses or light them, but rather to feed heavy industries, like the steel industry.
What are the alternatives that such industries will put in place to weaken their – already ethically and ecologically – dependence on fossil fuels? In a nutshell, is it possible for heavy industries to live on non-fossil energy sources?
These are the crucial questions that companies, researchers, international organizations, and national governments are seeking to address. The answer, as mentioned above, starts from the acknowledgment that we cannot continue doing what we have done so far in the same way; this acknowledgment, in fact, stimulates innovative, yet still controversial solutions. To highlight the main elements of this debate it is useful to focus on one of these proposals: the one concerning the low carbon transition of the Austrian steel industry. Research works suggest that the steel industry is still the world’s largest industrial source of carbon dioxide emissions, mainly due to the coal required to convert ore into molten iron. A report by the World Steel Association (WSA) shows that in recent decades global crude steel production has increased from 904 Mt in 2002 to 1559 Mt in 2012. According to the International Energy Agency the steel industry is currently responsible for around 7% of total global CO2 emissions and 25% of global industrial emissions, while the WSA estimates that global steel demand will rise by 5.8% in 2021 as economies recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Steel is indeed a key sector in the world economy, which consumes a lot of energy and produces many of the emissions that have changed our climate. At the same time the steel industry is crucial to our lives, being its product indispensable components of infrastructure, machinery, and endless different goods.
To escape this conundrum a group of scientists are planning to run the Austrian steel industry entirely on clean energy. The ongoing Horizon 2020 project H2Future has recently launched the world’s largest ‘green’ – i.e., produced exclusively through renewables – hydrogen production plant. Hydrogen can have various functions such as powering liquid rocket engines and most modes of transport. It is generally accepted that along with electricity, hydrogen will constitute a primary energy carrier upon which vehicles, buildings, aircraft will depend. The H2Future project has instead the goal of generating green hydrogen that is specifically intended for the steel industry. The Austrian hydrogen plant, located in the Voestalpine’s steel mill in Linz, is based on a polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) electrolysis system and can generate up to 6 MW of power. The benefits of using this approach include low maintenance costs and needs, high-quality hydrogen produced with zero emissions and no additional chemicals that could endanger the system operators.
In sum, the Austrian vision demonstrates that greening large industries, such as steelmaking, is feasible and is a viable option in the near future. Indeed, this is an archetypical example of the much need actions of ingenuity and bravery that humanity needs if it wants to lessen and/or avoid the direst consequences of centuries of reckless behavior.
Marco Grasso is Professor of Economic and Political Geography at the Università of Milan-Bicocca. His research interests include international environmental policy and climate change governance. He currently works on a project on the role of the fossil fuel industry in climate change and the decarbonisation of energy systems.
]]>The way we relate to nature and the planet tells a lot about how we define ourselves, both personally and collectively, about our ways of associating to a particular environment that we are part of. The history of the various approaches developed to protect and preserve our planet is a fascinating journey where scientific, political, and moral issues mix in an inextricable way.
History gives us some clues about how humanity has become aware and taken care of the planet, its nest. It is well known that the first ‘modern’ natural park was the one inaugurated in 1872 in Yellowstone, Wyoming. ‘Modern’ here refers less to a previously unused innovative approach – it would be difficult to find a civilization that didn’t consider it vital to preserve the things that guarantee its very existence – but rather on the one hand, to a way of articulating a concern of political and cultural order and, on the other hand, to the application of the scientific knowledge available at the time to guide what today has become known as environmental policy.
The creation of parks and protected areas all over the world was the result of an emerging awareness about the importance of preserving the environment – ignoring, however, the massacre of indigenous populations perpetrated to that end – and of the willingness, almost the necessity, of people – especially of urban dwellers – of having a pristine, yet accessible, place reminiscent of the bygone times unsullied nature. A further reason was a growing interplay between the natural and social sciences aimed at understanding the natural world and, at the same time, at orienting our view of situating humans in relation to it in order to preserve both.
Protected areas became, over time, the dominant paradigm for conserving biodiversity: however, this canonic approach soon revealed its most critical aspect: the prospect of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution that ignored the local particularities and modalities of co-existence between human populations and the natural world. Additionally, national parks replicated the extractive objective that characterized the emerging industrial society, in so far as they were seen anthropocentrically as mere providers of amenity services to humans
Now we must take a huge leap forward in time. One hundred years later, still in the United States, concern emerged among scientists and environmentalists. The strategy of building protected areas, though valid and necessary, was not enough to ensure the survival of existing biodiversity or to reverse and recover wilderness from the devastating effects of urban expansion and of the patterns of growth demanded by the dominant relentless industrial and extractivist economic model. In the late 1970s, a botanist and journalist from the University of Wisconsin named William Jordan defined, and christened, a new conservation practice, called ecological restoration – launching in 1981 the first scientific journal in the field.
Biodiversity was not just to be protected: active intervention was needed in order to create appropriate conditions for it to proliferate and expand. The interesting aspect is that ecological restoration – which would become a sub-field of applied ecology – was born as a concern of those who were directly involved in biodiversity management. The practice of ecological restoration, according to Jordan, provided the technical means for the production of a new synthesis between humans and the natural world, in that it required their active engagement in an existing ecological community. This enabled the construction of bio-cultural communities through a perspective that Jordan defined as postmodern primitivism.
It maintained that it was necessary to rediscover traditional wisdom and apply it to the ethical and aesthetic conditions of current time. The social and political consequences of this ecological restoration approaches are self-evident: in the first place, the new perspective evinced that the approach of protected areas was not enough, since the pressure that these areas were suffering put them at constant risk of exploitation; in a different view, ecological restoration processes, without overlapping with environmental protection policies, also focused on endangered areas non conceived as areas warranting protection, given their scant ecological relevance; by working with the consequences of humans and their activities, ecological restoration processes additionally assume a pedagogical role, that of producing new relations between humans and non-humans.
And here we come to what could be defined as the third – and so far the last – proposal to solve the double challenge of preserving and extending non-human species simultaneously with the modification of our practices and ways of interacting with them: rewilding. Instead of the active role played by humans in the two approaches outlined above, rewilding eliminates humans as agents of active intervention in the natural and biological dynamics of a given ecological community; humans are only, so to speak, instruments of passive management that should intervene to envision the formal and informal infrastructure needed to implement rewilding projects, either in the case of manifest disturbance of a given ecological community, or in specific cases of the introduction of key species for the maintenance of ecosystems. All in all, rewilding is seen as a means to reactivate ‘acceptable’ relations between humans and non-humans: it makes it possible to relearn to share spaces that bring together various species in a way that can and must be advantageous for most of them. By guaranteeing the capacity of reproduction and maintenance of local biodiversity, the aim of rewilding is that of trying to ‘contaminate’ human interactions with the non-human world, so that such interactions become a vector for socio-economic and cultural transformations of the territory. Therefore, rewilding is a progressive approach to conservation. It’s about letting nature take care of itself, enabling natural processes to shape land and sea, repair damaged ecosystems and restore degraded landscapes. Through rewilding, wildlife’s natural rhythms create wilder, more biodiverse habitats.
Once again, it is a matter of scientific formalisation, as the three approaches summarized – establishing protected areas, ecological restoration, and rewilding – have to many extents been used, even together, throughout human history. Although recently – for instance the first professorship was established only in 2020 at University of Wageningen, in the Netherlands – the concept of rewilding is nonetheless expanding rapidly. One of the places where this approach has been convincingly adopted is the Italian Central Apennines, which includes the regions of Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise. Set up within the framework of the Rewilding Europe initiative – which brings together various initiatives and is currently developing eight rewilding projects in Europe – the Central Apennines project has the general goal of transforming a problem – the abandonment of agricultural and mountain territories in the Central Apennines – into an opportunity for socio-economic development and environmental improvement. This goal is pursued through three specific objectives: creating coexistence corridors by connecting the local economy with the wilderness; boosting the Marsican brown bear population; and promoting wildlife watching.
The distinctive trait of this project is the strategic role that it gives to people in maintaining the natural richness of the region and showing its beauty. Such awareness and support of stakeholders and people are of great importance for the conservation of the Central Apennine ecosystems. The Rewilding Apennines project engages local stakeholders in order to develop new nature-based businesses and at the same time protect wildlife. In 2020, the project established a ‘Bear Fund’, which aims to identify and connect entrepreneurs who respect wildlife and are willing to develop customised products and services: this can create the basis for new nature-based economic activities, such as experiential tourism. The fund also supports the development of Bear Smart Communities by raising funds to improve bear conservation practices across the ecological corridors of the Central Apennines. In fact, the underlying assumption of the inclusivity of the project is that the more people – both local and visitors – are engaged in rewilding initiatives – through communication, meetings, fieldwork – the more effective and accepted such initiatives are.
Marco Grasso is Professor of Economic and Political Geography at the Università of Milan-Bicocca. His research interests include international environmental policy and climate change governance. He currently works on a project on the role of the fossil fuel industry in climate change and the decarbonisation of energy systems.
]]>
If until a decade ago it was possible to believe that ecological changes could be contained within certain safe boundaries, today this perspective must be placed among those mystifications of that not so far away age of hope and boundlessness.
Things have changed for the worse, unfortunately; even the Earth’s axis of rotation has notably shifted since the 1990s due to the massive ice melting of the period. The transformation of ecosystems and entire territories in the name of the promise of abundance for all must be re-evaluated in light of the ghastly future humanity faces. We need to pull the emergency brake on the locomotive of history, as Walter Benjamin claimed in 1942 about the impending catastrophe of the Second World War: now pulling the emergency break would give us the chance – shrinking everyday – to preserve, or perhaps to rescue, our only planet, the memories, and the affections produced with it and not only in it.
In this regard, the Anthropocene is a very interesting concept for many reasons; for instance, it makes it possible to eventually abandon the conceptual framework where nature and culture were considered separate, while it provides the conceptual tools to describe and verify the great transformation of the biochemical, physical, and socio-political dynamics of our ecological systems. But the notion of the Anthropocene has also been increasingly used as an ethical-aesthetic instrument to grasp, from the point of view of individual and collective phenomenological experiences in everyday life, the transformations underway on our planet in a comparative temporal perspective, one that can situate the lifespan of an individual within much longer geo-stories.
It is therefore possible that in their everyday trajectory a person can experience how much the climate and the ecology of a landscape have been transformed; a landscape that is dear to them or that they have had the opportunity to visit and to establish an emotional bond with during their life.
To live this inner journey, we need to go out, walk, look, breathe, smell, listen. Some scientists did so. 25 years ago, they hiked the Alpine region (from Vienna to Nice) and decided to retrace it recently. The trek was described as alarming. Forests are drying up in the lower regions where a proliferation of tree-damaging insects have been observed. Plants that most of us consider just an inert being become migrants in their own right. They are moving to higher altitudes looking for new opportunities of life. But of course they are strictly intertwined with the place they live in; the interactions that provide the life support conditions are changing - temperatures, pollinators, soil. We are not sure that people know how our agricultural practices will change in a few years. How some species will move, escaping high temperatures and a lack of water, while others will disappear. It’s just crazy, they seem to allude.
