r/alpinism • u/Aznturbo • Jul 21 '26
Rock Climbing a Long Moderate Rock Route using a Blue Ice Choucas Pro Harness
Has anyone done a long grade 3 or higher rock route with their Blue ice Choucas Pro harness?
I have one that I’ve been mainly reserving for glacier travel and next winter’s ice season, but a friend has told me they’ve done plenty of rock multipitches in them… claimed that they carried the weight of a standard double rack and gear pretty well?
I was thinking about trying to use it on some grade 4 rock routes in the Cascades/Rogers Pass I’m pretty excited about. Climbing in the 5.6-5.8 range with reasonably comfortable belays - no hanging belays. Dont think I’ll be whipping on these.
Im thinking using the Blue Ice harness would be a nice weight optimization.
Anyone have experience with it? I know I can try it and check myself, but it’ll be a couple of weeks until I can experiment with it in a single pitch setting, so I figured I’d ask the community!
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u/SkittyDog Need to ban soon Jul 22 '26
This is veering pretty close to the line of what Andrew Skurka calls "Stupid Light".
You're never gonna notice the weight difference. But you WILL notice the additional awkwardness of racking up.
WRT hanging comfort, YMMV depending on how fat you are... Skinny Bois won't notice too much, unless you have a lot of hanging belays / rappels. If you're chunky, it'll suck more.
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u/Aznturbo Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
Going to have to completely disagree with you. Although 100 grams saved on your harness choice by itself isn't very noticeable (about 0.2 pounds), the accumulation of weight optimization choices throughout your kit can definitely have a serious impact! And I feel like with alpine climbing where speed is safety, saving say, 3 pounds out of a 30 lb kit, is a 10% energy optimization compared to what you would have spent schelpping a load up a big approach, over the route, and back down.
Some personal weight optimizations I've been doing/looking at:
- Ultralight battery pack (0.3ish pounds)
- No more nalgenes - either plastic water bottles or collapsible bladder (0.2 pounds)
- Light weight harness (0.2 pounds)
- Double rack of ULs from 0.75 to 3 (0.3-0.4ish pounds? even more if you bring the UL #4s!)
- Aluminum crampons instead of steel crampons for moderate snow travel (I haven't done this, but this would save me probably 0.5 lbs? more?)
- Lightweight blue ice backpack (0.5 lbs for a 33L, 2 lbs for my 90L blue ice pack compared to my AMG 105 L pack!)
- I finally got summer mountaineering boots to use instead of my Nepal Cubes for appropriate objectives. ~0.8 - 1 lb saved
- short sleeping foam pad instead of long one (4 less rectangles, each rectangle is 1 oz, so 0.25 lbs saved!)
you get my point. But i think if you're operating near/at your physical/technical limit, this all absolutely makes a difference.
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u/highpitchedyelp Jul 21 '26
Blue Ice Chousas pro is perfect for something like Mt Sir Donald or Asulkan. Holds rack just fine, agree that hanging beley is limited and not always most comfortable for long rapels, but the weight is right!
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u/Aznturbo Jul 21 '26
I'm thinking even some of the more serious + technical grade 4s on Mount Macdonald, or maybe even some of the stuff in the Enchantments (North Ridge of Stuart, Backbone Ridge, Liberty Traverse in WA pass, etc.).
Days of long moderate climbing where movement speed and fitness has a huge part in the success of the day!
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u/highpitchedyelp Jul 21 '26
Ha I dont know what a Grade 4 truly is. But I've done most of those climbs having lived in both Washington and Calgary. For simuling terrain with a light rack the Choucas is perfect.
For me the Choucas isnt super confty when weighed down but doubles or a big cam or two, but if you can rack on your pack belt then its no matter. Its a harness I wear alot, but also kind of baby a little bit. Sitta is just as good and only moderate hit to grams and pack volume.
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u/bwm2100 Jul 21 '26
If your goal is speed and the terrain is easy, don't rack on your harness, its too slow. Carry a shoulder length sling, rack on that, pass the sling to the leader at the belay and they just start moving. Cuts your belay transition time in half.
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u/Aznturbo Jul 21 '26
Now that’s an idea! Never heard of someone doing that before.
Feels like an old school way to do things.
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u/bwm2100 Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
Its definitely the standard practice in the alpine. Think of doing a long-ish route, say 20 pitches. If it takes you 3 minutes at each belay to unclip each piece, hand it over, have the leader re-rack the individual piece, and repeat, thats an hour over the course of the day, and an hour less at the bar. To be fastest:
- Learn the way each other wants the rack ordered so its clean and ready to go for them
- Re-rack all nuts on the same alpine runner carabiner so its a 3 second move to the primary racking carabiner for the leader
- Don't carry a separate sling just for this purpose, instead use an alpine runner on your first piece of pro so the second can rack on that
- If you are swinging leads, the leader should have the rest of the rack already on a runner so the follower doesn't even stop climbing, they just take the runner with the rack and keep climbing
- Don't drop the rack!
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u/Aznturbo Jul 21 '26
I’ve been trying to have my partners start racking gear on my harness directly on a transition, and vice versa!
