Make sure you can take that basket totally off, or self-belay may be very hard. It could be that the basket is so small, it will sink in anyway; I'd sure hate to find out on a 45 degree slope. But if the basket is so small that it slips easily into the snow, what is the basket for?

I've got a BD whippet, and my biggest complaint is that it is hard to get the basket off for self belay.

squishy wrote:I would rather have both than something that may not do each job as well...

I agree. That would be a weird hold for your hand holding the axe head like a trekking pole handle.

I ended up using the whippet on two local snow climbs last year. I practiced on a steep slope and was able to stop 15 of 15 supine head-first falls (snow wasn't that fast), so I thought all was cool. But when I actually used it, I found myself crossing a steep soft slope with bad runout, and wanted to self-belay; the whippet basket prevented the shaft from sinking a very far.

You can unscrew the whippet basket, but it isn't that easy when your hands are cold and wet, and it's something you want to think about before getting in a bad situation. The shaft doesn't look anywhere as strong as a normal ice axe shaft, so I would probably think twice about trying to belay someone else off of it. There is no adze, so the self-belay grip is different.

Looks like if you fall wrong and self arrest slightly wrong it would be painful. I can see the shafts kinking up with body weight on it too. I never used them though, so I wouldn't know. "Just saying"

I think Stubai makes a similar product .. never used either of them. I'm more a fan of using trekking pole for approach, ice axe for steeper snow slopes.

One time though while on Mt. Shasta, either on the summit plateau or the actual pinnacle I watched a guy come up with some unusual equipment .. he had two trekking poles, each with an ice axe duct-taped to it

Hotoven wrote:Looks like if you fall wrong and self arrest slightly wrong it would be painful. I can see the shafts kinking up with body weight on it too. I never used them though, so I wouldn't know. "Just saying"

At first I thought that self-impalement might be a problem, but it isn't. The whippet isn't as menacing as it looks in the adverts. People snowboard with them and are fine. Besides, the whippet comes with a soft plastic guard that can be placed over the point (it can be attached to the body with a thin shock cord).

The last time I used the whippet was late last April, in a place where the approach to the big snow climb involved discontinuous steep banks of snow. When I got to a point where I put on crampons, I left the whippet behind and took out a real ice axe. The snow had a 6" soft layer on about 3-5' of hardpack, and I knew that I would need to self-belay a lot on the way down.

This winter I'll experiment more with the whippet and removal of the basket for self-belay. My thought is that it might be useful for transitional periods in the Sierra, on peaks where the need for an ice axe is not so clear.