Yes, we have been talking a lot about mountains lately; not because of an excess of adventurous imagination, but, rather, because in times of virus and climate change they seem to be the place to be, the safe area which can free us from the terror of disease, high waters, poisoned air and paralyzing heat. Poor mountains: in the future they will be the ones to bear the burden of our repeated inertia.
But mountains – and the people who live there – will have to face their own risks. The condition of glaciers around the world is one of the most impressive examples; those who still think it is reasonable to continue in a kind of subtle everyday denialism of a fading ecosystem should take a look at the amazing comparative research project developed by the team On the trail of Glaciers. It is a “photographic-scientific project that combines photographic comparison and scientific research in order to disseminate the effects of climate change through the observation of changes in glacial masses over the last 150 years”. There, side by side, we see the transformation – the shrinking and eventually the disappearance – of the salient features of places like Alaska, the Himalayas, the Andes, the Alps. It is not just an aesthetic effect that hits us, the loss of the glaciers, transformed and removed from the landscape; rather it is the dense connection between events seemingly distant and remote from each other. By abandoning the background and moving to the front of the scene, these pictures show the interrelationship of biochemical, physical, and socio-cultural processes that affect the spaces of habitability of living beings – including human ones. And it is precisely these interactions that tend to accelerate the crossing of tipping points for the multiplicity of life forms on the planet.
Historical research of this magnitude has an effective (and affective) aspect of great relevance: by placing our time in a comparative historical path, it is possible to question our present and our future, throwing ourselves into that instant when we hold our breath before the grandiosity of our madness. Where are we wandering? The route may well continue without snow or glaciers; but it becomes desolate if it presumes it can go out and go on in an ecologically poor, sick, or dead world. To the Adventurer of the Anthropocene we must add the typical characteristics of science fiction: the exile from territories that offer little chance of life. A fiction that has become our present, at least for the many who must learn what it means to lose their territory and live without it in strange lands. We must absolutely learn in all its complexity what this means to those of us who still have a territory. We must multiply the instruments – be they scientific, artistic, or otherwise – that allow us to probe the changes underway. The comparative effect – between our past and present in an uncertain future – can be activated in various ways.
We are indeed conscious that many are tired of hearing the same arguments over and over again in a to and fro between a little hope and a lot of pessimism. But, unfortunately, our stories – human, all too human – become more and more dependent on these other stories, of melting glaciers, sea level rise, desertification, increasing temperatures, nonhuman migration, fires, and extinctions. This is the point: we need to learn to tell stories that are more than human, something that writer Amitav Ghosh has been advocating for some years. According to him the current global ecological crisis “is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.” We need, desperately, to learn to tell new stories, to create new stories, to invent new instruments to narrate multiple stories, and to live them differently.
Marco Grasso is Professor of Economic and Political Geography at the Università of Milan-Bicocca. His research interests include international environmental policy and climate change governance. He currently works on a project on the role of the fossil fuel industry in climate change and the decarbonisation of energy systems.
]]>
There’s no business like snow business, but, thanks to climate change, the fairytale of immaculate white slopes framed by pristine Alpine forests is skating on very thin ice, literally and figuratively. It was back in 1761 that the great Swiss Enlightenment thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau described how the British, fascinated by the wholesome, healthful European mountain range and the virtues of the folks who dwelled therein, pioneered modern Alpine skiing as a recreational sport. And thus the transformation of the Alps into a mountain playground was decreed, with the first modern resorts springing up at the dawn of the 20th century.
An incredible 1136 ski resorts now pepper the mountain playground that is the Alps today, with 197 of them found on Italian territory. Europe’s Alpine mountain range, stretching 1200 km and bestriding eight nations, has only 20% of the worldwide ski resorts, but attracts 80% of overall visitors; that’s 150 million tourists hitting the Alpine slopes per annum, a figure that has remained relatively stable for the past twenty years: Of these, around a fifth – between 25 and 30 million winter sports enthusiasts – decide that the Bel Paese offers the best mix of food, hospitality and, of course, glittering white gold. Seven of these Italian Alps resorts see over one million tourists vying to hustle through their ski-lift turnstiles every year.
But what do these numbers translate to in economic terms? Winter holidays on the slopes in the Alps add $33 billion (almost €28 billion) overall per annum to the coffers of the Alpine nations, while the 2018-2019 ski season saw the Italian resorts taking €10.4 billion – a figure that includes ski passes, hotels and complementary services – a drop of 11% compared to the previous year’s takings.
A recent study found that in the 1990s our planet lost roughly 800 billion tons of ice each year; that figure has since soared to around 1.2 trillion tons, making a total of 28 trillion tons of melted ice between 1994 and 2017. Higher global temperatures are having the inevitable effect of shrinking mountain glaciers from the Alps, to the Himalaya and the Andes. And the upshot of all this is that snow is disappearing, even at higher altitudes, where once it came down in abundance. Because climate change affects mountainous regions even more mercilessly that lower lying lands: the Alps saw average temperatures go up by 2 °C in the 20th century, compared to an average of circa 1 °C for the northern hemisphere (and this average is not levelling out; on the contrary, it is heading along at a steep vertical projectile motion, but without the force of gravity to eventually help drag it back down). It is being seen, to striking effect, on Alpine ski stations located between 1500 and 2000m above sea level. Forecasts for the region predict that warming will worsen, leading to reduced snowfall and the number of days in which the temperature will remain below the vital 0 °C. And then it’s a case of cause-and-effect 101: according to one study, in the Alpine regions where reliable snow cover (at least 30 cm per 100 days /year) is currently at 1500 m, a 1 °C increase would lead to the altitude rising to 1650 m, a 2°C increase to 1800m. Of the 666 currently operating medium-to-large Alpine ski resorts, 90% normally have enough snow to cover the ski season for 100 days per year. A future rise of 1 °C could see this figure drop to 500, 2 °C to 400, etc. You get the picture.
But the loss of snow at high altitudes has consequences far more serious than some elite tourists missing out on some après-ski: the surfaces remaining uncovered by snow means the earth absorbs more heat instead of reflecting it, exacerbating the temperature on the mountain, something defined in environmental terms as positive feedback.
But let’s examine the Italian scenario: of the 290 ski resorts in the country as a whole, 197 are fully functioning in the Italian Alps. But that is 200 less than the heyday of the 1960/1970s winter holiday boom and snow abundance. Yes, there are as many deserted resorts as there are functioning ones.
Driving through the Alps, the first sign you are approaching a ski resort is the distance curving slopes snaking down the mountainside, stripped of trees. But that can be a cursory impression is the only sign of a once bustling ski resort. If you venture nearer, you see how the surrounding wildlife is claiming back its territory, creeper plants vying to help pull down the crumbling of the walls of the hotels; you can even step into these eerie former accommodations, their doors long since torn off their hinges, the graffiti on the walls testament to the impromptu parties held by the youth of the neighbouring valleys, the abandoned sleeping bags and used hypodermic needles evidence of them being used as temporary shelter by those down on their luck. When – if! – the snow does fall, the warm chestnut shades of the rusting steel cables provide stark contrast to the pure white of the surrounds, the once bustling resort now reduced to a ghost town.
A Legambiente Neve Diversa 2020 report divided the abandoned resorts into three categories: those completely abandoned, those temporarily closed in the hopes of more prosperous times, and those being kept alive thanks to the injection of huge sums of public funding to maintain jobs, a kind of temporary life support before the inevitable. The report highlights how, for example, 60% of funding for artificial snow came out of the taxpayer’s pockets in the Piedmont region, to cite one example, for the 2019 season. At what cost? Well, according to the WWF, every hectare of piste requiring artificial snow uses around 95 million cubic metres of water and 600 gigawatt-hours of energy per year, at a cost of €136,000. And that’s without even taking into consideration how these artificial means impact the ecology of the localities, with soil erosion and the pollution of local water supplies being just the first ones to spring to mind. The Club Italiano Alpino, the association at the vanguard of safeguarding the Italian Alpine environment, is the first to proclaim that, in order to adapt to climate changes and safeguard the local ecological and economic system, diversification must be explored, the system cannot subsist on the monoculture of the ski resort alone.
On a different note, one curiosity arises from the receding snow on the Alps: some rather unexpected souvenirs are being unveiled. Sleds, skis, goggles, trenches, personal belongings, cannons and other major artillery abandoned during the so-called ‘Guerra Bianca’, the Italian-Austrian battlefront during World War I. Never before had warfare taken place at such high altitudes, even reaching over 3,000 metres above sea level; at an exhibition sponsored by the National Geographic, photographer Stefano Torrione’s suggestive and poignant images narrate the Great War on the Adamello Massif as few words could.
Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, considered to be one of the greats of early-20th century German literature, has as one of its central themes the destruction wreaked by great swaths of civilised humanity. The protagonist Hans Castorp visits his sickly cousin seeking a cure in a sanatorium in Davos, in the Swiss Alps, just across the Italian border. Yes, the same Alpine setting where the great and the good gather annually at the World Economic Forum to figure out how to undo the destruction wreaked on our planet by civilised humanity.
The Verte is probably one of the peaks of Mont Blanc that makes the mountaineers dream most. It is often said that its name would come from the blue / green hue that hits the ice that covers the summit cap when the sun lights up its profile. But the origin is to be found in the pre-celtic root "ver" or "var" designating a peak. In Chamonix, we call it "la Verte". No easy routes to reach its summit, hence the famous quote of Gaston Rebuffat "before the Verte we are alpinists, at the Verte we become mountaineers".
Aiguille Verte - © David Ravanel
Out of the confinement in May 2020, we set our sights on the Aiguille Verte by the Washburn route (the Z). To get to the top of the Aiguille Verte via this itinerary, the ideal is to make a bivouac or one night at the refuge of Argentière. The next day, it will then be necessary to count between 3 and 6 hours to climb the 1000m of this face. It is climbed roped, crampons on the feet and more or less technical ice axes depending on the conditions. The descent can be done skiing on the same route but if the ascent is on foot you will have to come down before the sun by the Whymper where relays are installed.
Living at the foot of the Grands Montets, we leave in the sneakers from the house with all the gear on the back. We head to the Col des Rachasses, 500 meters under the top of the Grands Montets where we set the bivouac. We are not far from the foot of the face and it's at 5 in the morning that we leave the camp. Approaching the Verte, we have doubts about the possibility of passing the Bergschrund. A few minutes of observation allow us to glimpse the best way to attack it. So here we are, skis on the backpack and crampons on our feet for the 1000m of the Washburn route. After a few thousand steps and 3 hours of climb, we are happy to reach the well-ventilated summit. In 1929, the pioneers, despite their much less evolved gear, had made the feat of climbing it in 4:20.
We do not hang out at the top, because a big descent awaits us and the sun already radiates on this mythical face. After a few turns to take control, we embark on the steepest slopes of the route where concentration and determination will not leave us anymore.
