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.