Black Diamond’s Hydra Might Just Be the Best Ice Tool on the Market

Ice climbing tools have come so far since the medieval days of straight-shafted instruments that it can be difficult to wade through all the modern-day options. Most ice tools have a balanced swing weight, comfortable grip, and aggressively shaped shaft to minimize pump and bruised knuckles. So where does a would-be consumer go from there? We’d point them toward Black Diamond’s all-new Hydra.

At first glance the Hydra looks like a copy of several popular ice tools, most notably Petzl’s Nomic. We love the Nomic for its performance on vertical ice, but our testers found the Hydra to take steep ice climbing to a new level thanks to its incredible modularity, perfect balance, and best-in-class ice penetration. Climbing has been testing a pre-production model since last December, where we swung them on long multi-pitch flows around Cody, WY, and Banff, AB; scratched our way up hard mixed in Ouray, CO; and on tricky alpine terrain in the Canadian Rockies. Our team of testers, led by Climbing digital editor Anthony Walsh and alpine maestro Maury Birdwell, were unanimously psyched on the Hydra—finding nearly no downsides to the “many-headed beast.”

Customization

One of our favorite things about the Hydra is how customizable you can make it depending on your wintery objective. Its innovative head weights are the real headline here: rather than bolting a fat chunk of metal onto the tool’s pick—and therefore making the tool harder to clean in funky ice—Black Diamond sank the weights into the head itself, simultaneously providing a more balanced swing weight and a lower profile. Thanks to this recessed head, you can opt for simple 5-gram “spacers” if you’re climbing warm, wet ice and don’t need the extra heft. But if you’re swinging into bullet-hard ice in Canada, as we did on the north-facing Stanley Headwall last winter, you can drop in two 40-gram headweights to let the Hydras do the work. We’ve also been going hybrid—one light spacer, one heavy weight—to achieve that Goldilocks-swing at medium altitudes.

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Head weights aside, the Hydra comes with a suit of tools that would make a mechanic jealous, including a long “Alpine” spike for snow plunging, a “Micro” spike, a full-size alpine hammer, a micro hammer, an adze, and handle spacers. The handle spacers are quick to attach and much appreciated in the field; even if you think you have “average” sized hands, as our testers do, we appreciated the ability to shrink the handles down so they fit while wearing thin dry-tooling gloves, and then expand them weeks later while climbing WI 5 in thick mitts during a -5℉ cold snap. These spacers are some of the best we’ve used; they slide in midway through the handle and keep its shape and performance regardless of your hand size.

The Hydra also comes with three pick options: ice, mixed, and dry. As with most tools we test, we opted for the ice pick in all but the scrappiest of drytooling scenarios, since the 2.5mm pick tip sinks like a hot knife into butter on steep, technical ice. (An appreciated feature when tapping into a delicate dagger after a long, pumpy section of dry tooling.) Of note: a 2.5mm pick is standard-setting in the ice climbing world. Even the beloved Petzl Pur’Ice pick is 3mm at its tip—BD’s new blades really make a difference.

Swing

Thanks in part to the Hydra’s well-placed head weights, this tool swings like a dream. Maury reported that the Hydras “handled the delicate placements on Cody’s Mean Streak (sketchy and thinly delaminated WI 5) and the steep, engaging features of Legal at Last (WI 6) with equal aplomb.” I found them to perform perfectly on Cool Spring (WI 5+), in Field, B.C., where I was consistently surprised to get a solid “stick” after just a swing or two. Over the course of that dead-vertical pitch, I surely saved at least 10 minutes of energy thanks to the Hydra’s dampening shaft and razor-thin pick.

• Watch Anthony Walsh tap his way up a thin, delaminated pitch of WI 3 in the Canadian Rockies last winter. The Hydra’s super-thin pick ensured he disturbed as little ice as possible. 

The only real con that either Maury or I could come up with after a full winter of testing was that, for me, I wished the Hydra had an even more radically shaped shaft when pulling steep mixed pitches onto daggers. The crux of Dark Nature (WI 5+ M5/6) in Lake Louise, AB, required pulling a meter-plus-long roof with my feet far below me. While swinging into the ice overhead, I found the Hydra’s upper handle to bash the ice before my pick would sink in, forcing me to re-calibrate my wrist-flick on the fly. Granted, my previous go-to tools were Camp’s super-aggressive X-Dreams, and I’m used to being able to sink my pick far before the handle gets in the way. However, for those currently climbing on the Nomic or the Grivel Dark Machine, the Hydra won’t take any getting used to, and we strongly recommend them for any ice or mixed climber shopping for a tool that can handle nearly anything.

Pros and Cons

⊕ Modular head weights
⊕ Extremely durable build
⊕ Adjustable handle size
⊗ Geometry is isn’t aggressive enough for seriously overhung terrain

Buy the Black Diamond Hydra for $310

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