INDIVIDUAL GEAR
a) Duetto helmet, dual Certification mountaineering and skiing, ideal for this type of terrain
b) 2 Ghost Evo ice axes (one adze and one hammer): great performance even in steep and delicate passages. Importance of the hammer for pitons if necessary
c) Mistral harness: lightweight and compact
d) Ski-tour crampons: effective binding system and safety
e) Raid Pro 25 backpack: compact and functional thanks to its opening in the back
f) 2 ice screws (one 360 and one Helix)
g) 2 Plume Nut K3N carabiners: compact and lightweight
h) 1 Master Pro, versatile tool for rope maneuvers
i) 2 Alpine Rings 120 cm
j) Rappel kit (a 60m rope in 5mm, a Scream plate, a Magic Ring and two carabiners): one of the skiers has the Rappel Kit and the second a single rope for safe rappels if necessary
k) Trail One poles: ideal for the steep slopes, they offer adaptability of hands' position thanks to their long grip
- 1 Abalakov hook
Charlotte Barré, born in 1986 and based in Chamonix, is part of Grivel Team since 2018. She is rock climber, mountaineer and Mountain Guide. She collected some expeditions around the world and she opened some new rock climbing routes in Greenland and Pakistan. Favorite Grivel products: Dark Machines, crampons G20 Plus.
Alexandre Pittin, born in 1983 and based in Chamonix, is part of Grivel Team since 2018. He is steep skier, mountaineer and Mountain Guide in Chamonix. He collected some steep descent in the Mont-Blanc Massif and he opened some new descent in the Italian side; he repeats two times the Nant-Blanc descent. Favorite Grivel products: Dark Machines, Mistral, Ghost Evo, crampons Ski Tour.
There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home. Or so the refrain goes. But when home is an Earth where, however remote or apparently wild, no location exists that has not been despoiled by humankind, it puts a new spin on things. And this is one of the aspects that led scientists like the Nobel prize-winner Paul Crutzen – who, sadly, recently passed away – to characterize human ubiquitousness as the mark of a new geological period called the Anthropocene.
In fact, a study recently published in the prestigious journal Nature found that the weight of objects produced by humans is far superior to all living biomass; and bear in mind that this mass doubles approximately every twenty years. The planet has become a huge warehouse for man-made products, the so-called ‘anthropogenic mass’. This is not an accident, nor is it a mere unintentional consequence of 7.9 billion people crammed onto the planet; on the contrary, it is the result of an explicitly rapacious model of unrestrained economic growth based on the intensive use of natural resources, renewable and non.
The same work argues that the global mass of plastic alone is greater than the overall mass of all terrestrial and marine animals combined. Yes, plastic: it is everywhere, from the object that has long borne the burden of global villainy – the plastic bag – to clothing, furniture, computers and smartphones, the granules in toothpaste exalted for that extra-clean feel, the gloss we smear onto our lips, the medicines that cure our ills; it is one of the hamster wheels of the global economy. Waterproof, thermally and electrically resistant, infinitely ductile, its diversity of shapes and colours means it has an almost endless life. Alas, it is derived from petroleum and is extremely polluting, and it is accumulating exponentially everywhere. From the 1.6 million km2 – three times the size of France, the biggest artefact on our planet – of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to microplastic particles almost invisible to the naked eye. Reports of their presence abound in food, drinking water and in the air we breathe; they have been detected in the gastrointestinal tract of marine animals, as well as in the human intestine. At the close of 2020, a new threshold was crossed, one that further conflates the organic and inorganic worlds: for the first time researchers detected fragments of microplastics in human placentas. In an interview to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, the lead author of the study claimed that “with the presence of plastic in the body, the immune system is disturbed and recognizes as ‘itself’ even what is not organic. It’s like having a cyborg baby: no longer composed only of human cells, but a mixture of biological and inorganic entities. The mothers were shocked.”
But not only do microplastics enter the most cherished parts of our inner sanctum, they are also on an unstoppable march into the most remote parts of the big wide world: the perennial ice of the Poles and the almightiest mountains.
In an effort to explain how these micro particles manage to conquer the world, the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany and the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF in Switzerland undertook an in-depth study, the results of which were published in Science Advances. They found high concentrations of these particles in the Arctic – in ice floes drifting in the Fram Strait and on the Svalbard islands – and in glaciers of the Tschuggen and Davos areas of the Swiss Alps. The study concluded that microplastics were blown there by wind currents, as another work related to a remote and pristine mountain catchment in the French Pyrenees had previously shown.
The German-Swiss research group examined the microplastics trapped in ice and snow samples from the sites under investigation with an infrared microscope and, through the different wavelengths of infrared light absorbed and reflected, identifying the different varieties of plastic. In the Arctic snow, they mainly found polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polycarbonate, polylactic acid, and polyimide, whereas in the Swiss samples, polyamide, varnish, rubber type 3, nitrile rubber, ethylene-vinyl-acetate, and polyethylene (PE) prevailed. Furthermore, they established that, on average, these microplastics are about the same size as pollen grains, and – astonishingly – that they could have been transported to both locations by air from places as far-flung as the equator.
Another study published in Nature Communications found up to 12,000 microplastics particles per litre of sea ice in five remote regions of the Arctic Ocean. Researchers found fragments of packaging, paint, nylon, polyester and cellulose acetate that is commonly used in the manufacture of cigarette filters in every sample. Some of the particles were only eleven micrometres in diameter – one-sixth the diameter of a human hair – and a concentration of two to three times more microplastics than past measurements was registered. The Nature Communication study also found that the main sources of microplastics are abandoned fishing equipment travelling thousands of kilometres via ocean currents – for instance most of polyethylene is believed to come from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – and increased shipping and fishing in the Arctic region, whose sea has become a massive conveyor belt to transport plastic waste.
Another recent study published in the same journal, Nature Communications, found that the Arctic is extensively contaminated by microplastic fibres that originate from the seemingly harmless act of washing polyester clothes in Europe and North America. The study focused on seventy-one surface water samples collected from Norway to the North Pole and in the Canadian High Arctic. Twenty-six more samples were taken at a depth of 1,000 metres in the Beaufort Sea, north of Alaska. Specifically, the study found that more than 92% of the microplastics were fibres, and that 73% of these were polyester of the same width and colours as those used in clothing.
From one frozen terrain to others: besides Antarctica, microplastic have also been discovered in the ice close to the dizzying heights of the summit of Mount Everest.
While the issue of litter on Everest has long concerned both locals and global environmentalists, a study even found microplastics in the ice of a location called ‘the Balcony’, a platform a few hundred metres from its 8,850-metre summit. All the samples collected in eleven spots on Everest ranging from 5,300 metres to 8,440 metres above sea-level contained microplastics: on average thirty particles per litre of water, with the most contaminated one containing a whopping 119 particles per litre.
When ice coming from what should be pristine environments like the most remote corners of the Arctic, the Alps, and the top of Mount Everest, not to mention the placenta of a pregnant woman, contain the same major by-product of our lifestyle – plastic – alarm bells should be ringing. So loudly that we should be clutching our ears in pain. The evidence required to prompt drastic action exists, it has long been provided by scientists investigating the Earth’s current ecological crisis, but it would be flippant to expect that this alone could pave the way to reversing the critical situation. Rapid and profound cultural changes must condemn humanity’s brutalization of the planet, with incisive action required to avert the drastic implications of the relentless production and use of plastic. Let us heed those alarm bells wisely.
The Couloir Jaeger is the "smallest" of the legendary snow couloirs that characterize the east side of the Mont Blanc du Tacul, but despite being a few hundred meters shorter of its "bigger brothers" Diable and Gervasutti, Jaeger does not look bad for slopes and technical difficulties. A proof of that is the fact that its first ascent dates only 12th June 1964, many years after the first ascents of the other couloirs mentioned above.
Even its first descent in skis was the last in order of time and dates back to 1977, made by Jacky Bessat.
On the other hand, access to the canal is very comfortable: from Punta Helbronner, you pass the Flambeau col to ski down the first part of the mythical Vallée Blanche. At the Jonction, you go back with the skins for a few hundred meters towards its obvious bergschrund, located immediately to the right of the gigantic Couloir Gervasutti.
With good ski conditions, the ascent does not present particular technical difficulties, if not a narrow and a more steeper wall in the first part. Another narrow part is at the exit and often some small rocks block the passage, marking the point of arrival for the “pretenders” to the ski descent.
Last week Davide Capozzi and I have benefited from excellent snow conditions, managing to easily climb up to 4080 meters of the top of the Tacul's shoulder, from where once shovelled the entrance blocked by a cornice, we could start our descent.
After the first 80 meters, we opted to not take any risks in the bottleneck, rappelling down the few meters of little snow-covered rocks that despite the conditions, made the key passing delicate.
Even the first meters after this passage were rather complicated, as the sun works on the snow since early morning, compromising the skiing, but not to the point of having to remove the skis or use the rope again.
Once you use the due caution these sections, the rest of the canal has proved very pleasant to ski, also thanks to the fact that this winter can be exploited to enjoy both sides of the couloir, making the most of the quality of snow.
For technical data lovers, the channel is 650m long, with 50 ° constant slopes, with some short sections a little steeper.
MY GEAR
GRIVEL GEAR
a) Condor Poles: ideal compromise for snow slopes. During the ascent, it allows you to have a second tool to go with the Ghost ice axe, while during the descent you always have a balde available for difficult situations like traverses, skids and dry skiing.
b) Imbrago Mistral: light, comfortable and high-performance.
c) Duetto helmet: the lightest double certification helmet. With very little weight it protects your head both during climbing and skiing.
d) Raid Pro 25 backpack: great comfort and volume with very little weight. Veryo good for both skiing and carrying the skis.
e) Ski Tour crampons and Ghost ice axe: at the top of performance with minimal weight, respecting the needs of all skiers.
f) Rappel kit: ideal solution also thanks to the Scream plate, the only one certified for 6-mm ropes, which are now commonly used in skiing.
h) Alpha K1N and Delta K5N carabiners.
i) Alpine Rings.
OTHER GEAR
Denis Trento, born in 1982 in Aosta.He has been part of the Grivel Team since 2009. Alpine Guide passionate about mountain skiing, with a recent past in high level competitive ski mountaineering. Favorite products: Mistral harness, ice axe Ghost, ski tour, Scream kit.
The progression with the blades is simple: you swing your ice axe in the ice, load the weight and proceed, step by step.
The history of the blades of ice axes starts a long time ago and Grivel has always followed and often anticipated their evolution.
In 1786 Balmat climbed to the top of Mont Blanc holding a long stick with a pointed tip and, fastened to his belt, a hatchet with a short handle; we therefore speak of sticks or alpenstocks, even very long ones to facilitate the descent and probe the snow.
The ice axe was born around 1840 by combining these two components: the tool had to be especially suitable for cutting steps to make up for the lack of the technique of using crampons (which had not yet been invented!).
The first blades were almost straight, without teeth: the latter appeared only later with two or three notches only in the tip area.
