I missed the Lyon Equipment stand at KORS (write up coming soon), but had a meet up with familiar face Si to catch up on what’s coming up now and next year. I’ll have a quick spin through the different brands over the next couple of days. First up is Petzl.
These are the new Lynx crampons. They’re a 14-point modular design and they come in their crampon bag with several versions possible from the array of bits amd pieces in there.
You can have long, short or asymmetrical dual or mono front points and there’s a choice of toe bindings.
The plastic loop will fit worn or ungrooved toes and the wire version will fit nice and quick on compatible boots. The wire is easily removed too, Si demonstrated below, one end is pulled out with a loop of binding webbing and the other end twists out next. They’re fully length adjustable and come fitted with ant-balling plates, which are secure, I nearly lost a thumbnail testing that point.
Kinda beyond me remit these days, my old Rambo’s went on ebay years ago, but I get a little flutter when I handle this kind of kit, it’s just so badass. It’s a nice package too, all the bits and the wrenches to assemble them, taking these home and unpacking them would be like a getting a new Action Man outfit home and er, dressing him up in it. I realised just how sad that simile reads as I was writing it.
Petzl have stoked up the headtorch range, LED’s really have changed everything and it’s brilliant fo us, the brightness and battery life arms race continues apace.
Above is the 160 lumen Myo RXP. It has a programmable output, choose three including the strobe setting to best suit your plans, battery preservation for trekking of brightness for a winter trail run. Boost gives you 160 lumens from any setting at the press and hold of a button.
I’ve got the original Myo XP, used it on my WHW trek and it’s a nice bit of kit, the thought of a brighter more efficent version definitely appeals.
The Tikka XP2 as seen below has been a favourite of mine for a while, small size and a very usuable output even on winter high camps. The tweaked version that’s coming up has a maximum of 80 lumens for 180hrs of battery life. The red LED in there is great for camp life and preserving night vision and Petzl are now quite happy for us to be sticking lithium batteries in there. Because we weren’t doing that before, oh no.
All the torches here have the diffuser which flips over the LED for a wide beam too.
One interesting point is that Black Diamond and Princeton Tec are using Petzl’s test and rating parameters, this good for us as it gives a proper scale to compare models not only in a range but across manufacturers. 