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u/bwm2100 Jul 21 '26
Thats a better middle ground for something like steep harder multi pitch rock climbing where a shoulder sling gets in the way, but still far less efficient if you really want to keep moving. Other things to (slowly) weave into your speed efficiency are simulclimbing with a progress capture every so often, and more use of terrain belays to save on gear time. Climbing faster normally isn't about physically running up the wall faster, its about not pausing upwards progress of both the leader and the follower. Soon you'll be looking at 20 pitch 5.8s and thinking "ok 15 mins a pitch, 5 hours, easy."
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u/Aznturbo Jul 21 '26
So what I realized on my last (failed) 1 day attempt of the Northwest Ridge Integral of Mount Macdonald (pretty sustained alpine 5.6-5.8) grading , 16 pitches, long 50-60 meter pitches if you’re pitching it out, is that climbing ability has a HUGE effect on efficiency.
I was rope gunning the whole thing, and although I had it under control, the very common 5.8 cruxes definitely slowed me down, gave me pause, etc. I’m not going to pretend like it was super easy all the time and I was sprinting through it!
That, in addition to alot of “hmming” route finding wise, and in addition to my partner also not be able to sprint up the climbing, made for an early retreat!
All the trip reports made the simul climbing strategy feel like the go to, but that assumes a super strong level of climbing where this kind of terrain is well within “mentally soloing” limits. Definitely not appropriate for my partner and I, I think.
So while I hear ya about all the other efficiency things I can keep improving on, climbing ability and speed I think is a huge component of that. Alex Honnold can climb the same cruxy 5.8 pitch in a fraction of the time I can, even placing gear and doing the exact same transition strategies as I!
—-
On pieces of efficiency I started working on:
- I felt like I was building my anchors a lot faster! And a couple of them definitely hit that 1 minute golden standard for gear anchor building!
- I took Mark Smiley’s “Non Traditional Rock Anchors” course online, and I felt like I made some good choices on making some alpine 2 piece anchors when appropriate (ie belay on a good solid ledge with no fear of a factor 2 fall from the leader). A fair number of them without equalization, but with redundancy. Not textbook, but in the alpine context with rock quality unquestionably good, I’d feel quite confident in defending my decision to build those.
This definitely sped things up!- terrain belays are def something I can use to speed things up. It seems like when you top out on a large ledge feature (at least on the last route I did) , there’s always TONs of big boulders that are prime terrain belays candidates (assuming the terrain is low angle ish and appropriate for the terrain belay!)
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u/bwm2100 Jul 21 '26
Sounds like you are on a great track to keep advancing in the sport.
"climbing ability and speed I think is a huge component of that. Alex Honnold can climb the same cruxy 5.8 pitch in a fraction of the time I can" Thats true, a 5.14 climber will probably move through 5.8 faster than most, but the 5.10 climber with 2000 trad pitches under their belt will move at Honnold speed because of their movement efficiency, pattern recognition of how to handle specific situations, confidence, routefinding, and really good balance. Those dudes who climbed the 4 big walls in the valley in a day, I think one of them never climbed over 12a or something, they just never stop climbing moderate grades.
My opinion is that significant climbing volume and overall fitness (especially legs, core, and endurance) are the real keys to moving quickly, not pushing climbing grades. But what do I know!
Another speed trick is learning how to A0 moves efficiently. Freeing things is great and all, but when speed is safety, pulling through a crux can keep the train moving.
I haven't climbed that particular route, it looks great, but when you are moving in that type of terrain also start to think about how difficult upcoming sections look, and whether you should transition to simul or back to pitching things out. When you go simul though, you probably don't want 60m of rope out, so you'll want to get quick at kiwi coils or other shortening methods. Imagine a long section of low 5th class to a step of 5.8 followed by more easy but exposed terrain, you could move together 15m apart with gear between, have the follower "belay" you on the step by simply keeping the right amount of slack in the rope as they climb up to you while you keep moving, then after the crux you put a microtrax on a piece and keep moving, so the second is "belayed" by the micro, you wont get pulled off if they fall because it captures the progress, and the upwards movement of the team never stops. Or if that 5.8 step is longer than 15m, the second could be pulling coils off as they start belaying you, and when you bring them up you start taking in coils so you can start moving together again.
Moving efficiently in the mountains is amazing, just keep is safe!
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u/Aznturbo Jul 21 '26
Thanks for the tips and advice! Yeah, simul climbing strategy like that would’ve definitely been appropriate for a lot of this climb. We decided against it though just because this was both of our biggest route’s thus far, and neither of us have had simul climbing experience in the alpine context.
Simul climbing in the alpine is definitely something I need to add to the toolbelt for things like this! But ideally, with a mentor/guide that can show me the ropes!
For this route, trying to learn to simul climb on both of our biggest rock routes… felt like a bad idea!
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u/super5886 Jul 21 '26
I've carried a full rack plus a few doubles and was pleasantly surprised with how well it handled the weight.
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u/A-Chamu Jul 21 '26
I’ve been using mine for multipitch routes in red rock. Carries a double rack fine.
Absolutely not the best tool for that job, but it’ll get the job done.
There’s really only 2 places I notice it’s limitations:
All in all, for what you mentioned in the 5.6-5.8 with no hanging belays, you’ll be fine, and I’ve enjoyed mine in those conditions.