Ice axes were mainly a tool to be used as a support stick and precisely to cut steps where to place the feet.
Only in the early years of the twentieth century, with the widespread use of crampons (the first ones were made by Grivel in 1909), did the ice axe take on a more "modern" shape: the pick lengthens, about twice the size of the blade, and the handle begins to shorten, from 2/3 of the person's height to about half of the height; the first teeth appear on the tip to improve anchoring skills.
In 1938, the German Andreas Heckmair used a shorter ice axe with a very inclined blade, handcrafted to win the north face of the Eiger.
In the mid-1950s, the Austrian mountaineer Kurt Diemberger introduced the "ice dagger", which planted at shoulder height made it possible to remove and replant the ice axe higher without losing balance: you could speak for the first time of a second tool for progression.
The ice axes change face: the pick is made with a greater inclination and with a greater number of teeth, in some cases also on the upper side of the blade. This guarantees a firmer anchoring, but complicates the subsequent extraction of the tool.
Starting from the early 1970s, the new way of climbing on ice with two tools was established, called "piolet traction": a technique used for the first ascent of the North Couloir of the Dru (1973) by Walter Cecchinel and Claude Jager, ascent which in the Alps is identified as the first with this technique.
The radical transformation then occurs when the downward inclination of the blade is changed to facilitate traction, but complicating penetration into the ice.
At the same time, the lengths of the shafts were shortened: using the tools only in traction, they compromised the possibility of planting them above the head on slopes that quickly approached 90 degrees.
In the same years, however, we must record that Scottish mountaineers were already technically advanced, also given the terrain on which they climbed with walls with thin ice and cracks clogged with ice: more than a real ice axe, a sort of "hook" was needed to fit into the cracks and hook onto the rock holds: hence the birth of the first ice ax similar to the current ones called Terrordactyl designed and used by Mc Innes.
Very short shaft and super solid blade but also very short with 4 teeth on the tip, very inclined (over 45 degrees), but with a straight shape that worked well for hooks, but was very difficult to swing given the angle of insertion, with bad consequences even for the fingers banging against the wall. And it had a weight of over 800 grams!
In 1975, the idea of reversing the curvature of the tip was born, in America with Forrest, in France with Simond. The “Chacal” came to life, with the reverse curved blade called “banana”, a shape which is still used today. The banana shape greatly helps penetration into the ice and at the same time allows excellent traction.
The Chacal blade had a complete set of teeth up to the shaft, but it also had some limitations: the first was its length, greater than Terrodactyl, but still too short to protect the climber's fingers, the second that the curvature was minimal and it was difficult to swing it in the ice and, once it was in, it was very difficult to extract it, the third that the thickness of the blade was too high and the material with which it was made was rather fragile, breaking frequently especially if used in torsion.
At the beginning of the 1980s, modular tools (Simond, Grivel, Stubai, Lowe) became popular, better said with replaceable blades and hammers / shovels.
In the early 1980s, Grivel took a step forward in this evolution with the Super Courmayeur, a system of interchangeable blades and accessories on the shafts. The system also includes the first forged, banana-shaped, interchangeable blade.
The forging process makes it possible to make thinner blades that break the ice less and enter more easily. They are less fragile and for the first time the curve of the banana is pushed to facilitate insertion and the blade is also lengthened by a few centimeters. Special care was also reserved for ease of extraction by increasing the curvature of the upper part of the blade and increasing the upper sharpening. Belays were often made on ice axes (screws were almost always the weak link in the system), which is why Grivel invented a blade with a very high top so that it can be hammered deeply using the hammer to create a secure anchor point.
Between the end of the 80s and the 90s, ice climbing evolved very rapidly, as did the equipment. The shafts begin to curve (but this is another story ...) and the blades have to respond to increasingly difficult technical requirements, for increasingly demanding climbs.
In the early 90s the blades were mostly flat or only with a slight central excavation, slightly longer than the reference Chacal, with homogeneous teeth (half-moons) which already represented the best compromise between holding and extraction.
In 1993 Grivel began to differentiate and specialize blades according to their use.
The Evolution was truly an "extreme" ice blade with a very elongated banana shape that was also called "proboscis", very low at the tip and very thin in the tip area for optimal penetration without breaking the ice. The tip was very low and very inclined, while the very short teeth at the tip gradually increased in height.
The Face Nord blade was instead more all-round, shorter and thicker with less aggressive teeth and therefore more suitable for "heavy" use for mountain climbs (e.g. north faces, mixed climbs).
In those years, however, the idea of the maximum lightness of the tools began to spread, to save fatigue on the arms, so all excess masses are eliminated by reducing the ice axes and blades to the bare minimum. The blades are hollowed out inside, assuming a “double T” profile that allows for further lightening without compromising strength.
In 1995, the Evolution blade was further excavated and lightened, in the meantime a new intermediate Goulottes blade was presented, thinner than the North Face, but shorter and higher than the Evolution. The latter remained the top, of a truly unique design, characterized by a clear change of curvature in the tip area to facilitate the insertion as much as possible: this point also became the critical point of the peck and often the blade bent (without breaking however) and could be straightened back.
Shortly afterwards, the tubular blade was added, with the aim of breaking the ice less, and which worked well especially on porous ice. An idea initially promoted by the Americans, mostly Lowe, and also transferred to the Alps: while almost all companies made straight tubular blades (obtained from a tube) Grivel proposed a forged tubular blade on a banana shape!
In 1997, the revolutionary "The Machine" ice axe was introduced, with two new blades: the Cascade and the Mixte, which replaced the previous ones.
The first one is a less extreme Evolution, higher at the tip, less bent and with softer teeth, the second a far thicker and heavier blade that also ends in the upper part with a wedge zone to facilitate the use in the cracks. A blade to be used on mixed routes but not performing well on ice.
A choice of super-specialization also dictated by the rapid development of the modern mix that was beginning in those years. Indoor training was also started with ice axes on artificial holds and, to avoid damaging them, in 2000 Grivel presented a plastic-coated Indoor blade:
later, the structures were differentiated and a plastic blade was no longer necessary. Pushed by ice climbing competitions, very pointed blades have been made to hook into the holds and create a better hook. This is how the real dry tooling and competition blades were born.
In the 2000s and beyond, the blades continued the path of specialization, which can be classified into:
1) pure ice blades: the thinnest ones, they are sharpened and have a specific shape and teeth to facilitate penetration into the ice and subsequent extraction. TOTAL ICE VARIO.
2) mountain and mixed blades: robust and multipurpose blades, suitable for use on mountain terrain where ice, rock and every possible combination of the two are found. ICE VARIO e ALPINE VARIO. KATANA ICE VARIO.
3) dry tooling and competition blades: these are robust and thick blades, designed for the typical hooks of dry tooling and competitions. Their hooked shape makes their use on ice problematic. TOTAL DRY VARIO e DRY PLUS.
The blades were initially obtained from recovering the steel of the old railway tracks, and later they were made with chromium-molybdenum alloys which were shaped by beating and forging to obtain the desired shape, then hardened with an artisan procedure, handed down as an art. If we analyze the evolution of ice climbing, the influence of the technological development of materials has been decisive for the progress of sports performance!
Today the blades are produced with industrialized operations and very high temperatures. Until the 1990s, low alloy nickel-chromium-molybdenum steels were used which were then tempered and found, but sometimes it still happened that some blades broke during use. Since the early 2000s the steels are supplied with very low phosphorus and sulphur, and today breaking a blade is a very rare.
For the blades of technical ice axes, we now use two types of production processes:
Forging: it is a hot plastic deformation of the metal, it allows to obtain very elaborate and three-dimensional shapes, it allows to vary the thicknesses on the same piece and substantially put the right amount of material in each section of the blade, lightening where it is subject to less load.
It allows to obtain elegant details such as embossed lettering and ribs of different thickness, different roughness on different portions of the nose and makes sharpening easier and more precise. The roughness derived from this process and the type of steel used, Nickel Chromium Molybdenum, are an advantage in the joints in cracks typical in the mountaineering use of the tools. The aesthetic qualities of a hot-forged piece make it an object that recalls an ancient art that has been handed down in Grivel for 7 generations. ICE VARIO, ALPINE VARIO, MIX BLADE
CNC shaping: starting from the highest quality material, the desired shape is extracted.
Since there is no deformation of the material during the production phases, it is possible to use materials with superior mechanical characteristics, i.e. micro-alloyed steels, obtaining thinner and more uniform blades along the entire section. The greatest value lies in the quality of the steel grain which is super-refined to guarantee the total absence of defects, systematically checked by ultrasound checks. TOTAL ICE VARIO e TOTAL DRY VARIO e DRY PLUS e IICE BLADE e ICE PLUS BLADE
The latest generation of Grivel blades is called KATANA, like the ancient Japanese swords with which they share some characteristics.
Japanese swords were produced starting from two steel plates, one with a high carbon content, the other in mild steel. The two plates were heated and joined by beating, they were then folded to obtain 4 layers, folded again to obtain 8 layers up to 15 successive folds, with which thousands of alternating steel layers are obtained. The alternation of the very thin layers balanced the characteristics of hardness (hard layers) and flexibility of the sword (mild steel layers).
Similarly, the steel of the Katana Grivel beaks is composed of a matrix where the alloy elements are micro-diffused, simulating, but in a more effective and repeatable way, the alternation of the layers of the ancient swords.
The result is a series of reliable and durable tips, paving the way for a new generation of tools and accessories available.
This is the logical choice for those who want a series of very performing blades, for very technical climbs or a demanding expedition, where re-sharpening on the wall can be complicated, or for those who simply want to play with the most advanced blades available today on the market.
High mechanical characteristics allow to reduce the thicknesses and keep low sections, lightened blades, weight moved forward, they are the ultimate weapon for the technical mixed climbing.
Katana series products: Katana Ice Vario, Katana G20 plus points, Katana G22 plus points.
]]>This is a story of a crazy adventure, which will excite you, it is a story of sharing and listening. It is not the story of a personal enterprise, but that of a group that grows, changes, interacts and reaches a goal. It is an unprecedented project in the Aosta Valley that has had results far beyond expectations.
"Flight! Zorba! I can fly! " he screamed euphorically from the vast gray sky.
The human stroked the cat's back.
“Well, cat. We did it,” he said with a sigh.
"Yes, on the edge of the abyss he understood the most important thing," Zorba meowed.
"Oh yes? And what did you understand? " asked the human.
"That only those who dare to fly, can fly"
Story of a seagull and the cat that taught her to fly, Luis Sepúlveda, 1996.
I'll tell you the story through the words of the guys who participated and continue to participate in the project.
Sepulveda's words were reported by one of them because they reflect the sensations that climbing generates.
“Climbing is to love, to love even that most difficult part when you are one step away from the finish line. The meaning of how fascinating an experience is, is found in ourselves, fatigue, fear, beauty, courage, happiness, lightheartedness, attention. All emotions that put together form freedom. "
Laura
“The hardest part is getting a map of what can be done. Realizing that you can do it is wonderful. That hand that slowly comes out of the bag, tied to the waist with a thread, and rests on the bare rock…. with trembling feet, the hand finds a foothold: three fingers ensure the next step. Climbing is observation, research and balance.
