Dry tooling is one of the more obscure branches of climbing, although it’s gaining popularity. I wrote the following guide to teach you everything you need to know about dry tooling.

So, what is dry tooling? Dry tooling is a sport where you rock climb using ice climbing equipment such as axes and crampons. You use the tools to gain purchase on the rock.

Originally used to be training for ice climbing during the winter months, dry tooling has now become a niche sport of its own. Using ice axes and sometimes crampons, people will ascend sheer faces of rock, hooking the axes onto small handholds and placing their crampon points on footholds to pull themselves up. Sometimes, they swap their crampons out for actual climbing shoes for better footwork. If you want to train for ice climbing, or if you simply want to experience a new sport with some fun moves of its own, dry tooling is a great option.

Dry Tooling: An Overview

In them most basic terms, dry tooling is rock climbing except with ice tools. Instead of using your hands and feet for purchase, you use your ice axes to hold on and crampons to keep you supported. You hook the tips of your ice axes onto handholds, and place the points of your crampons on footholds; this allows you to work your way up the wall.

The sport was originally created as a way for ice climbers to train in the off season. Dry tooling gives you a great forearm workout, while also allowing you to practice balancing on delicate axe placements and sketchy footholds. You have to be extremely careful with your placements when dry tooling, or you’ll find yourself coming off the wall. In this way, it’s extremely good for learning the movement and balance patterns needed to ice climb.

Dry tooling really came into its own in the 90’s, though, when Jeff Lowe modernized mixed climbing with the ascent of Octopussy, M8. After that, people began to realize that there was an art to scaling sheer pieces of rock using your ice climbing tools, and the sport began to grow.

Nowadays, while dry tooling hasn’t gained the same recognition as rock climbing (or even ice and mixed climbing), it’s a niche sport with a few loyal followers of its own. While it’s similar to those other activities, there are still a few key differences.

Dry Tooling vs Ice Climbing

If you want to learn how to move on ice but you don’t have a convenient frozen waterfall, dry tooling is the way to go.

When you place your weight on an axe that’s hooked onto a small ledge of rock, you need to be extremely careful with how you move. If you tilt the axe in the wrong direction, shift it from side to side, or pull on it in the wrong way, the axe is going to come loose and you’re going to fall.

In this way, dry tooling is very similar to ice climbing. For people unfamiliar with the sport, or who just want to get better, it’s a great way to get used to the feel of ice climbing without some of the associated risk.

Dry tooling is less risky because it’s safer to fall. I’ve written a lot about the dangers of ice climbing falls, and how some of your limbs may remain stuck in the ice even as your body falls. With dry tooling, that rarely happens; you’re much more likely to experience a ‘clean’ fall, which means you don’t have to worry as much when you’re pushing the limits.

Dry Tooling vs Rock Climbing

Dry tooling has less in common with rock climbing than it would originally seem. The first time I ever hoped on a dry tooling route after a season of rock, I was shocked at how conservative I had to be with my movements. Gone were the days where I could smear my feet, crimp hard with one hand, and go swinging across the rock to the next hold. Dry tooling is a delicate, methodical sport.

There are also some techniques that are unique to dry tooling, such as:

• Stein: This is the undercling of dry tooling, where you flip your axe upside-down and wedge it under a piece of rock.
• Torques: As the name suggested, you jam your axe into a crack and twist it, wedging it in place. It’s like a handjam, but it’s not as masochistic.
• Figure fours and figure nines: These cool looking maneuvers may sometimes be used in bouldering, but they originated as an ice climbing/mixed climbing move.

Dry Tooling vs Mixed Climbing

Mixed climbing basically is dry tooling except you also need to worry about switching on and off or ice. This makes mixed climbing a little more difficult and a little more dangerous. However, good dry tooling skills are essential for mixed climbs, so lots of people will still practice dry tooling.

Why Do People Dry Tool?

When a lot of people first learn about dry tooling, they have one question: why? It seems like an absurd sport, and it’s hard to imagine why someone would choose it over rock or ice climbing — or even mixed routes, for that matter.

Training

As I said, the origin of the sport, and probably the reason that most people still do it nowadays, is for training. In terms of ice climbing training, there’s no substitute to a good dry tooling session. You’ll work everything:

• Hanging onto your axes for tens of minutes at a time helps build the anaerobic muscles you need in your forearms to crush long routes on ice.
• Keeping your axes balanced on small handholds help develop the movement and muscle memory needed for ice climbing.
• Not touching the rock that you’re climbing trains you to trust your gear placements on ice.

For those reasons, lots of people will dry tool in the summer months when there’s no ice to climb. It keeps their skills sharp and makes sure that their strength doesn’t disappear in the offseason.

Dry tooling is also excellent practice for alpine and mixed climbing routes. It’s extremely likely that, when you’re mountaineering, there will be time when you need to climb exposed rock, and using your ice tools to do so is easier than stashing them away and trying to rock climb (especially if you’re in mountaineering boots and gloves).

Because of this, having good dry tooling skills are essential for many mountaineers or mixed climbers (mixed climbing is at least 50% dry tooling, anyways). It’s always better to develop your skills beforehand, so people will dry-tool to train themselves for difficult alpine routes.

Recreation

Aside from those who use it to train, there’s a small group of people who like to dry tool simply because it’s fun! It’s a unique sport with its own challenges, and there are some really entertaining elements to it.

You get to learn a whole slew of new moves like the ones mentioned above and challenge yourself at something new. Although I would guess that the majority of people still dry tool for training, there are some people out there who do it purely for fun.

What Do You Need to Dry Tool?

Another great thing about dry tooling is that it doesn’t take a lot of equipment to go! If you’ve got the gear for outdoor rock climbing (rope, draws, PAS, etc), you’re already halfway there. If you’re one step farther along and you own ice climbing gear, you have everything you need to dry tool.

