rdp32 wrote: ↑Wed Jan 20, 2021 9:39 pm
If anyone has any suggestions on specific things to practice or specific resources to guide me, please let me know!
I'll throw in a tidbit here that might be useful to be aware of. I picked up some Kahtoola K-10 Hiking Crampons (a strap on style similar to what you mentioned that can be used with regular boots) and tried them out on a couple small, safe-ish snow fields on Democrat a week or two ago (I had to go out of my way slightly to test them out).
What I found is that the hiking crampons worked great for going straight up/down the snowfields but they had very poor grip for walking sideways across steep snow. To do that I had to keep one foot pointed downhill to maintain stability.
I snapped a couple photos of the 3 traction devices I currently own which are:
Kahtoola microspikes
Kahtoola K-10 Hiking Crampons
Grivel G-12 crampons
Note the size, placement and sharpness of the teeth (you can tell if you look closely which ones I've currently used the most). Also the bar on the hiking crampons is designed to be somewhat flexible so as not to pop off regular boots when they flex while the bar for the Grivel is much stiffer and designed for stiff sole mountaineering boots.
The microspikes are great for their versatility and use with basically any boot for low to slightly moderate angle slopes.
Once you start to push the limit of the microspikes the hiking crampons allow you to push further into moderate slope terrain and still have confidence of your footing but if you look closely at the teeth in the photos below you'll see why they aren't so great if you need to cut sideways along steep terrain unless you keep one foot angled (note basically one set of "sideways" teeth vs. 3 for the crampons and several for the microspikes).
The Grivel crampons are designed to clamp onto mountaineering boots and you can tell just from looking the advantages they have for traction and front pointing (but since you can tell just from looking how little I've used them I'll not pretend to know more than I do - if I could find mountaineering boots that weren't so damn uncomfortable I'd probably use these more...)

- Traction_comparison.jpg (155.49 KiB) Viewed 408 times

- crampon_comparison.jpg (130.02 KiB) Viewed 408 times