Gio
“With your feet on the ground and your head turned upwards looking at the top of the wall, it seems impossible to get there. But when you start putting your first foot on the hold and then start climbing, you realize that climbing is possible. One foot after another, one hand in front of the other, the finish line is getting closer and closer. The effort is rewarded by the satisfaction of having succeeded and when you can let go you feel light.
Ada
This is how the “Safe Prospects” Project was born, as a therapeutic and educational offer for adolescents and young adults in charge of the Mental Health Department of Aosta who have a disability linked to mental health and psychological distress that often places them in situations of marginalization, discrimination and stigmatization.
There are many re-educational aspects, and climbing is part of the path undertaken, because it can lead children to recognize their own limits and abilities. A path that we athletes face every day, but which for the rest of the world is not obvious.
From the first moment for us Mountain Guides it was not all for granted, the boys are used to talking about their problems and also to make fun of themselves, and we were not prepared to make irony about their weaknesses, which we are not required to know. The first lesson on knots that can be done with ropes and their correct use was striking! Because you hang your waist from a rope, but you can also hang it by the neck, and not figuratively!
The Guides then embarked on training days with the educators and the psychiatrist who follows the group, to better clarify the dynamics and objectives of the climbing sessions. We understood that children must regain possession of normality, of themselves, and pass from what is seen as a limit at first, to acceptance and understanding of the problem through the gesture of climbing, returning to a situation of mastery of their own life, in a happy and carefree way.
But we went back to doing exactly the same work we do with all customers, but working in synergy with other professionals. Together with the educators, we are also able to get the psychiatrists to climb, who, sweaty and tired, have created the engine that climbing gives children, as if to say: from theory to practice. A naturalistic guide for excursions also worked on the mountain therapy project.
For the rest, the course was held, like any climbing group, with people more motivated than others, but the objectives were achieved for everyone: self-knowledge, control of emotions, management of stress and fear, but also of fatigue.
The results, after 15 meetings on the climbing wall and in natural gyms, in the space of a year were: the halving of hospitalizations and the reduction of therapy as needed.
Following this result, the Valle d'Aosta region decided to fund the project continuously for the following years from 2019.
And today in the days of the Corona Virus I motivate the boys via whatsapp, with small exercises that form the training day by day, to feel good about themselves and they send me super motivated videos, each in his/her own way, each in his/her style, ready to show that they give the best of themselves.From this January we started working on another project with autistic children, taken individually or in pairs. The first time the boys, fearful of physically entering the climbing wall and starting, were taken by the hand and after a while, tied to the rope, already climbing a few meters, they immediately expressed an unexpected desire to communicate the emotions they felt, overcoming the handicap of the disease and someone did not even want to stop!
The mountain has given me so much, and sometimes it is worth looking back and giving back what it has given me.
Anna Torretta
The names are fictitious, the boys involved in the “Safe Prospects” project were 18, 9 girls and 9 boys, aged 16 to 28. The mountain guide Max Gianchini worked with me.
Anna Torretta, Coumayeur - Italy, 49 years old, mountain guide since 2000, first and only female member of the Courmayeur Alpine Guides Association.
The Alaska Range is a vast wilderness and home to some of the most dramatic mountain terrain in the world. Even the ‘walk-up’ routes here all require a level of commitment not found in many Ranges. The access options to this mountain arena are: 1) walk for two weeks, 2) take a ski plane into the range. I have personally only used option two! While you stand on the glacier and watch the plane fly away, it’s hard to not have a slight sinking feeling in your stomach. At that point you want to be confident you have the right gear with you for your expedition.
One of the most dreamed of features in this range is the ‘Mooses Tooth’. Many climbers set their sights on the ‘Ham and Eggs’ (WI4M4 1000 Meters) route for their first technical route in the range. The route is continually engaging, although never overly difficult. With an accessible grade and being an incredibly aesthetic line it is deserving of its popularity. I have had the pleasure of guiding this route four times.
Pitch eight is the crux of the route. The climber has the choice of an 80-degree ice pitch that is often rotten and/or delaminated, or a short section of mixed climbing to the right. Although the mixed pitch looks intimidating it protects well, and is on solid granite. I think it’s a much more enjoyable and generally safer option.
Since the route features 18 pitches of climbing and an exposed, heavily corniced summit ridge moving quickly through the terrain is paramount. The descent route is the same as the climbing route, so making sure you have an efficient rappel system is very important for a reasonable one-day round trip from the Root canal glacier.
GRIVEL GEAR
a) G22 crampon: A solid lightweight crampon that provides stable footing on long ice routes.
b) North Machine Carbon: My choice for moderate ice and mixed terrain. Light weight and easy to hammer with for pitons.
c) Grivel double spring leash: Nice security for when dropping an ice tool is not an option.
d) Grivel Duetto Helmet: Very light helmet that is rated for both a climb and ski fall. I am often skiing as well on my Alaska expeditions. This allows me to just bring one helmet.
e) Grivel Plume quickdraw: easy to clip carabiners with gloves on.
f) Twin Gate Carabiners: Plume Twin Gate K3G is my favorite cold weather carabiner: it never freezes shut, and I can easily open it with heavy gloves on. Sigma K8G is a great all-rounder, very safe and practical.
g) Master Pro belay device: The increased friction mode is very helpful on thin icy ropes.
h) Helix ice screw: Simple and effective ice screw.
i) Neck Gaiter: very useful for combating the heavy spindrift usually encountered on this route.
OTHER GEAR
2x60 meter ropes
light double boots or very warm single boots
synthetic puffy jacket
sunglasses (not overly dark, since you are in a shaded cleft)
2-3 pairs of Gloves ranging from thin to very warm
Cams and stoppers
Alan Rousseau, 34 years old, living in Salt Lake City, Utah. As an IFMGA/UIAGM, mountain guide Alan works near his home in winter, Alaska in the spring, and Chamonix during the summer months. Helping people to progress their skills in the mountains, and climb things they would not be able to otherwise is what has kept him excited about guiding for over a decade. Alan has completed major first ascents in the Alaska Range and Himalayas, and has been awarded a 2020 Piolet D'or for climbing the west face of Tengi Ragi Tau. His favorite grivel products : Dark Machine, G20+, plume twin gate carabiner, ghost axe
]]>
Most alpine climbs in the North Cascades require a long approach, snow and glacier travel, followed by simul-climbing or soloing long stretches of easy rock, some technical rock climbing to get to the summit of the objective, and then a long descent down. A typical day is ~22-30km and 2000-3000 meters of vertical elevation gain. That means you need a lot of gear. Rock gear, glacier travel gear, ice gear… it starts adding up, and honestly, I’d rather bring an extra chocolate bar than heavy or unnecessary gear.
I personally choose to do a lot of these climbs car-to-car instead of camping out for several days. This means I am obsessed with keeping the weight of my gear low and making sure my kit is dialed in so I’m only bringing items that are necessary, multi-functional and add to my margin of safety.
Below is my gear kit that I bring with me on most alpine climbs in the area. It’s light, efficient and I have everything I need depending on what I’ll encounter, from glacier travel to chossy rock ridges and steep crack climbs. I interchange some pieces depending on the objective, but this is my go-to:
A) Trail Three Poles: My favorite, lightweight and easily-stowable poles. I love these so much I even wrote up a gear review about them
B) Radical Light 21 Pack: Lightweight with full functionality and easy to stow an ice axe and everything I need. Easily packs all of my gear and any extras
C)Stealth Helmet: Light and functional
D)Mistral Harness: Super lightweight and great for glacier travel and moving fast where you’re simul-climbing most of the climbs
E) Chalk Bag: Everything you need in a chalk bag. Has a zipper pocket where I often stow a hand warmer if it gets super cold
F)Ghost Evo Ice Axe w/ Trigger: Super lightweight and functional. Swings well with the trigger and is all you need for lower angle ice up to WI3 on approaches.
G)Air Tech Light Crampons: So light your feet feel like there’s barely anything on them! Very secure.
H)Plume K3W carabiners / Alpine Ring slings: Beautiful colors in gold/black and functional
I)Masterpro belay device and Mega K6N biner: My go-to multi-functional device for belays and rappels
J)Plume Nut K3N locking carabiners: My absolute favorite carabiners of all time. So incredibly light yet strong. I always carry a couple extras of these.
Beal Gully 70m Rope 7.3mm
Unparallel Up Rise Zero LV Climbing shoes
Katadyn Befree Water Filtration System 1.0L
TruWild Hydrate Amino Acids & Electrolytes
Silva Headlamp
Totems & Camalots
Garmin Inreach Mini
Sunglasses, sunscreen, tape, pain medication
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
The Radical Light 21 pack fits everything (and then some). It’s comfortable on the shoulders even though it packs down into nothing. It climbs well, has lots of strategic pockets, an ice axe attachment system and generally is very well designed with an alpine/ice climber’s needs in mind.
Natalie Afonina is a mountaineer and adventurer based in Seattle, WA. Originally from Russia, she has a penchant for longer aesthetic ice routes, singing Beyonce playlists and sharing behind-the-scenes stories to inspire all the “weekend warriors” out there. When he's not out exploring or organizing a project, he works in the robotics industry developing autonomous systems and other frontier technologies.
Her favorite Grivel products are The Dark Machines, G20 Plus crampons and Plume Nut K3N carabiners. Get in touch with her on Instagram or www.natexploring.com
In December 2019, the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage met in Bogotá (Colombia) and decided to inscribe Alpinism on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity of UNESCO.
For more information, see: https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/alpinism-01471
For Grivel, alpinism is the “founding father”. It inspires us on new products and it makes our heart beat.
We want to celebrate this historical achievement with a series of videos to share some of the emotions that alpinism can convey, to all of us, alpinists and non-alpinists alike. To make you dream!
Alpinism is made of many activities, on rocky or icy terrain, involving physical, technical and intellectual abilities, using appropriate techniques, equipment and highly specific tools.
With each episode, we want to celebrate a particular activity within the realm of alpinism.
Here is “Episode 3: Mountain Climbing”, enjoy!
]]>
Is the soloist in the big wall alone? Yes and no.
Of course, there is no partner, but before leaving, he packs equipment, that he chooses with care, as other choose a climbing partner. No wonder, that on the wall, he often personifies carabiners, ice axes and crampons. It is similar with me and I must admit, that I even talk with my gear sometimes. Of course, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the biners speak to me, although sometimes, I get the impression they listen and with silent, steel patience.
During the autumn climbs on El Capitan, expeditions to Baffin Island, Trango Tower and Troll Wall, but also in the local Scottish Mountains, I have been accompanied by Grivel equipment for almost 10 years. Ice axes, crampons, carabiners and pitons are like arms, legs, hands and feet adapted for climbing.
