Winter Mountaineering, Mixed Climbing and Ice Climbing – What’s the difference?
In our efforts to give a succinct overview of Winter Climbing, we thought it would be useful to provide other short definitions as follows:
Winter Mountaineering is generally considered to be something different to Winter Climbing and to be larger in scope or scale than ‘climbing’.
Fundamentally, mountaineering most often involves summiting a mountain. It also often refers to longer ‘classic’ lower grade routes – usually no harder than Grade II, very occasionally graded II/III.
It is usual to climb a mountaineering route with a single axe, although on the harder ones many people now carry a second tool ‘just in case’!