The lightest way to get your steel on! The Irvis Hybrid crampons feature steel toes designed hold up against rock impact for those questionable routes. But Petzl also understands you don’t want to lug a massive crampon up a mountain. As such, they paired the toes with an aluminum heel and connected the dots with the ultralight Cord-Tec linking system. That means they are also super packable, since you can just fold the crampons in half and stuff them in your pack. The Irvis Hybrids will fit just about any boot since they come with both an automatic and a semi-automatic bail system. Petzl ships them with a simple wire bail installed for ski boots, but you can also swap in the included flexible bail for TLT7s or other boots suspiciously missing a hard toe-welt. If you can’t decide which crampon you need for your purposes, the Petzl Irvis Hybrid makes it so you don’t have to! Just buy this and it will work.
CORD-TEC linking system is flexible and fits all boots up to around US size 13 men.
Installed automatic bail is fast for ski boots and keeps the crampons amazingly light.
Also shipped with FlexLock bail to attaching to boots without a good toe welt (+25g).
Six-point steel toe platform is rugged enough for big routes in low snow.
Four-point aluminum heel is light and lets you go French-style up steep couloirs.
Comes with ANTISNOW plates installed to help prevent dangerous snow build-up.
Protective nylon carry bag with drawstring included.
These crampons are light, packable, and secure despite the cord connector. I wore these for approximately 15 miles total of blue ice and wore through the "cord-tec" connecting the toe and heel pieces. It cut/abraded where it first makes contact with the heel piece and is sandwiched between the aluminum and boot. I have not used these much in snow, mostly blue ice walking and a tiny bit of ice climbing, so your mileage may vary depending on use case and I imagine they would fare much better by avoiding blue ice.
The heel lever also does not have a ledge to use as a fulcrum when stepping into the crampons which would be a nice touch.
I would give 5 stars for these crampons if not for the durability of the cord connecting the toe and heel pieces.
Decently light crampons. The steel toe sticks in alpine and water ice much better than aluminum counterparts. They're nice for moving efficiently in flexible shoes, because crampon fully flexes alongside the shoe unlike other brands that have a metal bar. I have heard that durability on other steel toe/aluminum heel crampons is an issue, usually they have a aluminum connecting bar which quickly gets chewed up by the steel front.
One negative is that in ski boots or other fully rigid boots the crampon toe piece pivots on stiff snow, or ice. The toe isn't held rigidly by a metal bar, but instead "swings" on the dyneema cords. They've never fallen off but it often feels like I'm close to forcing them off rotationally.
Petzl continues to knock it out of the park with their light/fast gear compared to other manufacturers. Steel front points and aluminum heels is awesome for the majority of the ski mountaineering and alpine climbing I do so these have kind of taken over as my more versatile crampons. They seem to climb great on easy ice and mixed stuff that you would use something like the BD Sabretooth or the full Irvis. Quite easy to adjust. Super packable. Light. Petzl also ships them with both strap systems which is rad!
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