Well, I admit that every season I look for some new products, innovations and inspirations. The development of equipment allows for creative expansion of possibilities, facilitation of wall life and taking on new challenges in climbing. Of course, I do not expect that the biners from the new Grivel collection will start to talk to me, but I can give one of many example of how innovation affects a climbing style: the Vlad biner makes easier to build a natural belay, which allows me to avoid drilling, which in turn will solve a painful problem in terms of a climbing ethic. This is the thing I expect from a hardware brand with climbing spirit and I get it from Grivel.
I've been trying to climb without drilling for years. Each of us climbs in our own chosen style, which is a specific kind of a hallmark, a signature of our individuality. We leave traces in mountains and on walls, where someday others will come and get to know us through our routes and climbs. The climbing I chose is: solo, alpine big wall and mixt winter. The mountains and walls I have visited and love to climb are: Yosemite, Baffin Island, Karakorum (Great Trango Tower), Romsdal (Troll Wall), Scottish Mountains, Tatra Mountains. Climbing with a Grivel gear, I left behind some hallmarks named: Superbalance (Polar Sun Spire), Bushido (Great Trango Tower), Katharsis (Troll Wall), MantraMandala (Ship’s Prow), Secret of Silence (ship’s Prow) and the list is not closed… I hope the virus will go away and we all be back on our climbing path soon.
In the meantime, the last days news: I built a climbing wall in my garden and just ordered a new Grivel Trend Crash Pad😊
My favorite Grivel equipment:
Ice Axes:
Tech Machine
Crampons:
Ice Protection:
Biners, Draws and Slings:
Alpha K1S – Perfect oval profile for aid climbing,
Climbing Devices:
Rock Protection:
Sabre 705
Rocket 70
Stiletto 503
Helmets:
Packs, Bags and Pads:
Climbing Chalk Bag
As a climber, I was born in Polish Tatra Mountains, then I grew up in Alps and Himalayas. My true love is solo and big wall climbing, which I started to do in Yosemite. I do not just climb big walls, I move and live there, breathing in the rhythm of walls. Climbing fascinates me; the intensity of experience, the variety of nature on the mountainside, the challenges, the loneliness, the friendships, and the way that people can be overcome by their climbing passion and adventures.
]]>In December 2019, the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage met in Bogotá (Colombia) and decided to inscribe Alpinism on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity of UNESCO.
For more information, see: https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/alpinism-01471
For Grivel, alpinism is the “founding father”. It inspires us on new products and it makes our heart beat.
We want to celebrate this historical achievement with a series of videos to share some of the emotions that alpinism can convey, to all of us, alpinists and non-alpinists alike. To make you dream!
Alpinism is made of many activities, on rocky or icy terrain, involving physical, technical and intellectual abilities, using appropriate techniques, equipment and highly specific tools.
With each episode, we want to celebrate a particular activity within the realm of alpinism.
Here is “Episode 2: Rock Climbing”, enjoy!
]]>
The route
This magnificent ridge with the legendary name, has a profile engraved in the sky. The atmosphere of this route makes it a dream route.
The climb is long and continuous, it has a few slopes and welcoming shoulders for bivouacking. But also athletic and aerial parts.
Its 1200m vertical drop makes it one of the biggest climbs in the Mont Blanc massif.
Welzenback, Brendel and Ottoz points have 5c passages.
The descent of the normal route is complex.
Karl Brendel and Hermann Schaller marked the history of mountaineering on August 26th and 27th, 1930, by climbing this impressive ridge.
Here is a strategy:
Night departure from Camping Aiguille Noire (Matteo Pellin offers a very good advice).
Access to the Borelli bivouac and approach at night in 3 hours.
Start climbing at dawn and climb up to the summits of Pointe Brendel or Biche, where there are very good bivouacs (with snow in the correct years).
Leave early the next day to enjoy the summit and especially to have time for the descent which is long and complex. (Summit-parking between 5 and 1 p.m.)
Enjoy as much as you can and have a beautiful adventure.
MY GEAR
GRIVEL GEAR
a. Ghost Hammer : Lightweight and efficient for a snow approach, and useful to re-hammer the pitons.
b. Air tech light : Light and efficient for an approach in snow. The weight of the gear is so important in a big route.
c. Clepsydra S : At the head of the belay for my second.
d. Sigma K8G : To block my rings on the harness.
e. Mega K6N and Mega K6G : Classic and efficient in all situations.
f. Magic Ring :For small, secure rappels without adding a carabiner.
g. Plume and Plume Captive quickdraws : Lightweight and effective, mainly in long size to avoid drag.
h. Plume K3W : On each of my cams.
i. Master pro : Belaying and abseiling
j. Alpine ring: very useful in climbing and at the belay
k. Stealth: The perfect helmet; light, robust, beautiful.
l. Trend harness: Pretty, light and comfortable.
m. Alpine pro backpack : volume and comfort to carry all the bivouac gear.
n. Winter Hat :It's cold in the evening and in the morning!
Other GEAR
Cams
50-meter rope
Stove
Water bottle
Food
Mattress
Sleeping bag
Route: Lion Ridge (Italian normal route)
The route
The Lion Ridge is the queen of normal routes: it is never easy nor banal, it is simply unique.
It is a classic mountaineering climb where progression is almost always by walking on a rope except on the more demanding passages where a few pitches are required.
The most demanding sections have been equipped with fixed ropes since the time of the first ascent and there is a lot of gear on the route (bolts, stops, pitons, etc.). The presence of this gear on site does not lower the technical level of the climb.
The route can be covered in one day starting from the Duca degli Abruzzi refuge located at an altitude of 2885 m. or in two days staying overnight at the Carrel hut located at 3835 m. In total, the climb has a positive vertical ascent of about 1600 meters.
Although on paper the difficulties may appear simple, never underestimate this climb. The climb always takes place on a very severe high mountain terrain where exposure to emptiness and the difficulty in finding the right way are the masters. In addition, the difficulties can vary greatly depending on the conditions of the mountain and the weather.
MY GEAR
GRIVEL GEAR
a. Air Tech Crampon: its short but very aggressive and manageable points are the best for climbing easily on mixed terrain where we find both rock and snow. Just like on the Lion ridge.
b. Ghost Evo Ice Axe: an ice axe is not always necessary on the Matterhorn, but when conditions require it, it is perfect. Aggressive and precise but at the same time so light that it doesn't seem to have it in your backpack.
c. Mistral harness: it allows maximum mobility and the best possible comfort. All this combined with maximum safety.
d. Stealth helmet: for years, it has been my inseparable climbing partner, I put it on in the morning and forget all day that I wore it.
e. 3 Mega K6N carabiners: on the Matterhorn the anchors have very large attachment points (cemented eyebolts), and this carabiner allows you to work easily at any time.
f. 1 Magic Ring: a small firend that can be useful in many situations, both on adjusting the lenght while walking on a rope and rappelling.
g. 2 Alpine ring (120 cm): two comfortable rings that allow us to quickly create an anchor and more.
h. 2 Plume K3W carabiners: small and light, I have them on the rings.
i. 1 Master Pro with 2 Alpha K1N carabiners: this is my standard belay kit and I have it with me on all mountaineering routes.
j. Radical Light backpack: practical and light, if it is used correctly it can easily carry all the gear you need to climb the Matterhorn.
k. 1 neck gaiter: always useful and versatile, almost with no weight
OTHER GEAR
1 Gore-Tex jacket
1 down jacket
1 lightweight fleece
1 pair of mountaineering pants
1 wool hat
1 headband
1 pair of thin gloves (preferably in leather)
1 pair of thick gloves (preferably in leather)
1 headlamp
1 30-meter rope
1 medical kit
1 pair of cat. 4 sunglasses
1 pair of Mountain boots
1 water bottle
Last but not least, a lot of determination and a good adventure companion.
With the right gear and these elements, your adventure on the "Noble Rock of Europe" can begin! Happy climbing and good fun to all of you.
François Cazzanelli, born in 1990 and based in Cervinia (Italy), is part of the Grivel team since when he was a child. Mountain Guide, mountaineer and member of Società Guide del Cervino since 2012, he collected many extra-European expeditions, from Patagonia to Himalayas, to the unknown massifs of Sichuan, opening many new routes. Favorite Grivel product: North Machine Carbon ice axes.
]]>The dominant thought at the time was that there was nothing more to say and invent about this category. We didn't believe it, and we worked hard to bring innovation to these products, exploring new tracks and looking for new solutions to old problems.
Maybe we have too many solutions now, so here is a short guide to find your way in our world.
1) HMS carabiners, that is, with a broad symmetric base
They are mainly used for anchoring on the V of the belay, having space for braking devices (plates) and other carabiners. Very useful for using the Munter hitch and for rope maneuvers in general.
The GRIVEL proposals:
Read here the opinions of our team.
2) Wide asymmetric carabiners
These are carabiners to be used to connect the rope to the harness (e.g. multiple parties on glacier, climbing in top-rope).
Also very useful when parked for self-belay with rope and clove hitch. If used with devices, they tend to bring them closer to the wall thanks to their asymmetry.
The GRIVEL proposals:
Read here the opinions of our team.
3) Medium asymmetric carabiners
These are carabiners to be used as personal anchors ends, to be hooked to the belay points to create a connection and also for rope-harness attachment
The GRIVEL proposals:
Read here the opinions of our team.
4) Small asymmetric carabiners
These are carabiners of minimum weight and dimensions, which make them very versatile for different uses, from clipping to the belay points to create connection, at the end of the lanyards. Very interesting when every gram counts.
The GRIVEL proposals:
Read here the opinions of our team.
5) Carabiners to be used at the waist to belay with a device (tube, gri-gri etc.)
They are ideal carabiners for securing the braking device to the harness, because they remain in position avoiding to rotate and / or go sideways (cross-loading phenomenon).
The GRIVEL proposals:
Read here the opinions of our team.
6) Special carabiners
These are carabiners with specific characteristics, or that combine particular functions.
GRIVEL solutions
DAMIEN TOMASI (France)
The safest HMS carabiner… The Twin Gate system lets you know that the carabiner is always securely closed!
FERNANDO FERREIRA (France)
I use it on long routes for all the manipulations which require a fixed security, to anchor myself, to block a rope, a bag ... and in crags for the installation of the top-ropes.
It offers almost absolute security, impossible to open without "human" manipulation, with 200% confidence.
ALAN ROUSSEAU (USA)
I use this as my carabiner to belay and rappel with. The round stock helps to feed rope smoothly.
ANNA TORRETTA (Italia)
It always pairs with the master pro and Delta k5N, when I use it in taking in, to belay the second. An indispensable tool for long routes in the mountains. I use it both in summer on multi-pitch routes, and in winter on ice falls. The Twin Gate closure is synonymous with security. I take a moment longer to put it on, but then I don't have to think about anything other than climbing. With practice you learn easily use it with one hand.
HERVE BARMASSE (Italia)
I always use it when on classic routes with customers, such as the normal route to the Matterhorn and the use of the munter hitch is essential.
I especially like the wide base, the low weight, the versatility.
TOMAS ROY AGUILO (Argentina)
While alpine climbing, my harness has at least 3 of these carabiners!
