How do you get into a prone position without catching your crampons?
With autumn starting to appear in the UK I find myself thinking about winter technique once again.
I've practiced self arrest technique, but always avoided doing it while wearing crampons. Obviously in an actual emergency I'd likely be wearing crampons in these situations.
I'm unclear how you perform a successful self arrest while preventing snagging a crampon in the snow in some situations. Particularly I'm unsure the mechanics of this if your sliding down a slope feet first face up. It seems difficult to rotate your body into the self arrest position (facing downwards and sliding feet first down the slope) and not accidently catch a crampon in the snow (resulting in some cringe worthy injury).
What's the best technique to deal with the above situation?
Update
This question; Proper technique for self-arrest with an ice axe, when wearing crampons, doesn't go into details about my particular scenario:
You never want to stop yourself with the crampons because they are liable to catch...The way you do this is first get into self arrest position
I'm interested in how you get into the self arrest position (prone position) without catching your crampons in the process of rotating.
This post was sourced from https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/q/9378. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
So I'm thinking, on my back, head up hill, crampons in the air (to prevent them snagging). I brace my ice axe into against my collar bone. I now need to roll onto my front to push the head of the axe into the snow. But how do I do that without catching my crampons (as I roll). Does that make sense?
When you're on your back, you don't need to get your crampons in the air. The front points are what would snag, and they're pointing at the sky. Even if you wanted to keep the heels of your crampons off the snow (which isn't necessary), you really couldn't, because your knees don't bend that way, and it's not practical to raise your legs at the hips in this situation.
To roll, throw your weight to the side, as if you were rolling out of bed. The direction to roll is the one that heads the pick toward the snow like an arrow.
Once you start rolling over, you can bend your knees to keep the front points of your crampons off the snow.
All of this is theoretical and idealized. It's how you should practice it in order to get it in your muscle memory. But in reality it may not actually work out this way, and in a real self-arrest you may actually need to use your front points -- if that's what it takes to keep from going over a cliff, that's what you do.
This post was sourced from https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/a/9384. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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