good basic axe

By james.b.st1516457 Ranked #506 - Backcountry Snowboarding October 20, 2009

Great basic axe. Strong shaft, enough weight in the head to thump into ice. One big problem I had was when we were trying to lower a friend with a broken ankle down a couloir after we were in a slide. We had one picket left, which we used as the initial anchor to lower him and myself a rope length. I boot axe anchored us with a clove hitch, and our buddy dug up the picket and descended to us, repeated by 9 pitches. We were trying to be as fast as possible, but the clove hitch knotted the wet rope up tight around the bottleneck of this axe and took a bit to get undone. Had the shaft been a solid piece up and down, it would have just slid off and we would have been out of the couloir faster. That's my only complaint. Maybe I should have used a different anchor method, I don't know. Either way, my next mountaineering axe will be a solid shaft from bottom to top.

View Details: Black Diamond Raven Ice Axe

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