They are very light, comfortable to use with the MASTER PRO device, and to make different knots in it, due to their spaciousness.
ALEX PITTIN (France)
I use it in climbing and mountaineering. I love its resistance to wear the quality of the screw, perfect for munter hitch.
LUCA ROLLI (Italia)
It is my favorite carabiner mounted on my personal anchor tied at the waist to the harness. On ski mountaineering tours, mountaineering, and multipitch climbing the speed of use of this carabiner makes it a "must" in use with or without gloves. Unbeatable!
I especially like its handling and solidity of construction.
DENIS TRENTO (Italia)
I use it for classic mountaineering, guide work, multi-pitch climbing, solo climbing.
Functionality and reliability are the characteristics that make it a perfect carabiner for rope maneuvers.
CHARLOTTE BARRE (France)
I use this carabiner on multi-pitch routes as a master carabiner on the belay but also while climbing ridge to belay or take-in the second with a munter hitch.
I love its maneuverability, its pear shape for the ease of sliding the rope (munter hitch) and the large capacity for the connection of several elements.
RICCARDO OLLIVERI (Italia)
I use it to secure myself on belays, both on long routes and icefalls. Ideal in geometries, a handy and space-saving carabiner. Pleasant to feel in hand, aesthetically impeccable.
FRANCOIS CAZZANELLI (Italy)
I use it in all my climbs as a climber and as a mountain guide both in winter and in summer. I find it practical and precise in all rope maneuvers.
LOUIS LAURENT (France)
I use it for belaying my clients at belays and for abseiling. I especially like its round and smooth shape which favors the sliding of the rope.
MANU CORDOVA (Spain)
It is a carabiner that I always carry in my harness. I use it for everything, usually as the central point of the belay. I love its size!
ANGELIKA RAINER (Italy)
I use it as a main carabiner on the belay and combined with the Master Pro to belay on long routes. I feel very comfortable with its rounded shape
TINC FINDIK (Turkey)
I use it in all forms of alpinism: on icefalls, on trad multi pitch rock climbs and in extreme altitude.
I like many of its features: the classic thick pear shape facilitates using italian hitch knot (HMS knot) for rappel or belaying on an emergency, even if you drop your rappel device; the quality of manufacturing and the colors; its ease of operation. Furthermore, the classic screw lock is smooth to operate, though it can freeze in extreme cold or come unlocked if you do not control often.
Overall it is a very strong main work carabiner for the climber.
SILVIA LOREGGIAN (Italy)
I use it at the belay center to attach all the other carabiners that we need (those for belaying the various components of the team, for the tube / plate, the haul bag, etc.).
Perfect for munter hitch on short ropes.
I like its wide shape, it is the perfect carabiner for sliding the ropes well with the munter hitch knot and for other uses that require a large size.
DANILO CALLEGARI (Italy)
I use it on my daisy chain and for belaying. I especially like its curvature and amplitude.
SILVESTRO FRANCHINI (Italia)
An HMS carabiner is ALWAYS present in my rack. Its shape and traditional screw-gate are perfect for building a munter hitch or a clove hitch. The quality of the materials combined with its lightness make this carabiner among the best on the market
BORIS LORENCIC (Slovenia)
I mostly use it for belaying and rappeling. A real classic between carabiners and a great replacement for classic screw carabiners! This is the first carabiner I came across with the Twin-Gate system, which convinced me right away with its usability and safety. It is always locked when closed, what more could a climber want ?! There is always enough space in it for all ropes, slings and carabiners. I mostly use it for belaying and rappeling.
TOMAS ROY AGUILO (Argentina)
I use it in sport climbing and multi-pitch climbing, with friends or clients.
Once you get used to it, they're easy to open and close with one hand, and most of all, it's a way to make sure the carabiners are always closed!
MANU CORDOVA (Spain)
The truth is that this carabiner always goes on my harness. I carry it with my belayer / descender.
I really like the Twin Gate system since I can never forget to close it, it also seems to me that it is a perfect size for use with the insurer in any condition, be it summer or winter, since it handles very well.
DAVID DIETRICH (Austria)
I use it for belaying, rappelling and building rescue pulleys.
Its best feature is the super-safe twin-gate closing system.
CRITIAN DORIGATTI (Italia)
I often use it for HIGH-LINE (high slack-line). Several times I went to try and see people slackline at heights of more than 100 meters with slings etc., and having carabiner without screw and various obstructions that acts as a ring that runs smoothly through the slackline is the best you can ask for. I really like its shape.
ANDRA LANFRI (Italia)
I use this carabiner in the daisy chain during rappelling to create an excellent brake-descender, or while belaying the climber going as first.
The classic pear shape has the right space to slide the rope in all the necessary maneuvers.
Thanks to the new locking system, screwing is not necessary, this carabiner eliminates the problem of accidental opening. It is therefore very safe and fast.
SOPHIE LAVAUD (Switzerland)
I use this carabiner combined with the 2x8 or MasterPro essentially in the Himalayas for rappelling or belaying. I love its size is well suited for handling with large gloves. The fact that it is large allows it to be well held in the hand and it is an extra safety, very important.
DAVID DIETRICH (Austria)
I use it for lightweight mountaineering for belaying and rappelling.
Its best feature is the wire-to-wire Twin-Gate system, which makes it super safe to operate.
]]>
RICCARDO OLLIVERI (Italia)
I use it to create bomb-proof anchors on all types of terrain. Light and not bulky, ideal for semi-mobile progression anchors on rock and ice.
GIAMPAOLO CORONA (Italia)
I use it for climbing in the mountains both at belays and to belay. I especially love its lightness and ergonomics in use.
MANU CORDOVA (Spain)
It is always in my "kit", I always carry two as carabiners for the belay. I love how light they are.
STEVE HOUSE (USA)
This is the twin-gate biner I use the most and the one I have given to many of my guide friends to introduce them to the twin-gate concept. I choose this biner with people who do know yet understand or recognize the benefits of twin-gate carabiners because it is very easy to use and the shape is great in a wide variety of situations. I personally use this carabiner for attaching myself to the anchor on a multi-pitch or alpine climb. I love that there is no screw-gate to freeze and become inoperable in winter or stormy climbing. The size makes it really easy to handle with gloves on and the strength is very high. A great, secure, all-use twin gate carabiner.
FRANCOIS CAZZANELLI (Italia)
I use it to create progression anchors or to secure myself or to belay my clients. When using it, there is no need to recheck it during the course of the activity. When closed, the twin gate closing system leaves no possibility of error.
LOUIS LAURENT (France)
I use it in an icefall to secure myself at the belay. Thanks to the automatic locking system, no more problems with the screw freezing.
BORIS LORENCIC (Slovenia)
Jackpot among locking carabiners ;) This carabiner will convince everyone. The gate-wire combination makes it really easy to use. It is lightweight, large and essential when climbing. As with all Twin-Gate carabiners - safety first!!
FERNANDO FERREIRA (France)
I use it on long routes for all the manipulations which require a fixed security, to anchor myself, to block a rope, a bag ... and in crags for the installation of the top-ropes.
It offers almost absolute security, impossible to open without "human" manipulation, with 200% confidence.
ANDREA LANFRI (Italia)
Safety carabiner used to secure myself at the belay. Practical both in progression and in descent, fast and safe without the risk of forgetting the open screw.
I love its fast and practical opening, very light without compromising safety and resistance. It does not require the classic screwing operation, also avoiding all those accidental openings that can occur.
ANNA TORRETTA (Italia)
It is always attached to my harness together with the Prussik lanyard, on glaciers and on long routes. I use it in progression on glaciers and on short rope terrain, as a point of union between the rope and the harness. I use it in rappelling as a self-locking safety device.
I love security for wire-lock closure, lightness, minimal dimensions, but also robustness in a micro-carabiner.
EMRIK FAVRE (Italia)
I mainly use it as a carabiner for the marchard in the high mountains. It never opens, it is comfortable, light and has a high load. So it can always come in handy.
PABLO CRIADO (Spain)
I use it to move around rooftops, anchored to provisional lifelines, certain that it won't open in any position. bomb proof insurance !!!
It is easy to put on and impossible to accidentally open. In risky jobs it is for sure a 10 out of 10.
LUCA SCHIERA (Italia)
I often use it to belay at the crag. It's quick to open and close and you can't go wrong, it works well on both the belay loop and the device.
GENIS ZAPATER (Spain)
It is my carabiner for belay devices or to work with ropes. It is a light and safe carabiner. And when you learn the manipulation to open the door of the carabiner it is the fastest and most reliable.
]]>
Tomas Roy Aguilo (Argentina)
I have used the VLAD in wall maneuvers, even in real rescue situations, where comfort is necessary when working on the belay / anchorage.
It is very versatile, as it has three anchor points, and also the twin-gate system prevents the gate from being locked when loading the carabiner too much, as it sometimes happens with “screw gate” carabiners. It is also very light.
EMRIK FAVRE (Italia)
I always use it in multi-pitch routes or in mountain rescue practices. It is a carabiner simple to use and being with 3 attachment points it allows me to always have a tidy belay and therefore easier to manage.
FERNANDO FERREIRA (France)
I use it for multi-pitch climbing and mountaineering with belays. It offers a perfect distribution of the handling of ropes at the level of the belay, to clip-in, to belay … it offers a clear visibility of all the maneuvers in progress, therefore increased security, and easy to set up which allows better management of the belay, especially for a rope party of 3.
PABLO CRIADO (Spain)
I use it when I work as a firefighter in a rescue situation or to keep the auxiliary ropes organized, with very little gear, allowing me to work quickly and safely.
Simple and effective. Multiple functions in one.
GENIS ZAPATER (Spain)
I use it especially at belays or when we have multiple ropes in rescues or large loads.
To work, you always have the ropes and carabiners in order. For inexperienced clients or climbers, it helps them understand and not bundle ropes and loads. Also to multiply weights when you rescue from crevasses, walls or to haul bags.
]]>
ALEX PITTIN (France)
I mainly use it in mountaineering. Its lightness is its main strength.
HERVE BARMASSE (Italia)
It is absolutely the screw-lock carabiner that I always carry with me, on any terrain.
I love its lightness, size and easy handling.
ANGELIKA RAINER (Italia)
I use it to build the belay and to carry equipment to the harness on long routes or waterfalls. I love its lightness!
CHARLOTTE BARRE (France)
I use this carabiner for all long routes that require a lot of equipment and where it is better to be light. Its lightness is its greatest strength!
DAMIEN TOMASI (France)
For those who think that weight is the number 1 enemy of climbers and mountaineers!
EMRIK FAVRE (Italy)
I use it in the mountains when I need small and light carabiners that guarantee safety. I especially appreciate its lightness, compactness and versatility.
LUCA SCHIERA (Italia)
I mainly use it on long routes to secure myself and build belays. It is light and the small size allows you to snap the hard-to-reach pitons.
TUNC FINDIK (Turkey)
I use it on long alpine traditional rock climbing routes and also at extremely high altitudes, at 7000 and 8000m+ peaks.