You’ll need the following pieces of equipment to dry tool:

• Ice Axes
• Crampons
• Mountaineering boots
• A helmet
• Climbing Gear

Axes

Ice axes are probably the most essential pieces of gear for dry tooling. You use them to hook onto handholds, jam into cracks, and haul yourself up the route.

It’s important to get climbing axes, not mountaineering aces; the curved shape and specialized handholds offered by ice axes make them infinitely easier to hold on when you’re dry tooling. You should also make sure to sharpen your blades after a dry tooling session, as scraping them against the rock can dull them out.

Crampons

Although crampons aren’t essential for dry tooling (some people use climbing shoes), I would highly recommend them, especially if you’re training for ice. Mono points work better than dual points, because you can get more exact foot placements.

Similar to your ice axes, there’s a good chance that dry tooling will dull out your points a little bit, especially if you try to smear (like I did the first time I went ice climbing).

Mountaineering Boots

If you’re wearing crampons, you need something to attach them to. Mountaineering boots are the most obvious answer, although you could use approach shoe if you have the right type of crampons.

For most people, though, mountaineering boots will be the easiest option, especially if you already own a pair. The downside is that can get heavy sometimes, which tires you out and makes it more difficult to do delicate foot maneuvers.

If you’re using dry tooling to train, thing can be a good thing: it will build up the muscles you need for ice climbing. If, however, you’re pursuing the sport just for fun, you may want to look at some alternative footwear like fruitboots.

Helmet

If you want to dry tool, a helmet is essential. Now, I don’t want you to take that as ‘this website said something is essential, but they’re just saying that to be overcautious’. This isn’t rock climbing, where you can get away with climbing unprotected. You need a helmet for dry tooling for too main reasons:

1. Dry tooling routes are often exposed to a lot of rockfall risk (more on this later)
2. If you fall while dry toolig, you’re more likely to have a tool stick into the rock and push you off balance. This makes it harder to keep your position in mid-air and more likely that you’ll swing into the rock.

Because of that, you should always wear your helmet when dry tooling.

Climbing Gear

In addition to the specific gear necessary for dry tooling, you also need a standard climbing rack:

• Rope: You should have a dynamic rope that’s at least 9.4mm thick
• Quick draws: The right number of draws will depend on how long the route is, but I would suggest at least a dozen.
• Harness and belay device: Make sure you have a partner who knows how to use these!
• Rock shoes: Like I said, some people like to switch their mountaineering boots for rock climbing shoes, so it can be good to pack a pair when you go!

Where Can You Dry Tool?

Now that you know what dry tooling is and what you need, let’s talk about where you can actually dry tool.

There are some issues concerning the ethics of dry tooling, because your tools can scratch up the rock and leave permanent scars. Because of this, you shouldn’t dry tool on established rock-climbing routes, as it damages the route for future climbers.

This is a fairly standard rule that you should follow. It can be frustrating sometimes to not be able to dry-tool at established crags; thankfully, though, there are some places where you can go:

• Choss piles/bad rock
• Dry tooling crags
• Mixed climbing routes
• Indoor/manmade walls

Choss Piles/Bad Rock

Remember when I said that dry tooling is exposed to more rockfall than rock climbing? That’s because lots of dry tooling occurs on chossy/poor-quality rock.  If you want to make sure that you’re not stepping on the toes of any rock climbers, the best way to do so is to go where the rock climbers won’t. Usually, this means poor-quality rock that people have yet to rock climb on.

As someone who dry tools, it can be a little frustrating to always be relegated to the bad rock, but there is a valid argument for doing so. Way more people rock climb than dry tool, so it makes sense to relegate the highest quality rock towards the sport where more people will get to enjoy it.

Dry Tooling Crags

With that being said, if you live in a popular climbing area, there are likely to be some established dry tooling crags that you can climb on. These are cliffs where all of the routes have been set with dry tooling in mind. Here, you don’t have to worry about scratching the rock, and you can stein and torque to your heart’s desire.

Mixed Routes

Climbing on established mixed climbs in the summer can be an excellent way to get some dry tooling in on higher quality rock. Because these are mixed lines, the rock will already be scratched, and you don’t have to worry about any blowback from you putting tools on it.

Mixed routes are also more likely to give you some experience with longer pitches that you might find in alpine environments.

Indoor/Manmade Walls

Finally, as the sport continues to grow in popularity, there’s been an influx of manmade walls being built to accommodate dry tooling. There are also tools out there that will let you dry tool in climbing gyms.

These routes are often pretty boring, more designed for working out than they are for doing any of the fun dry tooling moves. If you’re an ice climber looking to keep your fitness up, though, this can be a good option.

Tips to Try Dry Tooling

Finally, let’s talk about some tips you should know so that you can go dry tooling for the first time! Aside from all the information mentioned above, I would also say:

• Find a more experienced friend! Going with someone who knows more than you is a great way to get out dry tooling for the first time. They can lead the routes, set up top-rope, and give you pointers on your technique.
• Go with a guide: Although not many guiding companies offer dry tooling courses (although they may have mixed climbing ones), you could always hire a guide for the day and have them teach you. This will be more expensive, though.
• Rent or purchase used tools: If you’re just getting into the sport, renting or borrowing tools can be a great way to do so without needing to shell out a bunch of money. Some outdoor apparel stores will rent ice climbing gear at fairly affordable rates
• Practice on top rope: Although dry tooling isn’t as dangerous as ice climbing, lead falls can still be nasty. To avoid this, I would recommend doing laps on top rope so that you can train your body to learn how to move.

All in all, dry tooling is an awesome sport, both as a stand-alone activity and as a training mechanism for ice/mixed climbing. Give it a try and you might find that you love it!