Simond

Latest Reviews

Alpinism 55+10

An internal-frame backpack for weekend trips, mostly oriented on alpine climbers. It has convenient main storage compartment, high quality, durable materials, and lots of external attachment points. In the meantime it’s not very comfortable to wear and desperately lacks additional gear compartments. Me and my wife are less than amateur backpackers, and we don’t participate in multi-day backpacking trips. From ca. 2006 till beginning of 2017 I had been using very old and uncomfortable 55L backpack… Full review

Spider Screwgate

Lightweight, excellent screwgate locker that has a perfectly shaped nose to make clipping extremely easy. The best locking beiner for personal anchor systems at the top of a long difficult route. This carabiner is the best I have used to attach a personal anchor system at the top of a route. The nose is shaped in a way that it is quite open (bent out) compared to other screwgate lockers, so clipping is extremely easy. The diameter of the carabiner is around  a medium sized thickness. Since the… Full review

Chacal

I have tried a variety of tools through the years. My 4 favorites, you will see a review on each. The Simond Chacal with interchangeable tips (not uncommon these days) was one of the leaders of time gone by. Quality and durability equals my other three favorites too. Nice feel, relatively easy (with the right tools) to change the tips.  Easier to do at the top or start of a climb but possibly mid climb too.  Strongly recommend taking a Craftsman Combination Wrench and grind the open end off then… Full review

Toucan

The primary purpose of a belay plate is to stop a falling climber… and most of them do it quite well. The Toucan, like any other, does beautifully - as long as the belayer knows what he or she is doing! When feeding the rope to a lead climber, the non-load bearing “keeper arm” acts very much like the spring mechanism on traditional “spring” belay plates. By lifting the plate slightly off the belay caribiner, the stop-and-go jerking that is common with some devices is much easier to control,… Full review