I like mostly its extremely lightweight, almost you cannot say you have it with you or not! Where in long alpine wall climbs it is important to carry a certain amount, with less total weight, this item is excellent for use at forming belay anchors or connecting yourself to the belay. Also on climbs of extreme altitude you must carry less items with more functions, where this item is excellent. I use it at the rope end of my daisy chain..in altitude one needs a few pieces of extremely light, reliable locking karabiners like this. The screw lock is easy to operate and does not freeze easily.
The tapered D-shape keeps the knots and rope in fine direction i.e. away from the lock and gate.
The keyhole hanger does not snag while operating. It offers a lot of imaginable uses in alpine climbing. Its gate opening is better than many comparable items. It is really a tough small sized carabiner.
ANDREA LANFRI (Italia)
I use it in all situations where a fixed anchor is required, to create a belay or with a descender together with a lanyard and a marchad knot while rappelling on a double rope.
A classic carabiner with a very light, small and practical screw closure especially where there is little space on the belay.
SOPHIE LAVAUD (Switzerland)
I use it in the Himalayas in addition to the A&D at the end of the safety lanyard on the fixed ropes.
It is compact and light, easy to clip and unclip even with large gloves or mittens.
SILVIA LOREGGIAN (Italia)
I use it mainly on fixed belays on ice, to be passed in the screw. I always keep it in the harness with the Machard ready for use. Also to attach the haul bag to the recovery rope.
I really like its lightness, the small size and the softness of the screw-gate closure but at the same time its effectiveness (it never flows back by itself).
LUCA ROLLI (Italia)
I always use it in mountaineering or multipitch climbing. It is often necessary to use lanyards to lengthen the fast protections, if the pitch on mixed terrain or on rock is not exactly in axis. I often keep ready-made 80cm shoulder lanyards with Plume Nut K3N: this carabiner is light and the screw-gate is an additional safety in the event of a fall!
Lightness is its main strength.
GENIS ZAPATER (Spain)
I always use it! For belays, to belay ... for everything!
I love its lightness, small size and versatility! It works like any other carabiner!
]]>
ANGELIKA RAINER (Italia)
I always use it to belay with the Grigri at the crag. Its safety is its best feature.
FRANCOIS CAZZANELLI (Italia)
It is my inseparable climbing partner at the crag. With this carabiner just a click and safety is guaranteed one hundred percent. When using it, there is no need to recheck it during the course of the activity. When closed, the twin gate closing system leaves no possibility of error.
DAVID DIETRICH (Austria)
I use it as an always-on-the-harness carabiner for lightweight mountaineering.
Its best feature is the small wire that keeps it in place and prevents it from twisting.
SILVIA LOREGGIAN (Italia)
I use it for the belay device at the crag and for tying up the clients on a glacier rope.
I like its inability to open and the fact that thanks to the small wire and its flattened shape on one side it always remains in position at the harness ring without ever turning around.
TUNC FINDIK (Turkey)
I use it on alpine rock walls, single or multi pitch climbing and also sport climbing applications- belaying and rappelling. The carabiner is always aligned on its best direction while belaying and rappelling, on single rope or double ropes. Cannot cross load it on its weak axis even if you try hard. The gate lock is foolproof, in other words cannot accidentally open. Very safe, on my opinion the safest karabiner to use. The shape and thickness facilitates using italian hitch knot (HMS knot) for rappel or belaying on an emergency, even if you drop your rappel device. It is easy to operate the gate lock when you get used to the general layout of the carabiner, but this needs some practise of course. The quality of manufacturing and colors are very nice, anodization is strong, does not wear off easily. This is a very tough carabiner, beefy, bombproof and strong!
PABLO CRIADO (Spain)
It is my main carabiner in the firefighter's pants, anchored to my central point of the harness, always in position, to anchor myself to life lines, or with the Grivel Daisy Chain
It is the ideal size to handle even with gloves, position ok at all times. Reliability.
ANNA TORRETTA (Italia)
I always use it at the crag paired with the "gri-gri".
I love the small size, the safety of the Twin Gate closure, and the inability to position itself incorrectly. A carabiner that should become a must alongside the "gri-gri".
GIAMPAOLO CORONA (Italy)
I use it for sport climbing at the crag. Its best feature is the safety of the closure.
CRISTIAN DORIGATTI (Italia)
The carabiner par excellence for speed climbing (I used it a lot in training before having automatic winders). I love its comfort. There are no parts of the carabiner that protrude from the "line" of the shape. It looks like a unique piece with no shape defects.
DANILO CALLEGARI (Italy)
I use it to belay at the gym and at the crag.
I especially like its safety and the clean use with belay devices on the harness.
STEVE HOUSE (USA)
This is the carabiner I use for belaying sport climbing. Very secure and very functional. I never have to worry if my belayer has locked the carabiner holding the belay device (usually a Grigri)
It is super secure: if it is closed, it is locked. And the features ensure the carabiner is always oriented in the correct way and it cannot cross-load.
DAMIEN TOMASI (France)
The directional carabiner with the Twin Gate system allows you to always have the belay system in place, always well positioned and above all, in a closed carabiner. Also ideal for roping on glaciers.
ALEX PITTIN (France)
I use it all the time on an glacier and in winter. I especially love its handling.
CHARLOTTE BARRE (France)
I use this carabiner a lot for roping on glaciers.
I love its directional side which allows it to always work in its axis for maximum resistance, and its innovative opening and closing system which automatically locks the carabiner.
LOUIS LAURENT (France)
I use it on the glacier and in dynamic belaying on mixed ridges. Its directional system allows optimal resistance of the carabiner in all configurations. Ideal for guide work.
BORIS LORENCIC (Slovenia)
I believe this is a perfect carabiner for clipping all belay devices and I also use it a lot on glaciers for roping up my clients and am never afraid it would unclip.
Its best features are its light weight and its right size. The Twin-Gate system is an added value to this perfectly designed carabiner, which always stays in the right place in the belay loop. Literally love at first sight!
LUCA ROLLI (Italia)
I use this carabiner in mountaineering and multi-pitch climbing with a prusik lanyard. The carabiner with twin gate system is very efficient for tying the rope at the waist on mixed terrain and for self-belaying during rappelling under the descender. The speed of use and the safety of the twin gate make it unbeatable.
SILVESTRO FRANCHINI (Italia)
I always use it in climbing courses when climbing in top-rope. This carabiner limits errors if I choose to connect the harness with a carabiner while climbing in top-rope, its shape guarantees me that the rope is always correctly positioned, the double lever guarantees me a perfect closure at an opening at the same time fast, then I love the compact size that distinguishes several of the Grivel screwgate carabiners.
]]>
ALESSANDRO ZENI (Italia)Wow! Finally a harness that challenges a little the monotony of the classic market, finally an innovative idea with a nice touch of style!
A light harness, practical and quick to put on and extremely comfortable!
I like the Abstract style more because it has very bright and youthful colors. I like to be alternative and this theme detaches from the classic colors of clothing.
ANGELIKA RAINER (Italia)
A crazy, brave and captivating design !!!
I appreciate the comfort of the leg loops. When you are hanging on the harness while being lowered, when you are hanging in a belay or to belay, you seem to be wearing a second skin and weight is not a weight. My favorite is the trend Abstract style, I like the madness of a colorful, abstract harness.
RICCARDO SCARIAN (Italia)I thought ... wowwww cool! A nice series of harnesses very alternative to the classic style, now climb is different.
I appreciated its simplicity. Lightness and obviously comfort.
Of the four, I was immediately struck and liked the "Python" because it has a lot of style.
CHARLOTTE BARRE (France)I immediately loved the idea. It is a comfortable harness, with a high-quality tightening buckle (easy to tighten and loosen the strap). My favorite is the Trend Black. Fun, classy and sober at the same time.
GUIDO AZZALEA (Italia)Wow finally something new. The idea of a python harness has been spinning in my head for years. Excellent belt and positioning of the gear loops, and lightness.
MARCELLO BOMBARDI (Italia)The first time I saw the prototype I thought "Oh my god ... Are you really sure?" The astonishment and surprise effect that was wanted to be seen in seeing such a style on a climbing accessory would say that it was spot on. It is a style out of the ordinary, never presented on a harness, and as with all new and extravagant things it takes a moment to adapt to the pleasure of sight and imagine it in life but once you get to know and become familiar you will struggle to return to a simple and monotonous style like that of classic harnesses.
Its functionality is definitely its strong point. The perfect choice of the padding layer gives it comfort in being hung on the harness for a long time without affecting the characteristic lightness that often makes you forget you are wearing it.
I found the "Python" model ideal for those who want to have style even at the crag and not just for the Friday night outing. The snake-like motif makes it perfectly matching the rock. My favorite, however, remains the "abstract" model. The white and blue color matches exactly the uniform of the national team and I can't wait to show it off in the next international competitions.
LUCA SCHIERA (Italia)Certainly a flashy and aesthetically different thing from the usual, risky idea!
In reality, when you try it on it is very comfortable and has a low weight, suitable for the crag.
My favorites are Black and Python, I like the combination of external and internal colors.
FRANCOIS CAZZANELLI (Italia)Honestly, the first time I saw a Trend harness I was not very convinced. I was afraid it was an aesthetically beautiful but impractical for climbing. Then as soon as I put it on I changed my mind. Above all, I appreciate its lightness and extreme comfort!
I prefer python, because I hope it makes me stay attached to the rock like a reptile.
MASSIMO BAL (Italia)I immediately thought that this new fashion line makes the garments more stylish. The harness is comfortable and functional, with excellent load distribution. The Leopard is very captivating and youthful, as well as the other models, the choice is subjective!
DAMIEN TOMASI (France)The first time Grivel told me about the Trend harness, I must admit that I was a little skeptical ...
Then, I carried it on the crag and I must say that the reactions of the climbers were quite eloquent! I did not go unnoticed!
One more weapon to climb like a feline!
CRISTIAN DORIGATTI (Italia)Different. Something different that appears a lot and catches the eye. Something that remains etched in the mind of climbers.
I especially liked the leg loops. Thanks to their greater width than the previous ones they are much more comfortable. As well as the part that rests on the back that makes one think that climbing can be a truly relaxing thing. I love its lightness (essential quality of a harness).
My favorite is the Abstract. It reminds me of Picasso. A mix between a new climbing style and Italian artistic culture. A perfect design.
ALEX PITTIN (France)The first time I saw it I thought: superb. I love its comfort and the style. I love them all without exception I even want all the styles to change them often!
Discover more about the TREND HARNESS
]]>
For all of us lovers of the mountains, the confinement period of COVID-19 is hard as we miss the outdoors and the opportunity to use our favourite gear.
To help you all stay in touch with our world, and also train for what will come next, we have developed a set of workouts that you can do at home using ice axes, with our friend Stefano Perrone.
They are divided in three levels (easy, medium, hard) and each one targets a specific muscle group.
Now take your axes out, enjoy and get in shape!
]]>